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Mozilla: Rust, Socorro, and 'Healthier' Internet (Openwashing)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 15th of January 2021 01:03:17 PM Filed under


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Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems
Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as "an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management."
The key thinking behind Theseus is to avoid what Boos and three other contributors from Rice and Yale universities call "state spill".
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This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 373
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Socorro Engineering: Half in Review 2020 h2 and 2020 retrospective
2020h1 was rough. 2020h2 was also rough: more layoffs, 2 re-orgs, Covid-19.
I (and Socorro and Tecken) got re-orged into the Data Org. Data Org manages the Telemetry ingestion pipeline as well as all the things related to it. There's a lot of overlap between Socorro and Telemetry and being in the Data Org might help reduce that overlap and ease maintenance.
[...]
2020 sucked. At the end, I was feeling completely demoralized and deflated.
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Reimagine Open: Building a Healthier Internet
Does the “openness” that made the [Internet] so successful also inevitably lead to harms online? Is an open [Internet] inherently a haven for illegal speech, for eroding privacy and security, or for inequitable access? Is “open” still a useful concept as we chart a future path for the [Internet]?
A new paper from Mozilla seeks to answer these questions. Reimagine Open: Building Better Internet Experiences explores the evolution of the open [Internet] and the challenges it faces today. The report catalogs findings from a year-long project of outreach led by Mozilla’s Chairwoman and CEO, Mitchell Baker. Its conclusion: We need not break faith with the values embedded in the open [Internet]. But we do need to return to the original conceptions of openness, now eroded online. And we do need to reimagine the open [Internet], to address today’s need for accountability and online health.
TabFS Makes Your Browser A File System
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 12th of January 2021 05:34:37 AM Filed under

Like Unix, old-fashioned Linux has the philosophy that everything should look like a file. That paradigm works well and most of the operating system’s core features follow that pattern. However, many modern additions don’t really treat things as files or, at least, not files you can easily manipulate with the other tools. [Omar Rizwan] has a handy Chrome extension, though, that will make your browser tabs look like part of your file system. Not only is it a novel idea, but it is also surprisingly handy.
The extension feels like a bit of a proof of concept, so installation is a bit rough, but it does work and it allows you to do things that you would otherwise have to write an extension or a sophisticated program to screen scrape which is always less than desirable.
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9 Decentralized, P2P and Open Source Alternatives to Mainstream Social Media Platforms Like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Reddit
Submitted by itsfoss on Sunday 10th of January 2021 02:29:07 PM Filed under
Tired of Big Tech prying on your data and invading your privacy? Here are some open source, decentralized alternate social platforms.
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GNU Wget 1.21 and GNU Wget 1.21.1 Released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 9th of January 2021 08:15:32 PM Filed under

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GNU Wget 1.21 Released
Noteworthy changes in this release:
Improve the number of translated strings
Remove all uses of alloca. In some places the length of untrusted strings has been used, e.g. strings from the command line or from remote.
Fix buffer overflows in progress bar code in some locales
Fix two null pointer accesses
Amend cookie file header to be recognized by the 'file' command
Post Handshake Authentication for OpenSSL
Require gettext version 0.19.3+
Add configure flags --enable-fsanitize-ubsan, --enable-fsanitize-asan and --enable-fsanitize-msan for gcc and clang
Make several smaller fixes, enhance fuzzing, enhance building -
GNU Wget 1.21.1 Released
Noteworthy changes in this release:
Fix compilation on MacOS and Solaris 9
Remove bashism from configure.ac
Fix a compilation warning on 32-bit systems
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Mozilla Firefox Flips On AVIF Image Decoding By Default
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 9th of January 2021 05:20:17 AM Filed under

As noted before the holidays that Mozilla Firefox was ready to enable AVIF image decoding by default, now that the holidays have passed and developers back to their keyboards, Firefox today has re-enabled AVIF by default.
Since Google's Chrome 85 there has been AVIF support enabled by default while the Firefox support has been disabled by default for now. But as of today in their nightly code the functionality is there out-of-the-box.
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19 Free open-source self-hosted Invoicing and billing solutions
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 4th of January 2021 06:58:27 AM Filed under


In a dynamic business environment invoices are created regularly and require custom workflow according to the enterprise business process.
Invoice and order management solutions are built to manage billing and invoicing documents generally. Some of them manage orders and post-sale subscription billing.
Most of ERP (Enterprise Resources Planning) solutions include invoice, billing and order management features.
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Beginner's Guide To Get Email Account At Disroot
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 27th of December 2020 07:16:43 PM Filed under

