He is an Information Technology Specialist and a well known source of help for Google users. 25 year old Jomy Moses is well known person in orkut and Orkut help group forums. I recently got this opportunity to have some words with jomy about his life both social and professional and his experience in serving netizens, especially the users of orkut.com.
Jomy is known as a friendly, helpful and down to earth person who is ready to help anyone with a genuine problem, among tens of testimonials written by his friend on Jomy’s orkut profile the one common thing which I found about Jomy is, he is the best in everything he do.
More of Jomy’s life? Continue reading this very interesting and informative interview of Jomy Moses.
Jomy can you please write down your small biography? Where did you born, your schooling, higher education and your profession?
Well, I sure will try to keep this really short, so you guys won’t get bored. I was born on the 18th of February, 1984 in Trivandrum the capital city of what is called the God’s own country “Kerala”. I completed my schooling from ‘Kendriya Vidyalaya’ ,well that should sound familiar for guys from India, and did my Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, from Anna University, Chennai. Apart from that, my technical certifications include Microsoft Certified System Engineer MCSE on Windows 2003 Server and Upgradation to Server 2008 and Vista Client. Red Hat Certified Engineer RHCE on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, Cisco Certified Network Associate CCNA and Cisco Certified Security Professional CCSP, Training on Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist MCTS MVS2008 C# and ASP .Net SQL Server 2005… well I am not goanna mention all those over here.
I started my career as a Systems Engineer, but have spread my hand over all areas, including Desktop and Web Application Development. Of course my programming skills are limited to C# and Java, but to be honest I like to work on System Administration and Networking side. That suits more to my profile. But these days it’s more like we change our profile to suite the work we are assigned, rather than find a job which suites our profile. Well it would be great if you make your profile suite all these so you won’t run short on opportunities.
Orkut completed more than 4 years on net; however we didn’t saw much upgrades technically, is there is something new we can expect from orkut.com in future?
Of course you can always expect great things from orkut. It’s indeed the best online entertainment and social networking site you would come across. And orkut has undergone so many upgradations in these past 4 years for making itself more entertaining, flexible and secure to its users. Apart from being entertaining, orkut has made a lot of improvement in keeping vulnerable user information safe and maintaining the privacy of users. Improvements are made on spam detection and removal which helps in keeping orkut clean from inappropriate contents, which would create nerve biting experience to its users. Also elevated removal policies on copyright protected contents, nudity and impersonation, provide a pleasing experience to its users. In addition to this, sufficient support is provided to the users through one of the most active help forum where users can interact with each other provide and get help with less effort at the earliest possible time. Along with this, appropriate information as to where you can get help from, and links which will lead you to the experts from where you could get help for your issues is provided. Direct links for reporting impersonation and fake login pages are also available, to maintain maximum safety and privacy for its users. Although many users complain about the delay in getting response on filling up these forms, the reviewing team is putting in a good effort on taking necessary actions at the earliest. With Orkut becoming quite popular, the team receives huge amount of abuse reports daily, and naturally it might take some time to get a response on your report. But personally, I think it works much faster these days as I myself had reported a couple of my fake profiles and had it removed within 24 hours. The third party application developers are also doing a pretty good job in creating fun applications which makes orkut more entertaining.
Many of the orkut users and communities became the victim of hacking and profile hijacking. What are the best ways to avoid such incidents?
Yes. These days we get lots of reports on communities and profiles getting hacked, passwords being changed, ownership being transferred and lots of problems like that. Well I personally think modern day hacking has changed its main objective of finding vulnerability on a web server , web application or application sites, to taking advantage over the vulnerability of people or the users. Let me pour some light over this. Nowadays servers are more secured and shielded and it would be near impossible to penetrate on to a web server and hack or manipulate secure data. So hackers changed over to exploit the user’s vulnerability for stealing their passwords and other secure information. Let’s take an example of a person who has a craze for downloading the latest computer games and software, which would be like me about 5 years back. Suppose this person comes across a link saying “Click here for downloading latest games and software”. Straight away, without any hesitation, the person will go for a click and that could trigger a bunch of scripts which can do lot of things on the background which the person does not see on his web browser or the interface. Same thing is applicable when you are logged on to Orkut , Gmail or any other sites. You may receive links to external sites which may contain coding which could handover your vulnerable information to a hacker. Similar is the case when you use (copy and paste) certain java scripts on your web browser url tab. This is what usually happens in orkut, when someone gets hacked or loses access to their account. So in my opinion, the best way to avoid situations like this would be to avoid clicking on links when you come across it, or if it looks too tempting, just copy the link, open up a new web browser (if you are logged in orkut or gmail using Internet Explorer, open up a new window in say Firefox or any other different web browser) and try the link ,although it’s not recommended. After your session is over, make sure you log off rather than just closing the browser window. Also if you are logging in from a public internet pub, you could also clear out your cookies and caches after you wind up your session and may even look out for key loggers before you enter your password.
Social networking today has become the part of everyday life, on the professional side, it’s also a booming and competitive business. What is your future prediction both personally and professionally?
Of course social networking has become one of the unavoidable demands in the present day scenario, but I would rather say it would become much more demanding and unavoidable in the future to come. If I got to find a person the first thing going through my mind would be to open up orkut and key in the name on the search box. Even though it may sound funny but it’s the fact that it would be much easier to find a criminal over the internet cloud, rather than to find him under the sky.
