Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are turned on by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there. :blobcatverysad:

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice? :blobcat_thisisfine:

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

UPDATE: The about:config setting for this is `dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled`. It's a bool. Set it to false to turn it off.

I ended up taking into a dive into the state of #Rust on the web this morning. Looks like lots of progress has been made since the last time I checked!

You can call browser APIs from Rust now thanks to efforts like wasm-bindgen and web-sys. It looks a bit clunky, but it's effective. And I wonder about the wasm->jsvm->native pipeline (and back) and its effect on performance. Seems like that jsvm layer doesn't need to be there, but we haven't gotten rid of it just yet.

So if you want to make a regular front-end web app in Rust? Go nuts, it'll probably work well enough. And things like Yew and Trunk even make it rather nice in DX terms.

But for my own projects mostly building privacy-respecting-apps-as-browser-extensions, it looks like Rust isn't quite ready yet, but it's close. The key missing piece seems to be access to browser extension APIs. There's a web-extensions-sys project, but it's only targeting manifest V3 for some reason, which means FireFox support is completely out.

Although I'd love to switch my front-end work to use Rust, looks like I'm stuck with javascript (and jsdoc) for now.

Elephant help me, I'm actually releasing this thing! :toot: Folks, I present to you:

✨ End-to-end Encryption for Mastodon DMs ✨

#E2EE #Mastodon

https://codeberg.org/cuchazinteractive/Mastodon/src/branch/e2ee-4.0.2-dev/doc/e2ee

It's far from perfect (Far), but it's a start. I have no idea how people release mods for Mastodon because I've never seen one before. Forks, sure, but not mods. So I made something up. You can read all about it at the link above.

For now, I'm supporting Mastodon v4.0.2 and the Firefox browser. There's a browser extension in there, so browser support is tricky. It's a whole thing. I'm starting simple at first. Walk before you can run and all that, right?

Anyway, try it out. If you want. Or not, no judgement. But if you do, tell me how it went, will ya? I'm curious.

Maybe try it on a testing instance first though. I should probably set one of those up actually.

And If you try it out and run into trouble, send toots! :blobcatboophappy: I'll help out.