Mozilla: The Meta WG, Firefox Origin Telemetry and IRC
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language-design team meta working group
I’m happy to announce the formation of the language-design team meta working group. The Meta WG is tasked with helping to manage the transition of the language-design team to a new process – and, if consensus is something that interests you, we’d like you to help!
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AiC: Language-design team meta working group
On internals, I just announced the formation of the language-design team meta working group. The role of the meta working group is to figure out how other language-design team working groups should work. The plan is to begin by enumerating some of our goals – the problems we aim to solve, the good things we aim to keep – and then move on to draw up more details plans. I expect this discussion will intersect the RFC process quite heavily (at least when it comes to language design changes). Should be interesting! It’s all happening in the open, and a major goal of mine is for this to be easy to follow along with from the outside – so if talking about talking is your thing, you should check it out.
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Firefox Origin Telemetry: Putting Prio in Practice
Prio is neat. It allows us to learn counts of things that happen across the Firefox population without ever being able to learn which Firefox sent us which pieces of information.
For example, Content Blocking will soon be using this to count how often different trackers are blocked and exempted from blocking so we can more quickly roll our Enhanced Tracking Protection to our users to protect them from companies who want to track their activities across the Web.
To get from “Prio is neat” to “Content Blocking is using it” required a lot of effort and the design and implementation of a system I called Firefox Origin Telemetry.
Prio on its own has some very rough edges. It can only operate on a list of at most 2046 yes or no questions (a bit vector). It needs to know cryptographic keys from the servers that will be doing the sums and decryption. It needs to know what a “Batch ID” is. And it needs something to reliably and reasonably-frequently send the data once it has been encoded.
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Mike Hoye: Synchronous Text
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk.
I wasn’t in the room when IRC.mozilla.org was stood up, but from what I’ve heard IRC wasn’t “chosen” so much as it was the obvious default, the only tool available in the late ’90s. Suffice to say that as a globally distributed organization, Mozilla has relied on IRC as our main synchronous communications tool since the beginning. For much of that time it’s served us well, if for some less-than-ideal values of “us” and “well”.
Like a lot of the early internet IRC is a quasi-standard protocol built with far more of the optimism of the time than the paranoia the infosec community now refers to as “common sense”, born before we learned how much easier it is to automate bad acts than it is to foster healthy communities. Like all unauthenticated systems on the modern net it’s aging badly and showing no signs of getting better.
While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.
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