Do Twitter Phishing Scams Herald the End of Microblogs?

An anonymous reader writes "Twitter's been hit by a big phishing scam. Culture Crash blogger Dan Tynan says this is the end of Twitter's innocence. Will tweets become like email, with two out of every three just worthless spam?"

Comments

Re:Let's hope so

[DrVomact]

The sane internet died a decade ago. We're in the death throws of the internet-of-the-corporate-hack. Likely our next stop will be the reincarnation of an AOL like atmosphere where a central application or website insulates you from the internet, and provides you with a limited array of things to do.

Holy cow, you've hit on the solution! This is exactly what's needed! Needed not by us, of course, but by normals. Consider the possibilities. As you well know, over 90% of the people who own computers are not qualified to use anything more complex than a simple calculator. Computers are very complex tools. What are normals using these tools for? Well, to write email, maybe do their online banking, post stupid pictures of their kids on some website and...what else do normals use computers for? Not counting apps like Free Cell that don't require an internet connection, I mean. The rest of the CPU cycles of these computers are used to transmit spam and various malware—they are the soldiers of the botnets.

Then there's the maintenance & support headaches. Who here doesn't have a gaggle of clueless relatives and friends who bombard them with stupid questions and pleas for help with their malware-clogged, zombified computers? And then blame you the next time something goes wrong?

Well, the solution is now within our reach: put everyone of these people on dumb terminals connected to a service like AOL that gives them very limited options so they're not confused. They just plug it in, turn it on, and the user menu—complete with cute tail-wagging puppy—comes up. Give them access to word processing or spreadsheet apps on a pay-as-you go basis. (No installation hassles!) Sure, their data is now 0wnz0red by some corporate empire, but normals don't care about this kind of stuff.

Better yet, all maintenance problems now become the service provider's problem. You can honestly say "Gee, I can't help you with that, but if you call MyIntarnet's tech support, I'm sure they'll fix it". Best of all, without an on-board hard drive, there's no problem with virus/trojan/worm propagation. Spam will finally die...well diminish, anyhow.

Of course that's for them; people who know better would still use real computers. It would be even better if they could have their own internet sorta like AOL was in the early days...but that's probably not practical.