Category: Mozilla

The W3C, Dublin, and Incidental Beauty

Image #1 of the cabled roofBeltzner and I are sitting in the departures lounge, drinking preparatory Guinness before our flight to Dublin, for the w3c Web Security Context workgroup sessions this week.  The group is trying to put together a set of recommendations for web browsers to implement, so that we all have the same conversations with users about security.  This is preferable to the alternative which, historically, has been some combination of gross balkanization on anything new, and lowest-common-denominator (ref: padlock) on anything old.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve proposed Larry – an identity indicator in the primary UI – as a candidate recommendation, but others concern themselves with favicons, EV certificates, and “safe mode”  web browsing.  You can see the full list on the WSC wiki, here.

We’re also hoping, somewhere along the way, to visit the storehouse.

Anyhow.  Among all of this trip prep and security talk and bugmail, I looked up from my laptop in the lounge.  As you can see, we’re right at the edge of the terminal and, as such, have a unique view of the architecture holding the whole thing up.  This massive building, with its gently curved, elevated roof, is held up by these beautiful legs-on-cables.  It’s hard to describe, but luckily, beltzner had a cellphone camera.

Image #2 of the cabled roof

Call me a Make: magazine writer if you must, or chalk it up to the Guinness, but there’s beauty in that roof, and I’d like to shake the architect’s hand.

Recklessly Generous

Giving childI’m reading If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. It has been recommended to me by several people as the absolute best book written on the act of writing. Not necessarily on the structure of writing, certainly not on issues of grammar, but on the base, creative act. She wrote it in the late 1930s, and so far it is absolutely living up to its reputation. I haven’t finished it, but I already recommend it to anyone who has ever thought about writing, and doubly so to those who still haven’t written yet.

There is a passage on page 25 that I have to relate because when I read it, it caused me to stop and to put the book down on my lap and to smile. It’s actually a footnote to page 25, where she’s talking about the distinction between working to express yourself and the world you see around you, and grinding to make money or notoriety in business. It reads:

They will be uncreative in business as well as in everything else. For of course the creative power is expressed in business as well as in other things. I know a business man whose every sentence has more life, creative vision and generosity in it than those of many artists.

But the trouble with business expressing the creative power freely and prodigally as Art does, you cannot be recklessly generous in business, giving higher and higher wages and all your products freely and lovingly to the public.

There are lots of times in history that I would love to visit. I often think (more often than I should, really) about going back and chatting with Newton, or Darwin, and talking with them about which things panned out and which ones didn’t and where we’ve gotten to since. But there is absolutely no time in which I would rather be living than this moment.

I work for a company that gives its products freely and lovingly to the public, and we’re not the only ones doing so. I wish Brenda were around to see it.

Revisiting Security UI – Part 2

So we need to get better. We need to start fixing our messages to users so that we are more accurately communicating security information, while being mindful to not bury them in technicalities they neither want nor need. We need cues that are persistent (not relying on people to notice their absence), that are difficult to spoof, and that don’t mix metaphors.

We also, difficult as it is, need to get out of the “safety” game. We can’t tell users “this site is safe” because we don’t know that. Even ignoring the liabilities that might come with such a claim, there isn’t a good technological way to tell, right now, whether a particular site is safe in the way users care about. Do they handle credit card information properly? Do they ignore angry customers? Are they a front for stolen goods? These kinds of naughty people could get SSL certificates (and accompanying padlocks) and even the extended validation practices being discussed wouldn’t really stop them.

What we can do is equip people to make the safety decision for themselves, just as they often have to in the physical world, because we do have some information. It’s like putting ingredients labels on food. What we can do is change the conversation to be about identity instead of safety. This is important, so pay attention:

We need to change the conversation to be one about identity, not safety.

Identity is something we can verify. The padlock conflated identity with other things like encryption status and security, and while that conflation is almost natural to PKI-veterans, it has proven misleading for users.

So what might identity look like?

