Weave... Mozilla Is Trying To Be More Social 156
Cassanova writes "Weave is the newest Mozilla Labs project. It allows the user to save browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions, passwords, etc.) and load them from anywhere. With this project, Mozilla is trying to be an online services provider, which is an important step. But can Mozilla labs get over the privacy issues?"
so use encryption. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you make this a non-optional feature then it can be touted as a big privacy win and people will surely be happier wit it. If you allow the passphrase to be stored locally then ease of use is solved too (obviously you'd still need to enter it if you used a browser not on your home PC, but that's ok).
Re:so use encryption. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:so use encryption. (Score:4, Interesting)
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You're probably better off with thunderbird or evolution or something and gmail IMAP, where you can s
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If the mailboxes are stored in the encrypted form and Google does not store the content in the plain-text somewhere else (for their "unobtrusive context-sensitive advertisements"), nobody — not even with a government-issued subpoena — can read the mails, until the owner logs in and reads it themselves...
That could be a huge benefit for someone some day...
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Re:so use encryption. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so use encryption. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:so use encryption. (Score:5, Funny)
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Simple. First you build a silicon foundry...
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*blink*
It's being encrypted client side. You can be pretty damn sure it's the source code that's running. Build the binary yourself.
as long as no admin backdoor for the police (Score:1)
not that i'm paranoid, but that information request could become a trivial law enforcement action in the near future...and we already have e
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This is actually really great idea for backup purposes. It would have to take data archival problems into account but I'd love to see more programs do this in a standard way. It could help out a lot with simplifying the backup process for people who don't really have the ability to do a comprehensive full drive backup.
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Security-wise, although I can see that many people would like any stored data encrypted so the service provider can't make use of it, that'd mean the user's computer would need to encrypt/decrypt it client-side. If you want to be able to access information from a bog-standard HTML interface (which I believe Opera Link allows), the service provider needs to be able to decrypt your information server-sid
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Clearly you are not up to date on the tinfoil. What happens if they store that data till quantum computers come out?! They'll just break the encryption and years later they'll know about all your goatse links.
I don't think they are (Score:5, Funny)
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online, online, and online again (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way, good luck to Mozilla; it is always good to have more than one player.
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Hm, imagine that. Having a workstation that from the ground up is equipped to handle roaming users, even across the internet. There would be issues with compatibility and installed software, but assuming the basics (OS log
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It worked over the Internet too, but the general internet had way to much lag for X applications to run that way. It would be possible now if it weren't for MSFT and thier silly dog Apple. MSFT has done one good thing though, they brought down the cost of the hardware so everyone can afford some. Now if only they would bring down the cost of their OS so people
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Unix was there for the local network 15 years ago. You would walk up to any terminal and could log in with all your settings, preferences intact [...] but the general internet had way to much lag for X applications to run that way.
I'm not talking about running apps remotely, which is basically a thin client with or without X-the-windowing-system; when I said X-on-a-stick I meant X as in whatever-app-you-would-be-running ("the X that is seen is not the true X", and all that). Hmm, imprecise wording on my part.
What I am talking about is remote storage between sessions. While logged in your apps would run on the local workstation, only reading your profile from your remote store when logging in, and writing changes back when logging ou
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Yes. As the GP said, unix was doing that 15 years ago, in the form of NFS-mounted home directories. (15 years is actually a rather conservative estimate, but that's beside the point.) Works great for applications running on the loca
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[...]I'm not interested in entrusting my data (much less my secrets) to $RANDOM_CORPORATION, no matter how convenient that may make things. [...]
That's basically what I said in another post in this thread, "allow me to type in the credentials to *my very own* FTP server, tenjewberrymuds". Glad to know I'm not alone.
Incidentally, I had quite the head-to-head with my brother who's the "family webmaster", because he wants to change from Dreamhost to GMail, and I opposed having my data on Google's servers. Dreamhost I trust (and besides, my email must arrive *somewhere*); Google I don't.
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Well, I've run across two [gopc.net] services [zonbu.com] like that recently.
GOPC, while closer to 'save once, read anywhere' is ridiculously limite
Google browser sync? (Score:1)
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Thunderbird sync would be great not just for contacts, but also for the newsreader. I'm sick of having to look over all the same usenet articles again to figure out what I've read and what I haven't when I go from home to work and back.
