15 May 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Mozilla Privacy Blog: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools and should not be undermined

In the context of concerns around young people's interactions with digital technologies, the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is consulting on additional measures to prepare young people for growing up in a digital world. Before the backdrop of users circumventing age assurance systems mandated under the UK's Online Safety Act, the consultation considers age-gating virtual private networks (VPNs).

Mozilla's mission is grounded in the belief that the internet must remain open and accessible to all, and that privacy and security online are fundamental human rights. We recognize that the protection of young people online is one of the most pressing and challenging questions of our time, and we are committed to supporting policy proposals that address the root causes of online harms. We are concerned, however, that blunt interventions like mandatory age assurance and restricting access to tools like VPNs are not effective in improving the protection afforded to young people online, while undermining the fundamental rights of all users.

VPNs serve as critical privacy and security tools for users across all ages. By hiding users' IP addresses, VPNs help protect users' location, reduce tracking and avoid IP-based profiling. People use VPNs for lots of different reasons: to connect to their school's or employer's network remotely, to avoid censorship or to simply protect their privacy and security online. While being able to access VPNs is especially important for vulnerable groups like activists, dissidents or journalists, VPNs improve everyone's baseline protection online.

Young people are particularly vulnerable to online tracking, targeted advertising, and the risks that flow from personal data being collected and processed for commercial purposes without adequate consent or transparency. In a world in which young people are interacting with digital technologies as part of their realities from young ages onward, restricting young people's access to privacy-protecting technologies is in tension with the goal of equipping them to navigate the internet safely and competently. In order to be able to develop agency and responsible habits in engaging with digital technologies, it is crucial for young people to be introduced to best practices and key safety and privacy tools as they engage with the online world.

Rather than age-gating technologies like VPNs, we believe that regulators should address the root causes of online harm by holding platforms to account, encouraging the responsible use of parental controls and investing in digital skills and a whole of society approach to digital wellbeing.

Read our full submission to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

The post Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools and should not be undermined appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

15 May 2026 12:23pm GMT

13 May 2026

feedPlanet Mozilla

Firefox Tooling Announcements: MozPhab 2.15.1 Released

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.15.1:

Discuss these changes in #engineering-workflow on Slack or #Conduit Matrix.

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic

13 May 2026 8:14pm GMT

This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 651

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

Foundation
Newsletters
Project/Tooling Updates
Observations/Thoughts
Rust Walkthroughs
Miscellaneous

Crate of the Week

This week's crate is cloakrs, a library and CLI tool for detecting and masking personally identifiable information.

Despite having no suggestion to work with, llogiq is content 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, Cargo, Rustup or Rust language RFCs.

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

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.

No Calls for participation were submitted this week.

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 Bluesky 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 Bluesky or Mastodon!

Updates from the Rust Project

502 pull requests were merged in the last week

Compiler
Library
Cargo
Clippy
Rust-Analyzer
Rust Compiler Performance Triage

This week saw a couple of PRs affecting the new trait solver, which is steadily moving forward, in particular #156139 was a massive perf. win. #156185 optimized visibility computation, resulting in up to a 8% win on the typenum crate.

Triage done by @Kobzol. Revision range: 1d72d7e8..aa31d6d8

Summary:

(instructions:u) mean range count
Regressions ❌
(primary)		 0.3% [0.1%, 0.4%] 62
Regressions ❌
(secondary)		 0.5% [0.1%, 1.5%] 77
Improvements ✅
(primary)		 -1.7% [-8.8%, -0.2%] 18
Improvements ✅
(secondary)		 -13.6% [-85.6%, -0.0%] 34
All ❌✅ (primary) -0.2% [-8.8%, 0.4%] 80

2 Regressions, 2 Improvements, 5 Mixed; 4 of them in rollups 31 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:

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

Rust RFCs

Language Reference

Leadership Council

No Items entered Final Comment Period this week for Cargo, Compiler Team (MCPs only), Language Team 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

Upcoming Events

Rusty Events between 2026-05-13 - 2026-06-10 🦀

Virtual
Asia
Europe
North America
Oceania
South America

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

Of the last 150 merged PRs to Bun, 108 are memory-safety-adjacent - missed cleanup on an error path, use-after-free, uninitialized reads, out-of-bounds access, reentrancy. 75 of those would not compile in a language with destructors, move semantics, and a borrow checker. One in three PRs we ship is "forgot to free something on an error path."

Of the 108, ~88 are in Zig. The ~14 in C++ are mostly ref-cycles and GC-concurrency races - the residual class that survives any language. So the Zig→Rust delta is real: the Zig bugs are exactly the destructor/ownership-fixable kind, and the C++ side is already near the floor.

Without stronger compile-time guarantees, this stays a cat-and-mouse game. The proposal is to remove the largest bug class structurally rather than fix instances of it indefinitely.

- Jarred Sumner on the bun github Thanks to Brian Kung for the suggestion!

Please submit quotes and vote for next week!

This Week in Rust is edited by:

Email list hosting is sponsored by The Rust Foundation

Discuss on r/rust

13 May 2026 4:00am GMT