Mozilla Files Suit Against FCC to Protect Net Neutrality – The Mozilla Blog

Today, Mozilla filed a petition in federal court in Washington, DC against the Federal Communications Commission for its recent decision to overturn the 2015 Open Internet Order.

blog.mozilla.org

What is next?

As we have said many times over the years, we’ll keep fighting for the open internet to ensure everyone has access to the entire internet and do everything in our power to protect net neutrality. In addition to our court challenge, we are also taking steps to ask Congress and the courts to fix the broken policies.

As a process note, the FCC decision made it clear that suits should be filed 10 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which has not yet occurred. However, federal law is more ambiguous. Due to the importance of this issue, even though we believe the filing date should be later, we filed in the event a court determines the appropriate date is today. The FCC or a court may accept this order or require us and others to refile at a later date. In fact, we’re urging them to use the later date. In either instance, we will continue to challenge the order in the courts.

It is imperative that all internet traffic be treated equally, without discrimination against content or type of traffic — that’s the how the internet was built and what has made it one of the greatest inventions of all time.

You can help by calling your elected officials and urge them to support an open internet. Net neutrality is not a partisan or U.S. issue and the decision to remove protections for net neutrality is the result of broken processes, broken politics, and broken policies. We need politicians decide to protect users and innovation online rather than increase the power of a few large ISPs.

Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.”

Net neutrality is fundamental to competition. Without net neutrality, big Internet service providers can choose which services and content load quickly, and which move at a glacial pace. That means the big guys can afford to buy their way in, while the little guys are muscled out.

Net neutrality is fundamental to innovation. Without net neutrality, creators and entrepreneurs could struggle to reach new users. Investment in new ideas would dry up, and the Internet would start to look more and more like cable TV: so many channels, but with nothing on.

Net neutrality is fundamental to user choice. Without net neutrality, ISPs could decide you’ve watched too many cat videos in one day, and throttle your Internet speeds — leaving you behind on the latest Maru memes.

Firefox 51 took almost 8 MINUTES to start up. However, as of Firefox 55 it only takes 15 seconds.

While consistently using around two gigs of memory, we've now reduced to less than half a gig.

Mozilla Employee Denied Entry to the United States

In the wake of President Trump’s travel ban earlier this year, tech companies scrambled to return their employees who were traveling to the United States. But most major tech firms have offices around the globe, which means their employees are going to keep getting caught up in the country’s ever-evolving travel policies.

gizmodo.com|Kate Conger

Daniel Stenberg, an employee at Mozilla and the author of the command-line tool curl, was not allowed to board his flight to the meeting from Sweden—despite the fact that he’d previously obtained a visa waiver allowing him to travel to the US.

The woman asked Stenberg to wait while she made a phone call. “Then someone called her back, she waived me over and delivered me the message: I can’t go to the US on my ESTA [Electronic System for Travel Authorization] because it has been denied,” Stenberg explained.

The situation even caught the eye of Microsoft’s chief legal officer Brad Smith, who tweeted at Stenberg to offer legal assistance.

“I can’t think of a single valid reason why they would deny me travel, so what concerns me is that somehow someone did and then I’m worried that I’ll get trouble fixing that issue,” Stenberg said. “I’m a little worried since border crossings are fairly serious matters and getting trouble to visit the US in the future would be a serious blowback for me, both personally with friends and relatives there, and professionally with conferences and events there.”

Chrome won

Disclaimer: I worked for 7 years at Mozilla and was Mozilla’s Chief Technology Officer before leaving 2 years ago to found an embedded AI startup. Mozilla published a blog post two days ago h…

andreasgal.com

If the 6 year trend holds, IE should be pretty much dead in 2 or 3 years. Firefox is not faring much better, unfortunately, and is headed towards a 2-3% market share. For both IE and Firefox these low market share numbers further accelerate the decline because Web authors don’t test for browsers with a small market share. Broken content makes users switch browsers, which causes more users to depart. A vicious cycle.

Prior to 2014 Mozilla heavily invested in building a Mobile OS to compete with Android: Firefox OS. I started the Firefox OS project and brought it to scale. While we made quite a splash and sold several million devices, in the end we were a bit too late and we didn’t manage to catch up with Android’s explosive growth. Mozilla’s strategic rationale for building Firefox OS was often misunderstood. Mozilla’s founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser. Mobile thoroughly disrupted this mission. On mobile browsers are much less relevant–even more so third party mobile browsers. On mobile browsers are a feature of the Facebook and Twitter apps, not a product. To influence the Web on mobile, Mozilla had to build a whole stack with the Web at its core. Building mobile browsers (Firefox Android) or browser-like apps (Firefox Focus) is unlikely to capture a meaningful share of use cases. Both Firefox for Android and Firefox Focus have a market share close to 0%.

So while Google won the browser wars, they haven’t won the Web. To stick with the transportation metaphor: Google makes the best horses in the world and they clearly won the horse race. I just don’t think that race matters much going forward.

pyllyukko/user.js

user.js -- Firefox hardening stuff

github.com

A user.js configuration file for Mozilla Firefox designed to harden Firefox settings and make it more secure.

