Have they started Trying to ban orkut?

Reports are coming out that Rellaince Web World's have started banning Orkut already.
The story goes that the Ambanies are under heavy pressure from lobbyist, to start off the process of banning Orkut. Web world usually considered an upmarket cafe chain, is used mostly for gaming and official use, the number of people browsing Orkut from Web Worlds is limited to a great extent due to their exorbitant browsing charges.

The number of people browsing from reliance Internet connection though are huge, but no reports have come out yet about restriction on those.

Such moves by major ISP's without TRAI direction is not justifiable and against ethics. This should also be seen as corporate monopoly.

Is Porn Just about Porn ?

Is porn actually just about sex ? or is there something deeper, something nastier ?

Porn occupies a 45% traffic composition of the Internet. Some figures show that its much more but lets take 45% as a bench mark. Now imagine that 45% traffic is completely cut off one fine morning. What will be the revenue loss to the ISP's. How much money will the hosting providers loose. Porn hosting is more expensive than normal hosting. Now imagine the kind of money lost on ad revenues generated by soft porn websites. So its not that porn cant be stopped its just that no one wants to stop it. Even in Arab nation where porn is a criminal offence that can get severe and incomprehensible punishments one can access porn with out much difficulty, even though all pron sites are said to be banned officially. The ISP stand to loose a lot of revenue if they have an anti porn attitude. They stand to loose reputation if the support porn so what do they do. They talk bad about porn and let pron freely flow on their networks.

Now another thing about porn is that they are front end to many scams. People use porn as the front to get credit card information and the like. Now because of the secret and illegal nature in which porn sites operates its not easy to track them down in case a fraud occurs.

Another security threat related to porn is of spy ware Trojans and the like. Many porn sites install active x etc that are very much spy ware classifiable.

Porn is not about Porn.

Profile of The creator of ORKUT

Have you ever wondered who created Orkut ? guess what he is on Orkut.
This is the link to his profile:-
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=325082930226142255

The guy with that warm smile is the one who created Orkut.

Orkut created orkut as a part project the 20% golden rule on Google. This rule makes it mandatory for all Google employees to work on a personal project for 20% of their work time thus promoting innovation and creating tools like orkut Google news and many other famous tools.

It looks like Orkut doesn't use Orkut much, their are too many unanswered and unwanted scraps on his profile. Who knows may be he is busy building another revolutionary tool like orkut lets wait and see.

Your Teen and the Internet

The Internet the most powerful tool available to any one, is it safe ? If not why is it not safe ? Who makes it unsafe? What threats does it pose to your teen?

Lets consider how safe the net is.As much as content matters, mostly, if you stick on to the popular sites you wont encounter inappropriate content unless you look for it, that is , compared to the TV you find less inappropriate content at the first look.Does that justify saying that there is no inappropriate content on these popular sites. No that is in no way true even on very reputed sites you will find Porn, spam, and other such inappropriate content. So the net is not exactly a safe place but no public place can be considered safe, can we ?

What is not safe is important. There are sites online providing counseling about sex but there are also sites online showing child pornography. So its more about what you choose to see than what is available on the net. OK its a totally different story when it comes to scamster's and stalkers which we will handle in another article. If a teen chooses to see the child pornography then you could say the Internet is not safe but if he chooses to use the counselling service then its safe and just not safe but also socially productive.

Studies have shown that out of the total traffic on the Internet around 45% or more is being used to transmit pornography another 10 % for other inappropriate content. So its not easy for a teenager not to encounter such stuff online. The curious nature of the age will force them to explore an inviting lure that might pop up in the form of an ad. Now there begins the story that is fuelling one of the worlds biggest illegal industry. These illegal businesses are the one who are making the Internet , otherwise beneficial tool , into a multi level system that is degenerating the next generation and producing a huge group of perverts.

The most important and the best measure to protect your teen from such content is to talk to them. Teach them about sex, relationships, values and so on your self don't let their peers do your job. Remember they don't access the Internet just from home so securing your home computer does not mean that they are safe. So it would be wiser to invest some time on your teens than installing expensive software.

Why In the world did Orkut become this popular?

6 Million users !!!!
Now, that is without a single Cent spent for advertising. Lets make that figure a little more real. There will be a lot of people with multiple accounts so, lets take a million and a half from that;then,spammers and other such fraudulent accounts will count up to five hundred thousand. So, that leaves us with 4 Million which by itself is a really big number considering the fact that the number of Internet users in India is just above 40 million ,10 % of that is huge considering the fact that orkut is relatively young.

Now what drives people to Orkut? To answer this we have to first see what kind of people you find on orkut. Mainly you find 5 categories of people on orkut, they are people looking for old friends , people looking to make new friends , people trying to find information about some thing , advertisers , porn mongers.

