Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
That’s a big addition. Here’s what Hillary Juma (Common Voice’s community mgr) had to say about it:
Internet access is increasingly mediated through speech: Voice assistants and smart speakers give us directions, search for information, connect us to friends, used in assistive technology and much more. Yet this technology doesn’t work for millions of people. For example, neither Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, nor Google Home support a single native African language.
By giving individuals the ability to share their speech, we can help ensure all communities have access to voice technology and the opportunity it unlocks.
What a great initiative! (I first heard about Common Voice on Practical AI.)
Today we are pleased to announce Total Cookie Protection, a major privacy advance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
You gotta love to see it. 👏
supercookies can be used in place of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more difficult to delete and block. This makes it nearly impossible for users to protect their privacy as they browse the web. Over the years, trackers have been found storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags.
To hell with these trackers and the tech they rode in on.
In Firefox 85, we’re introducing a fundamental change in the browser’s network architecture to make all of our users safer: we now partition network connections and caches by the website being visited. Trackers can abuse caches to create supercookies and can use connection identifiers to track users. But by isolating caches and network connections to the website they were created on, we make them useless for cross-site tracking.
You gotta love it 🍻
Today Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corporation, shared news of big changes taking place at Mozilla in the wake of COVID-19. In addition to the changes noted below, Mozilla is also laying off 250 employees while it makes these changes.
…going forward we will be smaller. We’ll also be organizing ourselves very differently, acting more quickly and nimbly. We’ll experiment more. We’ll adjust more quickly. We’ll join with allies outside of our organization more often and more effectively. We’ll meet people where they are. We’ll become great at expressing and building our core values into products and programs that speak to today’s issues. We’ll join and build with all those who seek openness, decency, empowerment and common good in online life.
This internal document includes the details about the restructuring and other specifics.
I’ve reached out to Mitchell via LinkedIn messages to invite her on The Changelog for deep dive into the future of the internet. If you or anyone you might know has a direct connection to Mitchell, please pass this invitation on to her — we’d love to have her on the show.
Coil is a web monetization effort where you subscribe for $5 a month and get access to various exclusive content things on participating websites. I think of it like Brave meets Patreon.
Firefox Reality is “mixed reality” (AR/VR) games and experiences from around the web.
The news here is that Mozilla is adopting Coil to experiment with monetization on Firefox Reality. Coil is for-profit, which adds a wrinkle to things. It uses Interledger to move money, which means creators can work in whichever currency they like. Lots of details and explanations in the linked post from Mozilla’s blog.
The WebSocket Inspector is part of the existing Network panel UI in DevTools. It’s already possible to filter the content for opened WS connections in this panel, but till now there was no chance to see the actual data transferred through WS frames.
This is rad. It’ll ship to all Firefox users in version 71, but it’s available in Firefox Developer Edition today.
A look at a new proposal for WebAssembly that will make it possible to easily communicate between WASM and pretty much any language/runtime. This will allow seamlessly embed code from one language into another… think “native modules” except you no longer have to re-compile them on the user’s machine, not to mention you can use them “for free” on the web, and you get sandboxing built in! Wow!
The report focuses on 5 questions about the internet.
The answer is complicated, and the report doesn’t make any particular conclusions so much as share a series of research & stories about each topic. Includes some fascinating looks at what’s going on in AI, inclusive design, open source, decentralization and more.
For all our #applenerds out there — a key feature in iPhone has Mozilla worried. According to Ashley Boyd, VP of Advocacy at Mozilla, this key feature is making “their latest slogan ring a bit hollow.”
Each iPhone that Apple sells comes with a unique ID (called an “identifier for advertisers” or IDFA), which lets advertisers track the actions users take when they use apps. It’s like a salesperson following you from store to store while you shop and recording each thing you look at. Not very private at all.
You can turn the feature off, but “most people don’t know that feature even exists.” Mozilla has an idea of “privacy by default” though…
Lin Clark strikes again with her ridiculously well done code cartoons. This time, she’s taking on the task of explaining why Mozilla is championing DNS over HTTPS.
(Curious about Lin, her teaching efforts, and her work at Mozilla? GOTO 294.)
The problem, as described by James Vasile:
Open source is a broad term that encompasses many different types of projects. There is a wide range of open source approaches, and sometimes it helps to think through how your open source approach matches your goals, resources, and environment. In many places we look, we see open source used as a catch-all term to refer to every project. We don’t have a common vocabulary to discuss open source in ways that take account of important differences.
Mozilla commissioned a report that attempts to establish that common vocabulary so we can describe open source projects with clarity.
Although this report was tailored to advance open source strategies and project design within Mozilla, and with the organizations and communities we work with, we also believe that this challenge is not unique to us. We suspect there will be many other organizations, both commercial and non-commercial, who will benefit from the model.
The resulting framework consists of 10 common archetypes. Click through to learn more.
wasm-pack is a tool for assembling and packaging Rust crates that target WebAssembly. These packages can be published to the npm Registry and used alongside other packages. This means you can use them side-by-side with JS and other packages, and in many kind of applications, be it a Node.js server side app, a client-side application bundled by Webpack, or any other sort of application that uses npm dependencies.
We’re recording a show with Lin Clark today and will definitely ask her all about the progress Mozilla folks have been making on merging the JavaScript and Rust worlds via WebAssembly. Exciting times!
Mozilla has released their annual Internet Health Report:
Our 2018 compilation of research explains what’s helping and what’s hurting the Internet across five issues, from personal experience to global concerns.
The five issues are decentralization, digital inclusion, openness, privacy/security, and web literacy. There’s a lot to digest here. We should expect conversations around these findings to blossom the next few weeks. We might even need to do a show about it…
I recently bought into Samsung’s SmartThings (which is not open), but this open source announcement from Mozilla has me rethinking my choice.
Project Things is an open framework for connecting your devices to the web.
Let’s welcome the Mozilla IoT team and all their sources to GitHub.
Also, check out their Web Thing API spec to see how Mozilla is leading the way to an open standard for IoT.
Mozilla is doing a ton to ensure that people know they are all about privacy and security with the latest release of Firefox.
…we believe that privacy is fundamental to a healthy internet. That’s why we build Firefox, and all our products, to give you greater control over the information you share online and the information you share with us. We strive to collect only what we need to improve Firefox for everyone.
To enable tracking protection, open preferences and click on “Privacy & Security,” then scroll down to “Tracking Protection” and change that setting to “Always.” 😎
A page you may not know about is Mozilla’s full-disclosure privacy page for Firefox that includes explanations and details on what data Firefox shares and how you can change your settings to share even less. This page is auto-opened when you first install and launch Firefox.
Thank you to Mozilla for standing behind their mission to “create products and policy to keep the internet in service of people, not profit”.
As we have said many times over the years, we’ll keep fighting for the open internet to ensure everyone has access to the entire internet and do everything in our power to protect net neutrality. In addition to our court challenge, we are also taking steps to ask Congress and the courts to fix the broken policies.
