Human Systems Proofing

Human systems are defined by their capacity for prevarication and for manipulation. This is a distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence. In other words, to make a long tragic and sordid story short, history proves time and again that we are our own worst enemies.

My suggested solution for Spam is an automatic, mandatory "bounce-back" system. A variant of this would be an automatic "return to sender" system. For every unsolicited e-mail sent, one or even ten can be automatically "sent-back" or returned to sender. 

While such a system will double the amount of e-mail being sent back and forth over any given period, it will have the long-term result of deterring spamming and pseudo-Internet marketing schemes and scams from bulk e-mailing practices. The long-term result should be, at least in principle if not in practice, a lowering of the amount of Spam that is clogging the Internet. It is estimated that more than 99 percent of email being sent on the web today is essentially unsolicited Spam, and most of this represented by illegitimate or quasi-legitimate interests.

This kind of solution is of course not complete or the final anti-dote to the problem of human systems and human nature. Getting past the mountain of Spam is only the beginning to the challenge of proofing human-based systems from themselves, from their capacity for fraud, prevarication, spoofing, etc.

If we cannot bring the Mohammed to the mountain, we can bring the mountain to Mohammed. This is especially true when the mountain is a virtual one. If only a small percentage of hackers and spoofers are doing critical damage to the global Internet, it should in theory only take a small percentage of "internet" police to hold the "thin digital line." 

I can see Internet security agencies playing the spoofers and scammers at their own game, and nabbing them in "Security Inter-Networks." The idea is trapping would be abusers in their own ruses and nabbing them in the buttendsky in the process. Of course, current security agencies in countries like the US are more concerned with terrorism and domestic political violence than they are about Internet scammers and spammers, hence the resources needed to adequately address this issue just are not there. This would be like putting security systems one step ahead of the despoilers rather than always a step behind.

Security on the web has spawned a huge secondary computing industry. It has become big, big business, and anywhere we find big business, we must wonder about security.

It seems perhaps the trade-off and price we must pay for having an open and virtually free Internet is the basic vulnerability of such a system to the down-side of human nature. I'm not sure we can ever completely human-proof any system we devise ourselves, as whatever we may come up with, there will be some person, sooner or later, who will think beyond the box. This is what humans are good at--not great, but not bad either. 

he question in my mind then becomes what are the tolerance limits for Internet fraud and spoofing. How much Spam can we and the system cope with on a daily basis before we overstep our limits and things begin really going south? If we are to maintain a relatively free and open Internet, we must have fairly large margins and tolerance limits for human nature, and we must, I think, realistically be willing to accept that level of control and security that will protect the average surfer from the depredations of the sharks.