https://atlee.ca/blog/posts/migration-status-3.html

“I wanted people to feel the whole story with their bodies, not just with their minds. Once I discovered virtual reality was the place to do that, it was transformative.”
– Nonny de la Pe~na, CEO of Emblematic

Great creators can do more than just tell a story. They can build entirely new worlds for audiences to experience and enjoy.

From rich text to video to podcasts, the Internet era offers an array of new ways for creators to build worlds. Here at Mozilla, we are particularly excited about virtual reality. Imagine moving beyond watching or listening to a story; imagine also feeling that story. Imagine being inside it with your entire mind and body. Now imagine sharing and entering that experience with something as simple as a web URL. That’s the potential before us.

To fully realize that potential, we need people who think big. We need artists and developers and engineers who are driven to push the boundaries of the imagination. We need visionaries who can translate that imagination into virtual reality.

The sky is the limit with virtual reality, and we’re driven to serve as the bridge that connects artists and developers. We are also committed to providing those communities with the tools and resources they need to begin building their own worlds. Love working with Javascript? Check out the A-Frame framework. Do you prefer building with Unity? We have created a toolkit to bring your VR Unity experience to the web with WebVR.

We believe browsers are the future of virtual and augmented reality. The ability to click on a link and enter into an immersive, virtual world is a game-changer. This is why we held our ‘VR the People’ panel at the Sundance Film Festival, and why we will be at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York next week. We want to connect storytellers with this amazing technology. If you’re at Tribeca (or just in the area), please reach out. We’d love to chat.

This concludes our four part series about virtual reality, storytelling, and the open web. It’s our mission to empower creators, and we hope these posts have left you inspired. If you’d like to watch our entire VR the People panel. Check out the video below.

Be sure to visit https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/ to learn more about the tools and resources Mozilla offers to help you build new worlds from your imagination.

Read more on VR the People

• An Open Call to Filmmakers: Make Something Amazing With Virtual Reality and the Open Web
• Virtual Reality at the Intersection of Art & Technology
• Nonny de la Pe~na & the Power of Immersive Storytelling

The post Building Bold New Worlds With Virtual Reality appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/20/building-bold-new-worlds-with-virtual-reality/

This week we’re heads down focusing on adding features in the three broad areas of Browsers, Social and the Content Ecosystem.

Browsers

This week we focused on building Firefox Reality and we’re excited to announce additional features:

• Implemented private tabs
• Tab overflow popup list
• Added contextual menu for “more options” in the header
• Improvements for SVR based devices:
  • Update SDK to v2.1.2 for tracking improvements
  • Fallback to head tracking based input when there are not controllers available
  • Implement scrolling using wheel and trackpad input buttons in ODG devices
• Working on the virtual keyboard across Android platform
• We are designing the transitions for WebVR immersive mode

Check out the video clip of additional features we added this week of the contextual menu and private tabs:

Firefox Reality private browsing from Imanol Fern'andez Gorostizaga on Vimeo.

Social

We're working on a web-based social experience for Mixed Reality.

In the last week, we have:

• Landed next 2D UX pass which cleans up a bunch of CSS and design inconsistencies, and prompts users for avatar and name customization before entry until they customize their name.
• Ongoing work for final push of in-VR UX: unified 3D cursor, “pause/play” mode for blocking UX, finalized HUD design and positioning, less error-prone teleporting component should all land this week.
• Worked through remaining issues with deployments, cleaned up bugs and restart issues with Habitat (as well as filed a number of bugs.)
• Set-up room member capping and room closing.

Join our public WebVR Slack #social channel to join in the discussion!

Content ecosystem

This week, Blair MacIntyre released a new version of the iOS WebXR Viewer app that includes support for experimenting with Computer Vision.

Check out the video below:

Stay tuned next week for some exciting news!

https://blog.mozvr.com/this-week-in-mixed-reality-issue-3/

All entities move and nothing remains still.

At this time last year, I had just moved on from Release Engineering to start managing the Sheriffs and the Developer Workflow teams. Shortly after the release of Firefox Quantum, I also inherited the Taskcluster team. The next few months were *ridiculously* busy as I tried to juggle the management responsibilities of three largely disparate groups.

By mid-January, it became clear that I could not, in fact, do it all. The Taskcluster group had the biggest ongoing need for management support, so that’s where I chose to land. This sanity-preserving move also gave a colleague, Kim Moir, the chance to step into management of the Developer Workflow team.

