@coffeelover said in Can Opera be fully Trusted:
... Today I see that China has been using tiny microchips to gain access to US companies. This is yet another reason why I personally do not trust software or hardware that comes from China. Read about it by going to the link below. ... For those like me who no longer trust Opera, the evidence seems enough. For others like Blackbird who believe the evidence is not compelling, there is little point in continuing the discussion. It really boils down to what one is willing to place his/her trust in and for me... ...
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/10/04/china-used-tiny-microchips-to-gain-access-to-us-companies-banks-government-contractors-report
Writing as someone who has spent much of his career dealing with highly classified materials, I feel there's a vast difference between an adversarial government covertly placing spy-chips into a market-leading company's industrial/commercial/military server hardware by bribing/coercing factory personnel within that adversarial nation in hopes of penetrating corporate/government networks so as to acquire strategic information versus that same adversary somehow getting some lines of snooping code covertly inserted into a second-tier Internet web browser that's designed by code experts outside the adversarial country and aimed at individual non-commercial users. Of course anything is always possible, but 'possible' doesn't make it likely - and it certainly doesn't necessarily make it even worthwhile. Covertness always carries the risks of unexpected disclosure, whose costs and fallout can be considerable when measured against probable reward for the effort. Consequently, the potential payoff must always be worth the risks incurred - and, frankly, the market exposure of Opera into truly strategic arenas doesn't really qualify as worth it.
But, as I think we agree, it all comes down to personal opinions and preferences. For me and the equipment upon which I use browsers, Opera is currently OK in a security sense. For equipment that really matters in a real-world security sense, I personally believe there should be complete isolation from the public Internet - a genuine airgap, if you will. Hence, the only practical browser risks for ordinary users is from non-nation-state hackers and vandals.