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FoxMarks does this for the bookmarks in Firefox and I've been using it to keep the bookmarks in sync between my work installati
I dislike (Score:1, Funny)
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An arbitrary choice was made. Pick "he" sometimes and "she" at other times, if it bothers you that much. More importantly, stop making big issues out of nonexistent ones - you understood the article, didn't yo
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Yo. [metro.co.uk]
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Singular "their" etc., was an accepted part of the English language before the 18th-century grammarians started making arbitrary judgements as to what is "good English" and "bad English", based on a kind of pseudo-"logic" deduced from the Latin language, that has nothing whatever to do with English. (See the 1975 journal article by Anne Bodine in the bibliography.) And even after the old-line grammarians put it under their ban, this anathematized singular "their" construction never stopped being used by English-speakers, both orally and by serious literary writers. So it's time for anyone who still thinks that singular "their" is so-called "bad grammar" to get rid of their prejudices and pedantry!
- http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html [crossmyt.com]
Our modern confusion stems from eighteenth-century grammarians who analysed English according to the structures of Latin and imposed stringent and irrelevant rules (such as the one about not splitting infinitives) that have bedevilled everybody since. In this case, they proposed that he should instead be the standard in cases in which the sex of the person referred to isn't known.
- http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-the2.htm [worldwidewords.org]
So, do you choose to reject the dogma of those grammarians who tried to impose Latin rules upon English which claims that singular "they" is incorrect or embrace the teachings of those same grammarians which state that "he" is the appropriate gender-inspecific pronoun? If you choose to reject the latter rule by considering the use of "he" to be horribly sexist, then you can just as easily reject the former a
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Finn: She's looking for you.
Me: Who is?
Finn: Klinger is.
Me: O_o I thought Klinger was a
Also, in Sweden, if you ask somebody the time, (s)he'll say "She's 11:37."
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That really hurts my feelings you know. I'm trying to be hermaphrodite, I really am!
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I always read everything carefully, but I don't bother trying to avoid offending someone with a hypersensitivity to non-issues. Political-correctness is a waste of time and energy that provides little practical benefit.
Re:I dislike [gender bias in English] (Score:2)
I've been sensitized to the issue of builtin gender bias for a few years. English, like many other modern European languages, has an inherent gender bias that I don't like. I don't like it, because I think in English, and I'm quite aware that this bias can limit my ability to frame certain ideas. I don't like to have any constraints on my reasoning abilities, and I certainly don't like these kinds of hidden constraints that operate on my thinking at such a low level that I grew up unaware of their influence
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There are pocket dialects of English that use "they" and "theirs" for the singular as well as the plural
A change that radical will never catch on, because those "pocket dialects" are only spoken by obscure people like Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, W [crossmyt.com]
Useful enough? (Score:4, Informative)
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I wouldn't use this (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't envisage a time when I'd need this. Plus it's very easy to SCP my bookmarks.html from my PC at home if I need them - or a simple SSH and grep to find the precise one I want. A solution in search of a problem?
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Google also have such a thing, can't remember what they call it but there's a Firefox extension. So it's nothing new either.
Only for Firefox 3.0.* ? (Score:1)
If you haven't looked at Firefox 3... (Score:5, Informative)
If you haven't looked at Firefox 3 beta, there are some crazy new bookmark features, including "smart" bookmarks generated from frequently-visited sites and such. There's also bookmark tagging. This must fit in very nicely with the "weave" strategy.
I'd be worried if I were del.icio.us. Not panicked, just worried. :)
They need to focus on maintenence, too. (Score:2, Insightful)
I know maintenance is not as glorious as adding new features, but it's still very important with each new release to fix the problems that were found with previous versions (or at least verify that such problems no longer exist).
While some small number of people might like these new bookmarking capabilities, I think they should have spent more time on fixing some of the i
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They have been spending lots of time fixing those issues. Are there any specific bug reports you think should be addressed? Any particular site or feature you're having a problem with?
If you cannot or will not track down the problems you're complaining about, and they persist even after creating a new profile and trying other fixes in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base [mozillazine.org] and asking for help in the MozillaZine Forums [mozillazine.org], you should simply switch to another browser. Why put up with serious problems when there are so
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No, creating a new profile does not cause you to lose any information. You can import your old settings to the new profile [mozillazine.org].
