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Posted
2 days
ago
by
Luis Villa
Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia
... [More]
answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.
Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner, from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/14/wikipedia-the-peoples-encyclopedia/
As Sue says, the people who create Wikipedia are terrific. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve just wrapped up my first three months as their lawyer – as Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Consider this the personal announcement I should have made three months ago :)
Wikimania 2012 Group Photograph, by Helpameout, under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Greenberg Traurig was terrific for me: Heather has a wealth of knowledge and experience about how to do deals (both open source and otherwise), and through her, I did a lot of interesting work for interesting clients. Giving up that diversity and experience was the hardest part of leaving private practice.
Based on the evidence of the first three months, though, I made a great choice – I’ve replaced diversity of clients with a vast diversity of work; replaced one experienced, thoughtful boss with one of equal skill but different background (so I’m learning new things); and replaced the resources (and distance) of a vast firm with a small but tight and energized team. All of these have been wins. And of course working on behalf of this movement is a great privilege, and (so far) a pleasure. (With no offense to GT, pleasure is rarely part of the package at a large firm.)
The new scope of the work is perhaps the biggest change. Where I previously focused primarily on technology licensing, I’m now an “internet lawyer” in the broadest sense of the word: I, my (great) team, and our various strong outside counsel work on topics from employment contracts, to privacy policies, to headline-grabbing speech issues, to patent/trademark/copyright questions – it is all over the place. This is both challenging, and great fun – I couldn’t ask for a better place to be at this point in my life. (And of course, being always on the side of the community is great too – though I did more of that at Greenberg than many people would assume.)
I don’t expect that this move will have a negative impact on my other work in the broader open source community. If anything, not focusing on licensing all day at work has given me more energy to work on OSI-related things when I get home, and I have more flexibility to travel and speak with and for various communities too. (I’m having great fun being on the mailing lists of literally every known open source license revision community, for example. :)
If you’d like to join us (as we work to get the next 1/2 billion users a month), there are a lot of opportunities open right now, including one working for me on my team, and some doing interesting work at the overlap between community, tech, and product management. Come on over – you won’t regret it :) [Less]
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Posted
2 days
ago
by
gerv
…for their help in significantly mitigating the problems we were having with running out of memory when linking Firefox with Profile-Guided Optimization using Microsoft Visual C++. (If we’d have had to turn off PGO due to this problem, that would have made Firefox’s performance on Windows significantly worse.) Ted has the write-up.
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Posted
2 days
ago
by
msurman
Open Badges started as a modest experiment: build open source badge issuing software for ourselves and others. As momentum around this experiment has grown, it feels like the opportunity is bigger: we could build openness and user empowerment into
... [More]
how learning — and professional identity — work all across the web. With Open Badges 1.0 out there in the world, now is the right time to ask: where next for Mozilla and badges?
When Mozilla and MacArthur Foundation first started work on Open Badges about 18 months ago, the plan was to build a badge interchange standard (like SMTP for skills) and a collection of open source software for issuing and sharing badges (Badge Backpack, Open Badger, etc.). We’ve built all these things. And we’ve put up a reference implementation that Mozilla and others are using. This was really the limit of our original plan: build some basic open tech for badges and put it out there in the world.
The thing is: there has been way more excitement and pick up of badges than we expected. Even though Open Badges only launched officially in March, there are already over 800 unique providers who have issued almost 100,000 badges. We are also starting to see the development of city-wide systems where learners can pick up hundreds of different badges from across dozens of learning orgs and combine them all into a single profile. Chicago is the first city to do this (June 1), but Philadelphia and San Francisco are not far behind. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg: orgs like the Clinton Global Initiative and the National Science Foundation are focusing on badges in a way that is likely to drive even more educators to pick up the Open Badges standard, making their badges interoperable with others.
Of course, the fact that educators and policy makers are interested in badges doesn’t represent a victory in itself. It just shows momentum and buzz. The real opportunity — and the real impact — comes when learners and employers get excited about badges. Mozilla never planned to build offerings for these audiences. Increasingly, it feels like we should.
In the Internet era, people learn things online and out of school all the time. Whether you want to make a web page, knit a sweater or get better at calculus, the internet makes it easy to learn on your own or with a group of friends outside of a school setting. However, there is no good way to get credentials or recognition for this kind of learning. And, even if there was, there is no trusted, verifiable way to plug that recognition into Facebook, About.me and other places that make up your online identity. People have no good way to show ‘what they know’ online.
