I have two twitter accounts that I follow that recently gave me reason to be suspicious. They may be hazardous and they may be benign. Only by treating them carefully can I be safe.
The most recent instance was a one-time message from a user I know and trust, but which contained information about a virus. At first, I wasn’t sure whether to pass on the link in the warning message or not. What if the link was a pointer to the virus itself? The person sending the warning was not a person I knew to be sophisticated about such things. They could have made a mistake or the account could have been hijacked. Eventually, I found a safe way to check the link out, and it was a message that showed how the virus was being spread and not the virus itself. Thus, I was happy to send the link along. However, the realization made it clear to me that caution needs to be on ones’ mind always.
The other one of them is a tweeter who sends me good security information which I’ve checked out and then retweeted. Unfortunately with the good info I’ve also gotten a stream of tweets suggesting how I can get more followers and make easy money on the web—spam that I don’t want. My interpretation is that this is a real person, who just happens to be caught up in the make-money-easily trap, but who is worthwhile because they do send me good info in the process. I remove all the unwanted tweets from this user’s stream before sending the information on. In that way, I am performing a filtering service, my readers get the good content and only I have to wade through the muck to find it. If the ratio to useful info to spam gets worse, I will probably have to unfollow that user or at least find a way to filter out the spam from his tweets.
In the long run, this trend could be problematic. If too many accounts get hijacked, or too many people get caught up in MLM (multi-level marketing aka Ponzi) schemes, the ability to use twitter to spread good word-of-mouth information will be compromised beyond usefulness—it too will suffer the tragedy of the commons.
Some of the hardest hit people will be the “motivational” tweeters and those who hope to make contacts to sell things. I rarely read the tweets that such people post in any event, because they don’t generally provide much value to me—and I’m certain there are others who do likewise. Still, I occasionally do. Imagine how difficult it will be for them to get their message out, if everyone suspects that they can’t even read a tweet from an unknown person as it may infect them.
In fact, the scariest aspect of twitter coming of age is that there are people developing software to try and mine the various tweets and links to come up with ways of combining the information into useful trends. That may help Intel, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, et. al. find ways of knowing what they should try to sell to you, but it will also eventually get used by the various criminal organizations to better target their marks too. Sadly, it will probably help the criminals find easy targets before it helps normal companies find ways to sell us things we will enjoy better.
To me this is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, the fact that there will always be criminals and some of them will be one step ahead of us and in the process they will take all the nice things we invent to make our lives better and abuse them to make some of our lives worse. I fervently hope these problems won’t affect you.
The good news is that for most of us, these threats will remain just possibilities or minor annoyances. The adequate protections for most of us will not be severe and will become part of "common sense", just as they are in real-life. Most of us will never have our identities stolen. Not even me whose lost his wallet on several occasions and always had it returned with the money untouched. Similarly, even though I had one UNIX system I owned hacked, there was no harm that came from it other than having to rebuild the system from scratch and start running the appropriate protections. The anti-virus software that the Intel IT folks keep installed on my laptop appears to be adequate for most surfing that I do, and although it occasionally detects a virus, it always manages to delete the containing file.
You will still be more likely to be shot by your spouse (or yourself) if you keep a gun in the house than you will be the target of an internet attack that destroys your life. Your biggest risks will still be the drive you take to commute to work or slipping in the shower. Yes, if you use twitter to hook-up with someone interesting, word of that will probably get back to your spouse and their lawyer and used in your divorce, but that’s the risk of hooking up and not of the internet. The person who the twitter DOS attack was directed at was not an ordinary person, but an activist trying to bring about change where there are powerful forces already at work. If you are the next Gandhi, that may be an issue for you. If you are not, you will probably never be interesting enough to be singled out, sorry.
The risky things in life have not changed because of the internet. The internet has just made the world a smaller and more open place. It is much harder to hide your foibles. Hopefully, it may also make it harder for criminals to hide their tracks too. And, that may be the ultimate victory.
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