A bunch of computer scientists with PhDs working for Verizon have published a document about what they envision the future of the Internet will be like. Doesn't seem to Verizon centric, but then again I don't know much about Verizon's business plan.

They mention that GPS technology is small enough to place on cellphones and wristwatch, so we might just place GPS on everything, so you can't ever misplace one of your belongings again, but then bring up privacy issues. I really don't think privacy will be an issue at all, and here's why. First of all, GPS is a passive technology. Satelites in space send GPS data, your cellphone (or whatever) receives this data, and without sending anything out, knows where it is on Earth. That means that you can know where you are without sending out any info at all, so there's really no privacy issue there.

What about if you wanna know where your cellphone that you misplaced is? Your cellphone could regularly broadcast its location in an encrypted form, and only you and people you trust can locate it (via public key encryption). In fact, you could have a list of friends' public keys, and your cell phone would regularly publish its location encrypted to those keys, so all your friends could know your location, and all your enemies can't.

The issue with this second application of GPS is that your cell phone DOES have to send out something, so if you're a spy hiding in the airducts or vents, the enemy may sense a signal coming from the ducts, but they won't know what the data mean (Though probably just knowing something's transmitting from the duct is bad enough). The point is, for most applications, privacy isn't a big issue if you combine it with public key cryptography.

The next thing they bring up is when designign new network security technology, to assume quantum computers work. Because they soon will. The famous encryption suite PGP, for example, uses prime factorization as the core technology, and quantum computers should be able to break that easily. I'm not that familiar with quantum computer technology, but I assume that they can pretty much solve everything in NP (since prime factorization is NP-Complete, right?) The next harder problem is Exp, and I don't think Exp solutions can be verified in time P (or else it'd be NP), so as far as I know, we're pretty much screwed for traditional security. Everyone will have to upgrade to quantum computers

Another issue is how to network quantum computers. You can't tranform a QuBit to an electronic bit and send it over normal Cat5 cables. Again, I don't know much about quantum computers, so I'm not gonna add much insight here. I'm just highlighting this problem because it's one that hadn't occured to me before.

Another cool idea, but by no means original, is there "give everything an online presence". I'd love to walk around with special goggles that allow me to tag everything with notes Flickr style. I don't want to see everybody's tags, so it'd probably be like some sort of blog community where you subscribe to your friend's tags, and we can share inside jokes by tagging people/objects/locations. Like grafitti, but without the vandalism part.

Reducing energy consumption. They want to make it so that when your device receives a signal, it uses the energy in that signal to send a reply, like RFID. Eliminate batteries forever. Of course, you can't have a perpetual motion machine, so you'd probably supplement this with solar power or something.

Software radio. Right now, the FCC assigns radio frequencies to purposes. If you're using walkie-talkies, you can only broadcast within a certain spectrum. If someone else wants to use wireless internet, and no one around is using a walkie talkie (and therefore the walkie-talkie spectrum is empty), too bad, you can't use the walkie-talkie spectrum, 'cause it's reserved for walkie-talkies. With software radio, devices will use whatever region of the spectrum that is empty. Spectrum sharing is a very good idea, because we're running out of frequencies that won't cause cancer or microwave your lungs.