Mozilla

As is evident from Mark Surman’s recent “Why Mozilla Education?” post and all the stuff we’ve been adding to the Mozilla Education planning page, we’re getting involved with a lot of activities around the general theme of Mozilla and education. In order to coordinate all these activities we’ve decided to hold a weekly Mozilla Education teleconference call among Mark, Dave Humphrey, myself, and others working in this area. Because Mozilla is a public project we’re inviting anyone to participate (or just listen in) who has an interest in Mozilla and education. ...

I’m not that fond of the Internet equivalent of chain letters, but I’ll make an exception this time because two people (Mark and Marco) tagged me on this. The rules once more: Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (Done.) Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (Almost.) Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (I’ll break this one.) Let them know they’ve been tagged. (And this one too.) The things: ...

Some of you may recall that about a year ago the Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access, an Australia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing NVDA, an open source screen reader designed for blind users of Windows applications like Firefox. This grant went to support NV Access hiring a developer (James Teh) to work full-time on NVDA. (The Mozilla Foundation had previously provided a smaller grant as well.) I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows. ...

A departure from my usual topics, in remembrance of my college math classes (and with a nod to Mozilla folks working on related areas like automated testing and software verification): Via Eric Drexler via Emergent Chaos comes this interesting review paper on formal proofs in mathematics and software to verify them. As a dual math/physics major I was well acquainted with jokes about the lack of mathematical rigor on the part of physicists, who often engaged in rather slapdash simplifications in their drive to get formulas they could use to explain experimental data and make further predictions. However physicists who cut corners are ultimately saved by the fact that nature will check their work and let them know if they’ve made bonehead mistakes. ...

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.) ...