Every year around Halloween, ZDNet comes up with a list of the scariest technology trends. Last year's monsters included unreliable clouds, the never-ending workday and virtual workplaces. The 2010 goblins are equally frightening, so bolt the doors and turn up the lights before you read the list.

"The Night of The Smartphone Zombies"

You've seen these poor, lifeless beings everywhere. People - if you can still call them that - with pallid, emotionless faces, staring down at small screens while they walk direction-less down the street, completely unaware of their surroundings. Yet these poor souls actually believe they are more "connected" to the outside world and more people than ever. They must Tweet. They must Status Update. They must Check In. They must Text. They must check for emails. They must. Every. Single. Minute.

The Lawsuits That Wouldn't Die

Apple's suing HTC and Nokia, and Microsoft is suing Apple and Motorola. Motorola is suing Apple, and is being sued by RIM. Oracle is suing Google. Not only is this tying up the legal system and essentially just making attorneys and law firms richer, it's also slowing the progress of the technology industry and hurting consumers.

I Know Where You Are. Because You Told Me!

For what purpose do you need to broadcast your whereabouts to every single one of your Facebook contacts or the entire Internet on your Twitter stream in real time?

Bwahahaha. I Come To Suck Your Personal Data!

Location aware services are scary when people are willing to share this information with others, but even scarier is the amount of data that gets shared and distributed that you don't want others to see.

Attack of the Mutant Botnets and Worms

Botnets used to be the domain of Script Kiddies on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for going after financial and personal data on large targeted groups of individual end-user PCs, but now they've become the preferred cyber-attack tool of hostile governments and their official and unofficial cyber-warfare agents to attempt to steal data and deny service of large end-user services such as Twitter, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, as well as corporate and government extranets. I fear that we may very well be looking at a future where critical aspects of our national infrastructure running on Windows are brought to a halt by complex worms created by hostile governments or terrorist groups on an on-going basis." Have you noticed other scary tech trends? -- Leslie Stevens-Huffman