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Password managers are the most recommended tool by security experts to protect your online credentials from hackers. But many people are still hesitant to use them. Here’s why password managers … Read more The post Five myths about password managers appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

Password managers are the most recommended tool by security experts to protect your online credentials from hackers. But many people are still hesitant to use them. Here’s why password managers … Read more The post Five myths about password managers appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

Welcome to a new series of blog post where I'll share at random, tips and tricks that I've gathered over the last 10 years as a remote worker. I have work for 1 company on different subject and in two countries , as I've moved from one to another ... [More] while working remotely. I have managed to work being single, married without kids and married with kids. Advice that I'll be giving here are mostly from the employee's perspective, I'll also try to give a few hints about how to manage remotees. Disclaimer I have not read "Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart" from my ex-coworker. So let's start by the obvious first tip : don't stay alone. When I started working remote I had a girlfriend so I was quite occupied, when I wasn't working and when I was. But I was working from home, so Id' miss chitchatting with colleagues over a coffee. But I was coming out of a startup that was using skype as it's main chat tool and there was/(still is) an alumni chat session. So when I had a question or when I wanted to rant or think about something else or just have a pause I would chat with my ex-colleagues. After a few month I broke up with the woman I was with. And was left with almost not physical interaction with humans. The only thing close to it was me going to a swimming pool once a week and seeing people - but hardly interacting with them.After a month or two of that regime I started looking for a new job - a non remote one. Thankfully the 1,5h train ride killed the idea, while I made local friends using the meetup service (I was a Frenchman living in The Nederlands - Met Other people like me , we ended up having a weekly get together - which ended up in me meeting my wife). I also had an ex-coworker not living far from me that was also working on his own venture. We ended up having weekly lunches at the same restaurant were we could both bitch at life work and food :-p. When I moved back to my own country, it took my ISP two weeks to provide me with Internet access. In the meanwhile I needed access so I ended up going to the local co-working space. This was nice as I could interact with people in the same situation as mine (except that most of them were freelancers). They didn't have the same job nor background, so I had real nice tea chats. In the end I stop using the co-working facilities as I had plenty of meeting and I'm kind of a loud person - so I didn't fit much there and was more an annoyance than anything. But it was really a good solution to fight loneliness or the lack of human interaction (work related I mean). Finally I moved to a less populated area - were co-working didn't exist and was no option. Lunch with friend was not an option either. The only thing that kept me connected to work/ the rest of the world was IRC conversations with locals (a bit more locals , but I really mean French people here). The other thing that help was my involvement in local things like the kindergarten/ the library and so forth. This let me talk to people about work issue , even if they didn't understand everything venting helped a lot. [Less]

My XML5 idea is over twelve years old now. I still like it as web developers keep running into problems with text/html: Cannot arbitrarily nest elements. E.g., there is no way to create a custom element that takes the place of the td element. There ... [More] is also no way to create a custom element that contains certain HTML elements, such as the tr element. (See webcomponents #113 for more.) Cannot have custom elements start tags that are marked as self-closing. I.e., custom elements always require an explicit end tag. (See webcomponents #624 for more.) Cannot introduce a serialization of ShadowRoot nodes to enable server-side rendering. (See dom #510 for more.) Any change made to the parser can and is likely to impact the parsing of existing documents as every byte stream is converted to a tree. This has severe compatibility and security implications that cannot be underestimated. XML in browsers has much less of a compatibility footprint. Coupled with XML not always returning a tree for a given byte stream making backwards compatible (in the sense that old well-formed documents parse the same way) extensions to it is possible. There is a chance for it to ossify like text/html though, so perhaps XML5 ought to be amended somewhat to leave room for future changes. (Another alternative is a new kind of format to express node trees, but then we have at least three problems.) [Less]

