This is a guest blog post from Jane Finette, Executive Program Manager, who works closely with me in Office of the Chair.

In a recent blog post Mitchell described why she has been eager to see the hiring process at Mozilla have a larger focus on cross-functional participation, particularly for senior leaders whom we expect to represent a broad swath of Mozilla.  Enabling wider participation in how we hire for leadership has been our starting point.  She notes we began organizing panel discussions for a broader set of people to talk to the candidate some time ago.

The need to hire for a new senior role, Vice President of Marketing Communications, presented an opportunity to further explore this new type of approach. Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, our CMO and the hiring manager for this role, and I sat down to plan and document some further experiments with the hiring process for this role. Our goal from the start was to explore two outcomes: an increased participation within the organization and the simultaneous creation of a meaningful process for candidates to evaluate us.

Enabling participation in the hiring process for the VP of MarComm position was particularly crucial because this person has a role that represents and communicates publicly about a broad swath of Mozilla. The VP of MarComms oversees the global communications, social media, user support and content marketing teams and works across the organization to develop impactful outbound communications for Mozilla and Firefox products.

What was the process?

Jascha and I designed the interview process right at the start with participation as one of the key objectives. Together we identified interviewers as peers, direct reports, expertise leaders and others who were not from the group where the candidate would work; in this case Marketing.  We identified cross functional areas the hire would interact with on a regular and a geographic basis, these were people who might not otherwise have been part of the interview process.

Here is an overview of the process we devised:

1st round: Peers (no direct reports).
Purpose: Interviewing for values match, strong competency in area of expertise.

2nd round: Directs report + leaders in area of expertise, including cross-functional areas.
Purpose: Interviewing for leadership attributes, values match, competency in area of expertise.

3rd round: Panel – including moderator and panel members who were not part of the group where the candidate would work. Panel was a maximum of 7 people.
Purpose: Validate values match. Give insights into broader organizational dynamics.

4th round: Case study including peers + directs reports and a small selection of members of  the panel. Maximum of 12 people.
Purpose: Place for the person to demonstrate their expertise and shine, and experience a typical environment.

5th round: CEO and Chairwoman
Purpose: Validate values match, leadership and skills where appropriate.

We conducted well over 50 screenings and entered 8 very well qualified candidates into our process. The process took approximately four months to complete, approximately the same amount of time required for an executive level hire.

What have we learned so far?

The hiring process for the VP of MarComm is now complete. Alex Salkever, joined Mozilla as our Vice President of Marketing Communications on May 18, 2016.

We have a hypothesis that increasing the level of diversity and participation will lead to stronger hires at Mozilla. We are continuing the pilot to explore this further.

(1) In our opinion interviews are both for the organization and the candidate

• By increasing the level of diverse participation, we have been able to get more input from across the organization, finding blind-spots and bias. In our pilot case, the role was intended to be hired outside of the US due to the global nature of the position. The hiring manager explained he was heavily influenced by his peers in the organization regarding the location of this hire, which could have led to a suboptimal situation if he had pushed with his original preference. Additionally, we chose a candidate who has strong technical chops for a Marcom lead and yet, the recommendation was shaped heavily by the feedback provided from the non-marketing/policy participants.
• We are exploring turning this into a repeatable interview process.
• We have created an environment where candidates can also evaluate us from multiple perspectives.
  (i) By adding differing perspectives to our current hiring process, we are exposing a new hire to our unique culture and operating principles right from the start.
  (ii) The new hire already knows and has the potential to have credibility with a significant number of people at Mozilla from the first day. The process is essentially a way of reputation building on a distributed basis.

(2) Participatory hiring process in senior levels is our starting point

• Our starting point for a more participatory hiring process is our senior roles.  As Mitchell noted, “the more senior the role, the broader a part of Mozilla we expect someone to be able to lead, and the broader a sense of representing the entire organization we expect that person to have.” These roles require an ability to interact, motivate and work across teams, they also have the high potential to affect culture.

(3) Defining what success looks like helps identify who should participate in the hiring process

• A key practice to apply in all hiring processes: define (i) what success for the role will be and (ii) all the stakeholders in the organization whom can support success, this creates the pool of participants. In this case, we worked with both the hiring manager and the recruiter at the start of the process to design and determine the process.

