It's that space of year again: predictions for the next 12 months, most of which are expected to be wrong, and a few that, if right, will further unite Surveillance State's station as a greatest tier tech blog…maybe. President Obama will divulge the heart of Net neutrality activists by picking pro-telecom industriousness population for the FCC. On the other hand, Obama will gather someone great for the posture of privacy czar, and then castrate him/her by not giving the disposal any power. Comcast, AT&T and other ISPs will begin the bundle deployment of monthly download caps.
However, they will slug improve sharing deals with Google/YouTube and Apple to spared such shipping from customers' monthly bandwidth limits. Customers who go over the outstrip will have to pay extra--thus also conveniently gain off much of the P2P call (since no one will pay for BitTorrent), without having to retreat to Deep Packet Inspection. Google and Yahoo will collect the joust with to define the terms of the privacy vs. information logging debate: The scouring engines will settle on storing scrutiny log data for three to six months, but Microsoft will (unfortunately) ebb to characterize the debate on how the statistics is anonymized, rather than after how many months. Google and Yahoo will carry on to engage in privacy theater by not effectively anonymizing their logs.
We will not visit with the accommodation of any comprehensive rebuilding of privacy law in 2009. Efforts to retouch privacy to searches of laptops at the margin will fail. If legislation does pass, it'll be toothless. Bruce Schneier will be the next cybersecurity czar for the federal government.
The Transportation Security Administration will difficulty the flowing ban, but will persevere to secure in stupid guarantee theater. The replacement for intelligence honcho Kip Hawley will not prove things up. The RIAA will undergo its first major wastage in the courts, and will be forced to pay more than $100,000 in damages (in adding to statutory costs). Likewise, attempts by the RIAA and MPAA to inaugurate "three strikes" rules in the U.S. will fail.
The copyright job will refuse most of the applications for young DMCA exemptions. It will right extend the Sony rootkit exception (although expanding it to downloads/DVDs), and will also favourite approve the exemption growth request for academics to use DVD Rather archaic fine software for classroom use. All of the other requests will be turned down.
The alteration to digital TV will be a gigantic trainwreck. Politicians from all sides will turbulence to prong the finger and blame the FCC, and in particular, (by then) departed Commissioner Kevin Martin. Senator Herb Kohl's probe into section note pricing will go nowhere, the carriers will not end prices, and the class affray lawsuits will be thrown out of court.
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