Today the Thunderbird project is happy to announce that for the future Thunderbird 78 release, planned for summer 2020, we will add built-in functionality for email encryption and digital signatures using the OpenPGP standard. This new functionality ... [More] will replace the Enigmail add-on, which will continue to be supported until Thunderbird 68 end of life, in the Fall of 2020. For some background on encrypted email in Thunderbird: Two popular technologies exist that add support for end-to-end encryption and digital signatures to email. Thunderbird has been offering built-in support for S/MIME for many years and will continue to do so. The Enigmail Add-on has made it possible to use Thunderbird with external GnuPG software for OpenPGP messaging. Because the types of add-ons supported in Thunderbird will change with version 78, the current Thunderbird 68.x branch (maintained until Fall 2020) will be the last that can be used with Enigmail. For users of Enigmail, Thunderbird 78 will offer assistance to migrate existing keys and settings. We are happy that Patrick Brunschwig, the long-time developer of Enigmail, has offered to work with the Thunderbird team on OpenPGP going forward. About this change, Patrick had this to say: “It has always been my goal to have OpenPGP support included in the core Thunderbird product. Even though it will mark an end to a long story, after working on Enigmail for 17 years, I’m very happy with this outcome.” Users who haven’t used Enigmail previously will need to opt in to use OpenPGP messaging, as encryption will not be enabled automatically. However, Thunderbird 78 will help users discover the new functionality. To promote secure communication, Thunderbird 78 will encourage the user to perform ownership confirmation of keys used by correspondents, notify the user if the correspondent’s keys change unexpectedly, and, if there is an issue, offer assistance to resolve the situation. It’s undecided whether Thunderbird 78 will support the indirect key ownership confirmations used in the Web of Trust (WoT) model, or to what extent. However, sharing of key ownership confirmations made by the user (key signatures), and interaction with OpenPGP key servers shall be possible. If you have an interest in seeing more detailed plans on what is in store for OpenPGP in Thunderbird, check out our wiki page with more information. [Less]

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust ... [More] or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions. This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR. Updates from Rust Community News & Blog Posts Announcing the Inside Rust blog. Async Foundations update: Time for polish. Keeping Rust projects secure with cargo-audit 0.9: dependency trees, core advisories, unmaintained crates. Designing a COM library for Rust. Tonic: gRPC has come to async/await. reqwest alpha with async/await released. Writing an OS in Rust - updates in September 2019. Static Assertions 1.0 is released. Ownership and impl Trait. Writing an HTTP server in Rust (part 1). Adventures in motion control: The communications system part 1. Coding nRF52 with Rust and Apache Mynewt on Visual Studio Code. This month in Rust GameDev 2 - September 2019. The Embedded Working Group newsletter 19. Rust now has more than 100000 commits. [pdf] Leveraging Rust types for modular specification and verification. Crate of the Week This week's crate is algebraics, a pure-Rust algebraic numbers library for infinite-precision computation. Thanks to Jacob Lifshay and Vikrant for the suggestion! Submit your suggestions and votes for next week! Call for Participation Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn't know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started! Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information. Hacktoberfest issues from EmbarkStudios. rustc: Deprecation warning emitted from derive without a span. async-std: Add task::yield_now. async-std: Add sync::CondVar. async-std: Add path::{Path,PathBuf}. If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here. Updates from Rust Core 338 pull requests were merged in the last week Only add sanitizer runtimes when linking an executable LLVM/wasm: Fix conflict between ret legalization and sjlj LLVM/wasm: Restore defaults for stores per memop When encountering chained operators use heuristics to recover from bad turbofish Make visit projection iterative Make re-export collection deterministic Deduplicate closure type errors Suggest fix for type mismatch based on operator precendence syntax: improve parameter without type suggestions Polonius: use the fx hasher when interning extract expected return type for async fn generators async/await: improve not-send errors const-prop: Fix ICE when trying to eval polymorphic promoted MIR const-prop: Correctly handle locals that can't be propagated Still more ObligationForest improvements Avoid chain() in find_constraint_paths_between_regions() Optimize integral pattern matching proc_macro API: Expose macro_rules hygiene Deprecate #![plugin] & #[plugin_registrar] metadata: Some crate loading cleanup Do not ICE when dereferencing non-Copy raw pointer Fix zebra-striping in generic dataflow visualization Don't mark borrows of zero-sized arrays as indirectly mutable Deny specializing items not in the parent impl Add feature gate for raw_dylib Stabilize macros in some more positions syntax: Support modern attribute syntax in the meta matcher Use PlaceBuilder to avoid a lot of slice → vec → slice convertions use try_fold instead of try_for_each to reduce compile time Stabilize UdpSocket::peer_addr Stabilize Option::as_deref and Option::as_deref_mut Stabilize todo!(..) macro hashbrown: Add RustcVacantEntry::insert_entry BTreeSet intersection, is_subset & difference optimizations Implement Clone::clone_from for LinkedList Inline {min,max}_value even in debug builds cargo: Support for named profiles (RFC 2678) cargo: Disable preserving mtimes on archives rustup: Cleaned up error messages rustbuild: Make all alt builders produce parallel-enabled compilers Approved RFCs Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week: No RFCs were approved this week. Final Comment Period Every week the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now. RFCs No RFCs are currently in final comment period. Tracking Issues & PRs [disposition: merge] Stabilize proc macros generating macro_rules items. [disposition: merge] Stabilize slice::repeat (feature repeat_generic_slice). New RFCs Variadic tuples. Scope prints in diagnostics. Initial cargo-plugin-fields. Upcoming Events Europe Oct 16. Berlin, DE - OpenTechSchool Berlin - Rust Hack and Learn. Oct 18. Stuttgart, DE - Rust Meetup Hack and Learn. Oct 23. Stockholm, SE - Stockholm Rust - Rust Meetup @Embark Studios. Oct 24. Turin, IT - Mozilla Torino - Gruppo di studio Rust. North America Oct 16. Vancouver, BC, CA - Vancouver Rust meetup. Oct 16. Ann Arbor, MI, US - Ann Arbor Rust Meetup - Monthly Gathering. Oct 18 & 19. Dayton, OH, US - Rust Belt Rust. Oct 23. Portland, OR, US - PDXRust - Hack Night. Oct 30. San Francisco, US - Rust in Blockchain Workshop Day (SFBW) If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access. Rust Jobs Senior Blockchain Engineer at Nervos, Hangzhou, CN (Remote available). Rust/Core Developer at Parity, Berlin, DE (Remote available). Tweet us at @ThisWeekInRust to get your job offers listed here! Quote of the Week "Rust compilation is so slow that I can fix the bugs while it still compiles the crates" – Rustafarian on rust-users Please submit quotes and vote for next week! This Week in Rust is edited by: nasa42, llogiq, and Flavsditz. Discuss on r/rust. [Less]

