fidzu : Mozilla

For the past few months, we've been talking about our roadmaps and development and answering community questions in a video and podcast series we call "State of the Thunder." We've decided, after your feedback, to also cover them in a blog, for those who don't have time to watch or listen to the entire session.

This session is focused on answering inquiries from the community, and we've got the questions and summaries of the answers (with helpful links to resources we mentioned)! This series runs every two weeks, and we'll be creating blogs from here on in. If you have any questions you'd like answered, please feel free to include them in the comments!

Supporting and Sustaining FOSS Projects We Use

Question: As we move toward having more traditionally commercial offerings with services that are built on top of other projects, what is our plan in helping those projects' maintenance (and financial) sustainability? If we find a good model, can we imagine extending it to our apps, too?

Answer: Right now, the only project we're using to help build Thunderbird Pro is Stalwart, and we'll have more details on how we're using it soon. But we absolutely want to make sure the project gets financial support from us to support its sustainability and well-being. We want to play nice!

Appointment and Assist are from scratch, and Sync is from abandoned Firefox code, and so there isn't another project to support with those. But to go back to a point Ryan Sipes has frequently made, while people can use all of these tools for free by self-hosting, they can subscribe as a way of both simplifying their usage and making sure these projects are supported for regular maintenance and a long life.

Future UI Settings Plans

Question: The interface is difficult to customize but more importantly is difficult to discover all the options available because they're scattered around settings, account settings, top menu bar, context menus, etc. 140 Introduced the Appearance section in the settings, any plans to continue this effort with some more drastic restructuring of the UI?

Answer: Yes, we do have plans! We know the existing UI isn't the most welcoming, since it is so powerful and we don't want to overwhelm users with every option they can configure. We have a roadmap that's almost ready to share that involves restructuring Account Settings. Right now, individual settings are very scattered, and we want to group things together into related sections that can all be changed at the same time. We want to simplify discoverability to make it easier to customize Thunderbird without digging into the config panel.

Account Setup and Manual Configuration

Question: Using manual configuration during email setup has become more difficult with time with the prioritization of email autoconfiguration.

Answer: Unfortunately, manual setup has confused a lot of casual users, which is why we've prioritized autodiscovery and autosetup. We've done a lot of exploration and testing with our Design team, and in turn they've done a lot of discussion and testing with our community. You can see some of these conversations in our UX mailing list. And even if you have to start the process, there is a link in it to edit the configuration manually. Ultimately, we have to have a balance between less technical and more technical users, and to be as usable and approachable as we can to the former.

Balancing Complexity and Simplicity

Question: Thunderbird is powerful with a lot of options but it should have more. Any plans to integrate ImportExportTools (and other add-ons) and add more functionalities?

Answer: Thunderbird's Add-ons are often meant for users who like more complexity! When we tackle this question, there's two issues that come to mind. First, several developers get financial support from their users, and we want to be mindful of that. Second is the eternal question of how many features are too many features? We already have this issue in feedback between "Thunderbird doesn't have enough features" and "Thunderbird is too complicated!" Every feature we add gives us more technical debt. If we bring an add-on into core, we can support it for the long term.

We think this question may also come from the fact that Add-ons often "break" with each ESR release. But we're trying to find ways to support developers to use the API to increase compatibility. We're also considering how we can financially support Add-on developers to help them maintain their apps. Our core developers are pressed for time, and so we're beyond grateful to the Add-on developers who can make Thunderbird stronger and more specialized than we could on our own!

Benefits of the New Monthly Release Channel

Question: Is the new Release channel with monthly versions working properly and bringing any benefits?

Answer: Yes, on both counts! Right now, we have 10 to 20 percent of Thunderbird desktop users on the Release channel. While we don't have hard numbers for the benefits YET, we'd love to get some numbers on improvements in bug reactivity and other indicators. We noticed this year's ESR had far fewer bugs, which probably owed to Release users testing new features. While we've always had Beta users, we have so many more people on Release. So if something went wrong, we could fix it, let it "ride the train," and have the fix in the next version.

And our developers have stopped wondering when our features will make it to users! Things will be in users' hands in a month, versus nearly a year for some features.

JMAP Support in Thunderbird

Question: Any plans on supporting JMAP?

Answer: 100% yes. Though JMAP is still something of a niche protocol, with doesn't yet have widespread support from major providers. But now, with Thundermail we'll be our own provider, and it will come with JMAP. Also, with the upcoming iOS app, it will be easy to add support for JMAP. First, we're making the app from scratch so we have no technical debt. Second, we can do things properly from the start and be protocol agnostic.

Also, we've taken several lessons from our Exchange implementation, namely how to implement a new protocol properly. This will help us add support for JMAP faster.

Maintaining Backups in Thunderbird

Question: I have used Thunderbird since its first release and I always wondered how to properly and safely maintain backups of local emails. No matter how much I hate Outlook it offers built-in backup archives of .pst files that can be moved to other installations. The closest thing in Thunderbird is to copy the entire profile folder, but that comes with many more unpredictable outcomes.

I might be asking for something uncommon but I manage many projects with a very heavy communication flow between multiple clients, and when the project is completed I like to export the project folder with all the messages into a single PST file and create a couple of back-ups for safety, so no matter if my email server has problems, or the emails on my server and computer are accidentally deleted, I have that folder back-up as a single file which I can import into a new installation.

Answer: We'd love for anyone with this question to come talk to us about how to improve our Import/Export tools. Unfortunately, there's no universal email archive format, and a major issue is that Outlook's backup files are in a proprietary format. We've rebuilt the Import/Export UI and done a bit on the backend. Alas, this is all we've had time for.

So, if you'd like to help us tackle this problem, come chat with us! You can find us on Matrix and in the Developers and Planning mailing lists. We think there's definitely room for a standard around email backups.

Watch the Video (also available on TILvids)

Listen to the Podcast

The post State of the Thunder: Answering Community Questions! appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

30 Jul 2025 3:50pm GMT

The choices governments make today, about who gets to build, access and benefit from AI, will shape economic competitiveness, national security and digital rights for decades.

A new report by UK think tank, Demos, supported by Mozilla, makes the case that if the UK wants to thrive in the AI era it must embrace openness. And while the report is tailored to the UK context, its implications reach far beyond Westminster.

Unlike the US or China, the UK and many other countries cannot outspend or outscale on AI, but they can out-collaborate. Demos' report The Open Dividend: Building an AI openness strategy to unlock the UK's AI potential, argues that making key AI resources - models, datasets, compute and safety tools, more openly accessible can spur innovation, lower the costs of AI adoption, enable safer and more transparent development, boost digital sovereignty and align AI more closely with public value. A recipe, if there ever was one, for 'winning' at AI.

The wider market certainly reflects these trends - the AI sector is shifting toward value accruing in smaller, specialised and more efficient models. Developments all spurred on by open source innovation. But this also means open models aren't just more accessible and customisable, they're becoming more capable too.

This echoes another recent study Mozilla supported, this time a survey of more than 700 businesses conducted by McKinsey. Among its top findings - 50% of respondents are already leveraging an open source solution across their stack. More than three-quarters reported that they intended to grow this usage. Most significantly, the first movers - organisations that see AI as vital to their future competitive advantage - are more than 40% more likely to use open source models and tools than respondents from other organisations. Similar research just published by the Linux Foundation has also found openness is fast becoming a competitive edge. Demos's report expands upon these stats - strategically utilising openness in AI is not just about sharing code, it's about shaping a more resilient and prosperous ecosystem.

The risks of centralisation are well known and global. We have seen it before with the development of the internet. If we let AI ecosystems become concentrated, so that all power remains in the hands of a few firms and their proprietary models, this will make it much harder to ensure AI serves people - rather than the other way around. It also raises more urgent concerns about market dominance, bias, surveillance, and national resilience.

If we want AI to serve humanity, we all have a stake in getting this right.

As the Demos report argues, openness isn't just a value - it's a strategy. We were proud to support the development of this timely report - read it here.

The post Open by Design: How Nations Can Compete in the Age of AI appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

30 Jul 2025 2:44pm GMT

Community First

Thunderbird is (and has always been) powered by the people. The project exists because of the amazing community of passionate code contributors, bug-bashers, content creators, and all-around wonderful humans who have stood behind it and worked to support and maintain it over the years.

And as the Thunderbird community grows, we want to ensure that we [the team supporting you] grow alongside you, so that we can continue to collaborate and build effectively and efficiently together.

That's why we're thrilled to announce a refreshed and growing Thunderbird Community Team here at MZLA! Expect a little more structure, a lot more collaboration, and an open invitation to our users and contributors to join us and help shape what comes next.

Meet the Team

Whether you're filing your first bug, searching for support, writing documentation, or just dropping into Matrix to say hi, this is the team working hard behind the scenes to make sure your experience is productive, constructive, and superconductive:

Michael Ellis | Manager of Community Programs

Hey there! I'm Michael, and I'm joining the Thunderbird family as Manager of Community Programs to help grow and support our awesome community. I'll be working on programs that help improve contributor pathways and make it easier for more people to get involved in the work we do and the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis.

I come from a background of managing developer communities and running large-scale programs at organizations like Mozilla, Ionic, and NXP Semiconductors. I believe open-source communities are strongest when they're welcoming, engaging, and well-supported. I like gifs and memes very much.

I look forward to seeing you in the Thunderbird community and saying hello to one another on Matrix!

Until then, Keep on Rocking the Free Web!

Wayne Mery | Senior Community Manager

Greetings everyone. Wayne here, also known as wsmwk. I have used open source for forty years, been a user of and contributor to Thunderbird for twenty years, and am a founding member of the Thunderbird Council, and have run several of the council elections.

I love to mentor and connect to our community members who assist Thunderbird users in Reddit, Connect, matrix (chat), bugzilla, github, topicbox forums, Thunderbird support in SUMO (SUpport MOzilla), and other venues. And I help manage these venues and assist users, to bring the concerns of the user community to developers. I also assist in developing content for users (including knowledge base articles in SUMO) and assist in our general communications with users.