This tutorial explains to you how to have a free email account on the internet. Your email address will look like yourname@disroot.org and people will send you emails using it. This tutorial covers the step by step registration process, how to access your inbox, how to send your first email, and how to integrate your computer with it using a program called email client, all with pictures. This includes the reason why Disroot is chosen here. Now let's go and happy emailing!
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Daniel Stenberg: The curl year 2020
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 25th of December 2020 05:00:09 AM Filed under


As we’re approaching the end of the year, I just want to sum up the curl year with a few words.
2020 has been another glorious year in the curl project. We’ve seen a series of accomplishments and introductions of new things during this the year of the plague.
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139 authors wrote commits that were merged (so far).
We did nine curl releases, out of which two unfortunately were quicker “panic releases” that patched up problems in the previous release.
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Mozilla Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 22nd of December 2020 02:20:07 PM Filed under

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Scammers use Chrome, Firefox extensions in widespread ad fraud campaign
The scammers are using malicious browser extensions— a tried and tested fraud tactic — to inject bogus advertisements into the results displayed on a search engine page. The more users who visit the fraudulent ad pages, the more money the perpetrators earn via a traffic-driven advertising program. Microsoft did not identify who was responsible for the attacks, or how much money they had netted.
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Firefox Browser updated to 84.0.1 [in] PCLinuxOS
The Mozilla Firefox browser has been updated to 84.0.1 and is a minor bug fix update. This update will appear in your Synaptic Package Manager if you are using Firefox.
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David Humphrey: SnowyOwls.ca
But as the snow begins to fall each December, my attention turns to another owl: the Snowy Owl. Normally at this time of year I'm seeing Snowy Owls on my long commutes to and from work. With COVID, I'm not out driving anymore, and as such, I'm not having as easy a time finding them.
I decided that this year's marking-side-project would be a tool to help people find Snowy Owls near where they live. I've long wanted to play with eBird and the eBird API, and hoped that I could get recent sighting data this way. To use the eBird API, you have to create an account and then request an API key. After that you can do all sorts of interesting queries to get current or historical data about sightings by species, region, or location.
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As we enter our tenth month of the pandemic, I wanted to make something for the current moment. Christmas won't be the same this year: we won't be able to celebrate or visit our parents, siblings, or their families; I can't get together with any friends for a meal; and many of the usual traditions our family has are off the table. I'm sad at all of it.
I can't fix any of this, but I wanted to do something to give some small bit of joy over the holidays. While the pandemic forces us to avoid each other, we're still allowed to go outside, to drive in the country, to walk in the park or along the shoreline, and to look for Snowy Owls.
As I was finishing up the app's code, I noticed that a new owl had been spotted 15 minutes from our house. My wife and I drove off into the falling snow in search of it, creeping along an old fence line stretched across a farmer's field. It was really beautiful to be out, to be hopeful, and to be focused on what is yet to come.
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Web Browsers: Brave, Web Surveillance and Mozilla
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 20th of December 2020 11:26:38 AM Filed under

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What is Brave browser’s market share [Ed: Those are not legitimate measures.
How large is the Brave browser’s market share in the browser wars? A slew of technical hurdles make it difficult to count Brave’s user base, so no one has shared any market share analysis numbers that include Brave. Until now.
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Brave blocks the tracking scripts from these two companies by default, so its users are excluded from these datasets.
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Kartikaya Gupta: 9 years and change
I should probably note here that November 20 was my last day as a Mozilla employee. In theory, that shouldn't really change much, given the open-source nature of Mozilla. In practice, of course, it does. I did successfully set up a non-staff account and migrate things to that, so I still retain some level of access. I intend to continue contributing; however, my contributions will likely be restricted to things that don't require paging in huge chunks of code, or require large chunks of time. In other words, mostly cleanup-type stuff, or smaller bugfixes/enhancements.
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Working at Mozilla was in many ways a dream come true. It was truly an honour to work alongside so many world-class engineers, on so many different problems. I'm going to miss it, for sure, but I am also excited to see what the future holds.
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Mozilla Firefox Appears Ready To Enable AVIF Image Handling Support By Default
It looks like Mozilla Firefox very soon will be enabling support for AVIF as the image format based on AV1 video coding.
Google added support for AVIF to Chrome/Chromium earlier this year and shipped with Chrome 85. There has been other industry adoption as well around AVIF images, even by the likes of Microsoft with Windows. Now in an upcoming Firefox release, AVIF image support will be present too.
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