Similarly, employers are increasingly turning to the internet to find talent. They use sites like LinkedIn that let you search online resumes. Or, increasingly, to sites like Gild and TalentBin that use data mining to find potential hires. The problem: these services do not offer granular or variable skills profiles. And, with some of them, there are significant issues around privacy: people are being offered up as potential hires without even knowing that these sites are collecting data about them.
Mozilla could offer a distributed, open source and privacy-friendly solution to problems like these. We could help learners show their skills in all their online profiles and also help employers search for talent reliably. However, to do so, we’d have to build a Firefox-quality offering for learners and employers on top of Open Badges. While this hasn’t been our focus up til now, I’m thinking more and more that this is something we should consider.
In some ways, there is a parallel to Gecko and Firefox. Gecko provides the underlying platform for shaping standards around our vision of the web. But we need a popular consumer offering like Firefox if we want this vision to actually become relevant in the market. Right now, with Open Badges, we’re mostly just playing at the underlying standards layer. If we really want to shape how learning and professional identity work on the web, we probably need to build our own offerings directly for the people who most want and need badges.
Now is the time to be looking at where the opportunity is in this space. Momentum and demand is amongst educators is growing. More and more start ups are appearing in the badges, portfolio and skills spaces. And likelihood that badges will be important for learners and employers is growing. We need to be asking ourselves: how can Mozilla — and its values — shape this space?
With this in mind, Erin Knight is leading an effort over the next few months to look at different badges product options. She’ll be providing updates on her blog. And I’ll be summarizing here as well. If you have ideas on where Mozilla should go on all of this, we’d love to have you involved as we think this through. Comments here on this post are a good place to start.
Filed under: badges, drumbeat, education, learning, mozilla, webmakers [Less]
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Posted
2 days
ago
by
gerv
This is why we do what we do. (Via Arky.)
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Posted
3 days
ago
by
Kazé
I’ve tweaked the cpp.vim file that comes with Vim 7.3 to highlight most Mozilla-specific keywords when working on the editor core. A lot of Mozilla-specific types and that can be added manually but the task gets bigger when it comes to nsI*
... [More]
interfaces or NS_* macros…
Most nsI* interfaces can be grabbed with find/grep/sed:
find src/mozilla -regex ".*\.\(idl\|h\)" -exec grep "^\(class\|interface\)\s*nsI" '{}' \; | sed 's/\(:\|;\|,\|{\).*$//' | sed 's/^.*nsI/nsI/' | sed 's/\s*$//' | sort -u
same thing for NS_ERROR* / NS_IMPL* macros and constants:
find src/mozilla -regex ".*\.\(idl\|h\)" -exec grep "^#define\s*NS_ERROR" '{}' \; | sed 's/^#define\s*//' | sed 's/\s.*$//' | sed 's/(.*$//' | sort -u
find src/mozilla -regex ".*\.\(idl\|h\)" -exec grep "^#define\s*NS_IMPL" '{}' \; | sed 's/^#define\s*//' | sed 's/\s.*$//' | sed 's/(.*$//' | sort -u
Here’s the resulting cpp.vim file including the ~900 Mozilla-specific lines (ouch!). Copy it to your ~/.vim/syntax/ directory and voilà, your C++ files should be much more colorful.
Now it’d be really great if:
we had omni-completion for the nsI* interfaces instead of just the keywords;
we had a similar file (keywords + omni-completion) for JavaScript — mostly for the DOM API
this file could be generated automatically — say, with DXR;
this file could be included in the Mozilla tree (e.g. a .vimrc file in the top source dir).
To all Vim fanboys among the Mozilla community: I’d love to get your input about that. Maybe we could start a “vim-moz-syntax” project on github or something?
EDIT: (2013-05-19)
this work is now available on github: https://github.com/mozfr/mozilla.vim
there’s been an article about this in Russian: http://softdroid.net/Vim-Syntax-Highlighting [Less]
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Posted
3 days
ago
I have the privilege of having my desk located around a bunch of really intelligent people from the Mozilla Services team. They've been talking a lot about all the new technologies around server provisioning. One that interested me is
... [More]
Docker.
