fidzu : thunderbird

This is part one of a two-part series in which we explore approaches to protecting children online while safeguarding privacy, security and the open web. Part one covers our concerns regarding age gates, and alternative policy proposals that address the root causes of online harms.

Young people today have unprecedented opportunities to learn, connect, and explore - not just the web and the world, but also themselves. With the increased ubiquity of digital technologies and devices, worries around the relationship between these technologies and young people's well-being have grown, too. While concerns about the societal implications of new technologies is not a new phenomenon, experts argue that the accelerating speed of deployment of new technologies has outpaced scientists' capacity to feed into policy recommendations addressing risks. A growing body of research documents the harms experienced by young people online and the challenges reported by parents attempting to mediate their kids' technology use. At the same time, experts highlight the importance of contextual factors like existing mental health conditions, socio-economic circumstances and parental mediation to understand the real-world effects of digital technologies.

Faced with this complexity, and mounting public pressure, policymakers around the world are urgently seeking ways to improve child safety online. Driven by a sense of time running out and promises of new technical solutions to difficult questions, this has led, across jurisdictions, to proposals to restrict young people's access to certain technologies or platforms by introducing age assurance mandates.

Privacy and user empowerment have always formed a core part of Mozilla's mission. As we have said before, we support safer spaces for minors, but we caution against approaches that rely on identity checks, surveillance-based enforcement, or exclusionary defaults. Such interventions rely on the collection of personal and sensitive data and, thus, introduce major new privacy and security risks.

While many technologies exist to verify, estimate, or infer users' ages, fundamental tensions around accessibility, their effectiveness and effects on user's privacy, security and free expression remain. Technological approaches must be part of wider efforts to address the root causes of online harms. However, the deployment of age assurance technologies will not solve the complex challenge of preparing young people to navigate an increasingly online world and ensure their wellbeing. That will require more holistic approaches: offering education and support to navigate the web safely, addressing harmful business practices and acknowledging the offline factors shaping children's lives including social inequality, poverty or disparate access to (mental) health care services.

Ineffective age-gating mandates and the dangerous shift toward VPN restrictions

As jurisdictions around the world gain experience with government-mandated age gates for certain services, evidence is mounting that age restrictions are not an effective policy tool. Avoiding age gates is widespread and trivially easy: In Australia, where minors under 16 year of age have been banned from certain social media platforms since December 2025, the government's Compliance Update reports that seven out of ten young Australians remain online, often skirting age checks by simply entering a fake birthdate. A recent study on the implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act found that a third of children have bypassed age gates with fairly trivial steps like faking their birthdate, borrowing someone else's login credentials, or even drawing on facial hair, and that a quarter of parents have helped their children to bypass age assurance systems. In the US, studies indicate that as far back as 2011, 64% of parents who were aware their child under 13 had a social media account were also ones who helped them create that account.

Confronted with the apparent ineffectiveness of age gates, policymakers around the world seem to be shifting their attention to alleged circumvention tools. While research shows that many young people bypass age barriers by using other people's devices and accounts or tricking age estimation tools by making themselves look older, virtual private networks (VPNs) are increasingly framed as primarily a "loophole" to age gates. VPNs create encrypted "tunnels" between a user's device and the internet, protecting all internet traffic from that device and concealing users' IP addresses. VPNs are an essential privacy and security resource for millions of users worldwide, including young people.

Utah's recent age verification law holds websites hosting age-restricted content liable for verifying the age of anyone physically located in Utah, including individuals using VPNs or proxies. While the law does not ban VPNs outright, it forces websites to either block known VPN IP addresses or verify the age of every visitor globally. In the UK, policymakers debated age gates for VPNs extensively, but stopped short of restricting VPNs after new evidence confirmed that VPNs are not a relevant pathway for children seeking to bypass age checks. In Brazil, the ECA Digital law empowers the regulatory authority to order technical countermeasures against circumvention tools such as VPNs. These developments suggest a worrying trend: well-meaning but ineffective attempts to protect children risk undermining the fundamental rights to privacy, security, and free expression of all users, as well as the health and openness of the web itself.

We are convinced, however, that there are rights-respecting alternatives policymakers can pursue to empower young people online and improve their safety and well-being.

Moving beyond access bans

We strongly believe that online safety frameworks should be grounded in children's rights, striking a balance between their right to protection and their right to participate in society, express themselves freely, and access media and information. Such frameworks must also be proportionate and should not undermine the fundamental rights and access to tools like VPNs for all users.

