2020 Predictions
Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash
I hope you are as excited as I am for the new year. For those of you that are apprehensive about the coming months, you can stop worrying about what might happen. I started my list of 2020 predictions over a month ago, and they’re here to both enlighten and relax you. So without further ado here are the best predictions ever for the Infosec community, all totally based on facts and science and stuff. Yup, nothing but fact-based facts!
Tesla will release the Cyber Tricycle for children. It will look like the poop emoji, and the running joke will be that the Cyber Truck took a dump. The Cyber Tricycle will work perfectly, but due to its range of 1100 miles the amount of missing children will increase dramatically.
We’ll learn that Apple’s Siri voice commands are being monitored by Alexa instead of contractors. Everyone that complained about Apple using contractors will now be mad at Apple for outsourcing human jobs to AI.
There will be election hacking during 2020, there will be blame correctly and incorrectly assigned and mass chaos will ensue. No one but the tech people will seem to care about the facts. Mainstream news reporters will exclaim "oh my gosh, these voting machines are insecure!" to the astonishment of everyone except those in the security community. And nothing will get done before the next major election to fix the problem. Oh wait, that was my 2016 prediction.
Someone will announce they have finally found the last bug in Sendmail. Twenty-two people including myself will be thrilled and exclaim "see it is more secure". No one will hear us nor care.
Someone will try and invent the grossest and most deviant sex reference in a 2020 cyber-related prediction, only to find out that it not only already exists, but there are conventions, memes, and angry defenders who claim it isn't weird (this is a weak prediction, since it probable happens a lot).
At the annual secret meeting of The Committee for User Interface of Streaming Services, one of the longer standing members will be thrown out for making the suggestion that they all actually try to make the interfaces the same as opposed to just different enough to throw everyone off.
Apple will announce a public bug bounty program, but only the researchers from their previously _private_ bug bounty will find anything anyway. (EDIT: I wrote this before this announcement so now my joke prediction might come true.)
Wi-Fi on aircraft will become stable. Hahahaha, oh my god that "prediction" never gets old, oh man that is so funny! Wi-Fi on aircraft is still sad and utterly pointless.
A group of researchers will discover that the Deep Web is not the second page of Google search results.
A security researcher will write a scientific paper that explains how to properly name your bug/exploit/security-related flaw you’ve discovered. Since the scientific paper does not have a fancy headline-catching ad-clicking name, it will be dismissed as complete garbage by the security community.
A systems engineer from mainframe days will awaken from his 45 year coma. He will completely understand the cloud model. A group of millennial programmers will consider this proof that witchcraft exists, because damn, they practically invented the cloud, and old people shouldn’t just “get it”.
A hospital will upgrade all its Windows 95 systems to Windows 7. The Infosec community will count this as a win.
I guess I am supposed to make some joke involving vision of the future and 2020 and all that. Oh well. Just have a safe and memorable year. Let’s try not to fuck this one up.