The advice to create a new profile also has nothing to do with memory leaks in Mozilla software. If you're experiencing bugs in Mozilla software, you'll still see them with a new profile. If creating a new profile fixes a problem, it was due to a bad extension or other bad setting. In some rare situations, it may be possible that a perfectly reasonable setting triggers a bug in Firefo
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You're confounding two different issues.
One issue is that Firefox does have some bugs. Those are fixed by Mozilla developers fixing the bugs. That does not require the user to do anything. No one is asking for end users to debug those problems. If you can point out any issue you think is not getting the attention it deserves, please point it out. You can refer to a bug report in Bugzilla, or explain how one could see the issue.
The other issue is that users' computers get messed up for whatever reason.
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Id like to see (Score:2)
So privacy and security concerns go away (or at least, would be under my control rather than someone else's), but all the same functionality is there.
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From TFA:
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I thought it can be be withn plugins/extensions... (Score:1)
Re:I thought it can be be withn plugins/extensions (Score:1)
Plugins (Score:2)
Privacy issues? What privacy issues? (Score:3, Insightful)
- Go to a site
- Create an account
- Download an extension (on every single computer you use)
- Put in your username and password (again)
- Put in a private encryption passphrase
- Manually click the 'Sync' button.
Only then will it start automatically updating your bookmarks. If you have privacy issues about uploading your bookmarks to Mozilla's servers, then you can quite easily back out at any of these points, or not bother at all. If the fear is that they will share your bookmarks, then simply don't give them any to share. This is not a feature that is on by default, and the blog linked to even specifies that, if you're that paranoid about giving them your data, there will be a way to set up your own Weave server, so no-one but you will be able to know you visit PissMidgets.com
Slightly sensationalist article methinks.
host it yourself? (Score:4, Informative)
Great to have another vendor (Score:2)
I have suggested the option of entering login info for an FTP server that you own (or have access to), so you don't have to rely on someone else, but it's no surprise that it's not going to happen unless Mozilla themselves go after it (or I write it myself, exc
Google Browser Sync (Score:4, Informative)
And it's about as secure as your Google account already is. Whatever that means.
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I once had a funny experience with this thing - one weekend my boss logged in from my (google-synchronized) computer to check his email - well, his Gmail cookie synchronized to my home PC and I was able to read his mail. He hacked his own mailbox and I didn't even need to do anyt
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+1 for karma, +2 for low user id, -2 for mention of user id.
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But on the note of encryption... Yeah, Google could never have the computing power to break that encryption! I'm betting they are few years off from running their own distributed cracking program that can break pretty strongly encrypted stuff (all in house). Imagine if they used the browser sync install base (or b
Sure ... (Score:2)
Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt
Sounds familiar... (Score:1)
Opera? (Score:2, Informative)
Publish the protocol please! (Score:2)
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"kissramgoodby?" (Score:1)
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Another solution (Score:1)
I installeed portable Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice on a USB stick and use it whenever I'm travelling. I can take my working environment anywhere.
The downside is that if I lose the USB stick in my travels I'm screwed.
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Not if you periodically back up stuff that matters to a webmail account.
Link (Score:5, Informative)
I should sue them (Score:5, Funny)
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Excellent idea (Score:2)
Other than passwords, there aren't any privacy issues for me. If someone hacks my account and discovers my bookmarks or which c
a few options (Score:2)
Or they could let you choose which server you want to store the data on, maybe you would have your own server setup and you want to use that instead of theirs.
FoxMarks already does it (Score:1)
Hell, no! (Score:2)
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This makes me cringe, too, but technically, according to Webster, "he" can be used in the "generic sense or when the sex of the person is unspecified". [merriam-webster.com]
I can't call the language non-biased, but the bias exists in the English language itself.
That being said, the author should have followed basic writing etiquette and replaced the pronouns with him/her, he/she, etc... or, get rid of the gender-biased pronouns altogether and restructured the sentences to use words like "oneself".
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Why don't you just get off
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I can't call the language non-biased, but in this instance the bias does not exist in the English language itself.
That being said, the author followed well established usage.