Rather than focusing on limiting access, we believe that policymakers should prioritize interventions that tackle the root causes of online harm. Before considering new instruments, this work starts with ensuring that independent regulatory authorities have the necessary resources to enforce existing online safety frameworks. In Europe, preliminary findings against Meta and TikTok find these companies' addictive design features to be in breach of the Digital Services Act, underlining the potential of frameworks like the DSA to address key concerns.

The design of online interfaces, and the affordances and constraints they offer, significantly influences users' interactions, decisions and overall wellbeing. 'Dark patterns' or deceptive interfaces are key drivers of harms experienced by users, and especially young people: they can compel people to consent to extensive data collection and processing, resulting in hyper-personalized feeds, personalized ads that may exploit cognitive vulnerabilities and promote unhealthy or excessive consumer choices, and an overall erosion of privacy.

This is why we support proposals like EU Digital Fairness Act (DFA) and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) that could fill regulatory gaps. Specifically, we advocate for the prohibition of harmful design, guided by harmonized definitions of core concepts like "dark patterns", "deceptive design," and "addictive design" and anti-circumvention clauses to prevent companies from avoiding regulation through small tweaks. Platforms should be responsible for demonstrating that their design choices are fair, non-manipulative and non-exploitative. And services that are likely to be accessed by children should be required to refrain from enabling certain design features, including excessive notifications, endless feeds and gambling-like features by default, and only with parental consent.

Further, we urge policymakers to adopt a privacy-first approach to online harms. Many of the risks encountered by young people online are related to the collection and processing of personal data. Platforms collect enormous amounts of personal data, including sensitive data, to personalize and target services, ranging from algorithmic recommender systems to online ads. While the systems that target and display ads and curate online content are distinct, both are based on the surveillance and profiling of users.

Such profiling is the basis for young people being targeted with personalized ads and content recommendations, which can segment, exclude, or steer people into inequitable options and towards harmful content. Providers should thus be prohibited from using sensitive personal data (e.g. ethnicity, religious belief, health status, sexual orientation, political affiliation) to personalize content recommendations or ads, and they should be mandated to enable privacy-protective settings by default, including restricting access to users' location, camera, microphone, contacts, and camera roll. Policymakers should also extend the fairness and transparency obligations to personalization systems and advertising actors, including intermediaries and data brokers.

Additionally, everyone online, including families and young people, should be fully in control of their online experiences and navigate the web according to their preferences and needs. There is a significant opportunity to empower users with easy, effective opt-out rights and granular user controls. In practice, users should have the right to opt out of personalized content and targeting without being penalized with a downgraded version of the service. Some frameworks already strengthen choice - in those cases, we advocate for their robust enforcement.

Across jurisdictions, choice can be strengthened by ensuring that preferences explicitly expressed (e.g. settings selected, feedback signals, customization choices made, survey responses) are respected and "sticky", so do not get reset without being explicitly requested by the user. Interoperability mandates should let people integrate third-party content moderation systems or recommendation algorithms that better match their preferences and help them break out of the walled gardens of a few dominant companies. Parental controls are another important lever to operationalize user controls: Providers should deploy easy-to-use and effective parental controls that allow families to tailor online experiences to their preferences, across platforms.

We appreciate that this is a long list of complex policy recommendations which are also impacted by broader (geo)political developments. The fact remains that current age assurance approaches are not a silver bullet, and will create more, rather than solve, problems in the long term.

Where policymakers consider age signals as necessary to ensure age-appropriate online experiences, we believe that there are technical approaches better suited to balance users' rights than those currently pursued. We will explore these developments and approaches in the second part of this series.

The post Beyond technical fixes: Protecting kids online without breaking the internet appeared first on Open Policy & Advocacy.

17 Jul 2026 9:05am GMT

The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.97.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, getting Rust 1.97.1 is as easy as:

rustup update stable

If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website.

What's in 1.97.1

Rust 1.97.1 fixes a miscompilation in an LLVM optimization.

We have backported both an LLVM fix and a disable of the underlying change in Rust 1.97.0 of Rust's generated IR that increased the likelihood of this happening. However, note that the underlying miscompilation has been present since at least Rust 1.87.

If you'd like to help us out by testing future releases, you might consider running your code's CI or locally using the beta channel (rustup default beta) or the nightly channel (rustup default nightly). Please report any bugs you might come across!

Contributors to 1.97.1

Many people came together to create Rust 1.97.1. We couldn't have done it without all of you. Thanks!

