News Blog

Update Dec. 20 with Google comment

A computer worm has been spreading on Google's big-in-Brazil Orkut social network, according to a report on the Sounds from the Dungeon blog.

The relatively harmless worm appears to use JavaScript and Flash code to create new scrapbook entries on profiles with a New Year's message in Portuguese before propagating to the victim's friends.

It may have infected as many as 400,000 users, according to a post on a blog called "c0d3w12."

According to the Packet Storm security site, a vulnerability affecting Orkut was discovered November 8 and fixed last week. It was not clear whether this was the same vulnerability that was allowing the worm to spread.

"It appears Google has responded quickly," writes a blogger on ValleyWag. "Too bad. If Google had let the worm rampage, maybe some American users might actually hear about Orkut for the first time."

A Google representative sent this e-mail comment: "Google takes the security of our users very seriously. We worked quickly to implement a fix for the issue recently reported in orkut. We also took steps to help prevent similar problems in the future. Service to orkut was not disrupted during this time."

On August 31, Lakshmana Kailash K. was arrested in Bangalore, India, and charged with posting insulting images of a revered historical figure on the Internet. The police claimed that he had uploaded disrespectful images of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the Indian equivalent of George Washington. Free speech, it seems, does not extend to that sort of thing in India.

No dissent allowed on Orkut.

(Credit: Skip The Budgie / Flickr)

Normally, this wouldn't be a press-worthy story. After all, India is not the first country to take a hard line against Internet free speech. The Thai military regime blocked the entire YouTube Web site earlier this year after a single video posted to the site depicted a woman's feet touching the head of the country's king. Likewise, Turkey also recently blocked YouTube for a video insulting the country's founder.

So what makes this interesting? First, Mr. Kailash was alleged to have posted the pictures to Orkut, Google's redheaded stepchild of a social-networking site. Once Google divulged the IP address of the photo-uploader to the Indian authorities, the police sought the customer's identity from Airtel, one of the country's main telecommunication companies. This is where things get interesting. It turns out that the ISP gave the police the wrong information, and after three weeks behind bars, Mr. Kailash was released.

A police spokesperson was quoted by the Indo-Asian News Service as blaming the ISP for giving out the wrong information. "It is not our fault and Lakshmana should take Airtel to court and not us."

When contacted for comment, a Google spokesperson told me that, "Google has very high standards for user privacy and a clear privacy policy, and authorities are required to follow legal process to get information. In compliance with Indian legal process, we provided Indian law enforcement authorities with IP address information of an Orkut user." This was the only comment that Google's PR people would give me in response to a lengthy set of questions that I sent over. In particular, I asked if they had received a court order for the information, or merely a polite request from the police. Their response leaves things very hazy.

So what are the lessons to learn from this incident?

Given that Mr. Kailash didn't actually post the photos, I can't provide him with any advice for protecting his privacy on the Internet. All I can suggest is that he hire a very good lawyer, and attempt to take Airtel to the cleaners. If we assume, however, that Airtel eventually handed over the identity of the real "criminal," then perhaps some advice can be offered.

Internet crackdowns: First China, India next?

(Credit: ItzaFineDay / Flickr)

Internet users: If you live in a country that does not respect freedom of speech and where you can get jailed for posting social commentary or otherwise subversive information to the Internet, technology can help you. Likewise, if you live in a country where the major telecom companies have willingly (and for a good profit) sold out their customers' privacy to large-scale illegal government surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies can keep you safe.

The most important utility in any privacy-concerned Internet user's toolbox should be Tor, an anonymizing Web proxy. Based on technology originally designed by the U.S. Naval Research Labs, funded at one point by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and later by Voice of America, Tor has support from a strange yet wide variety of private and public groups. The EFF has published a guide to blogging anonymously, which is primarily based on Tor. Simply put, had the Indian Orkut user signed up for his account and posted the insulting photographs using Tor, neither he nor any other innocent Airtel customers would be locked up.

While this incident didn't come anywhere close to dissidents fighting for democracy, some strong parallels can be drawn between Google's decision to hand over IP addresses to Indian police, and that of Yahoo, which has handed over the IP addresses of pro-democracy activists to the Chinese authorities on multiple occasions. As a result of the company's snitching, Yahoo is facing a lawsuit, and a U.S. congressman has proposed legislation to make the company's actions illegal. Interestingly, the Global Online Freedom Act, which was proposed by Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ) in 2006, could also cause problems for any future India-based snitching by Google, should it ever become law.

The bill, if passed into law, would prohibit any U.S. Internet company from providing any foreign official of an Internet-restricting country information that "personally identifies a particular user...except for legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes as determined by the Department of Justice." Companies that violated this prohibition could be sued in U.S. courts by those foreigners whose information they divulged. Fortunately for the Internet giants, the bill has been stuck in committee since 2006 and doesn't show any signs of life.

Though almost everything Google touches seems to turn to gold, there is one project that never quite became ubiquitous (at least here in the U.S.). Orkut may have found a following in Brazil and Asia, but I don't know anyone who uses the service. As Erick Schonfeld reports in TechCrunch, that may be about to change.

Known internally as Maka-Maka, the project will provide a means for all of Google's existing applications to work together within a social-networking landscape. Google is also building a series of APIs that will allow developers to integrate their own applications into the Google universe.

... Read more

Over at Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel is making a bold prediction: The portals will be big winners in the social-networking wars.

