Google acquired Fabric, Mozilla unveiled a new logo, and Cloudflare opens up about their fight against gag orders.

Mozilla’s new logo

Last year Mozilla started a community effort to replace their old branding with a more modern look that reflects the actual work they do. Last week, this was finalized and Mozilla switched over to the new look.

As far as redesigns go, this looks pretty good. While the branding isn’t usually the most important part of an open source project (although a bad one can easily destroy it), it’s good that these kind of details are looked at once in a while for something as big as this.

So, what are the major changes? The main difference is obviously the new logo, and the related font. Obviously, considering who we’re talking about here, the font (Zilla) is freely available. The logo looks fresh, and I quite like the use of :// in place of ill in their name. But, while I can describe it, you’re probably better of having a look at the above link.

So, why the change? Often projects and companies get new looks because they want to refresh their looks a bit. This often happens with major companies where for example they’d go from a multi-colored piece of fruit to a metal grey one. In Mozilla’s case though, a major reason is that their purpose has changed.

When I first became aware of Mozilla, their main product was an application suite for the internet. Email, web browser, chat, newsgroups, all of them included. Over the years they replaced these with newer versions under different names¹. If you look at their site now however, there is only a single application left: Firefox. Instead of trying to build all the applications, while trying to improve the web, the Mozilla Foundation is now more focused on improving the web in different ways.

In fact, one of the things they’ve done is create a new programming language: Rust. While I write (and talk) quite a bit about Go and Swift, I do Rust a disfavor by not mentioning it more often. Like the other two, Rust is a very powerful and well-designed modern language. Unfortunately, I’ve never even played around with it so I can’t give a fair comparison. It’s not their only effort though, and if you haven’t been paying attention to all the things they are up to these days² I highly recommend having a look at the Web Innovations and Internet Health sections of their site.

Fabric at Google

Fabric, the mobile app development platform created by Twitter (and containing some of Twitter’s acquisitions) will be joining Google. For once this seems to be less a case of being an acqui-hire and more a matter of the platform now being managed by a different company. And in all fairness, a company for which it makes more sense to own a development platform like this.

According to the numbers provided by Fabric, its various parts are used by a lot of developers and in many apps. From the sounds that are being made, it at least seems that most of these parts will continue on as part of Google’s Firebase team. Of course, positive sounds are made all the time when it comes to acquisitions, the reality might still turn out differently.

Cloudflare’s gag orders

Cloudflare revealed in their latest transparency report that in 2013 they received a so-called national security letter. These are demands from the US government (or specifically it’s law enforcement agencies) to hand over customer data, while not being allowed to speak about the demand to anyone. As described in their post, Cloudflare fought against this through the EFF and got the gag order lifted.

While I’m happy to hear that Cloudflare does its best to fight against this kind of behavior, they’re still pretty powerless against it and that’s not good. I’ve written about this kind of thing before so I don’t plan to repeat myself with a long rant. Instead, and especially considering the change of government³, this is just a reminder that your data can be acquired while those doing the acquiring can’t talk about it.

As a sidenote, I do wonder about the practicalities of this. These orders are aimed at the CEOs, and they can only discuss them with their lawyers. How is this data then collected? In most cases I don’t assume the CEO will access the database themselves, and usually the kind of information requested will not be conveniently on a dashboard somewhere. Will the CEO have to name someone capable of collecting that data and who will then receive a similar letter?

Anyway, I recommend you read Cloudflare’s blogpost as it includes fun little details like someone from the government explaining to them they’ll never get requests like this and not being able to refute that because of the ones they already got.