orkut

[Alert] Orkut Affected By ‘Bom Sabado’ Worm, Stay Away For Now

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If you are an avid Orkut user, you might be aware of this new worm which has just been discovered. This XSS (cross-site scripting) attack was allegedly initiated in Brazil, where the social networking site has the most of users than any other country in the world.

The worm hijacks the user account and sends spam scraps to all those in the user’s friend list. The scraps just contain the words “Bom Sabado” with some links attacked to it, clicking on which the receiver’s profile will also get hacked. The worm adds some unrelated communities to the infected accounts and currently thousands of such attacks have been reported.

Bom Sabado virusBom Sabado worm communities

The word “Bom Sabado” stands for “Good Saturday” in Portuguese, the official language of Brazil.

Tip: If you notice that your account has been affected by this worm/virus, logout from your account, clear your browser cache and cookies and then sign back in, then change your password and secret question for the Orkut/Google account. If you account stands good and no traces of hijacking are found, just stay away from Orkut until the engineers fix the issue.

New Orkut Upgrade Brings More Facebook Like Features

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Orkut team has yesterday announced minor upgrades to the Google’s social networking site, definitely in a attempt to catch up to the Facebook’s domination in the arena.This is evident since the launch of new version of Orkut with changes like enabling friends to comment on the status updates,auto-magic groups, file transfer in chat etc.

The new upgrade to the site will bring three feature changes:

# Scraps are now being replaced by conversations:

“From now on, all scraps you send to your friends will also show up in your profile, making it easy to start new conversations”

You can even comment on the ongoing conversations that any of your friends have already started, now this conversation will start appearing in your profile, much like that way how Facebook shows them up.

# Private scraps:

You can now send a private scraps to your friends which will be visible to only selected friends:

orkut private scraps

“To keep something secret, just send a private scrap to your friends, and just those people selected will see it”

# Privacy Levels:

Orkut has added privacy settings for each of the individual items like who can see content on your profile, who can send a scrap to you, etc.

orkut_new_privacy_settings

“Every piece of content on orkut (a scrap, photo, video, etc) will be labelled with a privacy level, so you know who else is seeing it or not “

What do you feel about these new changes ? let us know.

File Transfer Feature Launched In Orkut and iGoogle Chat; To Be Available In Gmail Soon

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Do you frequently use chat in Orkut and iGoogle rather than using standalone Google Talk desktop client? And feel for the missing “File sharing” option that is available in Google talk ? You may not have to compromise from now on since Google has announced the introduction of file sharing option right inside the Orkut and iGoogle chat.

How To Send A File In Orkut Chat ?

Start chat in Orkut, and click on the “Actions” drop down menu and click “Send a file..”

send file orkut chat

Select the file you want to share/send to your friend and click ok.Your chat buddy has to accept the file similar to how do it in Google Talk to receive the file.

orkut_filetransfer_send_file

You can virtually share any file like pictures, documents, and other files with your friends while chatting in Orkut and iGoogle.

Google also promises that this file transfer option would soon be introduced in Gmail chat as they are working on it.

How To Gain Ownership Of An Ownerless Orkut Community?

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Orkut, Google’s popular Social networking website in Brazil, India & Pakistan is one of the largest daily visited site in these countries (mainly among the youngsters).Popularity always bring exploitations, isn’t it?  you can always find so many hacks, tweaks, tips, hacks exchanged between the users about Orkut.

The one such vulnerable feature being exploited was taking the ownership of an ownerless community.If the profile of the existing owner of a community gets deleted or the something of that sort happens and the community suddenly becomes ownerless.

ownerless orkut community screen shot techrena.net

Orkut had an easy option till last year that enables any user who is active in the community for at least a period of 7 days.That means that if I want to become a owner of a big community which is currently ownerless (of course for notorious reasons), then what I’d do is I just simply scan the orkut for such commnities and I’ll find the best of such communities and join.Then after 7 days, I’d get a link “Become the owner of this community” I click it and would become the owner.

Well, if you have been using these kind of tricks, may be not anymore from now, Google has recently updated the criterion for becoming owner of an ownerless community,

To become the owner of an ownerless community, you must need to be member of that community for at least 3/4th of the age of that community

So, as per the new rules to become a owner, you must be a member of that community for at least 3/4 th age of the community and also the age of the community should be more than 7 days by the time of registration.

However, as expected this is sure to rise the voices of the other group of people.Orkut users expressed their concerns over here and here.

This policy is subject to change if the Orkut team thinks it is important for the safety of orkut communities in general

New Feature in Orkut: Auto-Magic Groups

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Orkut has launched another new feature called “Auto-Magic Groups”.

Auto-Magic Groups automatically suggests friend groups (to filter updates) and suggests labels for them too.Just like friend suggestions that are coming in Orkut off late, you can either accept the suggestions or you may just ignore them.

orkut beta Logo

As you can see in the below screen shot, a link called “edit groups” will appear at the right corner of the ‘Friend updates’ tab.If you click ‘edit groups’ link, it will open all existing groups (that you have created) plus new groups suggested by orkut.You can further customize them from there.

This is what Orkut engineers have to say about this new feature in orkut blog.

This new feature makes it easy to filter your friends’ updates based on relevant groups, right on your orkut homepage, so now you can easily see only the updates from a specific group of people at a time. Try it out by selecting a group from the "groups" drop-down menu on your homepage!

automagic groups in Orkut

This feature I guess initially available to few selected users and will soon be rolled out for all.

Orkut’s Cool New Version Launched

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Facebook has been gaining a lot of ground among the users in recent times outplaying Google’s Orkut. The Google has finally gets up to the challenge by launching more faster, lighter and much more safer version of their social networking site.

This new version has been developed using Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

What’s new ?

  • Simpler and faster loading
  • Easy navigation to other Google properties [You can find links to other Google tools like Gmail, right at the top]
  • One-stop notifications[friend requests, testimonials, community requests or birthday announcements, all at one place]
  • Fast photo uploads and photo sharing
  • Video Chat Integration
  • Inline comments for status messages, photos and videos
orkut new homepage

New Inline comments feature

More Customization:

Picking up favorite color in orkut

You can now customize your own profile page like never before.The new version claims to have added features like picking your favourite color from a list of 5 available default colors.

But this new version has been allotted to selected few users and you can identify them with thisOrkut favicon symbol next to their profile name.You can ask them for an invite to get started with this new version.

find out more at this page.