Main goals

• Limit the possibilities to track the user through web analytics.
• Harden the browser against known data disclosure or code execution vulnerabilities.
• Limit the browser from storing anything even remotely sensitive persistently.
• Make sure the browser doesn't reveal too much information to shoulder surfers.
• Harden the browser's encryption (cipher suites, protocols, trusted CAs).
• Limit possibilities to uniquely identify the browser/device using browser fingerpriting.
• Hopefully limit the attack surface by disabling various features.
• Still be usable in daily use.

Expanded protection

The first new category, potentially unwanted software, is meant to flag software that makes unexpected changes to your computer, as explained in the Google policy. It is usually best to avoid this kind of software since it could (for example) collect your personal information without your consent and use techniques to make it difficult to uninstall.

The second category, uncommon downloads, covers downloads which may not be malicious or unwanted but that are simply not commonly downloaded. The purpose of this warning is to draw users’ attention to the fact that this may not be the download they think it is. For example, if you are looking to download a new version of Firefox or a popular software package such as VLC and get this warning, it is possible that you have been tricked into downloading a malicious file from a phishing site which has not yet been identified as such by the Google Safe Browsing service. You may want to double-check the address of the site where you downloaded this file and proceed with caution.

Firefox will block nonessential Flash content in August 2016, require click-to-activate in 2017

Mozilla today outlined its plans for supporting Flash in Firefox. The company's browser will block Flash content "that is not essential to the user experience" starting in August 2016 -- meaning Firefox 48 and up, as we're currently on version 47. Starting sometime in 2017 (so not before Firefox 51), Mozilla's browser will require click-to-activate approval from users before a website activates the Flash plugin for any content.

venturebeat.com

This is similar to how Google and Microsoft are handling Flash. Last year, Chrome started automatically pausing less important Flash content (like ads), meaning less Flash content has been enabled on pages for all users as of September 2015. Microsoft plans to follow suit with Edge this summer, presumably after the Windows 10 Anniversary Update rolls out.

Mozilla also plans to block Flash content invisible to users. Though it didn’t give a timeframe for when this will occur, the company estimated the change will “reduce Flash crashes and hangs by up to 10 percent.” The changes will be implemented based on a curated list of Flash content that can be replaced with HTML, and this list will expand to include the use of Flash to check content viewability, further improving performance and device battery life.

The end goal for all these browser makers is to push as many sites as possible to HTML5, which is better for both performance (lowering memory and CPU usage while boosting battery life) and in terms of web standards (which makes life easier for developers). Given Flash’s various vulnerabilities, there are obvious security gains as well.

Experimental Firefox feature lets you use multiple identities while surfing the web

Mozilla's Firefox browser is getting a new experimental feature today that aims to help you segregate your online identities and allow you to sign in into..

techcrunch.com|Frederic Lardinois

Mozilla’s Firefox browser is getting a new experimental feature today that aims to help you segregate your online identities and allow you to sign in into multiple mail or social media accounts side-by-side without having to use multiple browsers.

This new “container tab” feature, which is now available in the unstable Nightly Firefox release channel, provides you with four default identities (personal, work, shopping and banking) with their own stores for cookies, IndexedDB data store, local storage and caches. In practice, this means you can surf Amazon without ads for products you may have looked at following you around the web when you switch over to your work persona.

...

Still, simply being able to log into two Twitter accounts at the same time or being able to shop without ads then following you around for years without having to use an incognito browsing session is worth the price of admission. Firefox’s current implementation of profiles, after all, is somewhat clumsy and most users probably don’t even know this feature exists.

If you’re submitting your login form over HTTPS, that’s good, but it’s not enough. You have to deliver the form over HTTPS too.  If the login form isn’t delivered over a secure channel, then an attacker can inject JavaScript code to steal the user’s password — every character the user types can be stolen by the attacker.

We’re releasing this feature in Developer Edition, since developers are ultimately the ones that need to make logins more secure on the sites they build.  (There are no current plans to show these warnings to users of Beta and general release Firefox.)  We’ve been displaying a warning in the Developer Tools Web Console for a long time; adding the struck-through lock icon to the URL bar makes the issue more prominent.

Mozilla's Privacy Icons Tell You How Sites Use Your Personal Data

Created by interface-design guru Aza Raskin, these "privacy icons" will provide websites with an easy way to inform users when their privacy is being respected or threatened online.

TogetherJS is a free, open source Javascript library by Mozilla that adds collaboration features and tools to your website. By adding TogetherJS to your site, your users can help each other out on a website in real time!

• Boot to Gecko is a fully open phone stack
• It has a Linux core and its Gaia interface is written in HTML5 – so there is no need to learn any Java or C++ to write apps for it or customise the OS itself
• The phone features a full telephony and messaging stack
• It also runs WebGL with 60fps smoothly
• By the end of the year Telefonica want to release a phone running it and we are in talks with others to do the same (I am off to Hannover on Wednesday for Cebit for that)
• As the OS is incredibly light-weight it boots in 12 seconds:

In other words: it kicks ass and it allows me as a web developer to build things for phones with the same technologies that I build web sites in. The interesting thing was that this option doesn’t transpire that easily to mobile developers.