Apple was the last major holdout on proprietary video codecs, the only major industry player that hadn't signed onto the Alliance for Open Media, home of the AV1 video format, a successor to On2's groundbreaking open formats of the early web years, which led to the company's acquisition by Google in 2010. Read the rest
Brett Gaylor from Mozilla writes, "The FCC received 22 million comments in response to its plan to repeal Net Neutrality legislation. So we've created a virtual way for you to drop 22 million virtual leaflets on Ajit Pai at the FCC headquarters. And we're almost there! Folks have dropped over twenty million so far, and in the process made weird cyber graffiti appear all over DC. Help us get to 22 million!" Read the rest
In 2012, Google introduced Certificate Transparency, an internet-wide tripwire system designed to catch cryptographic "certificate authorities" who abused their position to produce counterfeit credentials that would allow criminals, governments and police to spy on and tamper with secure internet connections. Read the rest
Mozilla has extended and improved its Firefox Focus browser, heretofore an Ios product, bringing it to Android, with auto-blocking of trackers and ads and making it easy to erase your browser history. Read the rest
Brett Gaylor writes, "As part of the Mozilla Privacy Arcade project in this year’s Global Sprint, Mozilla is inviting activists, artists, designers, educators, gamers, storytellers, and technologists of all backgrounds to invent new privacy-themed adventures for the role playing game Cryptomancer." Read the rest
Mozilla announced its new ＢＲＡＮＤ ＩＤＥＮＴＩＴＹ today. There it is above. Reception has not been kind. But is it ever? Its nerdliness (:// indeed!) is being held responsible for the inelegance of the logotype, but it's the best thing about it.
I know it's easy to toss off "how I woulda done it" logo designs, but I think a little subtlety could have worked wonders. Something like the following, perhaps? Making the :// live within the flow of the type...
Brett from Mozilla writes, "Codemoji, a game and learning tool that lets you encode secret messages in emoji and then send them to friends for deciphering." Read the rest
"Zero rating" is a widely practiced business among mobile carriers: they solicit bribes from Internet companies in return for their services being exempted from the carriers' data-caps -- products from companies that pay the bribes can be used for free, while a billing meter ticks for every bit downloaded from their competitors. Read the rest
The World Wide Web Consortium has been co-opted into standardizing a DRM scheme for letting entertainment companies control your browser; what's more, they've rejected even basic safeguards for competition, changing the browser landscape in a way that threatens the kind of disruptive innovation that gave us the Mozilla project and the Firefox browser. Read the rest
Test Pilot, a new Firefox plugin from Mozilla, lets you try out features that the company is thinking of launching, contributing both telemetry and explicit feedback that they'll use to plan the product roadmap. Read the rest
Let's Encrypt (previously) a joint EFF-Mozilla-Linux Foundation project that lets anyone easily create an SSL certificate for free in minutes and install and configure it so that visitors to their Websites will be shielded from surveillance, came out of beta this week, and it's already making a huge difference. Read the rest
Mozilla has shipped a new version of Firefox whose private mode also blocks tracking beacons for ad networks, which will make private Web usage much harder to track. Read the rest
The Matchstick, a Firefox-OS-based Chromecast-style device, kickstarted on the promise of bringing open, user-rights-respecting video to our homes -- then they decided to add DRM. Read the rest
Al sends us the Fx0, a "beautiful mid-range phone running Firefox OS announced in Japan today by KDDI, one of Japan's largest mobile phone companies." Read the rest
Firefox Hello (a Webrtc implmentation) has debuted in the just-released v.34 of the browser, allowing users to conduct peer-to-peer video-chats without any plugins -- just create a chat, send the URL to your friend and start talking. Read the rest
In some ways, it's the inevitable outcome of Google's increased focus on Chrome and Yahoo's increased focus on getting anyone, anywhere to care about it before it runs out of money. Read the rest
It allows you to erase your browser history/cookies for 5 minutes, 2 hours, or 1 day, in case you want your browser to be able to unsee wherever it is that you've blundered into. Read the rest
