Internet Predictions for 2009

The biggest threat the Internet is facing is Security.

1) In 2009 and in a very near future I forecast a huge cyber attack that will leave few computers unharmed.
"Internet security is broken, and nobody seems to know quite how to fix it."
It is the natural consequence of building insecure systems using inadequate tools and practices, connecting them with insecure protocols, not controlling them at all, and then expecting that they will do things they are not designed to do.
It is the natural consequence of real world entering virtual world.
Crime follows money and when the big money is online, also big crime is online.
And online offers so many privileges to the ones who know how to create them.
Anonimity, fast acting, dealing with machines who do not think, but just follow paths they were programmed to.

2) A huge breech on privacy will be the second threat on the Internet in the very near future.
No one will be safe online.
Information that was previously difficult to generate will be almost trivial.
Our privacy will have to face the more and more pentration of "search" in our life.

3) Regulation of the Internet is unavoidable.
P2P is under haevy threat.
In Italy filtering and blocking is already mandatory,
France and Germany are already preparing filtering/blocking laws that should even be mandatory.
The journey through the wacky world of deep packet inspection will beging in early 2009.

4) More and more the first news will be on the Internet sooner than on the Media.
Mobile will be the password, and private mobile will be the key.
Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other mobile and other social networks will be there first.
Classic journalism will be dead sooner than the end of 2009.

5) War will begin as a "cyber" war.
"Chinese hackers have penetrated the White House computer network on multiple occasions and obtained e-mails between government officials, a senior US official told the *Financial Times*.
On each occasion, the attackers accessed the White House computer system for brief periods, allowing them enough time to steal information before US computer experts patched the system.
US government cyber intelligence experts suspect the attacks were sponsored by the Chinese government because of their targeted nature. "
Hacking will have more and more a political color.