I meant to post something about this when it first came through Reuters, but then there were so many other interesting things going on and I didn't get to it — and then even Slashdot got to it before I did. Anywho, the premise is — shocker — Brazilian drugs rings were caught using Orkut to arrange drug deals. So really, that's not actually the shocking part — what's more interesting is how many people were shocked by the news.

As danah puts it: duh.

I also got a kick out of a comment from one of the /.-ers, which I'll reprint here because it pretty sums up the way the news is treating Orkut like the MPAA/RIAA are treating BitTorrent (it's awfully difficult to level a reasonable charge against a simple protocol, not that that seems to stop anyone): "In other news, a new device called a 'cellphone' was recently used in the bust of three columbian druglords. Apparently they were using the address book feature to store phone numbers of other drug lords and were using the 'voice' features to network and make deals. How does one go about 'wiretapping' and busting such a multi-lingual and diverse group of folk who use 'cellphones?'"