Weekly Status Report, W16/2012

Here's a short summary of Mozilla-related work I've done in week 16/2012 (April 16 - 22, 2012):

• CSI:Mozilla / CrashKill:
  Filed a bug on missing CSV data due to a weekend Socorro outage, and dealt with the fallout from that for my custom reports.
  Created another patch for updating correlation report versions to be ready for the upcoming source code uplift.
  Continued reviewing explosiveness math work for integration into Socorro.
  More dealings with Flash reprocessing.
  Some crash bug triage and pushing on getting fixes for some issues (e.g. a trunk topcrasher).
  Just like every week, watched new/rising crashes, caring that bugs are filed where needed - that is, as much as I could with missing ADU numbers for the latter half of the week, which made some reports go AWOL.
• Themes:
  Some more work on 2.9 versions of my themes - the 2.8 versions of EarlyBlue and LCARStrek now received reviews.
• German L10n:
  Some reviews for FF/TB 13 "train" work done by Archeopteryx.
  Also did another L10n sync with trunk for core and suite, including mobile a11y strings.
• Various Discussions/Topics:
  Error message humor and fun in the project, new L10n dashboard, Firefox 12 endgame, approvals on trunk for mobile 14, issues with security suite interactions, Datacenter moves, WebAPI security discussions, mailbox corruption fixes, etc.

Over the last two weeks, I invested quite a bit of my "free" time into getting my website system integrated with BrowserID, the new sign-in protocol that is now part of the Mozilla Persona initiative to provide user-centric web identities with minimum to no tracking across sites.
Interestingly, implementing the actual interaction with the protocol/servers was the by far easiest part of it all and very straight-forward. A lot of the time went into changed workflows due to emails already being verified when my wesites receive them from BrowserID and not needing to do the verification after the user provides data, and into a lot of details for supporting both conventional password logins and BrowserID in the same system. In the end, I was successful and quite happy to switch a couple of my sites to using BrowserID and even removing my user passwords for them from the system.
I also saw that for someone creating a new site and not needing to worry about legacy logins, this system is pretty nice and easy to implement, and given the one doesn't have to worry about password security on the own website any more, probably all in all just as easy if not easier then the conventional methods.

In the end, I don't think there's anything better than a system that improves user privacy, minimzes security risks due from password re-use, reduces trackability of centralized login methods, and is easier to implement for web developers at the same time!