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.

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.