Docker is a pretty nifty piece of software. It's essentially a glorified
wrapper around Linux Containers. But,
calling it that is doing it an injustice.
Docker interests me because it allows simple environment isolation and
repeatability. I can create a run-time environment
once, package it up, then run it again on any other machine.
Furthermore, everything that runs in that environment is isolated from
the underlying host (much like a virtual machine). And best of all,
everything is fast and simple.
For my initial experimentation with Docker, I decided to create an
environment for building Firefox.
Building Firefox with Docker
To build Firefox with Docker, you'll first need to
install Docker. That's pretty
simple.
Then, it's just a matter of creating a new container with our build
environment:
curl https://gist.github.com/indygreg/5608534/raw/30704c59364ce7a8c69a02ee7f1cfb23d1ffcb2c/Dockerfile | docker build
The output will look something like:
FROM ubuntu:12.10
MAINTAINER Gregory Szorc "gps@mozilla.com"
RUN apt-get update
===> d2f4faba3834
RUN dpkg-divert --local --rename --add /sbin/initctl && ln -s /bin/true /sbin/initctl
===> aff37cc837d8
RUN apt-get install -y autoconf2.13 build-essential unzip yasm zip
===> d0fc534feeee
RUN apt-get install -y libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libgtk2.0-dev libiw-dev libnotify-dev libxt-dev mesa-common-dev uuid-dev
===> 7c14cf7af304
RUN apt-get install -y binutils-gold
===> 772002841449
RUN apt-get install -y bash-completion curl emacs git man-db python-dev python-pip vim
===> 213b117b0ff2
RUN pip install mercurial
===> d3987051be44
RUN useradd -m firefox
===> ce05a44dc17e
Build finished. image id: ce05a44dc17e
ce05a44dc17e
As you can see, it is essentially bootstrapping an environment to
build Firefox.
When this has completed, you can activate a shell in the container by
taking the image id printed at the end and running it:
docker run -i -t ce05a44dc17e /bin/bash
# You should now be inside the container as root.
su - firefox
hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central
cd mozilla-central
./mach build
If you want to package up this container for distribution, you just find
its ID then export it to a tar archive:
docker ps -a
# Find ID of container you wish to export.
docker export 2f6e0edf64e8 > image.tar
# Distribute that file somewhere.
docker import - < image.tar
Simple, isn't it?
Future use at Mozilla
I think it would be rad if Release Engineering used Docker for managing
their Linux builder configurations. Want to develop against the exact
system configuration that Mozilla uses in its automation - you could do
that. No need to worry about custom apt repositories, downloading
custom toolchains, keeping everything isolated from the rest of your
system, etc: Docker does that all automatically. Mozilla simply needs to
publish Docker images on the Internet and anybody can come along and
reproduce the official environment with minimal effort. Once we do that,
there are few excuses for someone breaking Linux builds because of
an environment discrepancy.
Release Engineering could also use Docker to manage isolation of
environments between builds. For example, it could spin up a new
container for each build or test job. It could even save images from the
results of these jobs. Have a weird build failure like a segmentation
fault in the compiler? Publish the Docker image and have someone take a
look! No need to take the builder offline while someone SSH's into it.
No need to worry about the probing changing state because you can always
revert to the state at the time of the failure! And, builds would likely
start faster. As it stands, our automation spends minutes managing
packages before
builds begin. This lag would largely be eliminated with Docker. If
nothing else, executing automation jobs inside a container would allow
us to extract accurate resource usage info (CPU, memory, I/O) since
the Linux kernel effectively gives containers their own namespace
independent of the global system's.
I might also explore publishing Docker images that construct an ideal
development environment (since getting recommended tools in the hands of
everybody is a hard problem).
Maybe I'll even consider hooking up build system glue to automatically
run builds inside containers.
Lots of potential here.
Conclusion
I encourage Linux users to play around with Docker. It enables some
new and exciting workflows and is a really powerful tool despite its
simplicity. So far, the only major faults I have with it are that the
docs say it should not be used in production (yet) and it only works on
Linux. [Less]
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Posted
4 days
ago
by
Seif Lotfy
Globaleaks 0.2 Alpha is out. Globaleaks is an open source project aimed at creating a worldwide, anonymous, censorship-resistant, distributed whistle-blowing platform. It enables organizations interested in running whistle-blowing
... [More]
initiatives to setup their own safe zone, where whistle-blowers and recipients can exchange data.
