MANILA, Philippines -- By now, we are saying goodbye to the year’s most frighteningperiod. We are now right in the middle of readying ourselves for the mostwelcome part of the year.

But before we do, just one more look at the IT world’sharrowing specters, especially those that are yet to come.

The IT world is an exciting place, most of the time. Whileother news tend to ruin our days with reports of wars, famines, mass murders,terror attacks, and disasters, developments in the high-tech sector, especiallythe consumer electronics market, usually bring us joy and lots of excitement.

Somehow, there is no room for sadness and being afraid aslong as we hear of newly launched smartphones, tablet computers, media players,supercomputers, and other high-tech toys and gadgets. Our hearts go a-flutterwhenever we hear of advances in computer technology, LCDs and other displaysystems, miniaturization, and manufacturing processes.

So-called freedom fighters can blow each other to hell, andgovernments can try their best or worst to suffocate us all in the name ofkeeping us safe. These do not matter, however, as long as we have new, shiny,and super-thin laptops.

But I digress. This is supposed to be about ghosts in the ITworld. And ghosts the high-tech market has plenty of.

Google Buying Yahoo?

Reports are aplenty of search giant Google cooking up a bidto acquire rival Yahoo, with the “don’t be evil” company allegedlytalking to private-equity firms for financing the possible deal. Of course,Google can easily swallow Yahoo, after all, the search giant’s coffers areoverflowing with money.

The question is would market regulators worldwide allowGoogle to gain control of one of the remaining two search engines that barelykeep it from being dubbed a monopoly. Yes, I don’t think so too. Anyway, there are plenty of other companies that areconsidering acquiring Yahoo.

But should Google’s dream of acquiring Yahoo! become reality,Internet users might find themselves confronted with one mean online nightmare.

Facebook vs. Germany

German authorities have warned Facebook to make its facialrecognition software conform to German and European Union privacy laws byNovember 7, or face legal action. Facebook’s facial recognition application hasbecome quite popular with users of the world’s leading social network. Germanregulators, however, see it quite differently.

Germany believes the technology violates German and EU dataprotection laws, and accuses Facebook of gathering user data without the clearconsent of Facebook users.

Public Cloud Grows

My favorite high-tech market research firm IDC forecasts overallspending by providers of public cloud services on storage hardware, software,and services will grow 23.6 percent from 2010 to 2015. This means the cloudwill be one of the main drivers of growth in IT spending for the next fiveyears.

Long live public cloud!

That’s all for the meantime, folks. Join me again next timeas we keep on watching IT.