Futurismic

Ever find yourself wishing your phone could run the same software as your home computer? Well, at least they are now both susceptible to becoming part of a botnet, as the first known centrally-controlled mobile phone virus has been spotted in the wild:

Sexy Space uses text messages reading “A very sexy girl, Try it now!” to jump between phones. The messages contains a link that, when clicked, asks the user to download software which, once installed, sends the same message to contacts stored in the phone.

Similar SMS viruses have been seen before. But Sexy Space is unusual in that it also communicates with a central server and can thus be controlled by the hackers who created it – the feature that gives conventional botnets their power. If the network of infected phones is seen to be responding to remote commands, it can be described as a true botnet.

Brilliant. Given that recent research suggests more than 50% of computer users have clicked on a link in a spam email, we can evidently look forward to our back pockets being the next frontier for badly-spelled importunings from bootleg pharmacies and an inconceivable number of non-existent Nigerian government officials. [image by Bah Humbug]

[The first smug Apple fanboy to post an evangelical comment will incur the wrath of my crack team of Estonian DDOS experts. If the capability to not have to use your common sense to avoid viruses is really worth the hardware premium you pay for the privilege, I suggest basking silently in the glow of your own self-satisfaction.]

If there’s been one good thing to come out of the global financial shitstorm, it’s that all of a sudden we’re looking afresh at established institutions and questioning whether, actually, there aren’t much better ways we could be doing things.

Point in case: mobile peer-to-peer banking, which is going gangbusters in parts of Africa but has yet to make much of a splash beyond that continent. The Guardian’s Victor Keegan takes a closer look, and wonders whether it might be the key to saving the UK’s continually beleagured, semi-nationalised and utterly mismanaged postal service:

If you want to see pioneering experiments in banking you will have to go to a surprising place – Africa. And the question is, why can’t we do the same here? If the Post Office is looking for a new role, it need look no farther. In Kenya, customers of M-Pesa can send money to each other from around the country in 14 seconds flat using their mobiles. In the UK it takes three days, thereby endowing the banks with a huge float of money in transit on which they can earn interest. In Kenya, people leave their money at a trusted outlet such as a shop or pharmacy, where it is loaded into their sim cards.

At a Forum Oxford future technologies conference at the weekend we were updated on the startling success of the operation. It is reckoned that 17% of the Kenyan population is on M-Pesa. As a result they don’t need to carry cash any more, as everything from a can of Coke to your funeral can be paid for by phone. It works because the cash is held centrally by the bank, thereby enabling transactions to take place at very fast speeds. The average transaction is $30 (£20) because people trust it to do big ticket items.

Of course, there is always PayPal (which offers a mobile-linked transfer system as well), but finding a business that will accept PayPal that isn’t internet based is a big challenge. So, why hasn’t the idea caught on in more developed nations? [image by whiteafrican]

Maybe it is because we are not used to the idea of technology transfer coming from poorer to richer nations that industrialised nations have been so slow to realise not only that Africa is leading the world in mobile banking, but that it has big lessons for us.

Call me cynical (O RLY?), but I suspect it has a lot more to do with the fact that banks have no need to sell their services to us in a manner that emphasises our convenience, because our lives are so inextricably entangled in their profit generation systems already. Just like a drug dealer, they like to keep you waiting so as to remind you whose bitch you are…

Here’s some big news for the gamers among you (provided it’s not an elaborate and well-produced hoax) – a World of Warcraft client that runs on the iPhone.

Found via The Guardian, where Greg Howson asks whether the cramped screen real-estate and network lag would make it worth bothering. I figure that’s an academic question, really; I imagine if I (a) played WoW and (b) had an iPhone, I’d be mad keen for a mobile version; I mean, who wouldn’t be, right? If you’re an iPhone and MMO geek, you’re going to go mad for the idea of getting the best of both at once…

But more to the point (and the main reason I called it out), it’s another SF Prophecy Point on the leaderboard for Charlie Stross, who included mobile MMO gaming as a core trope in his 2007 novel Halting State. Two years from science fiction to reality – things move fast, don’t they?

This one’s doing the rounds everywhere, and with some justification. I try to steer away from pure OMG TECH! posts here at Futurismic, but if this doesn’t kick you right in the cyberpunk-sensawunda gland with a big pair of hob-nailed boots… well, you’re obviously not as massive an unreconstructed nerd as I am, basically.

See what I mean? As I remarked to a fried on Twitter last night, I’ll cheerfully trade my mortal soul to the first cellphone provider that offers me something that can do all that. Awesome. [via Hack-a-Day and many others]

Over at Wired last week, they ran a piece by Matthew Honan about his experiences with the new wave of geolocational software for the iPhone and Google’s G1. He starts off by asking fellow users in his locality what they use the systems for:

My first response came from someone named Bridget, who, according to her profile, at least, was a 25 year-old woman with a proclivity for scarves. “To find sex, asshole,” she wrote.

“I’m sorry? You mean it’s for finding people to have sex with?” I zapped back.

“Yes, I use it for that,” she wrote. “It’s my birthday,” she added.

“Happy birthday,” I offered.

“Send me a nude pic for my birthday,” she replied.

A friendly offer, but I demurred. Anonymous geoshagging is not what I had in mind when I imagined what the GPS revolution could mean to me.

I don’t think anyone who has looked at the adoption curve for new networking technology will be particularly surprised by Bridget’s response… [image by zanaca]

Honan goes on to look at the pros and cons of what is admittedly still a technology in its applicational infancy, which he finds fun and intriguing at the same time that it seems creepy and intrusive – the latter response being one that I’d attribute to his age. When these apps have matured in a few years, however, the Facebook generation will have no qualms or fears about them whatsoever.

Whether they should have qualms is another question, of course. If nothing else, geolocational apps are a reminder that the tin-foil hat brigade’s warnings about The Feds being able to follow your cell phone weren’t entirely fictional; the potential for stalking someone is obvious.

But would stalking be as big a risk in a society where many people’s locations were public knowledge? If lifelogging catches on at the same time, we might all become one big happy globally geolocative panopticon…