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Security in Ten Years
Schneier has posted a conversation between himself and Marcus Ranum, Chief Security Officer for Tenable Network Security, Inc. looking at where security is headed. "[...] at a meta-level, the problems are going to stay the same. What's shocking and disappointing to me is that our responses to those problems also remain the same, in spite of the obvious fact that they aren't effective."
It would seem like some sort of super intelligent artificial intelligence system which actively protects the cyber world would be the obvious solution to all of our problems. We should also give it some sort of cool name and since it sort of watches over the Internet like a big super powerful being in the sky we should call it skynet. That would solve all of our problems once and for all.
If you could take nothing FTFA but "security is a process" than you would have progressed farther along the path of enlightenment than you usually get.
Back to Digg with you! Begone!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
10 years? I remember my uncle trying to stay one step ahead of the cable companies back in the early 80's, ordering black box descramblers out of the back of Rolling Stone magazine, only to have the cable company then scramble the "newly" descrambled signal, and he'd have to find the new upgrade.
In the end, I think it would have been easier and cheaper to just subscribe to the damn cable, but that's not the point.
When I think of the history of hacking, of course there's the homebrew club, and it's ilk, and all the phreakers, etc. Are there other groups that predate computers? I'm imagining a group of people like HG Wells and his friends in The Time Machine...sort of steampunk hackers, or something...
I see it more as an angry mutant sea bass with a frikkin la-ser on its head.
And if you disagree with me sir, I shall slap you with it!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
In 10 years Windows will be over. There will be native Linux versions (still proprietary binaries) of Photoshop and productivity software, but a few people will see the newborn open source alternatives and try them out. Perhaps there will be price-fixing lawsuits against free software by proprietary software makers, and, in the worst case, patent lawsuits (depending on whether software patents are abolished by then or not).
Most people will run old versions of Windows (probably XP SP3, maybe SP4 - or perhaps Windows 7, but Vista will be another WinME) or ReactOS 1.x (it'll be too early for 2.x) in a virtualized PC running Linux. Unixphobes will run ReactOS (around 60 to 70%) or Windows (the rest) natively. Probably Microsoft will retreat from the OS business and stick with consoles or Office software, and Google will absorb the MSN messenger network.
I really hope that the Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HReactOS and similar OSs' security model will be revamped, with sandboxed registries and directories. Passwords will be asked for installations, unless software is ran by only one user.
Botnets will be rarer (and therefore much more expensive to rent than they are now), but they'll still exist due to user stupidity ("this game needs to run with root privileges"). They'll run in Anonymous P2P nets.
About Anonymous P2P, they'll be the norm for file sharing, but they'll be definitely banned by draconian governments - whether or not the US goes that way, is up to your imagination. Perhaps we'll see a struggle between anonymous P2P and content providers/law enforcement agencies, similar to what happened with Napster a few years ago.
However, website security will face more or less the same problems we're facing now, due to negligence to patch existing webservers. Botnets and phishers will use infected servers to keep stealing identities, and let's not forget about inside jobs and "user account info gone missing". These will go on. Hackers will be government sponsored - to hack into other countries' machines. Buffer overflows will be the favorite vulnerability, while hacker websites will run in anonymous P2P networks.
Let's put this post in a time capsule and see how well it fares in 2018.
They can pry my Free Software from my cold, dead platters
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom