fidzu : thunderbird

There's a popular post going around about Alibaba doing WebAudio fingerprinting and in the process, mucking around with the author's Bluetooth headphones. Here's the tl;dr: browser fingerprinting is a far-too-pervasive method of tracking users across the web, but at least for WebAudio specifically, it's not very effective. Firefox has largely eliminated this fingerprinting vector.

I work on Firefox. Chrome, Brave, Safari probably have defenses against this. I'm pretty sure Chrome's WebAudio code was made approximately constant (like ours) many years ago. It probably still leaks CPU architecture though.

I don't fully agree with the adage "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - I think a more true one might be "given enough victims, your attack code is going to change something that makes someone notice". And that's exactly what happened with... sorry, wrong link. That's exactly what happened with Alibaba's fingerprinting code.

If you want to test Alibaba's WebAudio fingerprint, I had claude extract it into a standalone page. My value is sha256:9a388c0dd04cfdc54314f9d961c7e2d247b972067e28d1cea76bd6060cf1392e, and the other value we saw in an internal survey was sha256:16d3191880ce01f726015ec6a1f9a072a81ebd04bf489098d4685d1d1c0b2711.

WebAudio Fingerprinting in Firefox

We made the WebAudio constant in Firefox 118 as part of our initial round of Fingerprinting Protection features. This eliminated most of the differences.

99.24% of users belong to one of three values, and .76% of users had that data collection point fail (a value of zero.) So virtually all users have one of these three values but why are there three values??? Why isn't there one?? Well this is why we collected this telemetry - to ensure we really had made things constant the way we thought we had, and if we hadn't, figure out why and fix it.

The improvements we put into 118 eliminated a lot of differences and I wish I had a graph I could show you of what it looked like before (but I don't.) But what about these remaining three buckets? We were able to figure out that the differences between these are CPU-level differences, which is not surprising given the math operations of audio processing. Specifically one value comes from (all) x86 CPUs and x64 CPUs that lack fused multiply-add instructions, one value from x64 with FMA, and one value from CPUs with the NEON instruction set (ARM).

We followed up on that effort to collapse these buckets into one another. Bug 2036977 collapses the x64 (with FMA3) into the x86/x64 (without FMA3) bucket. Bug 2040494 is on file to collapse the remaining bucket into the NEON bucket but I haven't worked on it in a while because it's just not as high a priority as larger improvements we can make like Sanitizing the WebGL Renderer and Vendor (something I talked a bit about a few months ago).

Because if you've read this far you surely care about the rest of the graph also. There is also the long-tail of 23 other values belonging to 48 other users. This is very unfortunate, as it makes these users completely unique, but it is also not terribly unusual - computers are weird and these results could have been caused by bad RAM, a CPU bug, or possibly some crazy architecture (LoongArch??).

But at the end of the day, WebAudio fingerprinting is nearly useless. I don't expect browser fingerprinting to disappear from websites entirely (unless some regulatory action occurs, fingers crossed) - it's still going to be effective against a majority of users on the web, but at least for privacy focused browsers, it should be wildly less effective.

20 Aug 2026 7:56pm GMT

Open or closed AI isn't a fringe question anymore; it's a live policy debate, with real consequences for who gets to build, audit, and compete in the AI ecosystem. But as that debate plays out in Washington, Brussels, and beyond, the harder questions are still very much up for discussion. What does meaningful openness actually require? Where should the guardrails sit? And who gets a say in setting them?

That's exactly the gap a group of us set out to close two years ago.

Back in 2024, Mozilla and the Columbia Institute of Global Politics brought together more than 40 researchers, builders, and policy experts for the Columbia Convening on Openness and AI. The goal was simple to state, but hard to do: figure out what "open" actually means once you're talking about foundational models rather than traditional software, and build a shared vocabulary that researchers, developers, policymakers, and civil society could all work from.

The convening was the start of a years-long effort to turn a room full of perspectives on openness into something durable and useful for developers, builders, and policymakers alike. Recently, that effort reached a new milestone: Communications of the ACM published "Unpacking Open Source AI: Toward a Framework for Openness in Foundation Models," which I co-authored alongside a host of other allies spanning academia, industry, and civil society.

The paper outlines a framework that does something the open source AI debate badly needs. It stops treating "open" as a single switch you flip on or off. Instead, it breaks the AI stack down into its component parts - data, code, model weights, documentation, and more - and looks at how openness at each layer shapes who actually gets to inspect, use, and build on a system. That kind of specificity matters. A lot of the current policy debate treats open source AI as a monolith, when in reality the details of what gets shared (and how) are what determine whether openness delivers on its promise of safety, competition, and accountability.