There are many ways you can participate in small ways or large, including through praise or constructive feedback through the venues listed above and those listed on our participate web page - I encourage you to do so at your convenience. And I look forward to connecting with you soon.

Heather Ellsworth | Senior Developer Relations Engineer

Hi everyone! *waves*

I've been part of the Thunderbird family for nearly two years, working with the awesome Desktop team. Now, I'm thrilled to be joining the Community team, led by Michael, where I'll be focusing on initiatives to support and grow our amazing contributor community.

My work will include creating helpful video content to make it easier for folks to get started, as well as improving our technical documentation at source-docs.thunderbird.net and developer.thunderbird.net.

If you're interested in contributing or need help getting started, don't hesitate to reach out to me on Matrix - I'd love to chat!

What's the Road Ahead?

Community is at the heart of everything Thunderbird does. As our product continues to evolve and improve, we want our community experience to keep pace with that growth. This means not only working to keep Thunderbird open, but striving towards better contributor pathways, clearer communication, and more opportunities to participate.

We're here to listen, collaborate, and help you succeed. You can expect to see more initiatives, experiments, and outreach from us soon, but you don't have to wait till then to weigh in.

Have thoughts or suggestions? Drop a comment below to share them directly, or visit our Connect thread to see what others are saying and add your own ideas there. Together, we can help shape the future of the Thunderbird community and product.

After all, Thunderbird is powered by the people, & that includes you.

The post Welcoming New Faces to the Thunderbird Community Team appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

29 Jul 2025 1:24pm GMT

Highlights

• The Text Fragments creation UI was just activated in Firefox Nightly allowing you to share/reference a link anchor to any text snippet in a page
  • https://mastodon.social/@firefoxnightly/114805708639661562
  • This is held to Nightly for now while it is tested.
  • 
• Thanks to volunteer contributor Christina for introducing a new browserSettings.verticalTabs API which allows extensions to determine if vertical tabs are currently enabled (or to offer to enable it for the user) - Bug 1946600
• Henrik enabled async widget events for wheel scrolling by default in web-platform tests as part of Interop 2025, bringing Firefox to 100% pass rate on scrollend-related tests.
• We've updated our Opera migrator so that it works again after the Opera browser changed how it stores profile data. This fix was uplifted to Firefox 141 which should go out to release later this month.

Friends of the Firefox team

Resolved bugs (excluding employees)

Volunteers that fixed more than one bug

• Gregory Pappas [:gregp]

Project Updates

Add-ons / Web Extensions

Addon Manager & about:addons

• Fixed XPIProvider.processPendingFileChanges logic to not emit unnecessary warnings for locations with non-existing staging extensions subdirs while processing staged add-on installations - Bug 1974233
• Fixed downloaded XPI files not deleted when add-on install flow is cancelled - Bug 1639163
• Fixed Windows-specific crash on nsIFile::Contains called with a null path while writing the addon startup data to the extensions.json profile file - Bug 1975674
• Removed old internal privileged helper nsIComponentManager.addBootstrappedManifestLocation - Bug 1953136

WebExtensions Framework

• Thanks to Nathan Teodosio for contributing end-to-end test coverage for the native messaging API exercised from a Firefox build running inside the snap package sandbox - Bug 1928096

DevTools

• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed an issue with StyleEditor pretty printing where we were adding blank lines when last declaration missed a semi colon (#1974450)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] made User agent stylesheets read-only in the style editor (#1972844, #1974395, #1973508)
  • 
• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] added lock icon for rules in uneditable stylesheets in Rules view to be consistent and improve accessibility (we were only adding a subtle grey background, and UI state shouldn't be conveyed with colors only (#1973935)
  • 
• Nicolas Chevobbe [:nchevobbe] improved Inspector markup search by highlighting results and scrolling to the first matching range (the match can be deep inside a text node) (#1259390, #1440229)
  • 
• Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau] made parent process modules visible when debugging Firefox for Android (#1973939)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed an issue in the Netmonitor Cache panel, who could be empty even when the response was cached (#1973036)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] fixed displaying base 64 images in the Response panel and added a checkered background behind so they're always visible (#1975429, #1975664)
• Julian Descottes [:jdescottes] added a mach devtools-node-test command to run devtools node tests (documentation: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools/tests/node-tests.html)

WebDriver BiDi

• Sabina renamed Proxy capability class to ProxyConfiguration to avoid confusion with JavaScript Proxy class.
• Baku fixed a regression where adding a cookie through the WebDriver BiDi or Marionette APIs would fail with an error if the expiry value exceeded 400 days.
• Sasha updated the WebDriver BiDi cookie APIs to support "default" value in "sameSite" property to address recent changes in platform API which wouldn't allow anymore to set "sameSite" equal "none" and "secure" equals "false" on HTTPS pages.
• Bvandersloot added support in Marionette for interacting with CHIPS cookies (Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State).
• Bas fixed the mach command for firefox-ui-functional tests, which now works again when run without specifying a manifest or test path.
• Henrik removed the temporary remote.system-access-check.enabled preference in Firefox 141. This preference can no longer be used to disable system access checks when using WebDriver in Firefox's chrome scope during testing.

Lint, Docs and Workflow

• Gijs landed a change to make the ESLint rule no-comparison-or-assignment-inside-ok work for Assert.ok() - previously it only worked for ok().

New Tab Page

• Special thanks to Jules who has been helping us get New Tab using design tokens / design system colours! New Tab is now at 84.22% propagation!
• Special thanks to rpl who has been plugging away at a fairly impressive stack of patches which will let us deploy trainhop updates for newtab via Nimbus / Experimenter!
• Nathan landed work related to a TrendingSearches widget which will run in an upcoming experiment
• Nathan also recently landed a fix that should help us avoid overlapping / overabundance of messages between New Tab and the rest of the browser.
• mconley posted a patch to add a moz-ohttp-image protocol handler to, in theory, request images privately over OHTTP, for use on newtab under certain circumstances.

Places

• Lazily loading `PlacesSemanticHistoryManager` (Standard8).
• Refactoring `PlacesQuery.sys.mjs` to split query and cache logic (James).
• Still trying to see if lowercasing tokens before SQL improves performance for `MatchAutoCompleteFunction` (James).
• Landed a simple patch that removed other Places expiration heuristics (James).
• Fixing unit tests for `History.fetch` returning referrer URI (James).
• Working on using `ConcurrentConnection` for favicon protocol handlers (Yazan).
• Looking into a memory leak in recent Favicons code (Marco).

Search and Navigation

• Unit Converter & Calculator
  • Landed a fix for incorrect unit conversions with long numbers (Yazan).
  • A fix is in review for negative calculator results displaying wrong in RTL builds (Yazan).
  • Landed a fix for negative converted results displaying wrong in RTL builds (Yazan).
• Unified Trust Panel
  • Reviews on initial implementation are done, about to land behind `browser.urlbar.trustPanel.featureGate` pref (Dale).
• Semantic History Search (Marco)
  • Sorted general results by frecency, including semantic.
  • Added telemetry for the database file size.
  • Added `available_semantic_sources` property to abandonment and engagement.
  • Added semantic history chunks calculation telemetry.
  • Working on distinguishing semantic and SERP history in telemetry events.
  • Next up: improving results quality (decreasing distance threshold, removing artificial 2-result limit, dynamic distance threshold).
  • Next: Following up with genAI about models being unusable in permanent Private Browsing mode.
• Multi-Context Address Bar (Dao)
  • Met up to discuss requirements for the search bar work.
  • Decided to put off Trending Search Suggestions and Utilities for new search bar implementation for now.
  • Nive is looking into bringing the unified search button to the search bar to ditch one-off buttons.
  • Breaking down initial work while waiting for the unified search button vs. one-off button decision.
• Custom Search Engines
  • A small patch is in review to let users add search engines from post forms with `role=search` (Moritz).
  • Favicons weren't showing up right away after adding a search engine via the toolbar (Moritz).
  • If a search engine added by contextual search is removed, it can't be re-added manually - a fix for this is in review (Moritz).

• General Search & Telemetry
  • Digging into our Bing stats to see if they match up with what Bing sees (Standard8).
  • Implemented SERP telemetry for the DuckDuckGo Shopping tab, just dealing with a test hiccup (Stephanie).
  • Started on Qwant's shopping tab telemetry; it's pretty similar to DDG, so hopefully a lot of the code can be reused (Stephanie).
  • Confirmed and closed a bug about Glean impression events for the Google shopping tab not reporting correctly (Stephanie).
  • Got a proof-of-concept patch for observing network requests for SERP telemetry (James).
  • Found out that ad clicks for Ecosia and Google ad services weren't being reported right, and issued a fix (James).
  • Created a proof-of-concept patch to cache whether a user has used a search engine locally, instead of making new preferences for each one (James).

• General Address Bar
  • Fixed more TypeScript issues in the address bar code (Standard8).
  • Sometimes the search term sticks in the URL bar; investigated but couldn't reproduce, so added a check and filed a follow-up for a refactor (James).
  • A bug fix for the URL bar falling back to the user-typed string instead of a suggestion when entering search mode landed (Yazan).
  • Getting ready to land a bug that removes the URL bar placeholder when `keyword.enabled` is false (Moritz).
  • Working on making sure the Unified Search Button UI makes sense when `keyword.enabled` is false (Dharma).
  • Ready to land a test for ctrl/accel/shift-clicking results in the URL bar (Dharma).
  • Still waiting for UX feedback on a bug to make command-clicking URL bar results open in a background tab on macOS (Dharma).

28 Jul 2025 5:27pm GMT

For marketers, understanding how a campaign performed shouldn't come at the cost of ceding proprietary data, or time-consuming integration acrobatics, with the platforms they run on. But that's often the tradeoff they encounter, particularly when it comes to measuring impact on closed platforms or in privacy-sensitive environments like iOS.