2 Years ago I helped out with the development of Globaleaks 0.1. And although I am not active anymore, I really support the initiative behind it. Now with the HERMES Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights backing it up, it has grown a lot and shaped up to be a very organized and thought through project.
TL;DR:
Full rewrite
More flexible and extensible
Linux ready-made system and network hardened installation
Written in python using twisted
New Frontend
Try it out:
Try out the demo. It is pretty straight forward.
Help out:
As young project, Globaleaks can use some help fixing bugs. Just head to the wiki and read through it. It is pretty straight forward, and explains the modules, security concepts and set up instructions.
Globaleaks already has Debian and Ubuntu ready packages. An easy way to help out is to set up a PPA for us on Launchpad.
Get in touch:
You can contact the Globaleaks team at info () globaleaks org or on IRC on #globaleaks at irc.oftc.net
Here are some screenshots of the new frontend
Congratulations you are using Tor
Receiver selection page
The submission receipt
Configuring a receiver
Configuring a context [Less]
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Posted
4 days
ago
by
aharoni
In part 01 of these series, I showed why is it important to always define the language and the direction of all HTML content and not rely on the defaults: The content may get embedded in a document with different direction and be displayed
... [More]
incorrectly.
This issue is laughably easy to avoid: If you are writing the content, you are supposed to know in what language it is written, so if it’s English, just write <html lang=”en” dir=”ltr”> even though these seem to be the defaults. Nineteen or so characters that ensure your content is readable and not displayed backwards. Please do it always and tell all your friends to do it.
The problem is that you don’t only have to explicitly set the language and the direction, but, as silly as it sounds, you have to set them correctly, too. A more subtle, but nevertheless quite frequent and disruptive bug is displaying presumably, but not actually, translated content in a different direction. This happens quite frequently when a website supports the browser language detection feature, known as Accept-Language:
The web server sees that the browser requests content in Hebrew.
The web server sends a response with <html lang=”he” dir=”rtl”>, but because the website is not actually translated, the text is shown in the fallback language, which is usually English.
The user sees the content just like this numbered list, which I intentionally set to dir=”rtl”: with the numbers and the punctuation on the wrong side, and possibly invisible, because English is not a right-to-left language.
Of course, it can go even worse. Arrows can point the wrong way and buttons and images can overlap and hide each other, rendering the page not just hard to read, but totally unusable.
This bug is also an example of the Software Localization Paradox: It manifests itself when Accept-Language is not English, but most developers install English operating systems and don’t bother to change the preferred language settings in the browser, so they never see how this bug manifests itself. The site developers don’t bother to test for it either.
The solution, of course, is to set a different language and direction only if the site is actually translated, and not to pretend that it is if it’s not translated.
Here are two examples of such brokenness. Both sites are important and useful, but hard to use for people whose Accept-Language is Hebrew, Persian or Arabic.
Here’s how the Mozilla Developer Network website looks in fake Hebrew:
Mozilla Developer Network website, in English, but right-to-left
Notice how the full stops are on the left end and how the text overlaps the images in the tiles on the right-hand side. This is how it is supposed to look, more or less:
Mozilla Developer Network home page in English, left-to-right
I manually changed dir=”rtl” to dir=”ltr” using the element inspector from Firefox’s developer tools and I also had to tweak a CSS class to move the “mozilla” tab at the top.
The above troubles are reported as bug 816443 – lang and dir attributes must be used only if the page is actually translated.
After showing an example of a web development bug from a site for, ahem, web developers, here is an even funnier example: The home page Unicode’s CLDR. That’s right: Unicode’s own website shows text with incorrect direction:
The Unicode CLDR website, in English but right-to-left
The only words translated here are “Contents” (תוכן) and “Search this site” (חיפוש באתר זה), which is not so useful. The rest is shown in English, and the direction is broken: Notice the strange alignment of the content and the schedule table. A few months ago that table was so broken that its content wasn’t visible at all, but that was probably patched.
Here’s how it is supposed to look:
The CLDR home page in English, appropriately left-to-right
I tried reporting the CLDR home page direction bug, but it was closed as “out-of-scope”: The CLDR developers say that the Google Sites infrastructure is to blame. This is frustrating, because as far as I know Google Sites doesn’t have a proper bug reporting system and all I can do is write a question about that direction problem in the Google Sites forum and hope that somebody notices it or poke my Googler friends.
