Futurismic

Unless you’ve been sleeping under that hypothetical internet-proof rock for the last 24 hours, you’ve probably caught wind of the charmingly-named Please Rob Me, a site that aggregates publicly-available Twitter updates which announce that their creator has left their home empty while they go somewhere else. The theory here is that, by announcing you’re not at home, you’re openly inviting some nefarious evil-doer to burgle all your stuff in your absence; what a terrible indictment of geolocational status updates and public announcements of your daily comings and goings, AMIRITE?

Well, frankly, no. Even someone as poorly versed in crime literature (be it fictional or factual) as myself is aware that an experienced and/or smart burglar tends to “case the joint” carefully before doing the job. And while Please Rob Me might make it possible to know when someone’s out of the house without surveilling it from across the street, that’s its only advantage… assuming that said burglar is willing to take an internet status update as a surety, which – were I a burglar – I certainly wouldn’t do.

So, yes – Please Rob Me may be a useful way of highlighting the fact that many people who geolocate themselves publicly on the web haven’t thought about the implications of that information being publicly available (which is what its creators meant it to do, if I’ve understood their “why” page properly), but it isn’t a sign that there’ll be a sudden swarm of Twitter-combing burglary crews hitting the luxury pads of Silicon Valley high-flyers while they’re slurping up lattes downtown.

If your house is worth robbing, and if it’s being targetted by the sort of burglar who doesn’t just operate on the basis of pure opportunism, then that burglar will find a way of knowing when you’re out of the house, whether that be through watching your Twitter stream or the more old-school (not to mention tried, tested and reliable) method of keeping an eye on the place for a week or so and learning your daily routine. Public geolocation might make that easier to do at a distance, but when their freedom is at stake, I expect the more cautious burglars – the ones who are likely to get away with burgling rich people’s houses at least once, in other words – aren’t going to rely on 140 characters and a GPS tag before crowbarring your back door.

Privacy and lifelogging are important issues, but the alarmist tabloid-esque flapping over Please Rob Me is actually obscuring the important parts of those issues, not bringing them to the forefront. So let’s think things through before hitting the big red button marked ‘technophobia’, shall we?

Ever wonder why the flood of emails plugging funny-shaped blue pills for gentlemen shows no sign of relenting? The simple answer is that enough people keep clicking on them to make it an extremely lucrative business – according to Ars Technica, a detailed trawl of sales ledgers reveals that pharmaceutical affiliate spam networks can pull in $4,000 a day of orders:

Samosseiko discovered a wide-open PHP backend to GlavMed that contained evidence that the company is indeed set up to benefit largely from spammers. This involves e-commerce software for spammers to launch their own GlavMed copies or to simply set up domains that redirect to GlavMed. Additionally, some of the documents Samosseiko discovered were sales records, giving a glimpse into the purchasing behavior of GlavMed’s targets.

According to the sales records from GlavMed, there were apparently more than 20 purchases per day per spam campaign, with GlavMed claiming a 40 percent commission on each sale. With an average purchase of around $200, that adds up to over $4,000 total per day per campaign (or $1,600 for GlavMed).

Those are the sort of figures that would make even the most moral code-monkey think hard about trading in their sysadmin cubicle for the easy life. It’s abundantly clear that no amount of effort is ever going to stop people clicking on spam emails, and while the market is willing to line people’s pockets to the tune of hundreds of dollars a day they’re not going to stop coming… all the while funding other organisations with more nefarious aims and purposes.

This also highlights the problem with nation-states in a networked world restricting certain products and services to their citizens, as recent adventures in attempting to restrict online gambling sites has demonstrated. As geography continues its slide into irrelevance, attempting to ban something that’s openly available anywhere else in the world becomes an exercise in bombastic futility that does little beyond undermining your credibility and authority.

Perhaps opening up legal avenues for the purchase of the more popular and controversial pharmaceuticals is the answer? After all, serious thought is being given to relaxing prohibition on more dangerous drugs as it becomes clear that their restricted availability plays into the hands of criminals… why not make the drugs safer for consumers by controlling quality and distribution, and hobble an easy income stream for the underworld?

That said, there’ll always be something that people want to buy but can’t; I guess it’d be a case of finding where the tipping point between easy profits and risk of operation is. Then all we’ll be left with are dodgy refinancing offers and invitations to see fallen pop stars in the buff…

So, how long is it going to be before I have to lock the comments on this post to block the flood of pingbacks? Place your bets, ladies and gents, place your bets…

The recession’s hurting all sorts of industries, it appears – the Dutch Justice Ministry has announced its intentions to close some prisons and slash 1,200 jobs, because there just aren’t enough criminals top fill the cells.

During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.

Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.

The overcapacity is a result of the declining crime rate, which the ministry’s research department expects to continue for some time.

Apparently they’re considering importing detainees from Belgium in order to keep the jobs open… perhaps we’ll see more outsourcing of prison services in the years to come? Steal a car, see the world…

What differences in prisoner conditions might exist between countries with more incarceration than they can handle and those with space to spare? What underlying attitudes or legal frameworks are contributing to that lowering crime rate, and how might they manifest in the prison industry, if at all? [image by abardwell]

It’s also interesting to note that I’m currently sat in a country whose prison system is full to bursting and whose crime rate is allegedly spiralling, but the Netherlands is the country with the relaxed attitude to soft drugs like cannabis – isn’t that exactly the opposite of the way the legislators tell us these things should work?

The increasing prevalence of recycled plastics in the manufacturing industry – doubtless due in part to the currently-struggling Chinese trash-trawling industry – means that a lot of everyday objects are now made from what you might call “mongrel plastics”, a blend of different chemicals with similar physical properties. Which is good news… unless you’re a detective who needs to lift fingerprints from the stuff, that is.

The recycled products may look similar, but the physical and chemical properties differ so widely from the plastics they replace that the techniques honed over recent decades to lift fingerprints off plastics are no longer effective, he says.

Traditionally plastics were made from just one or two chemical building blocks, arranged in a predictable structure. But even plastics with just a trace of recycled feedstock become much more complex. Although consumers are encouraged to separate their plastics for recycling, the resulting plastics are inevitably more of a mongrel product than the pedigree plastics they replace.

Now there’s a nice little rogue state niche industry waiting to be exploited – custom mongrel plastics that defy forensics efforts. The cost of hiring an out-of-work plastics geek would be offset by the higher prices you could charge to your secretive customers. [image by meaduva]

We’ve already seen how the public has been drafted in to help bust people trafficking across the US/Mexico border; turns out that law enforcement agencies in Arkansas and Texas are using web mashups to enable members of the public to track down the perps of other forms of crime:

Law enforcement agencies have longed relied on the press and the public to help catch crooks, of course. And some departments, like the NYPD, upload their “wanted” posters. But BanditTrackerArkansas.com — and its sister site for Texas, BanditTracker.com — are a little different and a little more sophisticated. Descriptions of the suspect and the crime are paired with pictures from the bank’s surveillance cameras, both indoor and out. The whole thing is then plotted on a Google Map.

The scheme seems to be in its infancy at the moment, but I doubt it’ll stay that way for long; budget restraints will mean a continued shortage of law enforcement officers, but there’ll probably be no shortage of people willing to do their bit to nab the baddies.

Somehow, I find this a lot less sinister than the border-watch systems; it smacks of a more honest sense of community. That said, it also has greater potential for some quick and dirty hacking, whether it be to protect a criminal from pursuit or to frame someone innocent…