If you are motivated by the love of free software, why aren't you thinking of the possibility that gcc can have a backdoor written by bribed immoral programmers ?
Or has Richard Stallman convinced you that by mere repetition of the word free, free software is also moral software ?
I have no doubts what so ever that Opera is run by ethical people and it an ethical company.
In any case a security / privacy audit is a much more rigorous test.
The whole free software movement is based on a pathetic assumption that if you can't read 10 million lines of open code you have to suffer from paranoia.
It failed to deliver a usable Operating System within a budget. It failed to deliver AI with even the intelligence of a donkey. It failed to deliver an efficient IDE. It failed to deliver a serialization format for the industry to use. It failed to deliver a fast interpreter for high performance applications like Games. It failed to deliver a usable framework for Web Applications for 20 years. It failed to deliver package management for libraries.
If the History of Lisp is to teach us anything is that the unity of data and code is not a prerequisite to write useful applications.
This article was meant to have seasonal relevance. It might have been published for maximum eye balls. It could also be fake or an article published earlier in 2002. Bribed to publish ?
Of course the reality of the matter is, journalists pretend to be surprised when scientists don't know anything, which is true. The all-knowing wise people of HN assert that both journalists and scientists don't know anything.
The actual reality is that neither HN nor journalists nor scientists nor anyone knows anything about reality.
If you take away sock puppets you take away anonymity as well. Even if you make everyone use their name and face and display pic and ip address and location, there is no guarantee that a group of people will stop censoring another group with or without sock puppets.
If you care to count there are at-least 5 controls on HN or any forum since 1990.
1. What gets on homepage ( Stickies )
2. Admin control
3. Firewall
4. Voting
5. Moderators
If you take social groups into consideration then on HN you have at least
1. Programmers
2. Startup People
3. Technical People
4. Geeks
5. Hackers
6. Security Hackers
7. College Students
8. Academic People
9. Trend followers
10. Trolls ( my people )
These 10 groups fight amongst each other with the help of 5 controls above. Every forum is always like this, since its inception-middle-death.
No one really wins but the constant bickering about forces each group to outdo each other. Whether it is progress or going about in circles only time will tell.
Just because you can patch the fucking software doesn't mean people will change. You will probably add one more control level to make into a total of 6 and then nothing. Some other egghead will write about censorship 3.0