On September 30th breaking changes will be deployed to the docs.rs build environment. docs.rs is a free service building and hosting documentation for all the crates published on crates.io. It's open source, maintained by the Rustdoc team and operated by the Infrastructure team.

The recording of my Rust Conf talk on algorithmic art and pen plotters is up on YouTube!

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I really enjoyed giving this talk, and I think it went well. I want more creative coding, joy, surprise, and silliness in the Rust community. This talk is a small attempt at contributing to that, and I hope folks left inspired.

Mozilla will turn the Firefox crank faster in 2020, releasing a new version of its web browser every four weeks instead of every six. If you're using the browser, the change should deliver new features to you faster since there will be less waiting between when developers build them and when they arrive.

"In recent quarters, we've had many requests to take features to market sooner. Feature teams are increasingly working in sprints that align better with shorter release cycles. Considering these factors, it is time we changed our release cadence," Firefox team members Ritu Kothari and Yan Or said in a blog post Tuesday. "Shorter release cycles provide greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to business or market requirements."

Today, one of the biggest issues facing the internet — and society — is misinformation.

It’s a complicated issue, but this much is certain: The artificial intelligence (AI) powering the internet is complicit. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook recommend and amplify content that will keep us clicking, even if it’s radical or flat out wrong.

Earlier this year, Mozilla called for art and advocacy projects that illuminate the role AI plays in spreading misinformation. And today, we’re announcing the winners: Eight projects that highlight how AI like machine learning impacts our understanding of the truth.

On Friday, Mozilla filed comments in a case brought by Privacy International in the European Court of Human Rights involving government “computer network exploitation” (“CNE”)—or, as it is more colloquially known, government hacking.

While the case focuses on the direct privacy and freedom of expression implications of UK government hacking, Mozilla intervened in order to showcase the further, downstream risks to users and internet security inherent in state CNE. Our submission highlights the security and related privacy threats from government stockpiling and use of technology vulnerabilities and exploits.

Government CNE relies on the secret discovery or introduction of vulnerabilities—i.e., bugs in software, computers, networks, or other systems that create security weaknesses. “Exploits” are then built on top of the vulnerabilities. These exploits are essentially tools that take advantage of vulnerabilities in order to overcome the security of the software, hardware, or system for purposes of information gathering or disruption.

When such vulnerabilities are kept secret, they can’t be patched by companies, and the products containing the vulnerabilities continue to be distributed, leaving people at risk. The problem arises because no one—including government—can perfectly secure information about a vulnerability. Vulnerabilities can be and are independently discovered by third parties and inadvertently leaked or stolen from government.

I’m going to begin with some of the less-loved things I’ve been working on, partially in an attempt to motivate some forward-motion on things that I believe are rather important to Mozilla.

Disable DoH by default. While encrypting DNS might be a good thing, sending all DNS traffic to Cloudflare by default is not a good idea. Applications should respect OS configured settings. The DoH settings still can be overriden if needed. ok landry@ job@

What I’m proposing, at its heart, is very simple. I want to better document the “agenda” of the lang-team. Specifically, if we are going to be moving a feature forward1, then it should have a shepherd (or multiple) who is in charge of doing that.

In order to avoid unbounded queues, the number of things that any individual can shepherd should be limited. Ideally, each person should only shepherd one thing at a time, though I don’t think we need to make a firm rule about it.

Becoming a shepherd is a commitment on the part of the shepherd. The first part of the lang team meeting should be to review the items that are being actively shepherded and get any updates. If we haven’t seen any movement in a while, we should consider changing the shepherd, or officially acknowleding that something is stalled and removing the shepherd altogether.

Assigning a shepherd is a commitment on the part of the rest of the lang-team as well. Before assigning a shepherd, we should discuss if this agenda item is a priority. In particular, if someone is shepherding something, that means we all agree to help that item move towards some kind of completion. This means giving feedback, when feedback is requested. It means doing the work to resolve concerns and conflicts. And, sometimes, it will mean giving way. I’ll talk more about this in a bit.

I personally have not done this many commits to curl in a single month (August 2019) for over three years. This increased activity is of course primarily due to the merge of and work with the HTTP/3 code. And yet, that is still only in its infancy…

Google has rolled out Chrome 77 into their stable channel as the newest version of their lightning fast web browser for Linux.

Chrome 77 now supports any HTML element providing form data via the "formdata" event, various security improvements, a Serial API for interacting with devices connected to physical or virtual serial ports, WebVR 1.1 support, tab sharing between devices, and a variety of other improvements.

Hi, everyone! We've just released Chrome 77 (77.0.3865.73) for Android: it'll become available on Google Play over the next few weeks.

Google is rolling out the latest version of Chrome for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Chrome 77 more widely introduces the “Send this page” cross-device sharing...

Google has promoted the Chrome 77 web browser to the stable channel for all supported platforms, including Linux, Android, Windows, and Mac.
Google Chrome 77 introduces several performance enhancements to speed up your browsing experience, including new performance metrics that helps web developers measure how fast the content of a web page loads so you can access it faster than ever, as well as new form capabilities to support custom form controls.

"It has not always been easy for developers to measure how quickly the main content of a web page loads and is visible to users. The usefulness of existing metrics varies. Some metrics are only measurable in a lab, while others tell nothing about content that users care about. Consider the example below, taken from a DevTools performance audit," said Google.

Additionally, Google Chrome 77 introduces new origin trials that lets you to try new Chrome features before they are released and give feedback to the web standards community on their usability, effectiveness, and practicality. Users will be able to register for the origin trials here.

Google has announced that they would soon be performing a trial of utilizing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in the Google Chrome browser. This experiment will be conducted in Chrome 78 and will attempt to upgrade a user's DNS server to a corresponding DoH server, and if available, use that for DNS resolution.

For those unfamiliar with DoH, it allows DNS resolution to be conducted over encrypted HTTPS connections rather than through the normal plain text DNS lookups.

Please join us in congratulating Bhuvana Meenakshi Koteeswaran, Rep of the Month for July 2019!

Bhuvana is from Salem, India. She joined the Reps program at the end of 2017 and since then she has been involved with Virtual and Augmented Reality projects.