(4) Add more people early on

• A previous learning indicated a broader group of diverse interviewees should be in the 3rd stage of the interview, not the last stage as their feedback proved to be critical in the decision process. This was upheld in this example. In order to invite a broad group to meet with a candidate, this could take the form of a panel to create an effective use of time.

Gotchas:

• We note that time taken by increasing participation in hiring could inhibit the process. In subsequent examples we intend to create and test a lightweight version of the process.
• When involving more people in the process, we must be careful to collect candidate feedback individually, as in larger group settings ‘group think’ can happen.

Often a standard type of interview process is designed for the company, rather than the individual being interviewed. The standard process is intended to maximize assessment in a core area of expertise, whereby candidates are evaluated by their manager, peers and direct reports in their domain only. This creates an unhealthy power balance and exposes a set of addressable biases in the process such as ones based on cultural fit, and skills gap perspectives from other areas of the company.

What’s next?
We will continue to explore, record results and share further findings. We have now begun another participatory hiring experiment at the ‘director’ level role.   It’s an interesting question what piece of evidence would conclusively prove cross-functional and cross-level participation in hiring leadership brings benefits to an organization.  We’ll continue to experiment.

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2016/09/02/guest-post-increasing-the-level-of-participation-in-the-hiring-process/

A little while ago, I wrote my first public Medium post 6 months into my PhD at the University of Sussex, describing the experience of taking a crazy leap of faith, moving from Vancouver to London and leaving a full-time job in tech to do so. A whirlwind year later, I now find myself past my first doctoral upgrade as a somewhat official-feeling PhD candidate, many amazing conversations, eureka moments and unexpected travels(!) later. So, without further ado, here is a new piece on Medium about that first year. My hope is that posts like this will give others the extra encouragement they may need to take the plunge and dive into the research they’re passionate about. I know it helped me a great deal when I was considering my next move.

And in a word, it’s all been amazing. Highlights have included seeing Bruno Latour discuss his thoughts on gaia (and blow out a birthday cake!) after presenting a paper at this year’s Society for the History of Technology meeting in Singapore, where the ever-inspiring Sally Jane Norman and I also organized a digital artifact workshop in this glorious psychedelic rainbow room at the city’s new ArtScience Museum, heading to Santa Cruz with Sussex Humanities Lab colleagues for this digital media exchange to play with Arduinos while meeting a group of talented art/tech practitioners there, and generally getting to hang out back in the UK with fascinating humans (and libraries!) in Brighton, Oxford and London while learning everything I could about theories of spatiality, making and community.

I’m writing this today from beautiful, sunny Barcelona, where I’ve been lucky enough to attend this year’s excellent 4S/EASST “Science and Technology By Other Means” conference on scholarship from EASST and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. In addition to being a discussant about “careers by other means” at its Doctoral Day, I also presented a paper I’ve submitted to Digital Culture & Society with Tim Jordan which critically examines key technomyths about the maker movement as part of an excellent panel convened by Adrian Smith, Maxigas and other great thinkers in this space entitled “Digital Fabrications Amongst Hackers, Makers and Manufacturers: Whose Industrial Revolution?”.

While presenting to a packed room of STS scholars was one of the more intimidating(!) moments of my academic career so far, the resulting discussion and ideas I received from such an engaged (and thoughtful!) audience made all the stress 100% worth it. I’m very grateful to everyone who came to listen and provide advice. Moments like these, where you get to share your research with the makers, hackers and thinkers who have helped inspire it the first place, are especially wonderful ones. Here’s to more beautiful memories in the sun (and studio) for all of us!

http://blog.codekat.net/post/149843684469

https://danielpocock.com/arrival-at-fsfe-summit-and-qtcon-2016-berlin

Pick of the Month: Multi Links Plus

by Geoffrey De Belie
Open, copy, and bookmark multiple links at the same time. No need to handle them individually anymore!

“Perfect, can’t live without it

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/09/01/september-2016-featured-add-ons/

Firefox 50 will be released on November 8th. Here’s the list of changes that went into this version that can affect add-on compatibility. There is more information available in Firefox 50 for Developers, so you should also give it a look.

General

• Remove box-sizing: padding-box.
• Forbid CPOW usage if add-on declares it is multiprocessCompatible. The multiprocessCompatible flag in the manifest disables all cross-process shims, ensuring the add-on works completely in e10s mode. This bug closes a loophole in this restriction. If you’re unfamiliar with e10s compatibility, please give this a read.
• Remove draggesture and dragdrop events. Their standard equivalents should be used: dragstart and drop.

