Today I got interrupted from my Swindleeeee!!!!! blogging slumber by the news that David Pakman is leaving eMusic. I have been critical of Pakman one or two times (most notably for not getting into “social software” earlier), and I have no idea how Pakman was perceived inside eMusic by its employees. However there’s no question that Pakman was a strong and consistent voice for moving the music industry past the DRM debacle, and that he had a clear (and I think mostly correct) vision of eMusic’s target market and how best to serve it; I suspect that without him eMusic would either have failed entirely or would have been acquired and then ruined by some clueless major corporation. ...

Last night a post by local blogger Wordbones caught my eye. Based on a story in the Baltimore Sun, it discussed proposed plans for affordable housing in Columbia Town Center, housing that would be reserved for those with income of less than $80,000 (10% of total units) or those with income between $80,000 and $120,000 (another 10% of total units). Wordbones particularly noted a quote in the article from Alan Klein of the Coalition for Columbia’s Downtown: ...

For those Mozilla folks and others who’ve been following my full blog feed: I happen to live in Howard County, Maryland, between Washington DC and Baltimore.For a while now I’ve been following Howard County local bloggers but haven’t joined the conversation myself. I’ve now been prompted to write on at least one Howard County topic, and in the event I write more I’ve started a Howard County category for my blog and a corresponding feed. If you’re not interested in this stuff I suggest you consider resubscribing to just my Mozilla feed.

Johnathan Nightingale recently addressed a very common question, namely why Firefox doesn’t automatically accept self-signed SSL certificates as being valid. I don’t have much to add to Johnathan’s discussion of the issues with self-signed certificates, but speaking on behalf on the Mozilla Foundation I do want to address some of the comments that I’ve seen people make with regard to SSL certificates, certification authorities (CAs), and Mozilla. First, a quick refresher: To support SSL web sites need a combination of a private key kept on the server and a public key embedded with other information (most notably the server’s domain name, and also in some cases the name of the organization operating the server) in a digitally-signed document, the certificate. When a browser connects to an SSL-enabled web server the server sends its certificate to the browser. If the certificate was digitally signed by a third party certification authority known to the browser, the certificate is treated as valid and the browser proceeds to use the information in the certificate to kick off the SSL protocol. (The public key in the certificate is used in setting up SSL encryption, the domain name in the certificate is double-checked against the domain name the browser was supposedly connecting to, and for Extended Validation certificates the organizational name in the certificate is displayed in the Firefox 3 site identification button to the left of the location bar.) ...

As announced by Mitchell Baker earlier and followed up by Mark Surman, Mark will be coming on board in a month or so as the Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation. We in the Foundation have all had a chance to speak with Mark in depth both by phone and in person at the summit in Whistler (including during a healthy-snack-fueled “Foundation road trip” up from Vancouver). I’ll let others add their own take, but I for one am very happy that Mark decided to take this opportunity to join the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla project. ...

I happened to be reading Bob Lefsetz recently on the Rolling Stones moving to Universal from EMI; after a few minutes I thought to myself, “Hey, I think I know why the Stones catalog got pulled from eMusic so unexpectedly soon after its arrival.” Note that this post is 100% pure speculation; I have absolutely no inside knowledge about what actually happened. As previously noted by Yancey Strickler, eMusic did a fair amount of due diligence with both ABKCO (the company holding rights to the Stones’ older releases in the US, the only region in which the eMusic Stones releases were made available) and Universal (the major label through which ABKCO distributed those releases) in order to make sure there were no impediments to the proposed deal. However something happened between the time of the contract signing and the time the releases were pulled, something that caused either ABKCO or Universal to get cold feet and kill the deal. ...

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 discusses the future of education and the possibility of customized online educational offerings as a disruptive innovation that might eventually grow to rival and even dominate traditional educational systems. It ended with a question: what does this have to do with Mozilla? I now attempt to answer that question.] Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort. But while disruptive innovations make users’ lives easier, they typically make vendors’ lives harder, at least initially, because creating truly disruptive products can be difficult and expensive. (For example, think of all the industrial design, usability engineering, software development, and other work that Apple put into creating the iPhone and its simplified user experience for running mobile applications and using the web from a handheld device.) ...

[This is part 1 of a two-part post; part 2 is here.] Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy. As usual, these are my personal opinions only. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 18, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the blogs published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Future of the Foundation Mitchell Baker announced that Mark Surman is being considered for the Foundation executive director position. David posted a blog entry with ideas about how the Foundation might support the Mozilla community. Legal issues Gerv called for people to sign committer’s agreements at the Firefox Summit. Grants and related expenditures The Mozilla Foundation is sponsoring the 2009 Foundations of Open Media Software workshop. Wellington Fernando de Macedo has made further progress on his Foundation-funded server-sent DOM events project; see bug 338583 for more information. CAs and related issues I gave final approval for two requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406794 and 406796) and filed bug 446407 against NSS and bug 446409 against PSM for the actual code changes. I started the first public comment period for requests from Comodo (for a new ECC root, bug 421946), Deutsche Telekom/T-Systems (bug 378882), and Wells Fargo (bug 428390). I worked with Kathleen Wilson to select the next group of CAs for which to process requests and do information gathering. Public communication David arranged for printing copies of the Mozilla brochure for OSCON, and started work on a brochure page for www.mozilla.org. David prepared for a session on the www.mozilla.org site at the upcoming Firefox Summit. David updated the About page on www.mozilla.org to keep it in sync with the last round of changes to the text of the Mozilla brochure. Conferences Zak continued working on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON and related activities, including drafting the schedule and helping to orient the event coaches and participants. Other Gerv met with various people about proposed Site Security Policy implementations. Upcoming events and activities David, Gerv, and Zak will be attending OSCON (July 21-25 in Portland OR) and the Firefox Summit (July 29-31 in Whistler BC). I will be attending the Firefox Summit but not OSCON, and then will be on vacation for most of the following week.

Back in February I discussed eMusic’s failure to provide more information about the artists whose music it sells, and suggested some ways it could do better. Now Fortune reports on eMusic’s attempt to do just that. This is gratifying, to say the least (though I doubt my post had any influence on eMusic’s plans). It will be interesting to see how well the new eMusic web site features match up with my and others’ visions of what eMusic could do in this regard. In my original post I wrote that ...