Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#11

Post by untilHellbanned » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 7:49 AM UTC

mcpherrinm wrote: post #6

I'm really disappointed this doesn't authenticate against Persona. Supporting Persona in Firefox seems to be pretty slow coming, and this seems like a big blow against having that smoothly integrating it.

yeah was wondering about that. very strange, should know better from Google, etc. about the value of the universal login.

I wanna love Mozilla (even bought a Firefox OS phone!) but this is pretty low-level.

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#12

Post by jeena » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:22 AM UTC

Will it still work with the self hosted sync server? Or will there be a self hosted one for Firefox Accounts?

And I hope they will implement it on Firefox OS very soon, otherwise the whole syncing is not really that interesting.

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#13

Post by espadrine » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:24 AM UTC

mcpherrinm wrote: post #6

I'm really disappointed this doesn't authenticate against Persona. Supporting Persona in Firefox seems to be pretty slow coming, and this seems like a big blow against having that smoothly integrating it.

It actually uses Persona inside, and it's an email-as-ID as well.

Also, this is a new occurrence of scrypt used in the wild.

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#14

Post by redditivist » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:32 AM UTC

That was a lot of text to say:

"Today, we’re introducing Firefox Accounts as a safe and easy way for you to create an account. With Firefox Account can integrate services, like Firefox Sync.

Firefox Sync enables syncing of passwords, bookmarks, history, and open tabs across devices, now even easier to setup the service and add multiple devices"

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#15

Post by SkynetSystems » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:40 AM UTC

This is a nice idea in theory, but after all the NSA revelations, we should all be very weary of cloud based data storage. Mozilla is based in the US, so what is stopping the NSA issuing them demands to hand over the user accounts? Browser data is just too detailed and sensitive, I would rather run Firefox portable off a flash drive and carry it with me.

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#16

Post by lotharrr » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:46 AM UTC

yeukhon wrote: post #3

I have to dig this up (sorry Brian, your talk was awesome and visually easy to get involved; kudos to identity team) http://people.mozilla.org/~bwarner/warner-rwc2014/#/

Thanks! Glad you liked it! I plan to do a proper brown-bag Air-Mozilla presentation of it soon, so we'll have a video recording available online (and not just the slides).

FYI, I showed three different designs in that presentation, to compare/contrast 1: original J-PAKE, 2: intermediate not-used SRP thing, 3: final non-SRP "onepw" design. More than one audience member was left confused about which one we're using for Sync. Tell your friends: we're deploying the last one, nicknamed "onepw", from page 20 of that slide deck:

http://people.mozilla.org/~bwarner/warner-rwc2014/#/20

cheers, -Brian (member of Mozilla FxA/Sync team)

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#17

Post by mziulu » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 8:54 AM UTC

jeena wrote: post #12

Will it still work with the self hosted sync server? Or will there be a self hosted one for Firefox Accounts? And I hope they will implement it on Firefox OS very soon, otherwise the whole syncing is not really that interesting.

I expect those of us that host their own Sync server will have to deploy this[0] one instead. This is the general idea I got reading [1].

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server

[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#18

Post by emn13 » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 9:03 AM UTC

BorisMelnik wrote: post #8

Love it. I abandoned the old sync. Figuring out how to set it up was more difficult than trying to learn Julia. Only thing I didn't love was the icon, but its beta so hey. Link to Aurora nightly: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/

How is Options>Sync>Pair a Device and follow the directions difficult?

I mean, it was definitely too many steps, and it wasn't labelled clearly enough which device was the master and which was the slave, but those are more like "users won't bother to find it" troubles, rather than it actually being difficult if you want to turn it on.

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#19

Post by chuckharmston » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 9:05 AM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #13

mcpherrinm wrote: post #6

I'm really disappointed this doesn't authenticate against Persona. Supporting Persona in Firefox seems to be pretty slow coming, and this seems like a big blow against having that smoothly integrating it.

It actually uses Persona inside, and it's an email-as-ID as well. Also, this is a new occurrence of scrypt used in the wild.

That's not quite accurate; Firefox Accounts uses the BrowserID Protocol, of which Persona is an implementation. That is to say, it authenticates using BrowserID assertions, but does not directly tie in to Persona accounts. Yet.

https://developer.mozilla.org/Persona/Glossary

Re: Introducing Mozilla Firefox Accounts

#20

Post by xiaq » Sat, Feb 08, 2014, 9:05 AM UTC

> Last year, we created a new team at Mozilla to explore one specific area of the Web that’s grown with the explosion of mobile devices — the cloud (sometimes called Internet servers).

Hey Mozilla, you are too honest about the cloud thing. :)