A few of the framework's ideas are worth pulling out. First, it treats openness as a gradient rather than a binary. A system can be open on weights while remaining closed on training data, or open on code while offering little documentation on how it was evaluated. The framework offers language to describe that mix precisely, instead of lumping it under one vague label. Second, it argues that safety can't be assessed at the model level alone: what matters just as much is the surrounding system - the deployment environment, the safeguards, the moderation layers, and governance structures. That's because a model's real-world risk profile is shaped by all of it together, not by the weights in isolation. Critically, the framework deliberately stops short of prescribing one "correct" level of openness for every system. Instead, it gives developers, researchers, and regulators a common vocabulary to make and evaluate those tradeoffs on a case-by-case basis.

It's worth pausing on who's behind this work. Scroll through the author list, and you'll find a genuine cross-section of the individuals and organizations contributing to moving the development of open systems forward. It's a collection of people who've spent years arguing, in good faith and often across real disagreements, that open approaches can be a foundation for safer, more democratic, more accountable AI. That's the same spirit that drove the original convening, and it's what makes this paper a genuinely important milestone for our mission to make AI systems accessible to the many, rather than the few.

You can read the full paper here.

The post A New Framework for Open Source AI appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

20 Aug 2026 3:57pm GMT

You've probably heard about "ad blockers," "tab managers," "anti-trackers" or any number of browser customization tools commonly known as extensions. And maybe you're intrigued to try one, but you've never installed an extension before and the whole notion just seems a bit vague.

Let's demystify extensions.

An extension is simply an app that runs on a browser like Firefox. From serious productivity and privacy enhancing features to fun stuff like changing the way the web looks and feels, extensions give you the power to completely personalize your browsing experience.

Addons.mozilla.org (AMO) is a discovery site that hosts thousands of independently developed Firefox extensions. It's a vast and eclectic ecosystem of features, so we've hand-picked a small collection of great extensions to get you started…

I've always wanted an ad blocker!

uBlock Origin

Works beautifully "right out of the box." Just add it to Firefox and uBlock Origin will automatically start blocking all types of advertising - display ads, banners, video pre-rolls, pop-ups - you name it.

Of course, if you prefer deeper content blocking customization, uBlock Origin allows for fine control as well, like the ability to import your own custom block filters or access a data display that shows how much of a web page was blocked by the extension. More than just an ad blocker, uBlock Origin also effectively thwarts some websites that may be infected with malware.

For more insights about this excellent ad blocker, please see uBlock Origin - everything you need to know about the ad blocker, or to explore even more ad blocker options, check out What's the best ad blocker for you?

I'm concerned about my privacy and tracking around the web

Privacy Badger

The flagship anti-tracking extension from privacy proponents at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy Badger is programmed to look for tracking heuristics (i.e. specific actions that indicate someone is trying to track you).

Zero set up required. Just install Privacy Badger and it will automatically search for third-party cookies, HTML5 local storage "supercookies," canvas fingerprinting, and other sneaky tracking methods.

Consent-O-Matic

Not only will Consent-O-Matic automatically handle pop-up data consent forms (per GDPR regulations), but it's brilliantly designed to interpret the often intentionally confusing language of consent pop-ups trying to trick you into agreeing to invasive tracking.

Developed by internet privacy researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark who grew sick of seeing so many deceptive consent pop-ups, Consent-O-Matic's decision-making logic is built upon studying hundreds of pop-ups and identifying duplicitous patterns. So using this extension not only gives you a great ally in the fight against intrusive tracking, but you're spared the annoyance of constantly clicking consent forms all over the internet.

I need an easier way to translate languages

Simple Translate

Do you do a lot of language translations on the web? If so, it's a hassle always copying text and navigating away from the page you're on just to translate a word or phrase. Simple Translate solves this problem by giving you the power to perform translations right there on the page.

Just highlight the text you want translated and right-click to get instant translations in a handy pop-up display, so you never have to leave the page again.

YouTube your way

Enhancer for YouTube

Despite offering dozens of creative customization features, Enhancer for YouTube is easy to grasp and gives you a variety of ways to radically alter YouTube functionality.

Once the extension is installed you'll find an additional set of controls just beneath YouTube's video player (you can even select the extension features you want to appear in the control bar).

Key features include…

• Customize video player size
• Change YouTube's look with a dark theme
• Volume boost
• Ad blocking (with ability to allow ads from channels you choose to support)
• One-click screenshots
• Change playback speed
• High-def default video quality

I'm drowning in browser tabs! Send help!

OneTab

You've got an overwhelming number of open tabs. You can't close them. You need them. But you can't organize them all right now either. You're too busy. What to do?!

If you have OneTab on Firefox you just click the toolbar button and suddenly all those open tabs become a clean list of text links listed on a single page. Ahhh serenity.

Not only will you create browser breathing room for yourself, but with all those previously open tabs now closed and converted to text links, you've also freed up a bunch of CPU and memory, which should improve browser speed and performance.

If you've never installed a browser extension before, we hope you found something here that piques your interest to try. To continue exploring ways to personalize Firefox through the power of extensions, please see our collection of 100+ Recommended Extensions.

20 Aug 2026 1:16am GMT