Creating draconian laws to supress the right to peaceful assemble and protest is an increasing (and worrying) trend.

It happens all across the globe and it is mostly as a reactive mechanism from the governments against the number of massive popular protests facilitated (but not created or organized) by the social media.

Some examples of these protests (there are others, these are from the top of my head):

February 15, 2003 anti-war protest: The February 15, 2003 anti-war protest was a coordinated day of protests across the world in which people in more than 600 cities expressing opposition to the imminent Iraq War. (...) According to BBC News, between six and ten million people took part in protests in up to sixty countries over the weekend of the 15th and 16th; other estimates range from eight million to thirty million.

The 2011 Egyptian protests (better known by the "Tahrir Square" protests): In February 1st alone "[t]he BBC reported the number of protesters in Tahrir Square ranged from "more than 100,000 to some 250,000-the square's maximum capacity." Egyptian security forces stated that 500,000 people participated in the protests in Cairo alone."

2011-12 Spanish protests (The "indignados"): According to statistics published by RTVE, the Spanish public broadcasting company, between 6.5 and 8 million Spaniards have participated in these protests:

2013 protests in Brazil: In June 20 alone "Protests in over 100 cities around the country rallied over 2 million people."

2013 protests in Turkey: 3.5 million of Turkey's 80 million people are estimated to have taken part in almost 5000 demonstrations across Turkey connected with the original Gezi Park protest.

Some governments like the Syrian, the Bahraini and the new (same as old) Egyptian did not tolerate and supressed with enormous amount of brutality in the very beggining their (then) peaceful protests that were organized in a similar fashion than the ones mentioned above.

The rest of the world governments watched and understood that they cannot afford the risk to let some small local matter (like increasing the bus fare in some cities in Brasil, or cutting down some trees in Turkey) to become the catalyst to mass protests.

Measures like these in Ukraine will happen more and more and won't be limited to countries with nascent democracies (like Ukraine) or repressive dictactorships (like Syria). In Spain proposals were already made to criminalize and regulate forms of protest. Thailand invoked "security laws" to curb theirs.

And without a doubt most other countries, eastern and western alike, will change their legislations, enact new laws and enforce old ones to ensure one thing: that the massive indignation and lack of confidence in the democratic process won't become a full blown revolution.

IIRC it already does.

Despite of that I believe there are plenty of dependencies and assumptions by the other software running in the machine that explorer.exe is the installed shell that it is not realistic that the replacement would be without issues.

That would be the least of the concerns. Just imagine if they accidentally train it to the /b/ images.

"Oh God, what have I done!"

About talking to cops and the fifth ammendment, it is a good thing you have there in America, the right to remain silent is one of the few thin lines that separates your country from situations like this

Yet "police throughout [Iraq] continued to use abusive and coerced confessions as methods of investigations," the State Department cites in its latest report, adding, "Credible accounts of abuse and torture during arrest and investigation, in pretrial detention, and after conviction, particularly by police and army were common." The State Department says former prisoners, detainees and human rights groups detail methods including "stress positions, beatings, broken fingers, electric shocks, suffocation, burning, removal of fingernails, suspension from the ceiling, overextending the spine, beatings on the soles of the feet with plastic and metal rods, forcing victims to drink large quantities of water then preventing urination, sexual assault, denial of medical treatment, and death threats."

Confessions have long been a deliberate element in Iraqi justice, both before and after Saddam's rule. The justice system, based largely on Islamic and tribal tradition, has always placed the importance of confessions above other types of considered evidence. Here, it's called the Master of the Evidence, similar to the Latin phrase Confession est regina probationum, or "Confession is the queen of proofs," which justified the use of forced confessions during the Middle Ages.

Denying the state the incentive of extracting a confession "by any means necessary" is one of the best gifts your founding fathers left for you. Removing that safeguard from your justice system will certainly be detrimental. You may think it will never be used against the innocent but one should never forget the famous quotation by H. L. Mencken:

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Actually, considering what was revealed on a previous article (DEA Program "More Troubling" Than NSA)

"The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated"

it is more likely than not that a very clear paper trail will be shown that it all happened by good old fashioned police investigation as you described.

It doesn't mean it was not obtained with an illicit program to begin with, only that they were able to cross the "t"s an dot the "i"s later.

That reminds me of that Monty Python famous scene

Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

Seems like that's all Steve Ballmer will leave to his heir at Microsoft

But does it run Windows?

First: it only take one of your FB friends to tag a picture of you with your new profile that were tagged before in your old profile to link both accounts.

Second: why would you trust FB (or any other third party service, anyway) with your information if you want it to keep private? Social networking (and the internet in general) is for publication of info (with emphasis in the "public" part of publication).

Bottom line: keep your private things in your own disk, not in a service designed to share content with as many people as you can.