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Weave... Mozilla Is Trying To Be More Social
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?"
anyone can get over the privacy issues, Mozilla just needs to encrypt the user's settings with a strong key and store the encrypted data to the server. Only the user can decrypt it (assuming he remembers his passphrase) and you're done.
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).
After all, this is a magnificent opportunity to build the greatest list of porn links the world has ever seen!
I understand that all this online frenzy hit all major players in the IT field, but I still think that the Internet as it is now is not ready for this, and, in parallel, a lot of people don't feel ready for this.
By the way, good luck to Mozilla; it is always good to have more than one player.
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
I think it depends on personal preference. If it was opt-in and encrypted on your end before it was stored on Mozilla servers then they send you the (encrypted) data on local load of Firefox then you enter your secret password/phrase (or have it come out of the wallet or equivalent) to decrypt it, again, locally then there wouldn't be *any* privacy issues. And if you chose to use it it would definately come in handy for those instances where the OS unexpectedly borks itself on you and you have to reinstall. Then install firefox, enter your access code and at least that part it back to pre-bork settings.
Shh.
I wouldn't use this. After all, the bookmarks I have at home are different from the ones I have at work. :)
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?
Get your own free personal location tracker
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. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Why? What would you rather see - "she" written throughout the article? How would that be any better? "It"? "He/she" or "s/he" everywhere? Cumbersome and ugly. "They"? Grammatically incorrect, despite being used everywhere. "One" just sounds weird and formal (and the article isn't written in German).
/rant
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 you? Language is about communication; people being arsey about things like this are missing the point entirely.
If you don't want to use it, don't download the extension. To use it, you have to:
- 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.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
There are a lot of new features in Firefox 3. But there has also been a serious neglect of the maintenance aspect of software development.
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 issues plaguing the core of their browser: excessive memory usage, memory fragmentation, excessive CPU utilization, and segfaults. Fixing those would help every user.
Yo.
From TFA:
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
From the debugging logs, it seems like the information is just stored on a server via HTTPS+WebDAV. So if you control a web site (and you trust it more than you trust Mozilla), just change the Server Location (in Advanced Settings) from "https://services.mozilla.com/" to your own server. You will have to create a directory underneath that is the sha1sum of your account name, and it is up to you to set the permissions on the directory properly so that no one else can access it. Of course, this is all just an educated guess, but... "The rest is left as an exercise to the reader." :)
Google Browser Sync
And it's about as secure as your Google account already is. Whatever that means.
I hate to want to reply to own post, but just in case you think TFA is just some goof with a Blogspot blog, the original quote is from Mozilla Labs, specifically from Dan Mills, a FireFox dev and former Novell engineer - definately not the average moron.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
I'm suprised at the lack of mention that Opera has had this feature since September.
Link to the actual Mozilla Labs project page instead of to some blog: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/
I should sue them for profiting from my good name, damaging my reputation and causing confusion among the masses.