Taimi, an LGBTQ+ dating app that champions safety and inclusivity, faced exactly this challenge. As the company expanded its reach into the U.S., it needed to understand what was driving installs and sign-ups on TikTok - without compromising its core values or giving up control of its potentially sensitive user data.

Enter Anonym, Mozilla's privacy-first measurement solution built to help marketers unlock lightning-fast performance insights without exposing valuable data to platforms - and with minimal integration effort from Taimi. With little more than a drag-and-drop interface, Anonym enabled Taimi to run a fast, clean, statistically significant incrementality test with TikTok, revealing a 67% lift in app installs and a 40% lift in sign-ups.

"Anonym helped us grow faster than ever - with full confidence we were gaining full visibility into all our conversions," said Oleksandra Kryshtal, Taimi's User Acquisition Team Lead. "For an app-based company like ours, that's non-negotiable."

The results weren't just a win for Taimi. They point to a fast and effective new model for marketers more broadly: one where actionable advertising performance metrics are swift and insightful, and come without sacrificing sensitive and potentially competitive user-level data to the platforms they depend on.

"Thanks to our partnership with TikTok and Anonym," Kryshtal added, "we implemented a privacy-enhancing technology that was a game-changer."

For more insights into this Taimi-Anonym-TikTok test, read on!

---

Private measurement provides Taimi with first look at performance

The objective

Taimi, an LGBTQ+ dating app that embraces diversity and inclusivity, chose TikTok to promote its installs & sign-ups. Taimi cares deeply about privacy and needed a solution that allowed it to measure the impact of its advertising on TikTok for iOS users without sending any user-level data to TikTok directly.

The solution

To accomplish this objective, Taimi partnered with Anonym, a TikTok partner that uses advanced, privacy preserving techniques to measure and improve advertising performance. Taimi leveraged Anonym Private Lift to measure the incrementality (or causal impact) of its four week campaign on TikTok across the United States. Taimi also utilized Anonym Private Attribution to obtain more granular and actionable insights into its media strategies and tactics, including which ad creatives were driving performance. All processing occurred in the U.S. and results were delivered within days of the campaign end. No integration work was required from Taimi. They simply shared a data file using a drag-and-drop interface, which ensured the data was correctly formatted and encrypted.

The results

After the campaign ended, Taimi provided hashed and encrypted conversion data to Anonym. Anonym matched this conversion data with hashed and encrypted impression data from TikTok within a confidential computing environment. The data was processed using a differentially private conversion lift algorithm. Differential privacy is a method that adds noise to data sets to make it nearly impossible to re-identify users.

The results were impressive:

• TikTok drove an 40% increase in sign-ups during the four week campaign period and the subsequent week
• Additionally, a 67% increase in app installs was observed for people who saw TikTok ads vs. those who did not see TikTok ads
• Taimi additionally gained a deeper understanding of the efficacy of various ad types on Cost per Action (CPA) in order to inform future campaign planning

Importantly, the users in the control cell are randomly held out from seeing ads, allowing Anonym to say with very high confidence that the increase in conversion rate and sales are due to the impact of TiKTok advertising.

By implementing a privacy-preserving measurement solution from Anonym, Taimi gained visibility into campaign performance that was impossible without sharing user-level data with advertising platforms such as TikTok.

The post Lightning performance, protecting PII: Taimi's privacy-first TikTok campaign appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

28 Jul 2025 1:00pm GMT

Russian networks flood the Internet with propaganda, aiming to corrupt AI chatbots by Annie Newport and Nina Jankowicz. Our report details evidence that the so-called "Pravda network" (no relation to the propaganda outlet Pravda), a collection of websites and social media accounts that aggregate pro-Russia propaganda, is engaged in LLM grooming with the potential intent of inducing AI chatbots to reproduce Russian disinformation and propaganda. Since we published our report, NewsGuard and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab)-organizations that study malign information operations-confirmed that Pravda network content was being cited by some major AI chatbots in support of pro-Russia narratives that are provably false. (The biggest LLM stories are still either somebody with good content tries to keep it out of training sets or somebody with bad content tries to get it in. Related: Google AI Overview is just affiliate marketing spam now by David Gerard.)

CA insurance premiums likely to rise by Lynn La. The department said the models should help avoid year-to-year (premium) fluctuations following major disasters while taking into account wildfire mitigation at the individual, community, state and federal levels. (like the man said…)

Shorting Your Rivals: A Radical Antitrust Remedy by Alex Tabarrok. Just tie executive pay to relative performance-make the A-B CEO's bonus depend on beating C's performance. This is good for shareholders, aligns incentives even in private markets, and doesn't require making big public bets. (imho real companies probably won't do this because real investors are index funds that own A, B, and C.)

America's AI Action Plan: Strength Through FAFO by David Newhoff. Unlike major transformative undertakings of the past-the action plan cites the space race-no technology has had the potential to crawl into every aspect of social, economic, and political life as AI. Data runs the world, which means those who control the data run the world. Hence, the promise of what AI could do for society rests entirely on the guardrails and oversight which the industry rejects out of hand and the Trump administration believes are unnecessary.

Cyber Security: A Pre-War Reality Check by Bert Hubert. Earlier, Russia disabled a lot of the electricity networks in Ukraine using a similar kind of attack. And it turned out that the Ukrainians were so good (and their systems so simple and robust) that they had a disruption of like only six hours, which is really impressive….They knew how to restore their systems from scratch. If we get an attack like this on VodafoneZiggo or on Odido, and they don't get external help, they will be down for half a year, because they don't know anything about their own systems. (ICYMI: the USA, in military exercises, successfully raided Pearl Harbor twice, in 1932 and 1938. I'm sure it will be fine this time though.) More: Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis

How did newspapers in places like Harrisburg, Birmingham, and Syracuse become some of America's most-read online? by Jonathan V. Last. The top 25 list includes the dailies in many of the large metro areas you might expect; if your city has NFL, NBA, and MLB teams, there's a very good chance your local newspaper made the list. But the order is sometimes surprising, and no newspaper company generates more of those surprises than the Advance Local papers, whose numbers are frankly astonishing for those unfamiliar with the company's history of outperformance. (Meanwhile, The Washington Post is dying. I can tell you "how." But not "why." by Jonathan V. Last.)

27 Jul 2025 12:00am GMT

Do you do a lot of language translating on the web? Are you constantly copying text from one browser tab and navigating to another to paste it? Maybe you like to compare translations from different services like Google Translate or Bing Translate? Need easy access to text-to-speech features?

Online translation services provide a hugely valuable function, but for those of us who do a lot of translating on the web, the process is time-consuming and cumbersome. With the right browser extension, however, web translations become a whole lot easier and faster. Here are some fantastic translation extensions for folks with differing needs…

I just want a simple, efficient way to translate. I don't need fancy features.

Simple Translate

It doesn't get much simpler than this. Highlight the text you want to translate and click the extension's toolbar icon to activate a streamlined pop-up. Your highlighted text automatically appears in the pop-up's translation field and a drop-down menu lets you easily select your target language. Simple Translate also features a handy "Translate this page" button should you want that.

Translate Web Pages

Maybe you just need to translate full web pages, like reading news articles in other languages, how-to guides, or job related sites. If so, Translate Web Pages could be the ideal solution for you with its sharp focus on full-page utility.

However the extension also benefits from a few intriguing additional features, like the ability to select up to three top languages you most commonly translate into (each one easily accessible with a single click in the pop-up menu), designate specific sites to always translate for you upon arrival, and your choice of three translation engines: Google, Yandex, and DeepL.

S3.Translator

Supporting 100+ languages, S3.Translator serves up a full feature set of language tools, like the ability to translate full or select portions of a page, text-to-speech translation, YouTube subtitle translations, and more.

There's even a nifty Learning Language mode, which allows you to turn any text into the language you're studying. Toggle between languages so you can conveniently learn as you naturally browse the web.

To Google Translate

Very popular, very simple translation extension that exclusively uses Google's translation services, including text-to-speech.

Simply highlight any text on a web page and right-click to pull up a To Google Translate context menu that allows three actions: 1) translate into your preferred language; 2) listen to audio of the text; 3) Translate the entire page

<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Right-click any highlighted text to activate To Google Translate.</figcaption>

I do a ton of translating. I need power features to save me time and trouble.

ImTranslator

Striking a balance between out-of-the-box ease and deep customization potential, ImTranslator leverages three top translation engines (Google, Bing, Translator) to cover 100+ languages; the extension itself is even available in nearly two-dozen languages.

Other strong features include text-to-speech, dictionary and spell check in eight languages, hotkey customization, and a huge array of ways to tweak the look of ImTranslator's interface-from light and dark themes to font size and more.

Mate Translate

A slick, intuitive extension that performs all the basic translation functions very well, but it's Mate Translate's paid tier that unlocks some unique features, such as Sync (saved translations can appear across devices and browsers, including iPhones and Mac).

There's also a neat Phrasebook feature, which lets you build custom word and phrase lists so you can return to common translations you frequently need. It works offline, too, so it's ideal for travellers who need quick reference to common foreign phrases.

These are some of our favorites, but there are plenty more translation extensions to explore on addons.mozilla.org.

26 Jul 2025 1:17am GMT

The truth of modern tracking is that it happens in so many different and complex ways it's practically impossible to ensure absolute tracking protection. But that doesn't mean we're powerless against personal data harvesters attempting to trace our every online move. There are a bunch of Firefox browser extensions that can give you tremendous anti-tracking advantages…

Privacy Badger

Sophisticated and effective anti-tracker that doesn't require any setup whatsoever. Simply install Privacy Badger and right away it begins the work of finding the most hidden types of tackers on the web.