Meet the Team

Let me start by introducing the Taskcluster team. We are:

• Hassan Ali
• Wander Lairson Costa
• John Ford
• Jonas Finnemann Jensen
• Dustin Mitchell
• Pete Moore
• Eli Perelman
• Brian Stack

We are an eclectic mix of curlers, snooker players, pinball enthusiasts, and much else besides. We also write and run continous integration (CI) software at scale.

What are we doing?

The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand…

One of the reasons why I love the Taskcluster team so much is that they have a real penchant for documentation. That includes their design and post-mortem processes. Previously, I had only managed others who were using Taskcluster…consumers of their services. The Taskcluster documentation made it really easy for me to plug-in quickly and help provide direction.

If you’re curious about what Taskcluster is at a foundational level, you should start with the tutorial.

The Taskcluster team currently has three, big efforts in progress.

1. Redeployability

Many Taskcluster team members initially joined the team with the dream of building a true, open source CI solution. Dustin has a great post explaining the impetus behind redeployability. Here’s the intro:

Taskcluster has always been open source: all of our code is on Github, and we get lots of contributions to the various repositories. Some of our libraries and other packages have seen some use outside of a Taskcluster context, too.

But today, Taskcluster is not a project that could practically be used outside of its single incarnation at Mozilla. For example, we hard-code the name taskcluster.net in a number of places, and we include our config in the source-code repositories. There’s no legal or contractual reason someone else could not run their own Taskcluster, but it would be difficult and almost certainly break next time we made a change.

The Mozilla incarnation is open to use by any Mozilla project, although our focus is obviously Firefox and Firefox-related products like Fennec. This was a practical decision: our priority is to migrate Firefox to Taskcluster, and that is an enormous project. Maintaining an abstract ability to deploy additional instances while working on this project was just too much work for a small team.

The good news is, the focus is now shifting. The migration from Buildbot to Taskcluster is nearly complete, and the remaining pieces are related to hardware deployment, largely by other teams. We are returning to work on something we’ve wanted to do for a long time: support redeployability.

We’re a little further down that path than when he first wrote about it in January, but you can read more about our efforts to make Taskcluster more widely deployable in Dustin’s blog.

2. Support for packet.net

packet.net provides some interesting services, like baremetal servers and access to ARM hardware, that other cloud providers are only starting to offer. Experiments with our existing emulator tests on the baremetal servers have shown incredible speed-ups in some cases. The promise of ARM hardware is particularly appealing for future mobile testing efforts.

Over the next few months, we plan to add support for packet.net to the Mozilla instance of Taskcluster. This lines up well with the efforts around redeployability, i.e. we need to be able to support different and/or multiple cloud providers anyway.

3. Keeping the lights on (KTLO)

While not particularly glamorous, maintenance is a fact of life for software engineers supporting code that in running in production. That said, we should actively work to minimize the amount of maintenance work we need to do.

One of the first things I did when I took over the Taskcluster team full-time was halt *all* new and ongoing work to focus on stability for the entire month of February. This was precipitated by a series of prolonged outages in January. We didn’t have an established error budget at the time, but if we had, we would have completely blown through it.

Our focus on stability had many payoffs, including more robust deployment stories for many of our services, and a new IRC channel (#taskcluster-bots) full of deployment notices and monitoring alerts. We needed to put in this stability work to buy ourselves the time to work on redeployability.

What are we *not* doing?

With all the current work on redeployability, it’s tempting to look ahead to when we can incorporate some of these improvements into the current Firefox CI setup. While we do plan to redeploy Firefox CI at some point this year to take advantage of these systemic improvements, it is not our focus…yet.

One of the other things I love about the Taskcluster team is that they are really good at supporting community contribution. If you’re interested in learning more about Taskcluster or even getting your feet wet with some bugs, please drop by the #taskcluster channel on IRC and say Hi!

http://coopcoopbware.tumblr.com/post/173126143130

http://www.ncameron.org/blog/dev-tools-in-2018/

Precision Agriculture, or high tech farming, is being heralded as a panacea solution to the ever-growing demands of an increasing global population - but the...

https://air.mozilla.org/emerging-tech-speaker-series-talk-with-rian-wanstreet/

This is a weekly call with some of the Reps to discuss all matters about/affecting Reps and invite Reps to share their work with everyone.

https://air.mozilla.org/reps-weekly-meeting-20180419/

“I want you to think: if she can walk into that room and change her entire life and help create this whole energy and buzz, you can do it too.”
– Nonny de la Pe~na

This week, we’re highlighting VR’s groundbreaking potential to take audiences inside stories with a four part video series. There aren’t many examples of creators doing that more effectively and powerfully than Nonny de la Pe~na.