Greetings! This issue of the newsletter is long overdue. Without further ado: What’s new in gfx Wayland dmabuf textures Martin Stransky landed the dmabuf texture work which was at the prototype stage at the time of the previous newsletter. This is ... [More] only used with the GL compositor at the moment which is not enabled by default (gfx.acceleration.force-enabled pref in about:config). Work to get dmabuf textures with WebRender is in progress. CoreAnimation integration Markus landed a number of infrastructure changes towards integrating with CoreAnimation and doing partial present optimizations on MacOS. This short description doesn’t do justice to the amount of work that went into this. Stay tuned, you might read some more about this on this blog soon. Direct Composition integration Sotaro has been working on a number of bugs in support for Direct Composition integration, including some ground work and investigation such as bugs 1585893, 1585619 and 1585278, and bug fixes like an issue involving the tab bar, direct composition, the high contrast theme and WebRender. RGB, RGBA, BGRA, BLARGH! Andrew landed a number of image decoding performance improvements, using SIMD to speed up pixel format conversion. Benchmarks targeting the improvements suggested a ceiling of 25-50% faster for pixel format conversions, initial telemetry data suggesting 5-10% real world average decoder performance improvement. Not bad! What’s new in WebRender WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for web written in Rust, currently powering Firefox‘s rendering engine as well as the research web browser servo. To enable WebRender in Firefox, in the about:config, enable the pref gfx.webrender.all and restart the browser. WebRender is available as a standalone crate on crates.io (documentation) for use in your own rust projects. WebRender enabled in Firefox Preview Nightly on the Pixel 2 This is the first configuration on Android that Jamie enabled WebRender on by default. A pretty cool milestone to build upon! Download it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix.nightly WebRender is only enabled by default for pixel 2 phones at the moment but on other configurations it can be enabled in about:config. Pixel snapping Andrew rewrote pixel snapping in WebRender. See the bug description and the six patches series that followed to get an idea of how much work went into this. Blob image recoordination If you have been following this newsletter you might remember reading hearing about “blob image recoordination” for a while now. That’s because work has been ongoing for quite a while. A lot of these patches that have been in the work for months landed recently. Blobs are now “recoordinated”. In other words, Jeff and Nical landed a lot of infrastructure work went into handling the coordinate system of blob images, webrender’s fallback software rendering path. This puts the fallback code on a saner foundation and allows reducing the invalidation of blob images in various scenarios such as scrolling large SVG elements, or when animations cause the bounds of a blob image to change. This translates to performance improvements on web pages that use SVG a lot. Picture caching Glenn landed some pretty big changes to picture caching: The cache is now organized as a quad-tree. Picture cached tiles that are only solid color use a fast path to optimize speed and memory consumption. There is a new composite pass with a simpler drawing model than other render passes. It is a first step towards deferring the composition of cached tiles to OS compositor APIs such as Direct Composition and Core animation, and will allow optimizations for the upcoming software backend. There are now separate picture cache slices for web content, the browser UI and scroll bars. WebRender now generates dirty rects to allow partial present optimizations. YUV image rendering performance Kvark fixed YUV images being accidentally rendered in the alpha pass instead of the opaque pass. A very simple change yielding pretty significant performance improvements as it reduces the overdraw while rendering video frames. Text rendering improvements Lee removed Cairo usage from the Skia FreeType font host. SkFontHost_cairo depended on the interposition of Cairo for dealing with creating/loading FreeType faces. This imposed annoying limits on our Skia text rasterization such as a lack of sub-pixel text positioning on Android and Linux. It also forced us to build and maintain FcPattern structures that caused memory bloat and had performance overhead to interpret. With this fixed, Lee enabled sub-pixel positioning on Linux and Android. Various fixes and improvements Botond fixed a regression affecting WebExtensions that move a tab into a popup or panel window (1), (2). Botond fixed an issue that prevented Windows users with certain Acer and Asus laptops from being able to two-finger scroll on Gmail and various other websites. Botond fixed one of the prerequisites for enabling a hiding URL bar in Firefox Preview. Kvark improved WebRender’s performance when allocating a page requires a lot of cached texture memory. Kvark added support for the Solus linux distribution in Gecko’s build system. Kvark updated the WebGPU IDL Kvark fixed a few IDL bindgen issues in the process (1), (2). Andrew prevented border raster images from going through a slow fallback path. AWilcox fixed YUV image rendering on big-endian machines. Nical cleaned up a lot of the scene building and render graph code in WebRender. Kris fixed an opacity rendering issue on SVG USE elements with D2D. Jonathan Kew fixed a rendering issue with stroked text with ligatures. [Less]