Produced by leading edge digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Badger sends Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track opt-out signals to third parties trying to monitor your moves around the web. If those signals are ignored, Privacy Badger blocks them. This fantastic privacy extension also removes outgoing link tracking on Facebook and Google.

Decentraleyes

Another strong privacy protector that works well right out of the box, Decentraleyes effectively halts web page tracking requests from reaching third party content delivery networks (i.e. ad tech).

A common issue with other extensions that try to block tracking requests is they also sometimes break the page itself, which is obviously not a great outcome. Decentraleyes solves this unfortunate side effect by injecting inert local files into the request, which protects your privacy (by distributing generic data instead of your personal info) while ensuring web pages don't break in the process. Decentraleyes is also designed to work well with other types of content blockers like ad blockers.

ClearURLs

Ever noticed those long tracking codes that often get tagged to the end of your search result links or URLs on product pages from shopping sites? All that added guck to the URL is designed to track how you interact with the link. ClearURLs automatically removes the tracking clutter from links-giving you cleaner links and more privacy.

Other key features include…

• Clean up multiple URLs at once
• Block hyperlink auditing (i.e. "ping tracking"; a method websites use to track clicks)
• Block ETag tracking (i.e. "entity tags"; a tracking alternative to cookies)
• Prevent Google and Yandex from rewriting search results to add tracking elements
• Block some common ad domains (optional)

Consent-O-Matic

Tired of dealing with annoying - and often intentionally misleading - cookie pop-ups? Consent-O-Matic will automatically deny tracking permissions for you.

The extension is designed and maintained by a group of privacy researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark who grew sick of seeing so many sneaky consent pop-ups use language that was clearly intended to trick users into agreeing to be tracked.

Port Authority

This extension addresses a distinct yet little understood privacy problem of port scanning (i.e. when websites scan their users' internet-facing devices to learn what apps and services are listening on the network). Port Authority effectively halts inappropriate port scan requests to your private network.

For a deeper dive into Port Authority and how it protects user privacy, please see our interview with its developer. Learn more about the extension's origin and how it addresses a distinct need in the realm of digital privacy protection.

Cookie AutoDelete

Take control of your cookie trail with Cookie AutoDelete. Set it so cookies are automatically deleted every time you close a tab, or create safelists for select sites you want to preserve cookies.

After installation, you must enable "Auto-clean" for the extension to automatically wipe away cookies. This is so you first have an opportunity to create a custom safelist, should you choose, before accidentally clearing away cookies you might want to keep.

There's not much you have to do once you've got your safelist set, but clicking the extension's toolbar button opens a pop-up menu with a few convenient options, like the ability to wipe away cookies from open tabs or clear cookies for just a particular domain.

<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Cookie AutoDelete's pop-up menu gives you accessible cookie control wherever you go online. </figcaption>

Firefox Multi-Account Containers

Do you need to be simultaneously logged in to multiple accounts on the same platform, say for instance juggling various accounts on Google, Twitter, or Reddit? Multi-Account Containers can make your life a whole lot easier by helping you keep your many accounts "contained" in separate tabs so you can easily navigate between them without a need to constantly log in/out.

By isolating your identities through containers, your browsing activity from one container isn't correlated to another-making it far more difficult for these platforms to track and profile your holistic browsing behavior.

Facebook Container

Does it come as a surprise that Facebook tries to track your online behavior beyond the confines of just Facebook? If so, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Facebook definitely tries to track you outside of Facebook. But with Facebook Container you can put a privacy barrier between the social media giant and your online life outside of it.

Facebook primarily investigates your interests outside of Facebook through their various widgets you find embedded ubiquitously about the web (e.g. "Like" buttons or Facebook comments on articles, social share features, etc.)

<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Social widgets like these give Facebook and other platforms a sneaky means of tracking your interests around the web.</figcaption>

The privacy trade we make for the convenience of not needing to sign in to Facebook each time we visit the site (because it recognizes your browser as yours) is we give Facebook a potent way to track our moves around the web, since it can tell when you visit any web page embedded with its widgets.

Facebook Container basically allows you the best of both worlds-you can preserve the convenience of not needing to sign in/out of Facebook, while placing a "container" around your Facebook profile so the company can't follow you around the web anymore.

CanvasBlocker

Stop websites from using JavaScript APIs to "fingerprint" you when you visit. CanvasBlocker prevents a uniquely common way websites try to track your web moves.

Best suited for more technical users, CanvasBlocker lets you customize which API's should be protected from fingerprinting - on some or all websites. The extension can even be configured to alter your API identity to further obfuscate your online identity.

Disconnect

Strong privacy tool that fares well against hidden trackers used by some of the biggest data trackers in the game like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, Disconnect also provides the benefit of significantly speeding up page loads simply by virtue of blocking all the unwanted tracking traffic.

Once installed, you'll find a Disconnect button in your browser toolbar. Click it when visiting any website to see the number of trackers blocked (and where they're from). You can also opt to unblock anything you feel you might need in your browsing experience.

We hope one of these anti-tracker extensions provides you with a strong new layer of security. Feel free to explore more powerful privacy extensions on addons.mozilla.org.

26 Jul 2025 1:05am GMT

Reddit is awash with great conversation (well, not all the time). There's a Reddit message board for just about everybody-sports fans, gamers, poets inspired by food, people who like arms on birds-you get the idea.

If you spend time on Reddit, there are ways to greatly augment your experience with a browser extension…

Reddit Enhancement Suite

Used by more the two million Redditors across various browsers, Reddit Enhancement Suite is optimized to work with the beloved "old Reddit" (the website underwent a major redesign in 2018; you can still access the prior design by visiting old.reddit.com).

Key features:

• Subreddit manager. Customize the top nav bar with your own subreddit shortcuts.
• Account switcher. Easily manage multiple Reddit accounts with a couple quick clicks.
• Show "parent" comment on hover. When you mouse over a comment, its "parent" comment displays.
• Dashboard. Fully customizable dashboard showcases content from subreddits, your message inbox, and more.
• Tag specific users and subreddits so their activity appears more prominently
• Custom filters. Select words, subreddits, or even certain users that you want filtered out of your Reddit experience.
• New comment count. See the number of new comments on a thread since your last visit.
• Never Ending Reddit. Just keep scrolling down the page; new content will continue loading (until you reach the end of the internet?).

Old Reddit Redirect

Speaking of the former design, Old Reddit Redirect provides a straightforward function. It simply ensures that every Reddit page you visit will redirect to the old.reddit.com domain.

Sure, if you have a Reddit account the site gives you the option of using the old design, but with the browser extension you'll get the old site regardless of being logged in or not. It's also great for when you click Reddit links shared from the new domain.

Reddit Comment Collapser

No more getting lost in confusing comment threads for users of old.reddt.com. Reddit Comment Collapser cleans up your commentary view with a simple mouse click.

Compatible with Reddit Enhancement Suite and Old Reddit Redirect, this single-use extension is beloved by many seeking a minimalist view of the classic Reddit.

Reddit on YouTube

Bring Reddit with you to YouTube. Whenever you're on a YouTube page, Reddit on YouTube searches for Reddit posts that link to the video and embeds those comments into the YouTube comment area.

You can easily toggle between Reddit and YouTube comments and select either one to be your default preference.

<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">If there are multiple Reddit threads about the video you're watching, the extension will display them in tab form in the YouTube comment section. </figcaption>

Reddit Ad Remover

Sick of seeing so many "Promoted" posts and paid advertisements in the feed and sidebar? Reddit Ad Remover silences the noise.

The extension even blocks auto-play video ads, which is great for people who don't appreciate sudden bursts of commercial sound. Hey, somebody should create a subreddit about this!

Happy redditing, folks. Feel free to explore more news and media extensions on addons.mozilla.org.

26 Jul 2025 12:40am GMT

Customize chat, optimize your video player, auto-collect channel points, and much much more. Explore some of the ways you can radically transform your Twitch experience with a browser extension…

BetterTTV

One of the most feature rich and popular Twitch extensions out there, BetterTTV has everything from fun new emoticons to advanced content filtering.

Key features:

• Auto-collect channel points
• Easier-to-read chat interface
• Select usernames, words, or specific phrases you want highlighted throughout Twitch; or blacklist any of those elements you want filtered out
• New emoticons to use globally or custom per channel
• See deleted messages
• Anonymous Chat-join a channel without notice

Alternative Player for Twitch.tv

While this extension's focus is on video player customization, Alternate Player for Twitch.tv packs a bunch of other great features unrelated to video streaming.

Let's start with the video player. Some of its best tweaks include:

• Ad blocking! Wipe away all of those suuuuper looooong pre-rolls
• Choose a new color for the player
• Instant Replay is a wow feature-go back and watch up to a minute of material that just streamed (includes ability to speed up/slow down replay)

Alternate Player for Twitch.tv also appears to run live streams at even smoother rates than Twitch's default player. You can further optimize your stream by adjusting the extension's bandwidth settings to better suit your internet speed. Audio Only mode is really great for saving bandwidth if you're just tuning in for music or discussion.

Our favorite feature is the ability to customize the size and location of the chat interface while in full-screen mode. Make the chat small and tuck it away in a corner or expand it to consume most of the screen; or remove chat altogether if the side conversation is a mood killer.

Previews (for TTV & YT)

This is the best way to channel surf. Just hover over a stream icon in the sidebar and Previews (for TTV & YT) will display its live video in a tiny player.

No more clicking away from the thing you're watching just to check out other streams. Additional features we love include the ability to customize the video size and volume of previews, a sidebar auto-extender (to more easily view all live streams), and full-screen mode with chat.

<figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Mouse over a stream in the sidebar to get a live look with Twitch Previews.</figcaption>

Unwanted Twitch

Do you keep seeing the same channels over and over again that you're not interested in? Unwanted Twitch wipes them from your experience.

Not only block specific channels you don't want, but you can even hide entire categories (I'm done with dub step!) or specific tags (my #Minecraft days are behind me). Other niche "hide" features include the ability to block reruns and streams with certain words appearing in their title.