One thing that I will not do is switch my Accept-Language to English. Whenever I can, I don’t just want to see the website correctly, but to try to help my neighbor: see the possible problems that can affect other users who use different language. Somebody has to break the Software Localization Paradox.
Filed under: Firefox, Free Software, localization [Less]
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Posted
5 days
ago
Backstory Every 3 months, we at Mozilla have to reset our LDAP passwords. The system helpfully sends the first reminder 2 weeks before your password expires, then the second reminder 1 week before your password expires and the last
... [More]
reminder 2 days before your password expires.
Sometimes time passes by faster than you know and you end up with
a Locked out of LDAP account.
The 3 month LDAP password reset is such a large part of our lives that
I propose it become a standard unit of measure for elapsed time.
Usage
Used in casual conversation:
Pat: Hi!
Jordan: Hi!
Pat: I haven't seen you before. How long have you been at
Mozilla?
Jordan: I've been here for 6 LDAP password resets.
Pat: Oh, weird. I've been here for 7. Good to meet you!
Would you like a banana?
Jordan: Would I ever!
Used in casual conversation on IRC:
<patbot> anyone use less?
<corycory> i only use sass. it's the best.
* riledupriley has quit (Quit: riledupriley)
<patbot> :(
<hugbot> (patbot)
* r1cky has joined #casualconversationexample
<r1cky> morning!
<nigelb> r1cky: hai!
<nigelb> Ah, it's nearly mfbt.
<mtjordan> sure. been using it for 3 ldap password resets.
<mtjordan> patbot: why do you ask?
Used in Bugzilla comments:
Jordan [:jordan] 1 day ago Comment 0 [reply] [-]
Readonly mode causes the site to ISE.
Pat [:pat] 1 day ago Comment 1 [reply] [-]
I looked into it. Turns out we haven't used readonly
mode in at least 4 LDAP password resets.
I think we just need to add a fake authentication
module. Easy peasy.
Used when joining a new group:
From: Pat
To: some-group@mozilla.org
Subject: Welcome Jordan to some-group!
Hi all!
I'd like to welcome Jordan to some-group! Jordan brings
expertise that is invaluable. I'm excited! Yay!
Jordan: Tell us about yourself!
Pat
From: Jordan
To: some-group@mozilla.org
Subject: Re: Welcome Jordan to some-group!
Hi!
I'm excited to join some-group! Hopefully I bring something
useful to the table.
I've been at Mozilla for 7 LDAP password resets, I like
top-posting and I make a mean cold brew coffee.
Looking forward to my first meeting!
Jordan
On Blah blah blah at blah blah blah, Pat wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> I'd like to welcome Jordan to some-group! Jordan brings
> expertise that is invaluable. I'm excited! Yay!
>
> Jordan: Tell us about yourself!
>
> Pat
Used in an email to everyone@ about departing:
Dear everyone!
It is with sadness that I tell you I'm leaving as of next
Friday. As you know, I've been with Mozilla for 32 LDAP
password resets and frankly, I'm totally out of usable
Sherlock Holmes story titles, so I'm off to new challenges.
I will miss you all.
[Comments] [Less]
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Posted
5 days
ago
Sometimes web pages display brief warning boxes at the top with "learn more" links. The learn more link in a specific warning box should go to a page specifically about that warning with, in rough order: screenshot of warning box
... [More]
quoted full text of the warning (for searchability / search engine discovery)
detailed text answering:
how could have the issue occurred?
what should the user do to resolve the issue?
how can the user avoid the issue in the future?
E.g. the "Learn more ›" link in the yellow warning box in this screenshot:
links to: https://support.twitter.com/articles/82050-i-m-having-trouble-confirming-my-email which:
Neither has screenshot nor text of warning
Covers several topics unrelated to the warning
Does not answer the above questions
And could be improved by linking to a specific page about this particular warning, containing the above points 1-3, and answering all three questions in point 3.
Related: Scary Twitter warning: "... removed the email address from your account... [Less]
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Copyright
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2013
Black Duck Software, Inc.
and its contributors, Some Rights Reserved. Unless otherwise marked, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
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®
and the Ohloh logo are trademarks of
Black Duck Software, Inc.
in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.