So, people from within Iran have hacked the Dutch company DigiNotar, allowing them to issue fake certificates so they could listen in on Iranian dissidents and other organisation within Iran. This is a very simplified version of the story, since it's all quite complicated and I honestly don't even understand all of it. In any case, DigiNotar detected the intrusion July 19, but didn't really do anything with it until it all blew up in their face this past week. Now, the Dutch government has taken over operational management of DigiNotar... But as a Dutch citizen, that doesn't really fill me with confidence, because, well - whenever the Dutch government does anything even remotely related to IT technology, they mess it up. And mess it up bad.

The number of rogue SSL certificates issued by Dutch CA DigiNotar has balooned from one to a couple dozen to over 250 to 531 in just a few days. As Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor project shared the full list of the rogue certificates, it became clear that fraudulent certificates for domains of a number of intelligence agencies from around the world were also issued during the CA's compromise - including the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. Additional targeted domains include Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Skype, Twitter, Tor, Wordpress and many others.

"As mentioned before, the original multi-monitor survey had some serious flaws, which means that its results should be used with caution. I don't know if I can gather people around this again, but I wanted to try an updated, much cleaned up version of the survey, with results distributed in public domain just as before. Here it is." (from The OS-periment)

"Okay, it's been about one week and there are not much answers anymore, so it's time to thank everyone who participated, close this survey, and publish the results, along with some interpretation." Everything is released under Creative Commons CC0 license, so anyone interested, please help yourself.

"At the beginning of this year, the Plasma team was itching to extend Plasma's coverage of the device spectrum. We already had Desktop and Netbook interfaces, and while maintaining and incrementally improving those, we wanted to show case the possibilities of Plasma by creating a full fledged touch interface for devices."

So, I kind of mocked this story yesterday, but today an interesting twist has emerged which puts the story in an entirely different light. This week, CNet reported a story about how Apple is working with the San Francisco Police Department to retrieve a lost iPhone 5 prototype. The police and Apple apparently traced the phone to someone's house, and showed up on his doorstep, threatening him and his family. The only problem - the SFPD has no record of any house search or of the case in general - raising the question whether Apple employees falsely impersonated the SFPD, which happens to be a serious crime in California. Update: While I was busy sleeping, the story changed a little bit, but it's still far too shady. After conferring with Apple, the SFPD now states four police officers were involved, and that only the two Apple employees entered Calderon's house. However, Calderon had no idea these two were private non-police people, since he claims they did not identify themselves as Apple employees. Had he known, he would not have let them search his house. So, update or no, Apple employees still impersonated police officers, and issued threats to intimidate Calderon into letting them search his house - without a warrant. I don't understand how people can just accept this sort of behaviour. Don't you have rights in the US? Update II: Perfect summary.

The last time we did this, it was still 2010, so it's been a while. Since I'm having a hard time finding interesting things to write about today (unless you guys want a story about Apple losing another iPhone prototype at a bar, or about Samsung's god-given quest to launch a tablet/smartphone for each number between 3 and 10), let's do one of those old-fashioned and quaint 'show us your desktop!'-things. I'll start.

"In a scene straight out of Bizarro World, Apple's lawyers are crying foul about Samsung and recent Google acquisitions Motorola's allegedly 'anticompetitive' use of patents. Yes, this is the same Apple that has initiated a patent war with these smartphone rivals. And it's the same rival that has tried to remove competing products from the market, rather than agree to negotiate a licensing fee. And it's the same company that patented multi-touch gestures 26 years after they were invented at a research university. And it's the same company that allegedly doctored evidence in European courts to support its lawsuits against Android. Yet in Apple's rose-colored glasses it is Samsung and Motorola who are bullies. Apparently Apple is irate about these companies' countersuits, which rely largely on patents covering wireless communications."

"My neighbor, Steve Jobs, has been in the news lately. The talk of the town is the recent announcement he will be stepping aside to let other seeds grow at Apple. The business press, the general press, the blogosphere, and just about everybody else has waxed poetic about the 'greatest CEO of all time' saying that this 'boy wonder' has shaped the very nature of our lives with his genius. It's all true, but here in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs isn't just an icon, he's also the guy who lives down the street." I like stories that put a human being behind a public figure. As much as I dislike Apple's recent policies, Jobs is still just a regular person, like all of us. It's easy to forget that when you're sitting behind a glass desk 4000 kilometres away.

Over the past few days, Microsoft has been talking about improvements made to Windows 8 on its 'Building Windows 8' blog at MSDN. Strangely enough, the improvements mentioned were either dealing with the classic desktop, or were demonstrated using the classic desktop - and not the fancy Metro user interface which is supposed to be Windows 8's big new thing. Today's post finally gives a little more detail about how the classic and Metro UI work together, but questions still remain.

Mozilla is currently working on the tablet version of Firefox, and Ian Barlow, user interface designer at Mozilla, has just shown off the user interface for this tablet version. I can assure you - this might just be the first tablet browser interface actually designed for, you know, tablets.

We're living in crazy times, that's for sure. Less than two weeks ago, HP announced it was going to quit making webOS devices. To get rid of existing stock, HP drastically cut the price of the TouchPad to a mere $99 - and this has resulted in a massive run on the device. Lines formed everywhere, and the device is now completely sold out. So, HP has just announced it is going to... Build an additional limited run of TouchPads.

AmigaOS 4.1 has seen another update; we've hit update 3 already. This one's got all sorts of fixes and updates, including updated PATA and SATA drivers, updated Intuition and GUI components, updated USB stack with USB 2.0 (EHCI) support, updated and improved Warp3D support, faster 2D graphics support, various kernel fixes for increased stability, and lots more.

"While the Mandriva Linux distribution lost most of its charm when many of the developers left to form Mageia Linux and the remaining stakeholders switched to just doing one official release per year, the 2011 final release was published on Sunday. While Mandriva no longer carries the popularity it did in its early days or back in the Mandrake days, the 2011.0 release is an improvement. Mandriva 2011.0 provides the mandriva Package Manager (a new package manager under heavy development), MandrivaSync (a cloud service for Mandriva that's similar to DropBox, iCloud, and Ubuntu One), LibreOffice 3.4, and adopts the system service manager."