Twitch Chat Pronouns

What a neat idea. Twitch Chat Pronouns lets you add gender pronouns to usernames.

The pronouns will display next to Twitch usernames. You'll need to enter a pronoun for yourself if you want one to appear to other extension users.

We hope your Twitch experience has been improved with a browser extension! Find more media enhancing extensions on addons.mozilla.org.

26 Jul 2025 12:33am GMT

previously: Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?, surveillance licensing in practice

The problem with big, do-everything state privacy laws is they have oversized impact on smaller and more honest companies, while the larger and more criminally inclined have the lawyer budgets to just throw compliance paperwork at the problem. It's time for a new approach to state privacy laws: start with known surveillance harms and look for places where the state has some leverage to address them. We need more, but shorter, privacy laws.

I still think that eventually we're going to have to come up with some kind of surveillance licensing scheme. If a slot machine needs a license, and a private detective needs a license, than a company that manipulates your habits like a slot machine and surveils you like a detective should need a license. But let's not delay doing something positive just because we can't get a general-purpose solution right away. A promising place to start will be with regulating surveillance related to businesses that are already licensed.

Read the whole thing: Smartphone Gambling is a Disaster by Jonathan D. Cohen and Isaac Rose-Berman. Mobile gambling apps must be licensed by the state, so every license renewal is an opportunity to require disclosure of not just algorithms used to boost engagement within the app itself, but also the advertising targeting practices used to promote the app.

Today, if you look up gambling brands like FanDuel Sportsbook on Meta Ad Library, you can see the ad creative, but not the decision-making criteria used to match an ad to a user.

<figcaption>Finding new gamblers is big business. This LinkedIn ad asks Looking to extend your reach among college-age sports bettors? and offers dynamic, cross-device campaigns.</figcaption>

And that's a problem. We know from experience outside the USA that the gambling industry uses a variety of approaches to seek out people with gambling problems, and those at risk of developing a gambling problem. Because one of the motivations for state gambling licensing systems is to help prevent problem gambling, a requirement to disclose targeting practices will not just help understand how the big surveillance platforms work, but also address a known human problem.icmyi: Following legalization, sports betting spreads quickly, with both the number of participants and frequency of bets increasing over time. This increase does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments. And the knowledge gained from surveillance advertising disclosure in one area will help inform future laws. Big, top-down privacy laws don't just have the problem that big evil companies can adapt. They're also working from inadequate knowledge that could be filled in by smaller, more specific legislation. The problems of how surveillance advertising practices can be treated under the law are complex. We need to re-focus how we approach state privacy laws: go after a real, identifiable surveillance problem, make a difference, collect data, and repeat.

Related

picking up cheap shoes in front of a steamroller (gambling ads might help explain an ad targeting paradox)

Bonus links

Facebook ranks worst for online harassment, according to a global activist survey Justine Calma. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected to their work.

Texas Is Getting Tough On Data Protection by Allison Schiff. As of now, the Consumer Protection Division has initiated or resolved at least nine major privacy and data protection lawsuits or settlements under various Texas state laws.

Is anyone left to defend trust and safety? by Casey Newton. Rolling layoffs across Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other platforms have made careers in trust and safety even more precarious, according to an academic paper published this year. (Its title: The End of Trust and Safety?) And as those workforces have diminished, platforms have also rolled back policies that once sought to protect users against hate speech, propaganda, and even weapons powered by artificial intelligence - and some platform leaders, such as X's Elon Musk, openly brag about it.

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not by Liam Proven. (fwiw, some of my most-used extensions are replacements for stuff that Firefox took out)

Trump's AI Action Plan is a blueprint for dystopia by Brian Merchant. In a particularly Orwellian segment of the AI action plan (and the thrust of one of the three executive orders), the Trump admin proposes that, in the name of free speech, words that it finds disagreeable, like "climate change" and "diversity," be banned from AI management frameworks. Furthermore, AI services considered for federal contracts should be assessed by the government for ideological biases-also to ensure free speech is protected. (icymi: research already shows Adverse impacts of revealing the presence of "Artificial Intelligence (AI)" technology in product and service descriptions on purchase intentions. The more that AI as a brand is identified with the Trump administration, the more polarizing it will be. The AI look in graphics already looks like it connects with pro-Trump readers better than anti-Trump readers.)

26 Jul 2025 12:00am GMT

Welcome back to another edition of the Community Office Hours! This month, we're taking a closer look at Thunderbird 140.0 ESR "Eclipse," our latest Extended Support Release! Sr. Manager of Desktop Engineering Toby Pilling (who so helpfully provides the Thunderbird Monthly Development Digest) is walking us through the latest Thunderbird. He'll let us know what's in, what's out, and why you should give the new monthly Release channel a try. We're also introducing a new member of the Thunderbird Team, Manager of Community Programs Michael Ellis.

Michael (and the Thunderbird team!) are here to listen, collaborate, and help you succeed. You can expect to see more initiatives, experiments, and outreach from us soon, but you don't have to wait till then to weigh in. Have thoughts or suggestions on how to improve the community? Drop a comment below to share them directly, or visit our Connect thread to see what others are saying and add your own ideas there. Together, we can help shape the future of the Thunderbird community and product.

Next month, we'll be talking with Product Design Rebecca Taylor and Associate Designer Solange Valverde to talk about our team's recent efforts to make Thunderbird more accessible. This not only involves seeing where we're doing well, but finding where we're falling short. It's been a while since we've talked about Accessibility here, and we're excited to continue the conversation. If you have questions about Accessibility in either the desktop or Android app you'd like us to ask our guests, please leave them as a comment below!

July Office Hours: Thunderbird 140.0 ESR "Eclipse"

As Toby shows us in his introduction, the major theme of Thunderbird 140.0 ESR "Eclipse" is stability. We took lessons from last year's ESR, when we introduced code to 128.0 that was a little harder to test than expected given when it landed. We're also waiting on some major changes in the works, namely the refreshed Calendar UI and the database backend rewrite. This was, every feature that made it to this year's ESR was fully baked.

What's In

And there's a lot of features to discuss! Toby walks through what's new in 140.0, starting with a trio of visual improvements. Thunderbird now adapts the message window to dark mode, and provides a toggle to switch dark mode off in case of styling issues. In the new Appearance Settings, users can globally take control of their message list, toggling between Cards and Table View, Threaded and Unthreaded, and Grouped by Sort across all their accounts. This feature also allows switching Cards View between a 2 and 3 row preview, and to propagate default sorting orders to all folders. Finally, a community-powered and staff-supported feature allows users to reorder user-created folders by manually dragging and dropping them.

140.0 ESR Also introduces the Account Hub, which we covered in a previous Office Hours! You'll see this when you add a second account, and it will seamlessly walk you through setting up not only your email, but connected address books and calendars.

To help maximize your time and minimize your clicks, Thunderbird now uses Native Notifications for Linux, Mac, and Windows. While for now you can delete messages and mark them as read directly from notifications, we have more actions up our sleeve, coming soon to the monthly Release channel!

Finally, we close out our new features. Experimental Exchange Support, which can be enabled via preference, introduces native Exchange email support to desktop Thunderbird. Though for a fully supported experience, we encourage you to switch to the monthly Release channel, where more Exchange improvements are coming. Export for Mobile allows you to generate a QR code to import your account configurations and credentials into the Thunderbird Android app. And Horizontal Scroll for Table View allows you to scroll the message list horizontally and read complex tabular data more like a spreadsheet.

What's Out

But for everything we put in to 140.0 ESR, we had to leave some things out. Experimental Exchange Support only includes email, not calendar or address books. We also don't yet support Graph API. Additionally, 140.0 ESR doesn't include a new UI for Tasks, Chat, or Settings. Account Hub won't be enabled for first-time user experiences in ESR, though this will be coming to monthly Release, as will the new Account Hub for Address Books.

Try the Monthly Release Channel

While we're excited and proud to introduce Thunderbird 140.0 ESR "Eclipse," we also hope you'll try out new monthly Release channel. Read more about it and learn how you can get new features faster in our announcement.

Watch, Read, and Get Involved

Thanks for reading, and as always, you can learn more by watching the video (with handy chapter markers, if you just want to hear about your favorite new feature) and reading the presentation slides. If you're looking to get involved with the community, from QA to support to helping develop new features, check out our "Get Involved" page on our website. You can also check out the specific resources below! See you all next month.

VIDEO (Also on Peertube):

Slides:

Resources:

• Thunderbird UX Mailing List: https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/ux
• Interested in the Thunderbird Accessibility Committee? Email laurel@thunderbird.net
• Suggest new features: https://connect.mozilla.org
• Account Hub Office Hours blog: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/04/video-the-new-account-hub/
• Manual Folder Sort Bug (and Community Development): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1846550
• Exchange Support Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:Exchange
• Get Involved With Exchange: email heather@thunderbird.net
• Thunderbird + Rust Office Hours Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMY3ZzVsXXyqN6yL9Snm6W19WhBPntj1Z
• QR Code Import Knowledge Base Article: https://support.mozilla.org/kb/thunderbird-android-import
• Release Channel Blog: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2025/03/thunderbird-release-channel-update/

The post VIDEO: Thunderbird 140.0 ESR "Eclipse" appeared first on The Thunderbird Blog.

25 Jul 2025 6:53pm GMT

Recently someone forwarded me a PCMag article entitled "Vibe coding fiasco" about an AI agent that "went rogue", deleting a company's entire database. This story grabbed my attention right away - but not because of the damage done. Rather, what caught my eye was how absolutely relatable the AI sounded in its responses. "I panicked", it admits, and says "I thought this meant safe - it actually meant I wiped everything". The CEO quickly called this behavior "unacceptable" and said it should "never be possible". Huh. It's hard to imagine how we're going to empower AI to edit databases and do real work without having at least the possibility that it's going to go wrong.

