What's Wrong With Orkut.com?

I was an early Orkut invitee. I tried it out, invited a few people, and even founded the "Mexico" community.

But these online social networks aren't really for me. I got bored and eventually stopped logging in.

One of my friends (stuntdubl) mentioned that he had been amused by my recent change I had made to another community that I founded that he was a member of. I hadn't logged in for at least 3 months, so I had no idea what he was talking about.

After logging in, I was shocked to see that my profile image had been changed to a pornographic image, and this same (gay sex) image was being used as the community image in the group that Stunty had referred to.

I shot off an email to Orkut support:

My account was hacked. I havent logged in since, perhaps september, and I logged in today and it said my last login was 12/28/2004 - my password was changed and my name was changed to "Patrick Stupid", my profile made claims of gay sex acts, and one of the private communities I administer had all its messages deleted, all of them replaced with pornographic content.

I can only assume that this is some sort of security bug in the software.

Let me just add, that although no password is "guess proof" - my Orkut user name was something not related to my name, and my password was a string of relatively random digits and letters. About 2 weeks later I get this as a response:

Thanks for your bringing this to our attention. We're sorry about the
difficulties you've had. If you'd like to permanently delete this account, please follow these steps:

1. Select the "Home" link in the blue bar at the top of the page.
2. Click on the "profile" button under your photo.
3. Click the "edit profile" button that appears under your photo.
4. Click the "delete account" option on the right-hand side of the page.
5. Select "terminate account." If you wish to remain a member, choose "I changed my mind."

Please keep in mind that once you delete your account, you will not be able to restore or reactivate this account.

Stay beautiful,
orkut.com

Okay. I report a suspected security flaw, and Orkut's response is to tell me how to delete my account. Nice user support. I mentioned this to a Google rep at the New Orleans Webmasterworld Pubcon, and the rep said that Orkut Buyukkokten *is* Orkut.com's support team.

Fine, Orkut, I'll delete my account. Thanks for supporting your wonderful product.

Call Center Service From India Sucks

I had to send in my Dell laptop for service, and had the "pleasure" to be helped by Dell's crack team of outsourced techs in India.

So far I've spoken with "Steve", "Paul", "Mark", "Sharma" and "Nikita" (who all spoke with Indian accents), honestly, all in all, just fine for answering general questions. However, I apparently threw the call center techs for a loop by using a different city and state for the pick up and drop off.

I requested service from Austin, Texas, and due to time contraints, requested that my repaired laptop be sent to Orlando, Florida (the next stop on my itinerary).

In theory, that should cause no problems - well, of course it did. I just found out this morning that my laptop was sent to Orlando, Texas 78741 (an Austin zipcode).

I just don't think that someone familiar with US geography would have made this mistake.

I appreciate that Dell has chosen to save money by using an Indian Call Center service. What I do not appreciate is that they made this mistake, especially when I made a *concerted* effort to avoid this problem by calling in to make the address change. I also put a note in the laptop with the correct mailing address, but obviously Dell's (non-Indian) automatons in the Tennessee repair center ignored it.

The only thing that this story is lacking is some ironic twist, like getting my laptop back without the necessary repairs, or being damaged in shipping.

Unfortunately, that part of the story will take at least 2-3 business days....