Opera is not the first nor the last victim of certificate theft. There is evidence that the use of digitally signed malware is increasing since the Stuxnet incident gave this attack vector worldwide exposure.

Both Kaspersky Lab and BitDefender have confirmed seeing a steady increase in the number of malware threats with digitally signed components during the last 24 months. Many use digital certificates bought with fake identities, but the use of stolen certificates is also common, Craiu and Botezatu said.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, revoking stolen certificates do not prevent malware signed with it from running. Most casual users I think tend to trust certificates (that is what it's for, after all, to certify that its from a trusted source). Not many will bother to check the authenticity of the certificate.

1. I heard Microsoft and Verisign revoked the stolen Realtek certificate, does it mean I’m safe now?

Due to the way certificates work, a revoked certificate doesn’t mean the malware will not run anymore. You will still get infected by Stuxnet and the driver will still load without any warning. The only effect of the revoke process is that the bad guys will not be able to sign any further malware with it.

It might be premature to talk about its impact being limited until the full scope of the intrusion and loss of data is made known, and the number of users affected by the intrusion (not disclosed so far).

Did you recently ...
- copy any html codes from someone else's website?
- save any pictures or files from the web?
- cut and paste an article or link it to a friend?
- take any screenshots of any interesting pages you found?
- download any movies, music or porn?

Congrats, you may be a cyberthief. This way please, for your appointment with Mr. Noose.

Reading the advisory from Opera, the only information on the possible consequences of the breach is that :-

It is possible that a few thousand Windows users, who were using Opera between 01.00 and 01.36 UTC on June 19th, may automatically have received and installed the malicious software. To be on the safe side, we will roll out a new version of Opera which will use a new code signing certificate.

Are users of other OSes similarly exposed to malicious software, such as those using Mac, Lunix, Android or iOS?

Here's another similar plan hatched by a Canadian company .

An even more fundamental assumption he makes is that intellectual property legislation is desirable because it encourages innovation. Why should that be a given?

Take for example, the very same example cited in TFA, Sir Issac Newton and his mathematical principles. Isaac Newton composed Principia Mathematica during 1685 and 1686, and it was published in a first edition on July 5, 1687. Copyright did not exist at that time; the very first copyright law, the Statute of Anne was enacted only 23 years later in 1710.

The point I am trying to make is that people will innovate and create, even without the protection of intellectual property laws.

On a separate point, if the whole rationale for intellectual property legislation is to promote innovation, shouldn't the focus be on protecting the rights of the actual person doing the creating, as opposed to whichever faceless entity who may own the contractual right to make use of the invention? Start by making intellectual property rights vest only in the creator, and make it non transferrable. This will force commercial entities to grant a fair share of the profits to the real innovators instead of the giving an unearned bonus to the patent troll who own a large number of the patents today. The way it is structured today, it is very clear that intellectual property legislation only benefits those with the capital to buy over the rights and not the creators themselves.

I forgot to add that while I'm sympathetic to your point of view, it appears that from a purely legal point of view, the authorities appear to have ensured that their actions are clothed with a fig-leaf of legality. Whether their actions have any moral justifications is an entirely different matter.

What is particularly repugnant is that these overly broad surveillance powers may have already been used to target civil liberty groups in the UK. I would think that it is a clear abuse of power to spy on parties perceived to be 'anti-government' instead of the terrorists they ostensibly were meant to root out when the laws were enacted.

Full credit to this article at the London School of Economics and Politic Science .

It is clear that FISA allows the US to target ‘persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information’. Arguably, when intelligence already in the hands of an agency such as the NSA is handed over to the GCHQ, there is little, if any, legal regulation or oversight in that situation as the RIPA applies only when the GCHQ gathers the data itself. If the data is simply provided to the GCHQ by the NSA pursuant to The Security Service Act 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act 1994 there is no legal requirement for a UK court warrant.

Also RIPA does not apply where the information on UK residents is harvested outside of the UK (e.g. harvested from Google servers based in the US).

For good measure, again No.

From the last paragraph of TFA :-

There are a few exceptions though – companies will not be required to pass on the data in cases where there are "justified national security reasons"

This provision is likely useless against the NSA.

So, this enforcement happens just when the newly set up Department of Business Oversight comes into operation. Coincidence?

In 2012, Governor Brown introduced a wide-ranging government reorganization plan to improve efficiencies within state government. As part of the Governor's Reorganization Plan (GRP), the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) and Department of Corporations (DOC) will become divisions under the new Department of Business Oversight, effective July 1st.

The core functions of the DFI and DOC Departments will remain the same, and consumers, financial institutions and other stakeholders will continue to receive the same level of excellent service. The examination, enforcement, legal, licensing and other programs will be organized under the Division of Financial Institutions and the Division of Corporations under the new Department of Business Oversight (DBO).

The new Department of Business Oversight will license and regulate all state-licensed depository and non-depository financial services and institutions.

Jefferson was right, and that statement far from painting him as a cokehead actually shows that he was a shrewd businessman.

These are the facts :-

1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two names for the same plant.

2) Hemp was historically useful for rope, paper, and clothing, and was long promoted in Virginia as an alternative cash crop.

3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm commercially.

4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in the late 1700s and early 1800s — pot use wasn't considered a problem until the early 1900s.

So, what was the problem with Jefferson's comment again?

Sure, this move benefits Google greatly -you're tagging their database and giving them more personal info, for free.

For the user though, not so much. If you've bought a hot new phone and want to show it off, its much more satisfying to do it in person where you can gush over it and more importantly, see your friend's reaction.

If you must share the news online, theres so many other ways to do it, over FB or Twitter for instance. All this instrusiveness achieves is make people more wary of using G+.