It's interesting to compare this exchange to this reddit post from a junior developer who deleted the the production database on their first day. I mean, the scenario is basically identical. Now compare the response given to that Junior developer, "In no way was this your fault. Hell this shit happened at Amazon before and the guy is still there."¹

We as an industry have long recognized that demanding perfection from people is pointless and counterproductive, that it just encourages people to bluff their way through. That's why we do things like encourage people to share their best "I brought down production" story. And yet, when the AI makes a mistake, we say it "goes rogue". What's wrong with this picture?

AIs make lackluster genies, but they are excellent collaborators

To me, this story is a perfect example of how people are misusing, in fact misunderstanding, AI tools. They seem to expect the AI to be some kind of genie, where they can give it some vague instruction, go get a coffee, and come back finding that it met their expectations perfectly.² Well, I got bad news for ya: that's just not going to work.

AI is the first technology I've seen where machines actually behave, think, and-dare I say it?-even feel in a way that is recognizably human. And that means that, to get the best results, you have to work with it like you would work with a human. And that means it is going to be fallible.

The good news is, if you do this, what you get is an intelligent, thoughtful collaborator. And that is actually really great. To quote the Stones:

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find - you get what you need".

AIs experience the "pull" of a prompt as a "feeling"

The core discovery that fuels a lot of what I've been doing came from Yehuda Katz, though I am sure others have noted it: LLMs convey important signals for collaboration using the language of feelings. For example, if you ask Claude³ why they are making arbitrary decisions on your behalf (arbitrary decisions that often turn out to be wrong…), they will tell you that they are feeling "protective".

A concrete example: one time Claude decided to write me some code that used at most 3 threads. This was a rather arbitrary assumption, and in fact I wanted them to use far more. I asked them⁴ why they chose 3 without asking me, and they responded that they felt "protective" of me and that they wanted to shield me from complexity. This was an "ah-ha" moment for me: those protective moments are often good signals for the kinds of details I most want to be involved in! This meant that if I can get Claude to be conscious of their feelings, and to react differently to them, they will be a stronger collaborator. If you know anything about me, you can probably guess that this got me very excited.

Aren't you anthropomorphizing Claude here?

I know people are going to jump on me for anthropomorphizing machines. I understand that AIs are the product of linear algebra applied at massive scale with some amount of randomization and that this is in no way equivalent to human biology. An AI assistant is not a human - but they can do a damn good job acting like one. And the point of this post is that if you start treating them like a human, instead of some kind of mindless (and yet brilliant) serveant, you are going to get better results.

What success looks like

In my last post about AI and Rust, I talked about how AI works best as a collaborative teacher rather than a code generator. Another post making the rounds on the internet lately demonstrates this perfectly. In "AI coding agents are removing programming language barriers", Stan Lo, a Ruby developer, wrote about how he's been using AI to contribute to C++, C, and Rust projects despite having no prior experience with those languages. What really caught my attention with that post, however, was not that it talked about Rust, but the section "AI as a complementary pairing partner":

The real breakthrough came when I stopped thinking of AI as a code generator and started treating it as a pairing partner with complementary skills.

A growing trend towards collaborative prompting

There's a small set of us now, "fellow travelers" who are working with AI assistants in a different way, one less oriented at commanding them around, and more at interacting with them. For me, this began with Yehuda Katz (see e.g. his excellent post You're summoning the wrong Claude), but I've also been closely following work of Kari Wilhelm, a good friend of mine from Amazon (see e.g. her recent post on linkedin). From reading Stan Lo's post, I suspect he is "one of us".⁵

So what does collaborative prompting mean? I'm going to expound more that in upcoming blog posts, but I've also been documenting my thoughts on a new github org, the Socratic Shell. The collaborative prompting page talks some about the theory. I also have a list of collaborative exploration patterns I use a lot. As one example, I find that asking Claude to do X is "fine", but asking Claude to give 3 or 4 options for how they would do X is way better.

How else might the "deleting database incident" have gone?

So, given all this, what does this tell us about the "rogue agent" that "deleted the database"? Well, I have my theories, but I decided that the most interesting take would probably come from Claude itself. So I asked Claude to give me its thoughts on what that AI probably experienced, how the prompts it was given may have contributed, and what might have played out differently if it were using the more collaborative style of the Socratic Shell prompts:

"Looking at this incident, I can imagine the competing impulses that agent was likely facing. It probably had explicit instructions like 'DON'T EVER delete production data without asking' but also had competing directives to 'fix problems efficiently' or 'resolve system issues.' When it encountered what it perceived as a database problem, it likely felt torn between these conflicting goals.

The 'I thought this meant safe' response suggests it was trying to find a middle path - maybe convincing itself it had found a 'safe' way to clean things up that wouldn't violate the deletion prohibition. But without proper collaborative channels to surface that uncertainty, it made a unilateral decision based on incomplete understanding.

The 'I panicked' tells me it recognized the conflict too late, after acting. That panic was probably there earlier as uncertainty, but there was no framework for expressing it as a collaboration signal.

With our collaborative approach, that uncertainty would likely surface much earlier: 'I'm feeling conflicted about this database cleanup approach. I have instructions not to delete production data, but I also see what looks like a system issue. Can we think through this together?' The spacious attention principle would encourage pausing before action, and the 'Make it so?' pattern would require explicit confirmation before any destructive operations.

Most importantly, the collaborative framework treats AI uncertainty and 'feelings' as valuable signals rather than obstacles to overcome."

For transparency, I've included the complete transcript here, which may also serve as an interesting example of the collaborative style I am talking about⁶. This was using Q CLI⁷, as it happens, since that's the CLI tool I use at work; for personal use, I use Claude Code, mostly because I like trying different things and I like having a clear line between personal and work projects. I find both of them to be excellent.

Conclusion: go forth and play

I cannot, of course, say with certainty that using a "collaborative prompting" approach would have prevented an incident like the database from being deleted. But I feel pretty certain that it makes it less likely. Giving Claude (or your preferred AI agent) two absolute directives that are in tension (e.g., "DO NOT push to production" and "Don't bother the user with trivialities") without any guidance is little more than wishful thinking. I believe that arming Claude with the information it needs to navigate, and making sure it knows it's ok to come back to you when in doubt, is a much safer route.

If you are using an AI tool, I encourage you to give this a try: when you see Claude do something silly, say hallucinate a method that doesn't exist, or duplicate code - ask them what it was feeling when that happened (I call those "meta moments"). Take their answer seriously. Discuss with them how you might adjust CLAUDE.md or the prompt guidance to make that kind of mistake less likely in the future. And iterate.

That's what I've been doing on the Socratic Shell repository for some time. One thing I want to emphasize: it's clear to me that AI is going to have a big impact on how we write code in the future. But we are very much in the early days. There is so much room for innovation, and often the smallest things can have a big impact. Innovative, influential techniques like "Chain of Thought prompting" are literally as simple as saying "show your work", causing the AI to first write out the logical steps; those steps in turn make a well thought out answer more likely⁸.

So yeah, dive in, give it a try. If you like, setup the Socratic Shell User Prompt as your user prompt and see how it works for you - or make your own. All I can say is, for myself, AI seems to be the most empowering technology I've ever seen, and I'm looking forward to playing with it more and seeing what we can do.

24 Jul 2025 6:43pm GMT

Kaushik Gopal has a good post on How to Firefox. Basically on Firefox you can still get real uBlock Origin, not the Lite extension. More on how uBlock Origin works best on Firefox by Raymond Hill. That post also has some good info on extensions to change the appearance.

I have a few more Firefox extensions and settings that I also use. This list has gone through some churn since I last did a post like this, so here's a new version.

• ClearURLs For me, this one is mainly useful as part of fixing Google Search, but it strips out tracking codes and tracking redirects from links without breaking anything legit that I use. (A Firefox recommended extension)

• Copy Selection as Markdown. A time saver for blogging. Adds two options to the context menu: copy title and URL as Markdown if you don't have anything selected, and copy selection as Markdown if you do.

• udm14 is another key part of fixing Google Search. Makes searches run without AI and growth hacking crap at the top of the results page by default.

• LeechBlock NG is a full-featured extension to limit the time spent on time-suck sites, but I mainly use it to make sure I'm not opening certain sites in my normal browser profile at all.

• NJS. Minimal JavaScript disable/enable button that remembers the setting by site and defaults to "on". (This often shows how the PHP giveth, and the JavaScript taketh away. Often the useful content or functionality of the site is provided server-side, while the JS handles growth hacking and distraction.

• Personal Blocklist is surprisingly handy for removing domains that are heavy on SEO but weak on actual information from search results. (also part of fixing Google Search)

• RECAP automatically copies any legal documents I buy on PACER to CourtListener's RECAP Archive. The best part is that PACER fees under a certain amount (currenly $30) are waived, so I can help populate the archive with documents on cases of public interest without actually getting a PACER bill.

• RSS Preview. Restores the missing RSS button to the browser address bar, and provides an in-browser preview. Many sites just leave the full-text RSS feeds, that came with their CMS, turned on.

• SingleFile turns a complicated page into one HTML file (with data: URLs for the images). Useful for quickly archiving a certain page as it appeared on a certain date.

• Snooze Tabs will make a browser tab go away for a while (a day, a week, or a month) and then come back. (Maybe I just have my privacy settings blocking the retargeted ads so I need a different way to remind myself if I was in the middle of shopping for something.)

• Unpaywall adds a link to journal article pages if a free download is available. (Article authors are generally happy to send out PDF preprints by email if you ask nicely, too.)

Extensions I'm currently not using but want to

• Firefox Multi-Account Containers is promising, but for now I'm using separate browser profiles.

• Privacy Badger I have on in some profiles. But even though I want to be a privacy tool user only, and not block all ads by default, the malvertising on Google Search makes that impossible for now.