16 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

This blog post describes an idea I've been kicking around called battery packs. Battery packs are a curated set of crates arranged around a common theme. For example, there's a CLI battery pack that has everything you need to build a great CLI, an opinionated pack for creating a backend web service, and one for embedded development (based on the Embedded Working Group's Awesome Rust repository). We've also got some smaller ones, such as the error-handling battery pack that shows how to handle errors in Rust. But this is just the beginning - a key part of the battery pack design is that anybody can create one.

Battery packs are meant to address one of the most common things I hear from new Rust adopters. Everyone loves the wealth of high-quality crates available on crates.io. And everyone hates having to spend a bunch of time researching and comparing alternatives. Battery packs can serve as a good set of default choices. And they don't lock you in. At heart, they're basically just a list of recommended crates, so you can always swap something out if you find an alternative.

We've got a prototype of the battery pack tool working today, so you can try it out if you're curious. Just run cargo install cargo-bp and then try a few commands! For example,

> cargo bp list

will show you the set of available battery packs, based on a crates.io search (as I'll explain below, a battery pack is itself packaged and distributed as a crate, but not one that you take a direct dependency on). And cargo bp add will add batteries from a battery pack into your crate, so e.g.

> cargo bp add cli

would let you select and add common CLI libraries. If you want to see a more involved demo, try out cargo bp add embedded, which is derived from the Awesome Embedded Rust repository.

Let's talk about you and me

One of the key ideas from battery packs is that anybody can publish one. They are just a crate named X-battery-pack; the dependencies of that crate are your recommendations. Features are designations of common sets of crates frequently used together. The examples are your templates. And so forth.

Letting anybody create a battery pack is in contrast to the previous ideas for an "extended standard library for Rust"¹, and it is intended to address some of Rust's unique challenges. For one thing, it lets people publish battery packs that are tailored to specific requirements. For example, the CLI and backend service battery packs are targeting a "typical computer". But I could imagine the Rust embedded working group publishing a battery pack with libraries focused on no-std and binary size optimization.

Being open-ended also addresses the "who decides?" question. To my mind, the best people to recommend what libraries you ought to use are other people building systems like yours. This is why I mentioned the Embedded Working Group publishing an Embedded battery pack, for example, as I think they are clearly a set of people who know their space well. But even within the embedded space there are yet smaller groups, and I imagine that sometimes it'll make sense to get narrower. For example, perhaps a battery pack targeted embassy and its associated ecosystem? Unclear.

Creating a battery pack

If you wanted to create a battery pack, how do you do it? One answer is that you just create a new crate. But a better approach is to use the "battery-pack battery pack"², which bundles a template:

cargo bp new battery-pack

This will prompt you for the name of the battery pack you want to create and a few other things and make your crate. Then you can just use cargo add dependencies to represent the libraries you want to recommend and publish.

"Batteries" are more than dependencies

The "batteries" that you can add to your project aren't always dependencies. They can also be "recipes" or templates. For example, the CI battery pack³ can configure your project with the kind of "super neat-o" github actions you've always wanted but never wanted to bother configuring. To use it, select one or more of the templates to install:

cargo bp add ci

I expect this kind of "actions to improve your crate" to become a rich source of things. Right now we're using a relatively lightweight template system built on minijinja, but I think we're going to want to expand on this.

Giving it some structure

Battery Packs also support more than just a flat listing of dependencies/features/templates. You can group dependencies and features into categories and then, for each category, distinguish between "pick at most one" or "pick any number". For a fun example, try cargo bp add embedded, which is derived from the Awesome Embedded Rust repository. If you run it, you'll see something like this, which groups the choices thematically and, in some areas like "concurrency framework", makes it clear that you want to pick one:

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 ▼ Concurrency Framework (pick at most one)
 > ○ ✦ embassy [embassy-executor, embassy-sync, embassy-time]
   ○ ✦ rtic [cortex-m, rtic]    RTIC - interrupt-driven real-time

 ▼ Display & Graphics (pick any number)
   [ ] ✦ display-ssd1306 [embedded-graphics, ssd1306]    SSD1306
   [ ] ✦ display-st7789 [embedded-graphics, st7789]    ST7789 col

 ▼ Popular Drivers (pick any number)
   [ ] ✦ display-ssd1306 [embedded-graphics, ssd1306]    SSD1306
   [ ] ✦ display-st7789 [embedded-graphics, st7789]    ST7789 col
   [ ] ✦ sensor-bme280 [bme280]    BME280 temperature/humidity/pr
   [ ] ✦ sensor-lis3dh [lis3dh]    LIS3DH 3-axis accelerometer (I
   [ ] ✦ usb-device [usb-device, usbd-serial]    USB device stack