Nonny de la Pe~na is a former correspondent for Newsweek, the New York Times and other major outlets. For more than a decade now, de la Pe~na has been focused on merging her passion for documentary filmmaking with a deep-seeded expertise in VR. She essentially invented the field of “immersive journalism” through her company, Emblematic Group.

What makes de la Pe~na’s work particularly noteworthy (and a primary reason we’ve been driven to collaborate with her), is that her journalism often uses virtual reality to bring attention to under-served and overlooked groups.

To that end, our panel at this year’s Sundance Festival doubled as another installation in Nonny’s latest project, Mother Nature.

Mother Nature is an open and collaborative project that amplifies the voices of women and creators working in tech. It rebukes the concept that women are underrepresented in positions of power in tech and engineer roles because of anything inherent in their gender.

It’s a clear demonstration of how journalists and all storytellers can use VR to create experiences that can change minds and hearts, and help move our culture towards a more open and human direction.

For more on Nonny de la Pe~na and her immersive projects, visit Emblematic Group. I’d also encourage you to access our resources and open tools at https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/ and learn how you can use virtual reality and the web to tell your own stories.

Read more on VR the People

• An Open Call to Filmmakers: Make Something Amazing With Virtual Reality and the Open Web
• Virtual Reality at the Intersection of Art & Technology

The post Nonny de la Pe~na & the Power of Immersive Storytelling appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/19/nonny-de-la-pena-the-power-of-immersive-storytelling/

https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2018/04/18/firefox-performance-update-6/

http://www.ncameron.org/blog/announcing-cargo-src-beta/

        $ sudo pip3 install webthing

class WeatherStation(WoTThing):

    async def get_weather_data(self):
        async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
            async with async_timeout.timeout(config.seconds_for_timeout):
                async with session.get(config.target_url) as response:
                    self.weather_data = json.loads(await response.text())
        self.temperature = self.weather_data['current_observation']['temp_f']
        self.wind_speed = self.weather_data['current_observation']['wind_mph']
   
    temperature = WoTThing.wot_property(
        'temperature',
        initial_value=0.0,
        description='the temperature in °F',
        value_source_fn=get_weather_data,
        metadata={
            'units': '°F'
        }
    ) 
    wind_speed = WoTThing.wot_property(
        'wind speed',
        initial_value=0.0,
        description='the wind speed in MPH',
        value_source_fn=get_weather_data,
        metadata={
            'units': 'MPH'
        }
    ) 

http://www.twobraids.com/2018/04/things-gateway-series-2-episode-1.html

People searching for a Google Chrome ad blocking extension have to choose from dozens of similarly named extensions. Only few of these are legitimate, most are forks of open source ad blockers trying to attract users with misleading extension names and descriptions. What are these up to? Thanks to Andrey Meshkov we now know what many people already suspected: these extensions are malicious. He found obfuscated code hidden carefully within a manipulated jQuery library that accepted commands from a remote server.

As it happens, I checked out some fake ad blockers only in February. Quite remarkably, all of these turned up clean: the differences to their respective open source counterparts were all minor, mostly limited to renaming and adding Google Analytics tracking. One of these was the uBlock Plus extension which now showed up on Andrey’s list of malicious extensions and has been taken down by Google. So at some point in the past two months this extension was updated in order to add malicious code.

And that appears to be the point here: somebody creates these extensions and carefully measures user counts. Once the user count gets high enough the extension gets an “update” that attempts to monetize the user base by spying on them. At least stealing browsing history was the malicious functionality that Andrey could see, additional code could be pushed out by the server at will. That’s what I suspected all along but this is the first time there is actual proof.

Chrome Web Store has traditionally been very permissive as far as the uploaded content goes. Even taking down extensions infringing trademarks took forever, extensions with misleading names and descriptions on the other hand were always considered “fine.” You have to consider that updating extensions on Chrome Web Store is a fully automatic process, there is no human review like with Mozilla or Opera. So nobody stops you from turning an originally harmless extension bad.

On the bright side, I doubt that Andrey’s assumption of 20 million compromised Chrome users is correct. There are strong indicators that the user numbers of these fake ad blockers have been inflated by bots, simply because the user count is a contributing factor to the search ranking. I assume that this is also the main reason behind the Google Analytics tracking: whoever is behind these extensions, they know exactly that their Chrome Web Store user numbers are bogus.