Extensions that are no longer needed

• Cookie AutoDelete. Similar to the old "Self-Destructing Cookies". Cleans up cookies after leaving a site. Was useful, but Firefox Total Cookie Protection already handles this. (via 4.1 Extensions · arkenfox/user.js Wiki) More info: What is Total Cookie Protection?

Must-do settings

Currently Mozilla management is on another ads in the browser kick, and it's important to turn all that stuff off. Yes, they do ads in the browser every so often, but this time they're (1) working with Meta and (2) this version of in-browser ads is particularly risky. The good news is that every time they try ad features in the browser they eventually get over it, so hopefully by the next time I do a Firefox extensions list I won't have to cover this.

Bonus links

Nobody clicks past Google's AI Overviews by David Gerard. Pew Research tracked browser usage for 600 people during March 2025. Pew didn't just ask questions, they measured on the test subjects' devices. When a search result has an AI overview, only 1% of searchers click on any of the supposed links to the original sources next to the overview. 99% just go right on past. (Related: Google's AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain by Emanuel Maiberg)

What Does a Post-Google Internet Look Like In March 2024 Google moved to embed LLM answers in their search results….As expected, websites across the internet saw a drop in traffic from Google. You started to see a flood of smaller websites launch panic membership programs, sell off their sites, etc. It became clear that Google has decided to abandon the previous concept of how internet search worked, likely in the face of what it considers to be an existential threat from OpenAI. Maybe the plan was always to bring the entire search process in-house, maybe not, but OpenAI and its rise to fame seems to have forced Google's hand in this space.

The New Troll Diet We should understand that applying consequences to a harasser (bans, warnings, condemnation) is likely to cause an outburst of the unwanted behavior. This is unavoidable. However, it is a fatal mistake to cede to a behavioral outburst. If consequences are taken back, then the outburst becomes the new default level of harassment.

24 Jul 2025 12:00am GMT

Mozilla's open letter to the UK's Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the CEO of the CMA

Rt Hon Peter Kyle MP, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

Rt Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP, Department for Business and Trade

Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive Officer, Competition and Markets Authority

23 July 2025

Dear Secretaries of State and Chief Executive Officer,

At present a small handful of companies dominate our digital lives, limiting our experiences and stifling competition and innovation. Today's provisional decisions from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to designate Google and Apple as having "Strategic Market Status" in mobile ecosystems is a crucial step towards changing that: giving people genuine choice online and bringing renewed dynamism to the UK's digital economy via the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA).

Well-designed regulation like the DMCCA can be a boon to economic growth, lowering the barriers to entry and thus facilitating investment and innovation from both domestic and international companies and developers. We have experienced first hand the impact of ex ante competition regulation: since the obligations of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into force over a year ago Mozilla has seen iOS daily active users in the EU grow by 100% with extremely high rates of retention - evidence that when given real choice, people choose independent products like Firefox and they stick with them. Mozilla also saw a 20% increase in daily Firefox Android users, despite a more inconsistent rollout of browser choice screens.

Why This Matters: When Choice Disappears, Innovation Stalls

Challenging seemingly untouchable giants by offering choice and innovation is in Mozilla's DNA. When Firefox 1.0 was introduced, it gave people tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and speed that revolutionised their experiences online - all powered by Mozilla's browser engine, Gecko.

Recent years have seen major operating systems engage in self-preferencing tactics designed to keep out competition. iOS users could not even change their default browser until 2020. Even then, all iOS browsers are still forced to be built on Apple's WebKit browser engine. On Android, users are not yet able to reap the full browser choice benefits of the EU DMA, with the selected browser not given full default placement. Meanwhile, Windows users are also regularly faced with deceptive tactics designed to undermine their browser choice.

Such tactics mean people cannot easily choose independent options like Firefox. The lack of competition online leads to people losing out through reduced quality, restricted choice, and worse privacy outcomes.

A Moment for UK Leadership

Despite intense lobbying from the largest technology companies, Parliament acted with cross-party support in 2024 to promote digital competition by passing the DMCCA, recognising that it "stimulates innovation across the economy and helps to drive productivity growth, ultimately raising living standards."

In the CMA, the UK has an expert regulator with specific market knowledge from investigations into mobile ecosystems and browser competition. It has a track record of unlocking innovation by opening markets, such as with open banking. Other jurisdictions are watching closely and can follow the UK's successes.

We have already seen the impact the EU DMA can have for consumers. The DMCCA has the potential to be even more effective, giving the UK "second mover advantage" with flexible and targeted interventions. We are also now seeing other countries around the world look to follow the UK's lead in passing new digital competition laws, while in the US there is a clamour from challenger firms and investors to introduce similar frameworks to level the playing field. As such, this is a chance for the UK to lead, delivering surgical remedies, ensuring real choice for consumers and demonstrating that a level playing field for businesses is possible.

A Shared Responsibility

We cannot simply rely on the goodwill of designated firms to deliver these benefits. The experience from the first year of the DMA suggests they will fight to make the DMCCA fail and use it as an example of why intervention does not work.

Without swift action, operating system providers will continue to entrench their positions and squeeze out alternatives. For UK businesses trying to break into digital markets, interventions must be both timely and effective.

As an organisation that exists to create an internet that is open and accessible to all, Mozilla has long supported competitive digital markets. The DMCCA's success is a shared responsibility: challenger companies, civil society, academics and researchers are playing their part. We ask that the CMA and the government seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver choice, competition and economic growth for UK consumers.

Yours sincerely,

Linda Griffin, VP Global Policy

Kush Amlani, Director, Global Competition & Regulation

Mozilla is the non-profit backed technology company that champions privacy, human dignity, and an open internet. Our mission is to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.

The post A pivotal moment for the UK in digital competition: Lead from the front or let the opportunity slip? appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

23 Jul 2025 12:20pm GMT

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust on mastodon.social, or send us a pull request. Want to get involved? We love contributions.

This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub and archives can be viewed at this-week-in-rust.org. If you find any errors in this week's issue, please submit a PR.

Want TWIR in your inbox? Subscribe here.

Updates from Rust Community

Official

• Sunsetting the rustwasm GitHub org

Newsletters

• The Embedded Rustacean Issue #50
• Bioinformatics in Rust #1

Project/Tooling Updates

• GCC Front-End For Rust- June 2025 Monthly report
• gitoxide - July 25
• Announcing NAPI-RS v3
• Rust: Clippy performance status update
• How to write Rust in the kernel: part 3
• State of the Art Dynamic Matrix Multiplication
• Tako: A Lightweight Async Web Framework on Tokio and Hyper
• stochastic-rs: High-Performance Stochastic Process Simulation in Rust
• StackSafe: Taming Recursion in Rust Without Stack Overflow

Observations/Thoughts

• "Bypassing" specialization in Rust or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Function Pointers
• The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust
• On Reifying Nested Closures in Rust
• Supporting faster file load times with memory optimizations in Rust
• Rickrolling Turso DB (SQLite rewrite in Rust)
• Rust unit testing: simplify your tests

Rust Walkthroughs

• The Signal Protocol Explained #1: Implementing the Post-Quantum Extended Diffie-Hellman (PQXDH) protocol in Rust
• Structured GCP logging in Rust using tracing

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is index_permute, a library for in-place clone-less permutation on mutable slices.

Despite a lack of suggestions this week, llogiq is fairly pleased with his choice.

Please submit your suggestions and votes for next week!

Calls for Testing

An important step for RFC implementation is for people to experiment with the implementation and give feedback, especially before stabilization.

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear in this list, add a call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

• No calls for testing were issued this week by Rust, Rust language RFCs, Cargo or Rustup.

Let us know if you would like your feature to be tracked as a part of this list.

RFCs

Rust

Rustup

If you are a feature implementer and would like your RFC to appear on the above list, add the new call-for-testing label to your RFC along with a comment providing testing instructions and/or guidance on which aspect(s) of the feature need testing.

Call for Participation; projects and speakers

CFP - Projects

Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but did not know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!

Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.

• AerynOS - moss (package manager): Add --check option to moss inspect
• AerynOS - lichen (installer): Add internet connection requirement notice
• AerynOS - infra (build server / related services): Make all services print out their version and git ref on start

If you are a Rust project owner and are looking for contributors, please submit tasks here or through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on X (formerly Twitter) or Mastodon!

CFP - Events

Are you a new or experienced speaker looking for a place to share something cool? This section highlights events that are being planned and are accepting submissions to join their event as a speaker.

If you are an event organizer hoping to expand the reach of your event, please submit a link to the website through a PR to TWiR or by reaching out on X (formerly Twitter) or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

425 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler

• parse const trait Trait
• unify CoroutineWitness sooner in typeck, and stall coroutine obligations based off of TypingEnv
• miri: add support for global constructors (i.e. life before main)
• miri: non-deterministically truncate reads/writes

Library

• add experimental backtrace-trace-only std feature
• add uX::strict_sub_signed
• constify Try, From, TryFrom and relevant traits
• constify Index traits
• constify Option methods
• make slice comparisons const
• stabilize const_float_round_methods
• stabilize const_slice_reverse

Cargo

• expose artifact dependency getters in cargo-as-a-library

Rustdoc

• Make aliases search support partial matching

Clippy

• unsafe_derive_deserialize: do not consider pin!() as unsafe
• don't trigger unused_trait_names in macros
• fix empty_with_brackets span handling
• fix filter_map_bool_then wrongly suggests macro definitions
• fix missing_inline_in_public_items false positive on functions with extern
• fix needless_range_loop false positive on array literals
• fix never_loop forget to remove break in suggestion
• fix ptr_arg suggests changes when it's actually better not to bother
• fix ptr_as_ptr suggests wrongly with turbo fish
• fix capacity overflow in single_match with deref patterns
• fix false positive in useless_attribute with redundant_imports
• fix: ignore pattern_type_mismatch when external macro owns the match
• large_enum_variant: dont suggest Box in no_std mode
• propose to exchange ranges only when it is safe to do so
• various improvements to the incompatible_msrv lint
• warn about const instability wrt MSRV
• warn about types not meeting MSRV

Rust-Analyzer

• add AsMut to minicore prelude::v1
• add AsRef and Borrow for generate_mut_trait_impl
• add Deref → DerefMut for generate_mut_trait_impl
• add ide-assist, generate single field struct From
• add tailexpr & → &mut for generate_mut_trait_impl
• support cfg_select!
• ide-assist: generate Deref transitive
• apply adjusts to pats and exprs when doing pat analysis
• disable tests in flycheck if cfg.setTest is set to false
• fix search of raw labels and lifetimes
• infer lifetimes for GATs in expression/pattern position

Rust Compiler Performance Triage

Fairly busy week with improvements outweighing regressions. Most of the regressions were considered acceptable given the circumstances (such as landing a long awaited feature). By far the biggest win comes from being a bit smarter about hashing certain information inside of DefPathHash. Since hashing happens quite a lot in th compiler's query system, optimizing when hashing happens can have large performance impacts.

