Michael Gracie

Don’t believe anyone who wishes you a happy new year, at least if the greeting comes via email.

UPDATE: The “Happy New Year” worm is still spreading on the net.

Late to the punch…I say. You’d think those worms would know something about internet time (or is that the news I should be criticising?).

It is the last day of 2006. What better time for predictions…

From the experts:

• The security threats that will bind us in 2007

• If you are more inclined to make (or lose) money next year, here’s “the take” from the Washington Post

Spamroll says:

• Spam will not end in late January (and Bill Gates will remain mum thereafter)

• Some spyware companies will be getting sued again by February, while the rest change their company name
• The government will quit buying consumer data in March, after determining that who is buying TMX Elmo is in no way correlated with who has a tendency to be a terrorist
• Everyone will be backing up their hard drives by April, but only if external hard drives are free
• They’ll be encrypting them by May, because everyone will be running hacked versions of Vista
• We’ll all take the summer off, since phishers already do
• Back-to-school will piss off millions of children, and not much else
• October will be much like September
• Telcos will implement IPv6 for Thanksgiving, and everyone on the internet will know who everyone else is, once and for all (with the exception of MacBook Pro users, which are already being tracked via heatsink)
• We’ll get a ton of self-serving predictions for 2008, a week early at Christmas

Happy New Year!

UPDATE: Sarcasm does work - someone is thinking about backup.

In the movies, the law enforcement types always say that once the kidnappers get the bag of money, the loved ones are going to die. Then the swat team rolls in and everyone gets killed anyway.

But when it comes to getting your domain kidnapped, maybe the best move is to negotiate, and then cough up the dough. At least that’s the course of action Blueprint Ventures recently took. Then again, given the choice between giving the money to the kidnappers or giving it to a bunch of lawyers, it was an easy decision ;-).

Mike Arrington wonders:

Part of the problem is that Google has always held itself to a higher standard than other companies. We took them seriously when they said their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil“. It was the right thing to say when they were young and battling the hated Microsoft. But today, as they begin to put themselves before what’s best for their users, that motto is coming back to haunt them.

Hell, I’m just trying to figure out why Spamroll is no longer in the Google index :-).

“I am shipping antivirus software for the platform anyway.” - Kapersky (another security company not worried about Vista security).

Are you sitting down? If not, please do, as we don’t need anyone passing out and hitting their head. Ready?
Read more »

It took laptops disappearing with tens of millions of records on them, but the US Government is finally getting the hint. It’s now full disk encryption for all their computers.

Not that it really matters - they are going to have a lot less to protect as of the new year.

UPDATE: Bruce Schneier thinks full disk encryption might be overkill. I think that picking and choosing what to encrypt, in a bureaucratic environment, is probably more headache than it’s worth.

There were a few M&A deals in the security space during 2006. If bankers have their way, we’ll see an acceleration of deal activity in 2007. Why else would analysts be floating such an idea?

They probably hate it now, since they’ve just admitted they mixed consumer data with airline passenger info while working on the Secure Flight initiative.

The process is now considered a serious privacy issue, after DHS culled info from consumer databases provided by Acxiom, Insight America and Qsent. Beyond that fact, auditors found security problems with the software that was being used.

DHS is blaming the mess on “inadvertent oversight.” If the weak systems get hacked, it’ll be another one of those “anomalies”, so you can be pretty certain your data is still safe ;-).

UPDATE: More on the Secure Flight issue from Bruce Schneier.

Time Magazine punted this year, and declared their “Person of the Year” was you. Yes, you. It was supposedly the year of user generated content - unfortunately, the magazine missed the boat. They forgot that all the user generated content sucks (Spamroll included) - everyone creating that content was too busy fighting viruses to producing anything of value.

Damn it, 2006 wasn’t the year of user generated content - it was was the Year of the Zombies!

Well, maybe Time did get it right; they just didn’t know it ;-).

UPDATE: Even Microsoft gets it. Now, let’s see if they do something about it, since last time I checked Linux and OS X installs weren’t getting hijacked too often.