Credit cards are only debt if you treat them like debt. I use the shit out of mine, but pay the full balance pretty much every month. There's a lot of convenience, I'm fully protected from fraudulent activity, and I have a stupid amount of points/miles/whatever for free (or at least cheap) travel, to boot — I flew to .au a couple years ago for free on that basis, for example.

Here (Singapore) card conditions were recently changed so that you would only be liable for the first $100 of fraudulent transactions (assuming you can prove it wasn't you). I think the bank can still hold you liable for more if they find you were negligent about guarding your card details.

Prior to these condition changes, I remember being told by the bank that you would be liable for all charges incurred before you had reported the card physically stolen or lost.

It doesn't. The GP comment is FUD.

So things like car loans and mortgages could be bad, since they start at 100% and go down.

If you cancelled your credit card after the Linode breech, you potentially saved yourself some hassle, and you saved some merchant somewhere the trouble of a chargeback and lost merchandise, but that merchant wasn't properly verifying cards anyway, so it's still on them. You didn't save yourself a penny.

All of this assumes that all the cards were actually compromised. One report of suspicious activity -- no matter how tightly constrained this person was with their usage -- does not prove that CCs in the Linode database were compromised.

Personally, I don't really care. One of the great things about credit cards is that you're protected from fraud (no really, that's one of the big sales pitches they make). Linode says the cards were encrypted and the private key had a strong password. I have no impetus to inconvenience myself until there is some material reason.

If you know of some method by which merchants are able to reject fraudulent card use of the sort alleged to have resulted from the Linode breach, please do tell.