Indian Police: Hacking Orkut Is Too Hard?

It looks like law enforcement in India are having a tough time hacking through Orkut in order to find the real identities of terrorists and criminals. Is it me or does this strike you as a bit...ironic?

(Indiatimes Infotech) Indian security agencies are having a tough time in catching criminals and terrorists who are members of Google-owned Gmail or Orkut sites.

According to security officials, since Google servers are based in US and their IP addresses are masked, it takes a long time to get the real IP addresses and log details of culprits. Moreover, Google demands a judicial order to process the request which further delays the arrest of the accused, who may even have fled by then.

You would think that they would realize Google (probably) hires the best hackers around the world. Although I wonder if anyone inside Orkut would be willing to offer their services to the cops for a small fee?

Is Google Winning The Scrapbook Spam War?

When it comes to fighting spam, Google has done an excellent job within Gmail, Blogger and even Google Groups.

But when it comes to Orkut, it seems that spammers have found a new way around the word verification system. This probably explains why I keep getting various scraps attempting to improve my "love life" through various forms of physical touch. (I think these spammers need to get a day job)

I discovered this after talking to one of the members of the Orkut Underground (whose forum keeps getting deleted by Google) who showed me a simple GreaseMonkey script that allows a user to post a link and bypass the word verification process altogether (note: for obvious reasons I will not post that script here).

Over in the What should Orkut do? forum, Randi has a great suggestion on what Google could do to combat this.

scrapbook should have 3 options.

1 open to everyone
2 open to friends only
3 open for those who speaks same language as you

and you can choose what's best for you

Google is already working on this suggestion, as it is within the top five feature requests, although it wouldn't hurt to submit that request again.

Hotmail Hacker Stealing Passwords?

The irony of this happening in the Hack Hotmail community forces me to have little sympathy for the victims.

Although I do not use Hot Mail anymore, apparently Fariiisssshhhh is attempting to steal people's passwords through social engineering.

Of course this only works if someone wants to hack another hotmail account using Fariiisssshhhh's advice.

Moral of the story: you reap what you sow.