And yes it has become a competitive business, every day when we move across the internet we see lots of new social networking sites emerging and some day in the near future, a few of these sites may become as popular and entertaining as orkut.
Could Orkut.com be successful or unsuccessful if it was not owned by Google? What is your personal thought on this?
Orkut is of course an amazing product and it would have become popular even if it was not owned by Google. But being owned by Google simply increased the pace and the quality of the product, which has now made it one of the best among social networking sites. Similar was the case when hotmail which introduced the first email service with graphical user interface. Microsoft had no hesitation in taking over the product which indeed was a big success. So innovative ideas along with supporting resources can prove much, rather than just having an innovative idea without any resource to support it. Google’s wide range of resources and state of the art technology has played a major role in making Orkut a great success.
What was your first project as a Network Security Administer? Please share your experience.
Well my first assignment as a network administrator was to design and implement the network infrastructure for a company. Of course that was about 3 years back. Because of the limited number of employees, I had to deal with everything, from software simulations of the design, purchase of routers and pix to crumbing of Ethernet cable. On security side there was not much of consideration. Since they did not have any live web or application servers running, I just had to perform some basic network penetration tests with built in standard tools to check the well being of the pix device and the built in firewall feature. Managing the internal network was also simple as we had limited number of employees and computers. We just had two servers including a domain controller. Indeed I had a nice experience with them.
Jomy, what are your favorite pastime activities?
I do have very limited pastime activities, still one thing I do to get myself relaxed is to lie on my bed, close my eyes and listen to the sounds of wind chimes. I do have couple of these tied up in my room. I love dismantling things, from the smallest of toys to the most complex electronic goods, although very few among them will regain its original shape once it is dismantled by me. Reading reviews on latest hardware and software can also be mentioned as a pastime activity because I spend a good amount of time on that.
We all knows that Orkut, though being a very nice social platform could not manage to get popular in rest of the world accept Brazil and Indian sub continent. What do you think, what went wrong? Or it’s simply a hard luck?
Well it would be like asking why wheat is more popular in North India while rice is popular in the south. It doesn’t mean rice tastes bad for people in north or wheat tastes bad for people in south. It’s just that people continue following the trails and trends.
India is developing fast, but still large number of population is internet illiterate but learning and exploring World Wide Web in very low rate. What are your comments?
Of course in India we come across a wide range on people, from those who spend the larger half of their time over the internet cloud from those who do not even know that such a thing exists. But things are changing fast, and each day more and more people are becoming aware of the Internet and its uses. In the future we can expect personal computers without hard drives, from which people could access the internet cloud while on the move, connect to a server containing their share and store their data’s, which would remain secure and could be accessed anytime, from anywhere.
Being on orkut, what was your most challenging task till now?
Being with orkut alone makes it pretty challenging. Every day we come across new things, either from the good guys or from the bad guys. The hardest thing would be to say a ‘no’ when someone comes to us for help and there isn’t any possible way to satisfy their demands. Everything has to be done through the proper channel and there are no shortcuts to help anyone personally.
What are the most common questions you encounter with people using Google product?
People come to me with a wide range of questions, some of them could sound very silly and some other may sound pretty complex.
Mostly people come to me asking how and why their accounts get hacked and why Google supports hackers.
Well as I have mentioned earlier, most of these hacking occurs by taking advantage of people’s vulnerabilities and weakness. One of the best ways would be not to try anything new and just use these sites the way it’s meant to be used. New things may sound cool and look attractive, but may prove quite expensive. And for those who are new to this, please take your time reading the help documents, and safety and security features.
Probably the next thing people come asking would be how and why their accounts get disabled.
There are two main reasons behind the accounts getting disabled. This could be either due to the violation of the terms of usage, or could be because of unusual activity from the account.
Now unusual activity from an account can occur either with the knowledge of the user or without the user being aware of what’s going on. Now this may sound strange but just take the example of using scripts when logged on to an account. As I have mentioned before these scripts can perform a lot of actions in the background which won’t be notified on the web browser so the user remains unaware of what exactly is going on. For instance it can just give a reply, “please wait, processing your request”, and the user keeps on waiting, while the action script performs all the things it was meant to perform, which would finally result in the account getting disabled.
And recently many people come to me mentioning they have been blocked from sending scraps and from sending friend requests.
Now this happens when you exceed a certain number limit for an allotted time period.
This usually occurs when you send too many scraps or friend requests in a very short period of time. Once you exceed that limit you will be forced to a timeout period which differs for each case and only after the timeout period you will be allowed to perform the action again. Make sure you do not keep on trying the same activity again and again in the timeout period, which could certainly lead to an increase in the period.
Jomy, thanks for giving your precious time and making this interview useful and informative for all those who need help from orkut or any social networking site. Your efforts in making social networking secure for everyone are appreciable. Thanks from OrkutHeroes.com
{ 6 comments }
great source of help
because of him i got my stock exchange community back from Mr Cool
wont forget his help
hello sir
is google coming out with new OS . will we be able to download it ?
plz also giv ur comments on this.
Cool man
You simply rock and thanx for giving such a good review.
I have send you a friends request plz accept it.
gr8
good to c ppl like him…good going
Cool man !
Keep the good work goin on. Any news on orkut changing its platform ?
brother what about Microsoft wlplannet?
it has better look and feel compared to orkut.
you move to Microsoft.
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