How To Hide ScrapHave The Orkut Wars Begun? (India Verses Pakistan)

Personally I am not too thrilled about seeing this on Orkut, but here is the general gist of the story (from what I can gather from various emails, a few orkut scraps, etc.).

Last month, there were reports that a group calling themselves HMG (note: what does HMG stand for?) had successfully hacked the Islamic Republic of Pakistan orkut forum (or IRP for short), which may have been a response to the Mumbai attacks that shocked India (and the world) two months ago.

When I first heard about the Orkut hack, I was hoping that Google would be able to restore access to the original owners of the forum (as Google has done previously when Orkut forums were hacked en mass).

Unfortunately it seems as if the original owner of the Orkut forum, Arzoo (whose profile is no longer working) was deleted, allowing for any member of the forum to "simply inherit" the rights to the IRP community.

Many former members of IRP have since created two other Orkut forums (although both communities are not as large as the original forum).

Later on it was reported that Pakistani hackers were able to briefly take over the Dr. APJ Abdul kalam's Fan Club forum (note: the original owners were able to recover it back).

(CIOL.com) Pakistani hackers have targeted the Orkut community of Dr Abdul Kalam. [...]

The orkut page of Dr Kalam currently reads "We, the people of India, apologizes to our Pakistani brothers and ISI for barbaric acts of terrorism like Mumbai and Gujarat and many more which were originated and carried out by few citizens of India and supported by government of India. We condemn such acts to fullest."

I am hearing more reports of various forums hacked by either side, although thus far these are the only two that I can confirm at the moment (as Google may have restored the others to their original owners).

While I do understand why everyone's emotions are running high (as America experienced something similar after September 11th), I do not see the point in these forum hijackings as it only helps divide Indians and Pakistani's (which is probably the goal of the terrorists).

(Image via Anil Kalhan, original photographer unknown)

Fortunately there are a few Orkut forums out there trying to bring both sides together (note: and they have even started a unity petition).

Hopefully both sides can find more ways of working together--especially the hackers who would probably benefit everyone by creating more Orkut Apps--or even mobile apps for Orkut (which is definitely needed for Google Android phones as well as the iPhone).

So instead of trying to tear Orkut apart, why not instead try to build it up into something great together? (and perhaps makes some money on the side).