XPCOM and Modules

• nsIClientAuthDialogs::ChooseCertificate should pass an nsIArray of nsIX509Certs, not strings. This change removes the CERT_USAGE_* constants in nsIX509Cert, used by some add-ons.
• Remove nsIX509Cert.getUsagesArray, requestUsagesArrayAsync, and getUsagesString.

New

• Provide API for add-ons to delay restartless updates. Delaying updates can be useful if an add-on is in the middle of running a slow process that needs to run completely.

Let me know in the comments if there’s anything missing or incorrect on these lists. If your add-on breaks on Firefox 50, I’d like to know.

The automatic compatibility validation and upgrade for add-ons on AMO will happen in a few weeks, so keep an eye on your email if you have an add-on listed on our site with its compatibility set to Firefox 49.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/09/01/compatibility-for-firefox-50/

For organizations interested in supporting Firefox on Windows in a managed environment, a longstanding hurdle has been that Firefox does not use the underlying platform’s certificate database when verifying TLS web server certificates. As an organization, having a separate transparent and open certificate authority program furthers Mozilla’s goal of fostering the open web. However, for users in managed environments attempting to connect to services that use non-public certificate hierarchies, this often results in a sub-optimal experience where Firefox will not connect while other browsers will.

To address this shortcoming, we have been developing an optional feature that, when enabled, will search the Windows certificate trust store for certificate authorities that have been added by the user or an administrator. If Firefox encounters any such CAs that are trusted to issue TLS web server certificates, it will incorporate those CAs into its own path building logic. When verifying a server certificate, if Firefox can find a path to one of those imported roots, the connection will succeed.

This feature is available in Firefox 49 and up (currently in beta). To give it a try, set the preference security.enterprise_roots.enabled to true. After that, Firefox should connect successfully to sites using certificates issued by 3rd party root certificates that have been added to the Windows trust database. Note that currently these root certificates will not appear in Firefox’s certificate manager as they are intended to be managed from the interfaces provided by Windows itself. This may change in the future.

But wait – there’s more! Using the same infrastructure, we have developed a similar feature to handle the case where Firefox is being used on an account that is being monitored by the Microsoft Family Safety functionality in Windows 8.1. For background information, this involves a local intercepting proxy that can log and/or block web traffic to and from an account. A similar feature existed briefly in Windows 10 but was reconfigured to only affect Edge. Starting with version 50, instead of showing the untrusted connection error page Firefox should “just work”.

These features are still in the early stages, so if you encounter any unexpected behavior, please feel free to file a bug.

This has been a guest post from David Keeler, Mozilla Engineer.

https://mike.kaply.com/2016/09/01/upcoming-changes-to-root-certificates-in-firefox-on-windows/

Group 6 of the Interns this summer will be presenting what they worked on. Jimmy Wang- TOR Edouard Oger- SF Ryan Hunt- MV Sam Wood-...

https://air.mozilla.org/inter-presentations/

Hello, SUMO Nation!

Hard to believe, but the year has entered its ninth month already. So, do you still have trouble writing “2016” instead of “2015”? ;-) Quite a few updates coming your way, so let’s get started before it gets too cold!

Welcome, new contributors!

• anf25
• easyaspi314
• rahulparakh678
• hdabney246
• Rezaul_Rabbi

If you just joined us, don’t hesitate – come over and say “hi” in the forums!

SUMO Community meetings

• LATEST ONE: 31st of August – you can read the notes here and see the video at AirMozilla.
  
• NEXT ONE: happening on the 7th of September!
• If you want to add a discussion topic to the upcoming meeting agenda:
  • Start a thread in the Community Forums, so that everyone in the community can see what will be discussed and voice their opinion here before Wednesday (this will make it easier to have an efficient meeting).
  • Please do so as soon as you can before the meeting, so that people have time to read, think, and reply (and also add it to the agenda).
  • If you can, please attend the meeting in person (or via IRC), so we can follow up on your discussion topic during the meeting with your feedback.

