• If you want an example of how user concerns do not drive software development, check out this Google-backed API

  A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition.

  In development since 2015, Google has been experimenting with the API since the release of Chrome 59 in 2017. As its name suggests, it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a corresponding native app is installed on a user's device.

  The purpose of the API, as described in the proposed specification, sounds laudable. More and more, the docs state, users will have web apps and natives apps from the same source installed on the same device and as the apps' feature sets converge and overlap, it will become important to be able to distinguish between the two, so users don't receive two sets of notifications, for example.

• Mozilla Releases DeepSpeech 0.6 With Better Performance, Leaner Speech-To-Text Engine

  DeepSpeech 0.6 currently achieved a 7.5% word error rate for this open-source speech-to-text engine. The new release has various API changes, better training performance with TensorFlow 1.14 cuDNN RNN support for their training graph, trimmed down their language model to be using the top 500k words, adding various data augmentation techniques, a tool for bulk transcribing large audio files, and various other changes.

• [Older] Give Firefox a chance for a faster, calmer and distraction-free internet

  Using Firefox gives you peace of mind and keeps you away from the advertising companies constantly following you around, profiling you and tempting you to purchase their products.

Mastodon’s quest to federate the Internet continues with the imminent launch of a photo-sharing platform which promises to be more privacy-focussed and to give more power to netizens

Mastodon is not done making headlines. One November 26, the open-source and federated platform announced, via Twitter, that they would be launching Pixelfed, “a fediverse alternative to Instagram and other photo sharing platforms.” Tacked on the end of the tweet is the hashtag #TheFutureIsFederated.

The tweet is a quote-tweet from the Pixelfed The only form of explanation comes in a teaser video. “What is the fediverse? It’s magic. A platform for the people. And we mean everyone. We’ll be arriving soon! Power to the people. Pixelfed.org,” says the video.

• Mozilla and the Contract for the Web

  Mozilla supports the Contract for the Web and the vision of the world it seeks to create. We participated in helping develop the content of the principles in the Contract. The result is language very much aligned with Mozilla, and including words that in many cases echo our Manifesto. Mozilla works to build momentum behind these ideas, as well as building products and programs that help make them real.

• Native IPv6: One Month Later

  That’s telling me I received 1.8 times as much traffic via IPv6 over the past month as I did over IPv4. Even discounting my backups (the 2 v6 peaks), which could account for up to half of that, that means IPv6 and IPv4 are about equal. That’s with all internal networks doing both and no attempt at traffic shaping between them - everything’s free to pick their preference.

  I don’t have a breakdown of what went where, but if you run a network and you’re not v6 enabled, why not? From my usage at least you’re getting towards being in the minority.

• Why I Voted to Sell .ORG

  Hi, I'm Richard. I've been around the Internet for a while. I work for Cisco now, and used to lead security for Firefox. I've published a few RFCs and served on the Internet Engineering Steering Group (the board of the IETF). I was a co-founder of Let's Encrypt and I currently serve on its board. I care about the Internet, and I care about nonprofits.
  I'm also a member of the Board of the Internet Society, and in that role, I joined the board's unanimous decision to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for the .org top-level domain, to Ethos Capital. Since this transaction has gotten some attention, I'd like to speak a little about why, in my estimation, this deal is a good one for the Internet.

• Arm Has Been Working To Boost The Chrome/Chromium Browser Performance

  Arm engineers have been working to speed-up the open-source Chromium web browser on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) and ultimately to flow back into Google's Chrome releases. Their focus has been around Windows-on-Arm with the growing number of Windows Arm laptops coming to market, but the Chromium optimizations also benefit the browser on Linux too.

  Arm has been focusing on Chromium optimizations not only for the Chromium/Chrome browsers itself but also for software leveraging the likes of CEF and Electron that rely upon Chromium code for rendering.

• TenFourFox FPR17b1 available

  TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 17 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). SourceForge seems to have fixed whatever was making TenFourFox barf on its end which now might actually be an issue over key exchange. For a variety of reasons, but most importantly backwards compatibility, my preference has been to patch up the NSS security library in TenFourFox to support new crypto and ciphers rather than just drop in a later version. We will see if the issue recurs.

  This release fixes the "infinite loop" issue on Github with a trivial "hack" mitigation. This mitigation makes JavaScript slightly faster as a side-effect but it's because it relaxes some syntax constraints in the runtime, so I don't consider this a win really. It also gets rid of some debug-specific functions that are web-observable and clashed on a few pages, an error Firefox corrected some time ago but missed my notice. Additionally, since 68ESR newly adds the ability to generate and click on links without embedding them in the DOM, I backported that patch so that we can do that now too (a 4-year-old bug only recently addressed in Firefox 70). Apparently this functionality is required for certain sites' download features and evidently this was important enough to merit putting in an extended support release, so we will follow suit.

  I also did an update to cookie security, with more to come, and cleared my backlog of some old performance patches I had been meaning to backport. The most important of these substantially reduces the amount of junk strings JavaScript has hanging around, which in turn reduces memory pressure (important on our 32-bit systems) and garbage collection frequency. Another enables a fast path for layout frames with no properties so we don't have to check the hash tables as frequently.

• Week notes - 2019 w47 - worklog

  Week Notes. I'm not sure I will be able to commit to this. But they have a bit of revival around my blogging reading echo chamber. Per revival, I mean I see them again.

  The Open Data Institute just started one with a round about them. I subscribed again to the feed of Brian Suda and his own week notes. Alice Bartlett has also a very cool personal, down to earth and simple summary of her week. I love that she calls them weaknotes She's on week 63 by now.

• Marco Zehe: My extended advent calendar

  This year, I have a special treat for my readers. On Monday, November 25, at 12 PM UTC, I will start a 30 day series about everything and anything. Could be an accessibility tip, an how-to about using a feature in an app I use frequently, some personal opinion on something, a link to something great I came across on the web… I am totally not certain yet. I have ideas about some things I want to blog about, but by far not 30 of them yet.