Futurismic

I guess we can look forward to a new pharmacological trade name appearing in our spam folders in the near future. A failed antidepressant, flibanserin will soon enter clinical trials in the UK to determine whether it’s safe to be marketed as the Female Viagra, accompanied by pointed questions from sexual health experts as to whether there’s really any genuine need for it:

Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug has proved controversial among sex researchers. Some argue pharmaceutical companies are exaggerating the number of women affected by low libido to expand their market, and are pushing a pill that will not deal with psychological issues that might put someone off sex, such as poor body image or stress.

With the hopefully obvious caveat that I’m not a woman, I’m siding with the skeptics on this one. Viagra solves a, er, mechanical problem that prevents men from having sex, whereas flibanserin appears to be psychological in effect from the details described – a ‘randiness’ pill, to put it crudely.

Personally, I’m all for personal pharmacological freedom – if there’s a pill out there that does something positive for you, then who are you harming other than yourself? But I’m not sure that that a lack of libido in women is a pathological problem in the same way as erectile dysfunction, and this has all the hallmarks of Big Pharma rolling out another “lifestyle” drug designed to cure something that isn’t really an illness. [image by Felixe]

I remain surprised that libido suppressants aren’t so readily available as their opposites, though. If there’s a market for chemicals to switch on a certain body response, surely there’s going to be one for chemicals to switch them off? One might argue in response that libido suppressants could be easily misused, given to people who neither wanted or needed to take them… to which I’d respond that the same surely applies to flibanserin and Viagra.

We’ve surely heard enough stories about how posting status updates on social networks can give away more information about you than you intended, so here’s the positive flipside of that: Rodney Bradford was a suspect in a Brooklyn mugging case, and it’s partly thanks to a Facebook status update made from his father’s apartment that the charges against him were dropped. [via TechDirt]

Of course, such alibis could be faked, if you had the time and intelligence to plan it all out and the help of a close-lipped accomplice… expect a lot more mystery and crime plots involving status updates, IP addresses and server timestamps to crop up in the next couple of years.

But perhaps this means that lifelogging is the ultimate way to protect yourself from accidentally being accused of something you didn’t do – if every second of your life is open to public scrutiny, you’re not going to commit a mugging and get away with it, after all.

But what happens when we’re all lifelogging, in some almost unimaginable combination of the participatory panopticon and David Brin’s transparent society? When every moment, when every minor indiscretion is a matter of public record, will we simply cease to sin? Or will we develop a kind of social blindness to the sort of unethical actions that we all take every now and again?

Did you hear about the recent exploit of jailbroken jesusPhones? Yeah, the Rick-rolling one (though that wasn’t strictly the original exploit, rather some Australian script-kiddie’s repurposing of a Dutch exploit from earlier in the month); to sum it all up in a sentence, bad things can happen to your hardware if you install software without changing the default password. As a sensible and experienced web denizen, you knew that already, of course.

But when you set or change a password, you’d better make the effort to think up a good one. Countless studies have shown how easy it is for black-hat types to guess the most common passwords (or alternatively social-engineer them out of you), but the ease of guessing is going to increase rapidly very soon, thanks to something one free software geek from Norway is calling the Hail Mary Cloud. [image by Anna Gay]

Yeah, I know, the pop-culture reference is a bit obscure, so I’ll sum it up for you: the Hail Mary Cloud is essentially a brute-force password-guessing botnet that has been scraping away at SSH daemons in recent months. A Mechanical Turk method of botnet expansion, in other words; why wait for someone to click on a spam email link when you can prise open a back-door on a webserver somewhere? [via SlashDot]

Each attempt in theory has monumental odds against succeeding, but occasionally the guess will be right and they have scored a login. As far as we know, this is at least the third round of password guessing from the Hail Mary Cloud, but there could have been earlier rounds that escaped our attention.

The fact that we see the Hail Mary Cloud keeping up the guessing is a strong indicator that there are a lot of guessable passwords and possibly badly maintained systems out there, and that even against the very long odds they are succeeding often enough in their attempts to gain a foothold somewhere that it is worth keeping up the efforts. For one thing, the cost of using other people’s equipment is likely to be quite low.

There are a lot of things about the Hail Mary Cloud and its overseers that we do not know. People who responded to the earlier articles with reports of similar activity also reported pretty consistently something like a sixty to seventy percent match in hosts making the attempts.

With 1767 hosts in the current sample it is likely that we have a cloud of at least several thousand, and most likely no single guessing host in the cloud ever gets around to contacting every host in the target list. The busier your SSH deamon is with normal traffic, the harder it will be to detect the footprint of Hail Mary activity, and likely a lot of this goes undetected.

If you’re worried, you’re thinking right – even the most complex of passwords can be guessed if you’ve got enough processor cycles (and available attempts) to spare. If the Hail Mary Cloud grows big enough, the era of the password as an even partially effective security method may be over… so start genning up on public key encryption now and avoid the rush.

Oh, to be a CEO of a tech start-up… they can get bored of their projects even faster than the public can, y’know. Actually, that’s a little unfair – Philip Rosedale, the man behind Linden Lab, hasn’t lost interest in Second life so much as he’s looking for a new fish to fry with his new company, LoveMachine Inc. [image by Mrs. Bones]

What does LoveMachine do? Apparently it’s developing a system of the same name that was used by Linden Lab as a points-based incentive tool:

Linden employees gave and received “love” for a job well done. If an employee was well-received amongst his or her peers, their accumulated love currency was redeemable for a cash bonus at the end of the month. Similar to social capital systems like Whuffie Bank, it appears that LoveMachine may become a reputation currency system for businesses.

Interesting to see another outfit chasing after reputation economies as a potential business model… and restricting such a system to the limited and manageable confines of discreet organisations makes sense, as closed economies are inherently easier to manage. I expect they’ve heeded Bruce Schneier’s advice on reputation economies, too:

You’ve all experienced a reputation economy: restaurants. Some restaurants have a good reputation, and are filled with regulars. When restaurants get a bad reputation, people stop coming and they close. Tourist restaurants – whose main attraction is their location, and whose customers frequently don’t know anything about their reputation – can thrive even if they aren’t any good. And sometimes a restaurant can keep its reputation – an award in a magazine, a special occasion restaurant that “everyone knows” is the place to go – long after its food and service have declined.

Details of the LoveMachine plans are understandably sketchy at the moment. However, Rosedale and company have got a public worklist of jobs that they need a contractor to take on, and – if you live in the San Francisco area – they’re looking to hire. [hat tip to Fabio Fernandes]

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.

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