Community

• Huge thanks to everyone who contributed (or is mentioned) in the Firefox 48 Release Report!
• Is anyone going to the Participation Meeting in Berlin on 10th & 11th of September? Make yourselves known, and we’ll try to organize a mini SUMO meetup there :-)
• We need to be inspired by you! Share your favourite superhero with Rachel. We are looking for different heroes from all parts of the world.
• MozFest is coming our way! London, October 28-30. Are you excited yet?
• Ongoing reminder #1: if you think you can benefit from getting a second-hand device to help you with contributing to SUMO, you know where to find us.
• Ongoing reminder #2: we are looking for more contributors to our blog. Do you write on the web about open source, communities, SUMO, Mozilla… and more? Do let us know!
• Ongoing reminder #3: want to know what’s going on with the Admins? Check this thread in the forum.

Platform

• PLATFORM REMINDER! The Platform Meetings are BACK! If you missed the previous ones, you can find the notes in this document. (here’s the channel you can subscribe to).
• We are working on making sure we recognize your “legacy” contributions after the migration – please take a look here.
• Updates from the most recent Platform meeting:
  • We hope to introduce some folks from the Lithium side to you, soon…
  • We have the migration split into three tracks: Community (“the people”), Design (“the look and feel”), Technical (“the invisible engine”) – and we’ll be sharing more details about each track’s progress as they happen!
  • You can (and should) follow the whole process using this public Trello board.
• QUESTIONS? CONCERNS? Please take a look at this migration document and use this migration thread to put questions/comments about it for everyone to share and discuss. As much as possible, please try to keep the migration discussion and questions limited to those two places – we don’t want to chase ten different threads in too many different places.

Social

Support Forum

Knowledge Base & L10n

• We are 2 weeks before next release / 4 weeks after current release. What does that mean? (Reminder: we are following the process/schedule outlined here)
  
  • Only Joni or other admins can introduce and/or approve potential last minute changes of next release content; only Joni or other admins can set new content to RFL; localizers should focus on this content.
  • All other existing content is deprioritized, but can be edited and localized as usual.
  • The content to be localized with high priority can be found on this list.
• Huge thanks to Inma, one of our Spanish localization heroes! She’s taking some time off from SUMO, but we hope to see her around Mozilla!
• Pontoon / user interface reminder: please do not work on UI strings in Pontoon as we are moving to Lithium – work on localizing articles instead.
• Final reminder: we’re working on refreshing the community guidelines for the migration, and Localization is no different… Take a look here and let Michal know if you have any comments.
• Final reminder: Joni has put forward a proposal to update categories for Firefox – read it and tell her what you think!
• Do not forget about the High Priority List for KB articles to be localized!

Firefox

• for Android
  • No new news for now…

• for Desktop
  • All is quiet on the Desktop front…

• for iOS
  • …even more crickets in the iOS space – at least for now.
    

…and that’s it for today! We hope you enjoyed this portion of the latest updates from the world of SUMO. See you around – keep rocking the helpful web! And stay safe!

P.S. Hey, are you following us on Twitter? There’s almost a thousand of you there! :-)

https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/09/01/whats-up-with-sumo-1st-september/

In May, Kevin Kelly shared the possibilities that technology will offer us over the next 30 years. But innovation unchecked can pose serious challenges to...

https://air.mozilla.org/being-human-in-a-data-filled-world-with-genevieve-bell-of-intel/

http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2016/09/talos-moves-to-crowdsupply.html

The microwave in my kitchen has a timer on it, which I use when making coffee: TIMER-4-0-0-START. When the time expires, it beeps incessantly at me. The natural reaction from decades of operating microwaves is to hit CANCEL at this point to get the beeping to start.

However, this doesn’t work. In fact, the designers of the microwave (GE, though probably not here in Schenectady) must have known this, perhaps through user research. When I hit CANCEL, the LED display scrolls a message: PRESS TIMER.

Stop and think about that for a minute. The engineers got feedback that users were hitting CANCEL to stop a beeping timer, and their reaction was to waste precious RAM and programmer time to educate the user about which button to use. Undoubtedly, this was more work than the other option: canceling a beeping timer when the user presses CANCEL.

Lots of software seems to suffer from the same error. For example, Mercurial often has several ways to achieve the same goal, but only one is “blessed” by the designers. When I use the wrong command, Mercurial helpfully tells me what I should have typed, presumably hoping that by the repetition of typing this I will eventually learn not to be so stupid.