 ▼ Hardware Abstraction Layer (pick at most one)
   ○ ✦ atsamd [atsamd-hal, cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, co
   ○ ✦ esp32 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32 (Xtensa, WiFi + BT,
   ○ ✦ esp32c3 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32-C3 (RISC-V, WiFi
   ○ ✦ esp32s3 [embedded-hal, esp-hal]    ESP32-S3 (Xtensa, WiFi
   ○ ✦ nrf52832 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, em
   ○ ✦ nrf52840 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, em
   ○ ✦ nrf9160 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, emb
   ○ ✦ rp2040 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, embe
   ○ ✦ stm32f0 [cortex-m-rt, critical-section-impl, cortex-m, emb
 embedded-battery-pack v0.1.0  ↑↓/jk Navigate | Space Toggle | ←/→

Let's talk about all the good things…

So why am I so keen on battery packs? It's largely because I've heard so many would-be or recent Rust adopters talk about picking crates as a challenge. But I feel they would help with some other problems as well.

What I really want to see is working groups in the Rust Commercial Network banding together to publish battery packs and recommendations. These would cover the dependencies that they're actually using.

Supporting maintainers

One of the reasons I want to have RCN-recognized battery packs is that they are a natural focal point to then prompt RCN members to fund the maintenance of those crates. I am imagining that for each sponsored battery pack vended within the RCN, there is an associated "ecosystem fund". Companies or individuals could sponsor this fund to get access to early patches, security disclosures, etc or other perks. The money would be used to support the maintainers of those crates, to implement missing features, and so forth.

Fostering interoperability

Another value-add from battery packs is the ability to drive interop efforts. I think that as soon as we start talking about standardizing, we're also going to recognize that there are some places where standardization is hard. For example, early conversations within the network service working group (unsurprisingly) immediately identified that while most people are using tokio, some major companies are using their own runtimes internally. It's not like the need for "async runtime interop" is news. But right now, every crate winds up effectively implementing their own set of little traits to make it work. Sponsored battery packs offer the possibility of a neutral home for that sort of thing.

…and the bad things that could be

There are some risks to people using battery packs. The most obvious is that the fact that anybody can publish a battery pack may mean that you just get a ton of battery packs, which doesn't really help anybody! I'm not so worried about this because I think that there will be a few obvious places that most people go first, and then I think once people are oriented, they'll get excited to explore what crates.io has to offer and start discovering more niche battery packs.

Avoiding stagnation

Battery packs are designed to evolve. I've seen it happen a number of times that there is a dominant crate for something, often taking a "traditional approach", but then somebody else comes along and presents an interesting alternative that gradually takes off. I love that and I don't want to put it at risk.

One example of evolution around CLI argument parsing. For a time, docopt was a popular way to parse command-line options. Then clap came along and presented a more structured alternative; that was nice, but then structopt came along and connected clap to an auto-derive, so you could just write your data structure and be done. And that was awesome. (That is now the standard in clap.) I want to be sure that, even if there is a CLI battery pack, there's room for the next clap to come along.

There are a few things about battery pack that I think will help us deal with this. First, they are a "thin abstraction". You don't "depend on" a battery pack, you depend on the crates within it. So if a new version comes out that uses clap instead of docopt, that doesn't impact you at all. Your code keeps working same as it ever did. And of course it helps that anybody can publish a battery pack. You can now have variations on battery packs that are focused around a new approach to help it get started.

Done right, I think that standardized battery packs can also help the ecosystem evolve and pivot. As it is now, knowledge of new crates has to spread by word-of-mouth. But if everybody is aligned around a new approach, adopting that new approach within a battery packs sends a clear signal that your group is aligned that something is the new hotness.

…Let's talk about crates⁴

"Always bet on the ecosystem"

I see always bet on the ecosystem as a key Rust design axiom. It's the reason we chose a small standard library and a package manager in the first place. It's also why battery packs are designed to be published by anyone.

But just like plants sometimes need a trellis to grow taller, any successful ecosystem reaches a point where it needs another layer of structure to help it keep growing. Without that, you have this "layer of tacic knowledge" (in the words of a Rust Vision Doc interviewee) that becomes an obstacle for folks. And I think we've reached that point with crates.io.

I am hopeful that battery packs can provide that next layer of structure. But at the end of the day, if there's a better approach, that's fine too, so long as we find a way to help people find (and fund!) the crates they need. So let's talk about it!

15 Jul 2026 3:24pm GMT