Gathering session cookies with Firesheep

There's a difference between a mistake (which happen to the best of us) and wilfully ignoring the necessary rules and safeguards, or a history of mistakes which leads to a diagnosis of institutional incompetence. I suggest that Verisign is guilty of neither of the latter two things.

In addition, the certificate(s) in the incident you reference were digital code-signing certificates, not web server certificates. Very occasionally, web server certs do fall into the wrong hands (which can be via hacking and theft as much as misissuance - how many SSL-running web servers do you think were rooted in the past year?) but I'd be impressed if you can show me a single reported incident where a fraudulently-acquired web server cert was used for spoofing.

Gerv