"Social networking is certainly rising and there seems to be no end in sight to the phenomenon. However, what I do know is that people will jump around from one Myfaceborkutspace to another and not all of them will win," Rubel wrote.

He is referring to Long Tail author Chris Anderson, who points out that all good web sites should have elements of social networking and therefore suggests that social networking is a "feature, not a destination." Rubel believes that the portals' key advantage is that they "own the glue that keeps many of usconnected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones--e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net."

That's true. You could also say that our buddy list is our social network, and we appreciate just plugging it into the most convenient and trusted network of our choice. Call it the "floating network." I therefore also agree with Rubel when he says, "No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) Web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central."

There are good reasons why there is a lot at stake for the traditional portals, and there are good reasons (Rubel names them) to predict they will not just sit back and watch the young social-networking sites own the game, especially now that business has begun facing up to social networks. And yet, I am hesitant to follow Rubel's prediction that the portals will have the upper hand in this conflict. In fact, I think he gets the conflict wrong.

I don't think this is as strict an antagonism as Rubel describes it, and I would even question the "war parties" as he identifies them: On the one side, the emerging social networks that are relentlessly trying to enhance the one main feature they're built upon ("making connections") into a platform. On the other side, the big portals, the AOLs, MSNs, Yahoos, that are seeking to operate more like social networks. This is an over-simplified showdown, for Rubel stages a competition where, in fact, we witness a co-evolution. The portals will adapt the best social-networking features, for example by activating the "dormant social networks" they own (see Yahoo Mash), and the social networks will adapt some of the portals' features; just yesterday AllFacebook and Paid Content speculated that Facebook is preparing to launch a music platform, either as a potential iTunes killer (according to AllFacebook) or a MySpace competitor (according to Paid Content).

However--and herein lies the major difference to Rubel's assumption--both social networks and portals are striving to eventually become something entirely different: the new operating system. Facebook is not shy about its intentions, and you could argue that it has already transformed the site into something much bigger than a social network.

It is a not a social-networking war; it is a race to become the de facto operating system for the social networker. And that is, of course, why Google, which is neither a social network nor a portal, is in the game too. The company is said to be feverishly working on "out-facebooking" Facebook by introducing a meta-platform that integrates not only a suite of Google services (like iGoogle, Gmail, Google Talk, Orkut, etc.) but is also 100 percent open to third-party developers--and other social networks. Google's recent acquisition of mobile social-network Zingku indicates that this uber-platform may have a strong mobile component and the long-rumored free, ad-based phone service. In other words, while social networks and portals are fighting the "social networking wars," Google may be winning the actual competition at hand: to become the dominant operating system for all of our communications. You can also call it the World Wide Web.

Statistics house ComScore released some numbers on Tuesday pertaining to how quickly a handful of popular social-networking sites are growing worldwide, and which ones dominate in which regions of the globe. There's nothing all too notable here, as the global reach of various social-networking sites has been well-documented already--and even mapped. But it's always cool to see numbers, which I suppose is why companies like ComScore exist in the first place.

The main set of numbers tracks worldwide social-networking growth, with June 2006 and June 2007 as the benchmarks, for seven services: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, and Tagged. Tagged, one of the smaller and newer of the bunch, showed the greatest overall growth--a 774 percent increase from 1,506,000 unique visitors in June 2006 to 13,167,000 unique visitors in June 2007. That could be because the San Francisco-based social network simply wasn't on the map until recently; it was founded in 2004 but scored its first round of venture capital in February 2006.

Facebook has, as one may imagine, also grown quite a bit--270 percent, from 14,083,000 uniques to 52,167,000. ComScore charts Bebo as having grown about 172 percent, and Orkut as having grown about 78 percent.

Friendster might be considered an also-ran, at least in the U.S., but according to ComScore's statistics, it's growing almost as quickly as MySpace: 65 percent versus 72 percent. That being said, Friendster's unique visits went from around 15 million to around 25 million, while MySpace's went from about 66.5 million to over 114 million, so we're clearly dealing with vastly different magnitudes here.

Interestingly enough, Hi5, which I've heard talked about as a rising star in the social-networking world, has been growing at a crawl compared with the others--only 56 percent growth from June 2006 to June 2007.

The ComScore statistics also charted where visits to social-networking sites are coming from, based on worldwide region: Out of the seven social-networking sites, the two with the most "balanced" user bases worldwide are Tagged and Hi5. Tagged, according to the ComScore numbers, has 22.7 percent of its base from North America, 14.6 from Latin America, 23.4 from Europe, 10 from Africa and the Middle East, and 29.2 percent from Asia and the Pacific region. Hi5, similarly, is 15.3 percent North American, 24.1 percent Latin American, 31 percent European, 8.7 percent African/Middle Eastern, and 20.8 percent Asia-Pacific.

MySpace and Facebook both have large percentages of their users in North America (62.1 percent for MySpace, 68.4 percent for Facebook) with sizeable portions in Europe (24.7 percent for MySpace, 16.8 percent for Facebook) and single-digit numbers in all other regions. Bebo, most popular in the U.K., is largely the opposite, with 62.5 percent of its users based in Europe, 21.8 percent in North America, and few elsewhere.

Orkut, famous for having a user base virtually restricted to Brazil and India, understandably has almost half its user base in Latin America, almost half in Asia-Pacific, and almost none anywhere else. Friendster, meanwhile, leans the most disproportionately toward a single geographic market: it gathers nearly 89 percent of its user base from the Asia-Pacific region.