benadida@mozilla

In a few days, I’ll be joining Mozilla.

What started as a fun lunch with Sid and Alex quickly turned into passionate brainstorming with Mike, Pascal, and Lloyd on the Mozilla Labs team. I told them I wanted to deeply explore a few ideas I’ve written about and prototyped (here and here, for example) and more importantly to work on making the browser a true user agent working on behalf of the user. Mozilla folks are not only strongly aligned with that point of view, they’ve already done quite a bit to make it happen. Check out Mike Hanson’s post just a few days ago on using Web Applications for Service Discovery. And check out what the entire team just released: Open Web Apps. Not to mention the less closely related but still totally awesome work Sid and Alex are doing with Do Not Track. This is the first effort I know of that is successfully using technology to declare a preference (“please don’t track me”), which can then be leveraged by policy makers to ensure that it is respected. As a long-time student of the interplay between tech and policy, I love this hack.

My job will be to join this fantastic team and see what I can contribute. I suspect that will involve some privacy, some crypto, some data portability, and a lot of web hacking. I’ll continue to blog here at benlog.com, though when I speak here I’m speaking for myself only, not on behalf of my soon-to-be employer. And I’ll continue to hack a bit on Helios, my voting system, especially as it continues to inform how one might do advanced crypto in a web browser.

I’m super excited.