For reference, the real ad blocking extensions are:

• Adblock Plus
• AdBlock
• uBlock Origin
• AdGuard AdBlocker

https://palant.de/2018/04/18/the-ticking-time-bomb-fake-ad-blockers-in-chrome-web-store

As the Firefox data engineering teams we provide core tools for using data to other teams. This spans from collection through Firefox Telemetry, storage & processing in our Data Platform to making data available in Data Tools.

To make new developments more visible we aim to publish a quarterly newsletter. As we skipped one, some important items from Q4 are also highlighted this time.

This year our teams are putting their main focus on:

• Making experimentation easy & powerful.
• Providing a low-latency view into product release health.
• Making it easy to work with events end-to-end.
• Addressing important user issues with our tools.

Usage improvements

Last year we started to investigate how our various tools are used by people working on Firefox in different roles. From that we started addressing some of the main issues users have.

Most centrally, the Telemetry portal is now the main entry point to our tools, documentation and other resources. When working with Firefox data you will find all the important tools linked from there.

We added the probe dictionary to make it easy to find what data we have about Firefox usage.

For STMO, our Redash instance, we deployed a major UI refresh from the upstream project.

There is new documentation on prototyping and optimizing STMO queries.

Our data documentation saw many other updates, from cookbooks on how to see your own pings and sending new pings to adding more datasets. We also added documentation on how our data pipeline works.

Enabling experimentation

For experimentation, we have focused on improving tooling. Test Tube will soon be our main experiment dashboard, replacing experiments viewer. It displays the results of multivariant experiments that are being conducted within Firefox.

We now have St. Moab as a toolkit for automatically generating experiment dashboards.

Working with event data

To make working with events easier, we improved multiple stages in the pipeline. Our documentation has an overview of the data flow.

On the Firefox side, events can now be recorded through the events API, from add-ons, and whitelisted Firefox content. From Firefox 61, all recorded events are automatically counted into scalars, to easily get summary statistics.

Event data is available for analysis in Redash in different datasets. We can now also connect more event data to Amplitude, a product analytics tool. A connection for some mobile events to Amplitude is live, for Firefox Desktop events it will be available soon.

Low-latency release health data

To enable low-latency views into release health data, we are working on improving Mission Control, which will soon replace arewestableyet.com.

It has new features that enable comparing quality measures like crashes release-over-release across channels.

Firefox Telemetry tools

For Firefox instrumentation we expanded on the event recording APIs. To make build turnaround times faster, we now support adding scalars in artifact builds and will soon extend this to events.

Following the recent Firefox data preferences changes, we adopted Telemetry to only differentiate between “release” and “prerelease” data.

This also impacted the measurement dashboard and telemetry.js users as the current approach to publishing this data from the release channel does not work anymore.

The measurement dashboard got some smaller usability improvements thanks to a group of contributors. We also prototyped a use counter dashboard for easier analysis.

Datasets & analysis tools

To power LetsEncrypt stats, we publish a public Firefox SSL usage dataset.

The following datasets are newly available in Redash or through Spark:

• client_counts_daily — This is useful for estimating user counts over a few dimensions and a long history with daily precision.
• first_shutdown_summary — A summary of the first main ping of a client’s lifetime. This accounts for clients that do not otherwise appear in main_summary.
• churn — A pre-aggregated dataset for calculating the 7-day churn for Firefox Desktop.
• retention — A pre-aggregated dataset for calculating retention for Firefox Desktop. The primary use-case is 1-day retention.

For analysis tooling we now have Databricks available. This offers instant-on-notebooks with no more waiting for clusters to spin up and supports Scala, SQL and R. If you’re interested sign up to the databricks-discuss mailing list.

We also got the probe info service into production, which scrapes the probe data in Firefox code and makes a history of it available to consumers. This is what powers the probe dictionary, but can also be used to power other data tooling.

Getting in touch

Please reach out to us with any questions or concerns.

• You can find us on IRC in #telemetry and #datapipeline.
• We are available on slack in #fx-metrics.
• The main mailing list for data topics is fx-data-dev.
• Bugs can be filed in one of these components.
• We are on Twitter as @MozTelemetry.