In this case, I have used hg add to add a file which I later refactored out of existence:

$ hg rm somefile.js
not removing somefile.js: file has been marked for add (use forget to undo)

The message isn’t even clear! I don’t want to “undo” something – I want to remove a file. I suppose removing a file is always an “undo”, as the file was created at some point, but that’s getting a little philosophical. How about this:

$ hg rm somefile.js
somefile.js: removed

I’m sure there are reasons for hg rm to not do what I mean. They likely center around not losing data, as that seems to be the driving force behind a lot of its design (despite Mercurial having slaughtered more hours of my work than Git by a long shot). I’m sure there’s reasons for the CANCEL button to not cancel things, too, based in some similar notion of design purity.

The moral of the story is: if your users are “misusing” your interface, adapt the interface, instead of trying to adapt the user.

http://code.v.igoro.us/posts/2016/09/user-guidance-vs-dwim.html

I blogged before about building Docker images on Travis and suggested uploading images after successful test runs to Docker Hub and use them as Cache after downloading them in next Travis runs.

Travis upgraded recently to Docker version 1.12 (from 1.9) and since version 1.10 Docker features Content Addressability for layers. This change breaks caching and we need to implement a workaround using Travis cache.

Changes need to be made in .travis.yml:

Enable cache

cache:
  directories:
    - /home/travis/docker/

Start by requesting Travis to cache /home/travis/docker directory.

Load Docker images previously cached

before_install:
  - if [ -f ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE} ]; then gunzip -c ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE} | docker load; fi

This checks that ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE} exists and then loads it in Docker while gunzip-ing it. For convenience and smaller lines I did setup ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE} as environment variable

env:
  global:
    - DOCKER_CACHE_FILE=/home/travis/docker/cache.tar.gz

Save image to cache

After building the image and running the tests it's time to save the new Docker image to Travis cache.

I chose to save only when I'm building the master branch but all branches and PRs will still get the cache as Travis will make the cache directory available to all builds.

script:
  # Tests go here
  - if [[ ${TRAVIS_BRANCH} == "master" ]]; then mkdir -p $(dirname ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE}) ; docker save $(docker history -q ${DOCKER_REPOSITORY}:${TRAVIS_COMMIT} | grep -v '') | gzip > ${DOCKER_CACHE_FILE}; fi

Note that we don't just docker save the resulting image. Instead we need to save all the intermediate layers explicitly. We get all the layers using docker history and we grep out all the images.

It's important that docker save happens in script step because right after this step Travis will save the contents of the cached directory.

That's all!

Note that Docker saving and loading, as well as Travis uploading and downloading of cache from S3 costs time. It may be faster to rebuilt your Docker image instead of caching it.

See also:

• Pulling build cache - GitHub Issue #20316

• Wikipedia article on Content-addressable storage

You can find a real life example of .travis.yml in the Mozilla Snippets project.

https://giorgos.sealabs.net/docker-cache-on-travis-and-docker-112.html

Firefox 48 Release and Firefox for IOS version 5.1

August 2016

This report is aiming to capture and explain what has happened during and after the launch of Firefox 48/ Firefox for iOS 5.1 on multiple support fronts: Knowledge Base and localization, 1:1 social and forum support, trending issues and reported bugs, as well as to celebrate and recognize the tremendous work the SUMO community is putting in to make sure our users experience a happy release.

We have lots of ways to contribute, from Support to Social to PR, the ways you can help shape our communications program and tell the world about Mozilla are endless. For more information: [https://goo.gl/NwxLJF]

Knowledge Base and Localization

Support Forum Threads

Issues to note: This issue showed up in Social and the forums, with the new awesome bar functionality and test pilot awesomebar experiments the ability to turn off the “search with google” was deprecated: ”Search with google”  How to remove “search with google” in Firefox 48,  I want to disable search in the address bar and browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete does not work ,  is there any way to disable browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete in firefox 48? 

Disabled add on signing was removed in 48, there was an evident population did not agree  Disable add-on signing not available in Firefox 48?

Some dislike was evident in some commentary about the change in url bar style:Upgraded to Windows 10 & Firefox 47 – now almost impossible to make out active tab 

Add ons: ALl in one sidebar was fixed All-in-one sidebar not working in Firefox 48

Quicktime was deprecated for Windows

Android: Firefox for Android 48 in developer preview 5 of Android 7 Nougat may not work properly with uBlock Origins on Nexus Devices:  How to fix when Firefox for Android on Android 7 aka N aka Nougat hangs periodically?

