Doomsdays of the Internet coming in 2011

Resuming the year events and developments Andreas M. Antonopoulos, NetworkWorld, noted that the reality is going weirder than fiction as the world was told about the operation Aurora, the first national-industrial sabotage attack with Stuxnet and in the end we see how “Wikileaks [is] about to become a constitutional crisis between the First amendment and a 1917 espionage law” Talking further on security in 2011 Antonopoulos has made the following predictions.

In terms of devices spread Antonopoulos believes that tablets, smartphones and other devices will push the ratio of devices/people well past 1-to-1. “Desktop virtualization will expand a lot beyond just laptops and thin clients if we want to secure data on mobile devices.”

Making prediction for the Internet censorship he says that annoying too many governments across the globe the “free” Internet will be controlled more even in developed states. Thus, the US is expected to try much harder to impose controls, censorship, prior restraint and eavesdropping on the Internet. Unconstitutional laws will be passed and challenged. “Freedom of speech is far less popular in practice than it is in the abstract and it will be up to a small minority to vigorously resist pressure to abandon principles of free speech, net neutrality and content neutrality.”

Data breaches will implicate many costs for businesses as they will disclose massive losses and then face massive notification costs. Antonopoulos explains that just buying credit monitoring and sending letters to the 500,000 people whose identities you lost can cost tens of millions of dollars and wipe out your business.

Talking about cloud computing he believes that now the government will be intercepting data without getting warrants. “In 2011, cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) adoption becomes big enough that you have the first legal skirmishes over the "expectation of privacy" in such environments. The feds will try to grab data without warrants. Hopefully, the service providers will push back. Either way, the legal parameters around ownership, privacy and lawful search & seizure will become better defined through legal precedent. Let's hope the new parameters don't make cloud unusable for anything other than Farmville.”