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Fling dishes or flaming furniture out the window, fire off celebratory gunfire, jump off chairs, ring bells, beat drums, clutch silver as the clock strikes midnight or sweep bad juju out of the house with a kitchen broom -- these are some of the ways people welcome in the New Year.
And we make resolutions, of course. This will be the year we lose weight, get healthy, quit smoking and organize ourselves. It's a way of shaping the new year according to our will, as is the practice of making predictions.
So we asked a dozen experts in fields that are apt to touch all our lives this year -- privacy, defense, spam, security, open source, technology development, life online and human rights -- to answer this question: "What do you wish would happen in 2004, and what do you think will actually happen?"
Simon Davies, director of Privacy International:
"I wish everyone would become more aggressive about protecting their civil liberties in 2004.
"What probably will happen is that government will continue to lie and manipulate in a determined effort to confuse imagery and reality. Government has become a master of deception. It has set out to compromise the fragile freedoms that remain, while at the same time providing agencies with a constantly expanding spectrum of powers. Public officials proclaim their support for individual rights and privacy while silently engineering their demise. I do hope people can learn to become angry about this trend."
Jason Catlett, president and founder of Junkbusters, a privacy advocacy firm:
"I wish Congress would ban spam in 2004 and repeal their recent law making spamming safe for major corporations. But they will probably do nothing, because the companies got what they wanted, and (legislators) do what the lobbyists tell them to."
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer, U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
"I wish the privacy community and the security community could come together with open minds, shedding the constraints of their usual viewpoints or official positions, to have a dialogue and help craft creative solutions for our country's security that are respectful of privacy concerns. Both needs -- homeland security and our respect for privacy -- are so fundamental and compelling they're too important to get bogged down in posturing and positioning.
"What probably will happen is some slow, incremental growth in communication -- hopefully due in part to my team's work -- between those within the government and those outside it; between those whose work is "privacy" and those whose work is "security"; between those who have long worked on these issues and those who bring new viewpoints to the table. Slow, because frequently people get entrenched in their viewpoints and their beliefs about how government does or doesn't, should or shouldn't, can or can't work. And incremental because I worry that some of our thinking about privacy practice has perhaps gotten a bit stale -- that's why we should seek to bring new voices into the conversation -- from within and even outside the United States -- wherever new thinking is happening about how to address these issues."
Robert Ferrell, security researcher and author:
"My 2004 wish is for Bill Gates to call a press conference and announce that, as a result of a visit from the ghosts of disgruntled customers past, present and future, he's hired Ross Anderson to oversee a complete retooling of all Microsoft products with out-of-the-box application security in mind. No new versions of any Microsoft software will be issued until this effort has been completed.
"What undoubtedly will happen is that Bill Gates will allow Steve Ballmer to continue spending way too much time thinking up new ways of embarrassing himself and the company in public with his cheesy 'motivational' hoopla while aggressively avoiding any implementation of actual security engineering best practices beyond the occasional utterance of empty phrases like 'Secure Computing Initiative.' Meanwhile, more Microsoft executives will leave to run various government agencies with the same level of attention to quality they displayed in the private sector."
Paul Jones, director of ibiblio, the Internet's first and largest contributor-run digital library:
"I wish true copyright reform that would recognize the importance of sharing and archiving would happen in 2004.
"What probably will happen is further extensions of corporate protections that harm artists, (the) audience and our culture. The trend of extension of the monopolists' powers over a culture from creation through archiving is difficult to explain and to reverse.
"Still I'm hoping that more and more people understand that cultural creations spring from us all and must return to us all having enriched the artist appropriately. I'm hoping that artists can break through the monopolist hold on distribution (recorded music, radio music and concert bookings) to bring innovative work from our culture and to our culture.
"I'm hoping that a reasonable business model will emerge that will benefit us all and allow us to share and become larger people with an even greater selection of materials added to our culture and preserved for the pleasure and remaking of and by later generations."
Tim O'Reilly, open-source and open-standards activist, founder and CEO of computer-book-publishing firm O'Reilly & Associates:
"I wish that Apple would take the best practices of the individual iApps, and make them consistent across the whole suite.... We need some equivalent to the original Apple human interface guidelines, updated for the network era, to state a vision of the consistent behavior expected of Internet-era applications.
"Apple's a smart company, so I really hope I'm not spitting in the wind on this one; there's no good reason why we shouldn't see some progress on this front announced at Macworld, and I hope more will come throughout the year.
"I wish that Nat Friedman (of Novell/Ximian) would finish up Dashboard for Linux, and that everyone from Apple to Microsoft would copy his ideas, since Dashboard is one of the smartest user-centric innovations I've seen in a long time.
"Unfortunately, Novell's got a lot on their plate, and innovation may have to wait in the queue behind various kinds of integration and catch-up efforts.
"I wish that the various Web services data vendors (including Amazon, Google, eBay, Salesforce.com and many others) would realize that they comprise the building blocks of a future 'Internet operating system,' and act accordingly, engaging with each other to interoperate.
"Unfortunately, I worry that the competition between Amazon, Google and eBay will lead to rivalries that make them forget the foundation of their success in the open Internet.