Continue reading “Revisiting Security UI – Part 2” →

Revisiting Security UI – Part 1 of 2

I tend to get excited about things. I’d say one of the key problems I have when writing – blogs, articles, books will probably be even worse here – is that, since I tend to be excited about things, my writing tends to wander to whichever dog has a puffy tail at the moment, and I sometimes look back and end up wishing each piece was tighter and more single-minded.

Take my post last week. Right now I’m excited about Firefox security UI, and about how to do a better job with the way we give users information. This is a good thing for me to be excited about, since it pays my bills. But I want to engender conversation about it, and to build context around my thoughts on the matter, and meandering isn’t necessarily the best way to do that.

So. This is the first of two posts I will write in the next week or so about this stuff. The goal is to outline:

  1. The way things are, and why we need to change them
  2. My thoughts on where we need to be looking to go

This is the first. What are we, as browser builders, doing for the user today when it comes to security UI?

Continue reading “Revisiting Security UI – Part 1 of 2” →

2.8 Billion Reasons to Do Better

Padlock by JohnathSo PC World is running an article by Robert McMillan about phishing. It’s not a bad article or anything, it cites the antiphishing workgroup and various Gartner research in non-inflammatory ways (phishing is up 700% year over year, losses for 2006 estimated at $2.8B USD), and basically concludes that the current state of the internet, vis a vis your[1] financial information, is somewhere towards the “festering cesspool of thievery from which no good thing can escape unscathed” end of the spectrum. Pretty standard stuff.

If Robert McMillan should be chastised for any part of it, it is his closing sentence, wherein he takes the too-obvious way out, no doubt because he was reaching his wordcount ceiling, and what the hell else is he going to say:

But to combat ever-adapting phishers, your best protection remains…you.

It’s not Bob’s fault, but this is a pretty awful way to leave things. How on earth are people supposed to do what he asks, particularly when all the evidence he’s just cited points to how profoundly they can’t?

Continue reading “2.8 Billion Reasons to Do Better” →

Day 2

I have officially begun. Friday was my first day of paid work with the Mozilla Corporation, and it was tiring. As expected, it mostly revolved around logistical stuff, though I did find some time with beltzner in the afternoon to watch an hour-long introduction to how Mozilla builds a DOM tree (thanks Johnny!)

Basically, what Friday allowed me to do was get my feet sufficiently under myself to come up with this:

bubbl.us Mindmap

I haven’t, historically, done much with mindmapping and other “thinking aids” but right now there is too much bubbling around to keep track of, so it seemed like a useful exercise. Attentive readers will note that the current list of thoughts is both incomplete and horribly short-sighted, stretching out a month at most. This is deliberate – I think it relatively stupid to hop on board on day 1 and to start making long term plans on day 2. I suppose someone will tell me that this makes me an “analytic” personality type, or some such, obsessed with having all the information before making a decision. I would suggest that this is grossly overgeneralized (as personality-classification schemes always, perforce, are) though I will confess to a preference for having some information before making any momentous statements of direction. I have always been nutty that way.

On a personal note, the first day (and, indeed, those leading up to it) has been grand. People at Mozilla are welcoming and congratulatory, people at IBM are well-wishing and congratulatory and, on balance, my LinkedIn profile has never been happier (though it is notably wanting for some more 1-degree-of-separation Mozilla love).

I really do think this was the right move to make, I’m pretty excited to be getting going. I’ll be heading to New York in early March with beltzner to talk to some of the people in the CA/Browser forum, and then later in March I’ll be in Mountain View to meet with some more of my newfound comrades-in-arms. In the meantime I’ll be trying to knock down that web of questions while simultaneously, no doubt, adding whole new subtrees. If anyone reading this wants to point out answers to some of the leaf nodes in that web, or alert me to obvious swaths of unmapped work, I can now officially be reached at johnath@mozilla.com. Huzzah! (Yes, my home email still works just fine, too).

[Update: Yes, the map was made with bubbl.us, mea culpa for not providing tasty linkage. ]

[Update2: Yes, the Johnny Stenback video is available online here. ]