The sheer excitement that one gets when he sees a long lost friend's profile is what addicts most people to orkut. Now why are the other social networking sites not becoming this popular? The main reason is there are a lot of people on Orkut. Now you stand a better chance in finding an old friend on orkut than on any other site. The large number of serious users on Orkut has resulted in a very rich pool of informative contacts , that by itself is bring more activity on orkut now. You find people that have never met talking about how to look after their babies or what not.

One major thing about orkut is that no one has seen any advertisement from Orkut asking them to join. One joins orkut only and only because some asks you to join and usually this some is a close friend so people tend to relate orkut to close friend thus, building a bond with orkut and also the related trust.

But, is orkut safe? No, its not. Like any other social place, there are all kinds of people so, you have to take all precautions that you take at any public place on orkut also. Would you print thousands of copies of your personal photos and give to every person you see on the road? I don't think so. So don't do that on orkut either, simple. We all know how to keep ourselves safe in other public places and orkut is as safe as any other public place. The fact that the administrators of orkut treat it as a public place is another reason why orkut is so popular, people don't like being told what to and what not to do. Orkut has a TOS, but it does no policing. This relative freedom attracts a lot of users to orkut(both good and bad) .

So I guess its time for you to scrap Dadi about today's dinner.

Is Orkut Going to Be banned in India

There are a lot of messages and rumors going around the net about Orkut going to be banned in India. The government in 2006 experimented with blocking selected sites in India like they do in China but due to our power full write of press laws the government failed bitterly.

There is no explicit provision in the IT Act, 2000 for blocking of websites. In fact, blocking is considered to be censorship; hence it can be challenged if it restricts the freedom of speech and expression. But websites promoting hate, contempt, slander or defamation of others, promoting gambling, promoting racism, violence and terrorism, pornography and violent sex can reasonably be blocked since all such websites cannot claim the Fundamental Right of free speech and expression.

So what the above quoted text means is that even if orkut is banned a Public interest litigation will result in the removal of the same. Maximum what can happen is deletion of some communities that are otherwise also non social in nature. Some body or group who doesn't have the maturity to understand that they have no right to defame or spread violence about any other person or group is not a social being. The essence of society is the understanding that there are others and that they are different from you but that doesn't mean your are inferior to them nor are they superior to you. Most importantly that you are not superior to them either. So from what happened in 2006 when they tried to ban blogger as whole, they failed utterly and had to withdraw from the measure, they will only be successful in removing communities from Orkut and these communities will more or less non social in nature.

So don't worry orkut is here to stay. Whether some like it or not .

Orkut, Targeted Phishing Gaining popularity

Orkut is now the playground for all kind of ammeter hackers. The main reason for this is huge number of lo fi users and relatively low control measures by orkut. What do I mean by lo fi users, these are new users with minimum knowledge of even common hacking methods.

Now the new kinds of attacks are targeted one's, that is for a purpose . The commonly targeted users are either community owners of large communities , people with a huge friend list. People owning many active communities etc. The usual attacks are all common Phish attacks, that too age old one's.
Why are these users targeted? The answer is simple to get hold of the capacity to communicate directly with their friends list or community member's lists. These are usually advertisers trying to make direct communication channels with users. Some do it just for the sake of it.

What ever the hackers porpoise following some common tips will keep you safe from loosing your password:-

• Always check the URL for authenticity, it should be www.orkut.com/ after the '/' it can have other stuff but the after http:// it should always be www.orkut.com/ only after this should anything else come. Do not log in if it is any thing else. The hacker will get your user name and password if you try to log in.

• Google staff will never scrap or send you a mail, that too never from a Gmail account. They all have official @google.com email id or @googlemail.com id's so never give your password or anything to any one claiming to be Google staff on orkut.
• Never give your password to other like friends or family because they might loose it out of the chance of such attacks working increase many times as the number of people using the same account increase because simply that there is more chance that one of them might mistakenly fall pray.
• Keep your self up to date to the scams going around.
• There are many legitimate tools that third parties have developed, but some hackers phish out on this. But most of these tools are not incorporating phish prevention techniques so try to keep updated on those. The most common technique to prevent phish attack for a site developer is to add a dynamic image, watch out for those and as i saide before watch out for the address if the tools name is say orkut cute or Smex then it will always be a similar domain in the url and never a free page URL like googlepages.com or some thing like something.something.com. Another thing you could do is ask your friends about the tool if they are using it and to get the URL from them for the tool that they are using.
• We will be posting phish url and other informative article here, keep update on those.
• Read about phish attack.

BE CAREFUL AND BE SAFE