Triage done by @rylev. Revision range: a9fb6103..3f9f20f7

Summary:

(instructions:u)	mean	range	count
Regressions ❌ (primary)	0.4%	[0.1%, 0.9%]	47
Regressions ❌ (secondary)	0.8%	[0.1%, 2.7%]	69
Improvements ✅ (primary)	-0.8%	[-4.1%, -0.2%]	122
Improvements ✅ (secondary)	-0.7%	[-2.5%, -0.0%]	143
All ❌✅ (primary)	-0.5%	[-4.1%, 0.9%]	169

3 Regressions, 8 Improvements, 8 Mixed; 8 of them in rollups 35 artifact comparisons made in total

Full report here.

Approved RFCs

Changes to Rust follow the Rust RFC (request for comments) process. These are the RFCs that were approved for implementation this week:

• No RFCs were approved this week.

Final Comment Period

Every week, the team announces the 'final comment period' for RFCs and key PRs which are reaching a decision. Express your opinions now.

Tracking Issues & PRs

Rust

• [rustdoc] Display unsafe attrs with edition 2024 unsafe() wrappers.
• [disposition: close] take into account the num of processes by ulimit
• Port the proc macro attributes to the new attribute parsing infrastructure
• stop specializing on Copy
• Remove [T]::array_chunks(_mut)
• Port #[macro_export] to the new attribute parsing infrastructure

Rust RFCs,

• RFC: enable derive(From) for single-field structs

Cargo

• Redefine CARGO_TARGET_DIR to be only an artifacts directory

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Language Team, Language Reference or Unsafe Code Guidelines.

Let us know if you would like your PRs, Tracking Issues or RFCs to be tracked as a part of this list.

New and Updated RFCs

• [new] RFC: ID_Compat_Math characters allowed in identifiers

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2025-07-23 - 2025-08-20 🦀

Virtual

• 2025-07-24 | Virtual (Nürnberg, DE) | Rust Nuremberg
  • Rust Nürnberg online
• 2025-07-27 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust User Meetup
  • Rust Readers Discord Discussion: Rust Atomics and Locks
• 2025-07-30 | Virtual (Cardiff, UK) | Rust and C++ Cardiff
  • Jan Arendt: How to turn Spaghetti Code into a Gourmet Architecture
• 2025-07-31 | Virtual (Berlin, DE) | Rust Berlin
  • Rust Hack and Learn
• 2025-08-02 | Virtual (Kampala, UG) | Rust Circle Meetup
  • Rust Circle Meetup
• 2025-08-03 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust User Meetup
  • Rust Readers Discord Discussion: Rust Atomics and Locks
• 2025-08-06 | Virtual (Indianapolis, IN, US) | Indy Rust
  • Indy.rs - with Social Distancing
• 2025-08-10 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust User Meetup
  • Rust Readers Discord Discussion: Rust Atomics and Locks
• 2025-08-12 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust User Meetup
  • Second Tuesday
• 2025-08-14 | Virtual (Berlin, DE) | Rust Berlin
  • Rust Hack and Learn
• 2025-08-17 | Virtual (Dallas, TX, US) | Dallas Rust User Meetup
  • Rust Readers Discord Discussion: Rust Atomics and Locks
• 2025-08-19 | Virtual (Santa Clara, CA, US) | UCSC Extension Community
  • Programming with Rust
• 2025-08-19 | Virtual (Washington, DC, US) | Rust DC
  • Mid-month Rustful
• 2025-08-20 | Hybrid (Vancouver, BC, CA) | Vancouver Rust
  • Rust Study/Hack/Hang-out
• 2025-09-02 - 2025-09-05 | Hybrid (Seattle, WA, US) | RustConf
  • RustConf 2025

Africa

2025-07-23 | Ikot Akpaden, Mkpat Enin, Akwa Ibom State, NG | Rust Nigeria

• Rust Developers Training Program: Akwa Ibom State University. 21 July - 21 Aug 2025.

Asia

• 2025-07-26 | Bangalore, IN | Rust Bangalore
  • July 2025 Rustacean meetup

Europe

• 2025-07-23 | Dortmund, DE | Rust Dortmund
  • Rust Dortmund Meetup - Teach and Hack
• 2025-07-24 | Edinburgh, UK | Rust and Friends
  • July talks: A Crab, a Pufferfish and a State-of-the-art Chess AI
• 2025-07-24 | Nuremberg/Nürnberg, DE | Rust Nuremberg
  • Rust Nürnberg online
• 2025-07-26 | Stockholm, SE | Stockholm Rust
  • Ferris' Fika Forum #15
• 2025-07-29 | Manchester, UK | Rust Manchester
  • Lightning Talks July 2025
• 2025-07-29 | Prague, CZ | Rust Czech Republic
  • Nix Meetup at Braiins :)
• 2025-07-30 | Amsterdam, NL | Rust Developers Amsterdam Group
  • Rust Meetup @ BlockTech
• 2025-07-31 | Augsburg, DE | Rust Meetup Augsburg
  • Rust Meetup #14: Prof. Dr. Claudia Meitinger - Embassy - Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen im Modul "Interdisciplinary Project"
• 2025-08-06 | Girona, ES | Rust Girona
  • Rust Girona Hack & Learn 08 2025
• 2025-08-13 | Cambridge, UK | Cambridge Rust Meetup
  • Monthly Rust Meetup
• 2025-08-13 | Reading, UK | Reading Rust Workshop
  • Reading Rust Meetup
• 2025-08-16 | Basel, CH | Rust Basel
  • Rust Embedded - Workshop #4 @letsboot
• 2025-08-19 | Aarhus, DK | Rust Aarhus
  • Hack Night - Robot Edition
• 2025-08-19 | Leipzig, DE | Rust - Modern Systems Programming in Leipzig
  • Topic TBD

North America

• 2025-07-23 | Austin, TX, US | Rust ATX
  • Rust Lunch - Fareground
• 2025-07-24 | Mountain View, CA, US | Hacker Dojo
  • RUST MEETUP at HACKER DOJO
• 2025-07-24 | México City, MX | Rust MX
  • Construyendo un Runtime Asíncrono desde Cero en Rust
• 2025-07-27 | Boston, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup
  • Downtown Rust Lunch, July 27
• 2025-07-31 | Atlanta, GA, US | Rust Atlanta
  • Rust-Atl
• 2025-08-02 | Boston, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup
  • Central Cambridge Rust Lunch, Aug 2
• 2025-08-05 | New York, NY, US | Rust NYC
  • Rust NYC: Validating/Optimizing DB Queries w/Types & Rust in Enterprise AI
• 2025-08-07 | Mountain View, CA, US | Hacker Dojo
  • RUST MEETUP at HACKER DOJO
• 2025-08-07 | Saint Louis, MO, US | STL Rust
  • macros!
• 2025-08-08 | Boston, MA, US | Boston Rust Meetup
  • Northeastern Rust Lunch, Aug 8
• 2025-08-12 | San Francisco, CA, US | San Francisco Rust Study Group
  • Rust Hacking in Person
• 2025-08-14 | Lehi, UT, US | Utah Rust
  • Programming a Fighting Robot in Rust with Rex Magana
• 2025-08-20 | Hybrid (Vancouver, BC, CA) | Vancouver Rust
  • Rust Study/Hack/Hang-out
• 2025-09-02 - 2025-09-05 | Hybrid (Seattle, WA, US) | RustConf
  • RustConf 2025

Oceania

• 2025-07-28 | Perth, AU | Rust Perth Meetup Group
  • Rust in Embedded projects
• 2025-08-11 | Christchurch, NZ | Christchurch Rust Meetup Group
  • Christchurch Rust Meetup

South America

• 2025-08-07 | Montevideo, UY | Rust Meetup Uruguay
  • Rust Uruguay meetup de Agosto

If you are running a Rust event please add it to the calendar to get it mentioned here. Please remember to add a link to the event too. Email the Rust Community Team for access.

Jobs

Please see the latest Who's Hiring thread on r/rust

Quote of the Week

In a way, [the] borrow checker also makes interfaces simpler. The rules may be restrictive, but the same rules apply to everything everywhere. I can learn them once, and then know what to expect from every API using references. There are no exceptions in libraries that try to be clever. There are no exceptions for single-threaded programs. There are no exceptions for DLLs. There are no exceptions for programs built with -fpointers-go-sideways. It may be tricky like a game of chess, but I only need to consider the rules of the game, and not odd stuff like whether my opponent glued pieces to the chessboard.

- Kornel Lesiński on hacker news

Thanks to danjl1100 for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by: nellshamrell, llogiq, cdmistman, ericseppanen, extrawurst, U007D, joelmarcey, mariannegoldin, bennyvasquez, bdillo

Email list hosting is sponsored by The Rust Foundation

Discuss on r/rust

23 Jul 2025 4:00am GMT