Cheers from

• The data engineering team (Katie Parlante), consisting of
• The Firefox Telemetry team (Georg Fritzsche)
• The Data Platform team (Mark Reid)
• The Data Tools team (Rob Miller)

Firefox Data engineering newsletter Q1 / 2018 was originally published in Georg Fritzsche on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/firefox-data-engineering-newsletter-q1-2018-229c723e8706?source=rss----9eb1bc803268---4

mconley livehacks on real Firefox bugs while thinking aloud.

https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-episode-136/

The web should be open to everyone, a place for unbridled innovation, education, and creative expression. That’s why Firefox fights for Net Neutrality, promotes online privacy rights, and supports open-source … Read more

The post Working for Good: Metalwood Salvage of Portland appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/working-for-good-metalwood-salvage/

This is the SUMO weekly call

https://air.mozilla.org/weekly-sumo-community-meeting-20180418/

Please meet our newest Friend of Add-ons, Viswaprasanth Ks! Viswa began contributing to Mozilla in January 2013, when he met regional community members while participating in a Firefox OS hackathon in Bangalore, India. Since then, he has been a member of the Firefox Student Ambassador Board, a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer, and a Mozilla Rep and Tech Speaker.

In early 2017, Viswa began developing extensions for Firefox using the WebExtensions API. From the start, Viswa wanted to invite his community to learn this framework and create extensions with him. At community events, he would speak about extension development and help participants build their first extensions. These presentations served as a starting point for creating the Activate campaign “Build Your Own Extension.” Viswa quickly became a leader in developing the campaign and testing iterations with a variety of different audiences. In late 2017, he collaborated with community members Santosh Viswanatham and Trishul Goel to re-launch the campaign with a new event flow and more learning resources for new developers.

Viswa continues to give talks about extension development and help new developers become confident working with WebExtensions APIs. He is currently creating a series of videos about the WebExtensions API to be released this summer. When he isn’t speaking about extensions, he mentors students in the Tamilnadu region in Rust and Quality Assurance.

These experiences have translated into skills Viswa uses in everyday life. “I learned about code review when I became a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer,” he says. “This skill helps me a lot at my office. I am able to easily point out errors in the product I am working on. The second important thing I learned by contributing to Mozilla is how to build and work with a diverse team. The Mozilla community has a lot of amazing people all around the world, and there are unique things to learn from each and every one.”

In his free time, Viswa watches tech-related talks on YouTube, plays chess online, and explores new Mozilla-related projects like Lockbox.

He’s also quick to add, “I feel each and every one who cares about the internet should become Mozilla contributors so the journey will be awesome in future.”

If that describes you and you would like get more involved with the add-ons community, please take a look at our wiki for some opportunities to contribute to the project.

Thank you so much for all of your contributions, Viswa! We’re proud to name you Friend of Add-ons.

The post Friend of Add-ons: Viswaprasath Ks appeared first on Mozilla Add-ons Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/04/18/friend-of-add-ons-viswaprasath-ks/

“If someone can imagine a world…they can create an experience.”
– Reggie Watts

This is the second video in our four part series around creators, virtual reality, and the open web. As we laid out in the opening post of this series, virtual reality is more than a technology, and it is far more than mere eye-candy. VR is an immensely powerful tool that is honed and developed every day. In the hands of a creator, that tool has the potential to transport audiences into new worlds and provide new perspectives.

It’s one thing to read about the crisis in Sudan, but being transported inside that crisis is deeply affecting in a way we haven’t seen before.

The hard truth is that all the technological capabilities in the world won’t matter if creators don’t have the proper tools to shape that technology into experiences. To make a true impact, technology and art can’t live parallel lives. They must intersect. Bringing together those worlds was the thrust for our VR the People panel at the Sundance Festival.

“You’re gonna end up finding someone who’s a 16-year-old in the basement with an open-source VR headset and some crappy computer and they download free software so they can build [an experience].”
– Brooks Brown, Global Director of Virtual Reality, Starbreeze Studios

That quote above is exactly why Mozilla spent years working to build WebVR, and why we held our panel at Sundance. It’s why we are writing these posts. We’re hoping they reach someone out there – anyone, anywhere – who has a world in their head and a story to tell. We’re hoping they pick up the tools our engineers built and use them in ways that inspire and force those same engineers to build new tools that keep pace with the evolving creative force.

So go ahead, check out our resources and tools at https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/. We promise you won’t be creating alone. You bring the art, we’ll bring the technology, and together we can make something special.

Read more on VR the People

• An Open Call to Filmmakers: Make Something Amazing With Virtual Reality and the Open Web

The post Virtual Reality at the Intersection of Art & Technology appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/18/virtual-reality-at-the-intersection-of-art-technology/

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/04/hello-wasm-pack/

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on this web stuff, things change. The latest mixup? Apps vs Web Apps. An app should be an app no matter what, … Read more

The post No-Judgment Digital Definitions: App vs Web App appeared first on The Firefox Frontier.

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/no-judgment-digital-definitions-app-vs-web-app/