Social Support Highlights

Brought to you by Sprinklr

Total contributors in program – 185

New users added between August 2 – August 19, 2016:

Warm welcome to Daniela and Alex Mayorga! Thank you for your help this release, we hope to see more of you.

Top 5 Contributors

This version we had a few new users and a larger amount of engagement

Outbound Top engagement:

“Firefox is Not Responding” Facebook post issue

Localization

• Special mentions – our hyperactive contributors:
  • wxie2016
  • TyDraniu
  • Jim Spentzos
  • Lan
  • Богданцев Сергій (Bogdancev)

• …and some of the “L10n legends” (in no particular order):
  • milupo
  • Tonnes
  • Angela Velo
  • Dinesh
  • Michele Rodaro
  • Artist
• For a comprehensive list of contributions, click here

Questions? Contact Michal.

Thank yous from users who received SUMO help

Support Forums:

Twitter:

https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/08/31/firefox-48-and-firefox-for-ios-5-1-release-report/

mconley livehacks on real Firefox bugs while thinking aloud.

https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-episode-69/

This is the sumo weekly call

https://air.mozilla.org/weekly-sumo-community-meeting-august-31-2016/

I thought it would be useful to publish a brief post regarding the various communication channels that we are using right now for Nightly, as well as a few of the main tools being used across the project. Suggestions and new ideas regarding communication and tools are always welcome.

Communication Channels

Currently we have two active communication channels where you can chat about issues you may be seeing in Firefox Nightly – IRC and the Telegram app. For IRC, you can find us at irc.mozilla.org in #nightly, and on the Telegram app please ask @mozillamarcia to add you to the group “Nightly Testers.” We have a bot that cross posts to both IRC and Telegram, so we now have cross communication between the two channels. If you are seeing a particular bug, it is helpful to mention it on IRC/Telegram app so we can see if it is a known issue or an actual regression.

Twitter

Follow us on https://twitter.com/FirefoxNightly/.

Forums and Mailing Lists

While there isn’t yet a specific mailing list for nightly (work in progress  – we do have a legacy one for Nightly QA Testers), feature development and other topics are often discussed on the Platform and Firefox desktop browser forums. The posts from planet.mozilla.org span the entire Mozilla project, and often Developers will write in detail about what they are currently working on.

• Mozilla Dev Platform  – Often new areas of work are prefaced with “Intent to Ship”
• Firefox Desktop Browser
• Firefox Mobile
• List of all Mozilla forums
• Blog posts from across the Mozilla project

Nightly Test Events

Currently Test Day events are being held for the branches, but not specifically for Nightly. If you are interested in organizing a Nightly test event, please reach out to marcia in the #nightly IRC channel.

Tools

• Bugzilla is the true lifeblood of Mozilla. Almost everything related to the project passes through the Bugzilla landscape. For Nightly, we encourage you to read about how to file bugs here. Please add the keyword “nightly-community” to your bug when you file it.
• Github is also used by some projects within Mozilla. One example is Test Pilot , but there are lots of others. You can see the full list here.

Crash Stats

Socorro is the tool that aggregates all the crash data across the various Mozilla products. It is in this space that you can see and investigate top crashes in the products.

The main crash-stats page has lots of great information about the current state of Nightly as well as the other branches.

Project Uptime is a Platform initiative specific to improving the crash rate on Desktop and Mobile.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/08/31/nightly-discussion-forums-and-some-of-the-tools-we-use/

Hello Mozillians!

As you may already know, last Friday – August 26th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 49 Beta 7.

Thank you all for helping us making Mozilla a better place – Ron Bentley, Iryna Thompson, Carmen Fat, Logicoma, Moin Shaikh, Aaron Raimist

From Bangladesh: Mohammad Maruf Islam, Samad Talukder, Nazir Ahmed Sabbir, Rezaul huque Nayeem, Azmina Akter Papeya, Saheda Reza Antora, Saddam Hossain, Tanvir Rahman, Kazi nuzhat Tasnem, Maruf Rahman, Sajal Ahmed,  Kazi Ashraf Hossain, Md.Majedul islam, Forhad Hossain, Sajedul Islam, Akash, Tazin Ahmed,  Toki Yasir, Ria, Sourov_Arko,  Amir Hossain Rhidoy, Roy Ayers, Sufi Ahmed Hamim, Fahim.

A big thank you goes out to all our active moderators too! 

