Mozilla: Facebook Container for Firefox, Issue Trackers, Securing Firefox with WebAssembly and Ad Hoc Profiling
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The Facebook Container for Firefox
Even with the ongoing #deletefacebook movement, not everyone is willing to completely walk away from the connections they’ve made on the social platform. After all, Facebook — and its subsidiary Instagram — is where the mountain biking club organizes rides, people post pet pics, dance moves catch on and life’s moments get shared with friends and family, near and far. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Facebook has been greeted with more skepticism as it’s been under a hot spotlight on how it gathers, uses and gives access to our personal data for targeted advertising and manipulation, both on and off Facebook platforms. With recent news about their policy not to block false political ads, this targeting gets ever malicious.
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Jira, Bugzilla, and Tales of Issue Trackers Past
It seems as though Mozilla is never not in a period of transition. The distributed nature of the organization and community means that teams and offices and any informal or formal group is its own tiny experimental plot tended by gardeners with radically different tastes.
And if there’s one thing that unites gardeners and tech workers is that both have Feelings about their tools.
Tools are personal things: they’re the only thing that allows us to express ourselves in our craft. I can’t code without an editor. I can’t prune without shears. They’re the part of our work that we actually touch. The code lives Out There, the garden is Outside… but the tools are in our hands.
But tools can also be group things. A shed is a tool for everyone’s tools. A workshop is a tool that others share. An Issue Tracker is a tool that helps us all coordinate work.
And group things require cooperation, agreement, and compromise.
While I was on the Browser team at BlackBerry I used a variety of different Issue Trackers. We started with an outdated version of FogBugz, then we had a Bugzilla fork for the WebKit porting work and MKS Integrity for everything else across the entire company, and then we all standardized on Jira.
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Securing Firefox with WebAssembly
Protecting the security and privacy of individuals is a central tenet of Mozilla’s mission, and so we constantly endeavor to make our users safer online. With a complex and highly-optimized system like Firefox, memory safety is one of the biggest security challenges. Firefox is mostly written in C and C++. These languages are notoriously difficult to use safely, since any mistake can lead to complete compromise of the program. We work hard to find and eliminate memory hazards, but we’re also evolving the Firefox codebase to address these attack vectors at a deeper level. Thus far, we’ve focused primarily on two techniques...
[...]
So today, we’re adding a third approach to our arsenal. RLBox, a new sandboxing technology developed by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Texas, Austin, and Stanford University, allows us to quickly and efficiently convert existing Firefox components to run inside a WebAssembly sandbox. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Shravan Narayan, Deian Stefan, Tal Garfinkel, and Hovav Shacham, we’ve successfully integrated this technology into our codebase and used it to sandbox Graphite.
This isolation will ship to Linux users in Firefox 74 and to Mac users in Firefox 75, with Windows support following soon after. You can read more about this work in the press releases from UCSD and UT Austin along with the joint research paper. Read on for a technical overview of how we integrated it into Firefox.
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Nicholas Nethercote: Ad Hoc Profiling
I have used a variety of profiling tools over the years, including several I wrote myself.
But there is one profiling tool I have used more than any other. It is capable of providing invaluable, domain-specific profiling data of a kind not obtainable by any general-purpose profiler.
It’s a simple text processor implemented in a few dozen lines of code. I use it in combination with logging print statements in the programs I am profiling. No joke.
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