Statusreport

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending June 6, 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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Alexander Surkov completed the intermediate milestone on his Mozilla Foundation-funded project to develop automated tests and regression fixes in the Mozilla accessibility module; so far he’s fixed 16 outstanding bugs (relating to crashes, regressions, and new features), as well as kept the accessibility API documentation up to date and worked on several other accessibility-related tasks. Proceedings, slides, and an attendee list have now been published for the Foundations of Open Media Software 2008 workshop, for which the Mozilla Foundation was a sponsor. Legal issues I approved a new privacy policy for mozilla.org sites and David Boswell posted it to www.mozilla.org. (Note that this is a separate policy from the privacy policy for mozilla.com sites, although it is based on that policy.) CAs and related issues Gerv proposed some ideas as to how we might address the Debian weak key problem in a Mozilla context. Kathleen Wilson is waiting on responses from CAs to close out her information-gathering work on their requests. I worked with her to identify a set of new requests to look at, including those for Trustis (bug 324126), Microsec Ltd (bug 370505), S-TRUST (bug 370627), and TC TrustCenter (bug 378882). I put Entrust’s request to enable the Entrust Root Certification Authority for EV (bug 416544) into the first public comment period. Public communication David Boswell continued work on a new www.mozilla.org design brief. David worked to help produce a new draft of the proposed Mozilla brochure and get model release forms signed for people whose photos appear in the brochure. Conferences Zak Greant continued work on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Other Gerv Markham worked on a project to calculate what percentage of the world’s Internet users have a localized version of Firefox available in their native language. Gerv also worked on a project to compile a definitive domain suffix list, e.g., suffixes like “co.uk” that do not themselves refer to web sites (unlike, e.g., “co.org”); this list could be useful in contexts like handling of cookies, bookmarks, etc. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. 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.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 30, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on that week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The Mozilla Foundation made a small grant to support the G3ict accessibility initiative. Among other things, G3ict has published a book, The Accessibility Imperative, discussing implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in an IT context. (I have a few copies of this book available for those who want one; please send me an email if you’re interested.) Legal issues Gerv Markham published an update to the Mozilla Foundation license policy, but held off on publishing the new Mozilla committer’s agreement pending a final decision on administrative arrangements for processing the signed forms. CAs and related issues Gerv worked with others to determine how the Debian weak key problem might affect CAs and SSL-enabled web sites. Kathleen Wilson worked on gathering information relating to requests from GlobalSign (bugs 406796 and 406796), secomtrust (bug 394419), Comodo (bug 421946), Wells Fargo (bug 428390), Verizon/CyberTrust (bugs 430694, 430698, and 430700), and TC TrustCenter (bug 436467). I communicated with various CAs regarding their planned applications for inclusion of roots in Mozilla, and posted a draft checklist for information needed for evaluating CA requests. Public communication David Boswell worked with Samuel Sidler on a www.mozilla.org design brief and archiving plan and posted to www.mozilla.org new featured Mozilla-based applications for June (Google AdWords Editor and Zimbra Desktop). David posted a draft copy of a proposed Mozilla brochure for public review. Conferences Zak Greant did a keynote presentation at eLiberatica, and worked on the proposed FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Upcoming events and activities The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. 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.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 23, 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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Eitan Isaacson completed his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to improve the Orca open source screen reader for Linux. Thanks go to Eitan for all his work on this! The Mozilla Foundation is funding Ben Millard for an accessibility-related project to study how authors use HTML in practice, compare this with the semantics and accessibilty-related features in HTML5, identify any gaps, and help develop realistic ways to fill them. The Mozilla Foundation is funding Wellington Fernando de Macedo to help implement in the Mozilla code base server-sent DOM events functionality as specified in HTML5. This is a project originally proposed for the Google Summer of Code; we thought it was a project worth supporting but didn’t have enough SoC slots to include it as part of that program. CAs and related issues As I previously announced in the m.d.t.crypto newsgroup, Kathleen Wilson will be assisting me with the task of gathering information about Certificate Authorities that apply for inclusion of their root certificates into Mozilla. I’ve assigned a number of CA-related bugs to Kathleen, with a priority on getting EV-related requests processed. I updated the pending and included lists to reflect changes in Firefox 3 RC1. Conferences Zak prepared for his keynote at eLiberatica and for the FOSSCoach event at OSCON. Upcoming events and activities Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest). The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY). Brian Behlendorf will be speaking there, and I’m also planning to attend. Schorsch (Schorsch@invalid.com) - 2008-05-29 06:57 Well - it looks as if the T-Systems CA ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378882 ) pass this train? I’ve to wait until FF4.7, am I right? ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 16, 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 weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Eitan Isaacson published an update on his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to improve the Orca open source screen reader for Linux. The Perl Foundation received a $200,000 donation to support Perl 6 development. Among other things, this donation will be used for continuation of Patrick Michaud’s Perl 6 work, for which the Mozilla Foundation made a $10,000 seed grant. Legal issues We got final legal signoff for the proposed new Mozilla committer’s agreement; Gerv is now working to get an official copy of this agreement and related information posted to www.mozilla.org. CAs and related issues I found someone to help clear the backlog of CA requests. Public communications and related issues David continued work on the www.mozilla.org site. Conferences We have more blog posts from the Mozilla accessibility team’s attendance of SightCity 2008, including one from Steve Lee and an almost minute-by-minute account by Ben Millard. Zak prepared for upcoming conference appearances. Upcoming events and activities Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest). The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 9, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on that week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures With support from people who’ve designated donations for Bugzilla, the Mozilla Foundation is funding a new project to be undertaken by Everything Solved, Inc. As a major Bugzilla contributor and customization expert, Everything Solved will survey large corporations and organizations already using Bugzilla in order to determine what the most desired enhancements and changes are. This will help guide the Bugzilla project for future development, and will also begin a standardized and organized list of feature ideas from the most visible users of Bugzilla. Legal issues We got a final round of legal review for the proposed new Mozilla committer’s agreement. CAs and related issues I held discussions with various parties about how to resolve issues with disabling email trust for certificates issued by DigiNotar. Public communications and related issues David participated in a planning meeting for www.mozilla.org changes and worked on related issues; for more information see his recent blog post. Conferences Various members of the Mozilla accessibility team attended SightCity 2008, with sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation; Marco Zehe wrote a blog post with more details. Zak prepared for upcoming conference appearances already scheduled, and proposed some new conferences for our consideration. Upcoming events and activities Zak will be doing a keynote at the eLiberatica 2008 conference (May 30-31, 2008, in Bucharest). The Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the Personal Democracy Forum conference (June 23-24 in New York NY), which I’m planning to attend if possible.