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued its ruling in Mozilla v. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the court case to defend net neutrality protections for American consumers. The opinion opened a path for states to put ... [More] net neutrality protections in place, even as the fight over FCC federal regulation is set to continue. While the decision is disappointing as it failed to restore net neutrality protections at the federal level, the fight for these essential consumer rights will continue in the states, in Congress, and in the courts. The three-judge panel disagreed with the FCC’s argument that the FCC is able to preempt state net neutrality legislation across the board. States have already shown that they are ready to step in and enact net neutrality rules to protect consumers, with laws in California and Vermont among others. The Court is also requiring the FCC to consider the effect the repeal may have on public safety and subsidies for low-income consumer broadband internet access. The Court did find that the FCC had discretion to treat broadband access like an information service and remove the previous rules. But as Judge Millett said (and Judge Wilkins concurred), that was with significant reservations: “I am deeply concerned that the result [of upholding much of the 2018 Order] is unhinged from the realities of modern broadband service.” Nevertheless, the judges stated that they felt their hands were tied by the existing legal precedent and invited the Supreme Court or Congress to step in. The decision also underscores the frailty of the FCC’s approach. Questioning the FCC’s reclassification of broadband internet access from a “telecommunications service” to an “information service,” Judge Millett reprised an argument made by Mozilla and other petitioners: “[F]ollowing the Commission’s view to its logical conclusion, everything (including telephones) would be an information service. The only thing left within ‘telecommunications service’ would be the proverbial road to nowhere.” We are exploring next steps to move the case forward for consumers, and we are grateful to be a part of a broad community pressing for net neutrality protections. We look forward to continuing this fight. The post Breaking down this week’s net neutrality court decision appeared first on The Mozilla Blog. [Less]

It’s Oktoberfest! You know, that German holiday about beer and lederhosen? No. As many Germans will tell you it’s not a German thing as much as it is a Bavarian thing. It’s like saying kilts are a British thing (it’s a Scottish thing). Or that milk ... [More] in bags is a Canadian thing (in Canada it’s an Eastern Canada thing). In researching what the heck I was talking about when I was making this comparison at a recent team meeting, Alessio found a lovely study on the efficiency of milk bags as milk packaging in Ontario published by The Environment and Plastics Industry Council in 1997. I highly recommend you skim it for its graphs and the study conclusions. The best parts for me are how it highlights that the consumption of milk (by volume) increased 22% from 1968 to 1995 while at the same time the amount (by mass) of solid waste produced by milk packaging decreased by almost 20%. I also liked Table 8 which showed the recycling rates of the various packaging types that we’d need to reach in order to match the small amount (by mass) of solid waste generation of the (100% unrecycled) milk bags. (Interestingly, in my region you can recycle milk bags if you first rinse and dry them). I guess what I’m trying to say about this is three-fold: Don’t assume regional characteristics are national in your distributed team. Berliners might not look forward to Oktoberfest the way Münchner do, and it’s possible no one in the Vancouver office owns a milk jug or bag cutter. Milk Bags are kinda neat, and now I feel a little proud about living in a part of the world where they’re common. I’d be a little more confident about this if the data wasn’t presented by the plastics industry, but I’ll take what I can get (and I’ll start recycling my milk bags). Geez, my team can find data for _any topic_. What differences we have by being distributed around the world are eclipsed by how we’re universally a bunch of nerds. :chutten   [Less]

Note This started as notes explaining the internals of how Celery’s AMQP backends operate. This isn’t meant to be a comparison or prove one is better or that one is broken. There just seemed to be a lack of documentation about the design and limitations of each backend …