Results:

• there were 19 verified bugs:
  • 998773, 1260522, 1276120, 1272462, 1022601, 1288897, 1294994, 1287980, 1287384, 1001324, 1163290, 1206251, 1221545, 1288963, 446171, 1283764, 1104054, 1101975, 1296917,  
• there were 2 new issues found:
  • 1298395, 1298575
• some failures were mentioned in the etherpad; therefore, please add the requested details in the etherpad or, even better, join us on #qa IRC channel and let’s figure them out

https://quality.mozilla.org/2016/08/firefox-49-beta-7-testday-results/

I’m employed by Mozilla. The same Mozilla that recently has announced that it is looking around for feedback on how to revamp its logo and graphical image.

It was with amusement I saw one of the existing suggestions for a new logo by using “://” (colon slash slash) the name:

… compared with the recently announced new curl logo:

Me being in both teams and being a general Internet protocol enthusiast I couldn’t be more happy if Mozilla would end up using a design so clearly based on the same underlying thoughts. After all,
Imitation is the sincerest of flattery as Charles Caleb Colton once so eloquently expressed it.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/31/mozillas-search-for-a-new-logo/

Every time Chuck Harmston commits to GitHub he has that fancy [verified] tag next to his name and I'm super jealous.

I've been too lazy to add GPG signing to my Git commits because it seemed like too much work, but I had some free time this afternoon and Julien Vehent convinced me it wasn't that hard, so, here we are. Writing this post is partly to encourage everyone to sign their commits, and partly so I can find these steps again when I forget how to do it in the future.

I already have a gpg key I use for Mozilla things, so I'll start with that. Check out your current keys (if this list is empty, you'll need to make a key):

$ gpg --list-keys wclouser@mozilla.com
pub   4096R/4A403229 2013-08-19
uid                  Wil Clouser <wclouser@mozilla.com>
sub   4096R/B438E342 2013-08-19

I want to use a new subkey for GitHub signing, so I'll edit my existing master key and add a new one:

gpg --edit-key 4A403229
gpg> addkey
4096 bit RSA signing-only key which expires in two years>
gpg> save

Reviewing my new key:

$ gpg --list-keys wclouser@mozilla.com
pub   4096R/4A403229 2013-08-19
 uid                  Wil Clouser <wclouser@mozilla.com>
sub   4096R/B438E342 2013-08-19
sub   4096R/04D1111C 2016-08-30 [expires: 2018-08-30]

Adding the key to GitHub

Telling GitHub about the key is pretty straight forward. Firstly, get your public key:

$ gpg --armor --export 04D1111C
-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
  ...
  
  ...
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Next, load https://github.com/settings/keys and click New GPG Key. Then copy and paste the entire output from the command you ran above into the textarea on that page and click save.

Signing the commit

You're going to sign all your commits, right? So let's just add this thing globally (bonus note: you can add this, but it only works in git 2.0 and above. If you have an old version you'll need to add the -S flag to your git commit commands):

$ git config --global commit.gpgsign true

If you have more than one key you'll want to specify the key to use:

$ git config --global user.signingKey 04D1111C

You can change all this stuff in ~/.gitconfig if you'd rather adjust it directly. While you're in there, double check that the user.email value lines up with the email address assigned to your key and the email address that GitHub knows about or else you'll have a mismatch when you try to use it.

Ready to commit something? Edit your files like normal, and git commit. You'll be prompted for your GPG password (unless you use an agent, and you should) and everything else should just work like normal. Github will recognize the signed commit:

Transferring the key to your laptop

Transferring secret keys around always raises some eyebrows, but the reality is many of us make commits from multiple computers. As long as you protect the key in transit, this should be relatively secure. Firstly, export it into a couple of files:

gpg --export 04D1111C > key-pub.asc
gpg --export-secret-keys 04D1111C > key-sec.asc

Then securely transfer those files to your laptop (scp is a good choice) and run:

gpg --import key-pub.asc
gpg --import key-sec.asc

When you're done, securely delete the .asc files on both computers (I use shred but there are other options).

And that's it. Signed commits!

http://micropipes.com/blog//2016/08/31/signing-your-commits-on-github-with-a-gpg-key/

Erin Berman and members of her web team from the San Jose Public Library (SJPL) will talk about their Virtual Privacy Lab tool, developed with...

https://air.mozilla.org/privacy-lab-august-2016-tools-to-teach-privacy/