In the last few years the AdS/CFT correspondence has been used to compute transport properties of strongly coupled deconfined superYang-Mills plasmas. We present a critical discussion of recent computations of the single-quark drag force and the jet quenching parameter from certain string configurations in an AdS black hole background. We argue that these computations do not give a consistent picture of frictional forces in SYM plasmas, and discuss possible corrections to the AdS computations which may qualitatively change these computations.