"I wish that Adobe, Macromedia and other leading PC software vendors would port their products to Linux, since we're just about at a tipping point for Linux on the desktop. I remember this great quote from Warren Buffett: 'Sometimes Mr. Market offers his wares cheaply, and sometimes they are dear. I've never understood why people hate to buy them when they are cheap, but rush to buy them when they are dear.' Linux application market share is cheap right now, so that makes it a great time to enter the market.
"My guess, though, is that most folks will wait till 2005 or later, and then be rushing to catch up to the leaders who moved early.
"I wish that the U.S. Patent Office would make it a requirement that any software patent application be accompanied by source code that demonstrates the invention in question. The original tradeoff in the patent system was that you gave up your trade secrets -- teaching everyone else how to do your invention -- in exchange for a limited monopoly on your invention.
"Of course, anything so reasonable is unlikely, because there are so many entrenched interests here that Washington resembles a taffy pull between those interests far more than it reflects an attempt to find real solutions to what is becoming a very serious handicap for software innovation."
Rael Dornfest, author of Google Hacks and the mobilewhack weblog:
"I'd like to see consumer mobile devices -- palmtops, hiptops and handsets -- scriptable. It was scripting that drove the Web, taking it from a static online catalog of content to an operating system. Gaining simpler programmatic access to the contacts, calendars and other assorted user data, Bluetooth, messaging, image capture and manipulation on the phone will open up the mobile to the people prototyping the next generation of applications."
Suresh Ramasubramanian, manager of security and antispam operations for Outblaze, one of the world's largest providers of e-mail and messaging solutions:
"I wish that spam would just go away in 2004.
"What probably will happen is that the amount of spam that is being sent out will explode in volume, filling your inbox the way it never got filled before, driving ISPs to stronger and stronger filters.
"We'll have more poorly conceived laws like the recently passed U.S. and British ones that are full of holes that you can drive a truckload of spam through. Laws against spam will be watered down by direct marketers who tend to equate e-mail with physical direct marketing and fail to realize that "cold calls" are not the same thing in e-mail, as in other forms of marketing, thanks to the transference of cost.
"It is a vicious cycle, which will one day lead to e-mail as we know it dying entirely, to be replaced by some completely new way of communication that lends itself less to spam than good old SMTP does. And then spammers will find a way to spam that brand-new communication medium as well, and antispammers will try as best as they can to lock spammers out of this new communication medium.
"Sure, we all believe that good will, at some future cataclysmic date, finally triumph over evil. But spam is not a simple black-and-white, good-and-evil type thing; there are gray areas in this that neither spammers nor antispammers can agree on right now. So I rather suspect that life will go on as usual, with rather more spam cluttering our inboxes than ever before."
Howard Rheingold, author and virtual community pioneer:
"I wish an interdisciplinary investigation (PDF) of human cooperation and collective action would begin to emerge in 2004, bringing together scientists, scholars and practitioners in self-organizing Internet politics, peer-to-peer computation, the sociology of managing common pool resources, the economics of open-source production, the biology of symbiosis, and the evolutionary psychology of cooperation around the nature, dynamics, barriers and multipliers of human cooperation.
"What probably will happen is that my colleagues and I will begin to put together a map of this emerging field and then stalwartly paddle upstream against the institutional tides of specialization -- because universities, corporate research and foundation funders succeed by specializing, and risk failure by broadening their interests across disciplinary boundaries, thus building into our civilization's knowledge-gathering institutions a strong negative incentive against seeing (or looking for) big pictures."
Oxblood Ruffin, executive director and founder of Hacktivismo, a group of international hackers, human rights workers, artists and others who seek to further the goals of human rights through technology:
"I wish that technology firms would grow a conscience in 2004.
"Companies like Cisco and Websense are exporting censorship technologies to China that make them money, but create a democratic deficit behind the Great Firewall. These same companies argue that they have no control over how their products are used, and regardless, Chinese economic development will lead to political development.
"This rationale is naive at best and self-serving at worst. Censorship not only stifles the free flow of information, it also creates international instability. And while Western companies continue to focus on short-term profit, the long-term results are clearly to our disadvantage.
"There is not a single technology that doesn't go to the People's Liberation Army for testing and reverse engineering. And while we continue to reward China for bad behavior, they're laughing at us and looking for the next group of suckers eager to make a nickel. Move over Enron, you've just been eclipsed in the greed and gutless department."
Craig Silverstein, director of technology, Google: "I wish computer search engines would become as intelligent as human searchers in 2004.
"What probably will actually happen is they'll just get better at faking it. Artificial intelligence is very, very hard. Luckily, sometimes faking it is good enough."
George Smith, virus researcher and senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.Org, a defense affairs think tank:
"I wish people would treat regular virus frenzies like an IQ test. If you convene a congressional hearing in the aftermath of the next PurplePeopleEater Worm, fly 'experts' across the country to purse their lips and utter noises of concern, spout estimates of economic damages that are the same magnitude as a yearly expenditure to reconstruct Iraq and get angry at a Department of Justice flunky over its inability to hang someone, you flunk.
"What I'd like to see happen once would be for someone to have the nerve to stand up in such a national forum and call the exercise good phlogiston, state the electronic infrastructure's not fixable, that more education will never fix our computer virus 'problem' and that we'll all be back in three months to say the same thing for the rest of you nincompoops.
"But it won't happen -- everyone will continue to pretend they have an IQ of 60."
