Black hats & bad guys
In last week’s interview with ARK, I set out my position as built on the belief that the Outlaw Planet superthreat wasn’t “simply a matter of weak technology, black hats and bad guys…”
And, yes, I still stand by this statement. I do think that - both in the media and in public discourse - the tendency has been to reduce Outlaw Planet to a purely technical problem, compounded by some kind of inherent weakness “hard wired” into the human condition. In our work for Superstruct, we’ve been attempting to spotlight the potential for social solutions, in addition to those that are purely technical.
I mean, when I first started reading up on the GEAS superthreats, I thought that Outlaw Planet could contain the seeds for something positive; something that could change the world for the better. Today, something happened that - while not changing my mind, exactly - certainly threw some of the more Panglossian elements of my perspective into shadow.
It started in the early hours of this morning, with a phone call from Zoe - who’s probably the closest thing I have to a best friend in this part of the world. Earlier that evening, her boyfriend Ian had gone to a pub on the other side of town for a couple of pints with a some of his former classmates. She’d been waiting up for him, but he hadn’t turned up. And this was a good couple of hours after last orders. She tried to call his mobile - it rang, but nobody answered.
Then she rang me. We retraced his route, called a couple of the people who’d been in attendance, and - once all our leads had deadended - contacted the police. They were still sweeping the area at 8.30am, when Ian was found, unconscious and bleeding, by a woman on her way to the supermarket.
Barring a broken leg, the injuries weren’t that serious. Combining Ian’s memories of the evening with some digital forensics on the part of the cops, it would seem that he was the victim of a GPS mugging. They must have clocked him at the pub, using bluetooth to sneak an application onto his mobile. Posing as a system upgrade, the malware waited for him to leave the pub, when it overrode the phone’s satnav. In an unfamiliar location, he was led to a location relatively hidden from city surveillance, where the muggers were lying in wait.
Textbook Outlaw Planet, that.
Now, I know there’d been some fairly major issues with the launch of the WorldVu AR service, but this was something different - a deliberate perversion of the trust with which we approach our technology and gadgetry. Futhermore, after a good hunt on the network, it looks as if this wasn’t even an isolated case. And, without surveillance evidence, there’s no guarantee that these guys will even be caught.
So, while Outlaw Planet might not be all “black hats and bad guys”, that’s not to say that they aren’t a signifant (and sickeningly real) part of the superthreat. :(
