Benlog

Category: mozilla

  • no user is an island

    US government agencies appear to be engaged in large-scale Internet surveillance, using secret court orders to force major Internet companies to provide assistance. The extent of this assistance is a topic of debate. What’s clear, though, is that the process itself is opaque: it’s impossible to know how broad or inappropriate the surveillance may be.…

  • getting web sites to adopt a new identity system

    My team at Mozilla works on Persona, an easy and secure web login solution. Persona delivers to web sites and apps just the right information for a meaningful login: an email address of the user’s choice. Persona is one of Mozilla’s first forays “up the stack” into web services. Typically, at Mozilla, we improve the…

  • Identity Systems: white labeling is a no-go

    There’s a new blog post with some criticism of Mozilla Persona, the easy and secure web login solution that my team works on. The great thing about working in the open at Mozilla is that we get this kind of criticism openly, and we respond to it openly, too. The author’s central complaint is that…

  • Firefox is the unlocked browser

    Anil Dash is a man after my own heart in his latest post, The Case for User Agent Extremism. Please go read this awesome post: One of my favorite aspects of the infrastructure of the web is that the way we refer to web browsers in a technical context: User Agents. Divorced from its geeky…

  • the Web is the Platform, and the User is the User

    Mid-2007, I wrote two blog posts — get over it, the web is the platform and the web is the platform [part 2] that turned out to be quite right on one front, and so incredibly wrong on another. Let’s start with where I was right: Apps will be written using HTML and JavaScript. […]…

  • connect on your terms

    I want to talk about what we, the Identity Team at Mozilla, are working on. Mozilla makes Firefox, the 2nd most popular browser in the world, and the only major browser built by a non-profit. Mozilla’s mission is to build a better Web that answers to no one but you, the user. It’s hard to…

  • encryption is not gravy

    When designing a secure service that stores user data, you might be temped to say “let’s make sure the data is encrypted.” That statement implies that you’re proposing adding goodness, without taking anything away. Something like “I’d like some of that delicious gravy on my roast turkey, please.” Clearly, turkey with gravy is strictly better…

  • a simpler, webbier approach to Web Intents (or Activities)

    A few months ago, Mike Hanson and I started meeting with James, Paul, Greg, and others on the Google Chrome team. We had a common goal: how might web developers build applications that talk to each other in a way that the user, not the site, decides which application to use? For example, how might…

  • encryption is (mostly) not magic

    A few months ago, Sony’s Playstation Network got hacked. Millions of accounts were breached, leaking physical addresses and passwords. Sony admitted that their data was “not encrypted.” Around the same time, researchers discovered that Dropbox stores user files “unencrypted.” Dozens (hundreds?) closed their accounts in protest. They’re my confidential files, they cried, why couldn’t you…