Web talks at Mozilla

Save the date! The Mozilla Meetup series continues with talks focused on modern web technologies.

To account for typical no-show rates, we’ve opened more RSVP spots than we can physically accommodate. Based on our last event, only about 36 of 100 registered participants (including Mozillians) attended in person. We will admit attendees on a first-come, first-served basis and will need to close the doors once we reach room capacity (around 50 people).

Note that this event operates under the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines.

18:00 - Doors open

18:30 - Intro to WebTransport - the next WebSocket?!

WebTransport is an upcoming protocol (standardized by the IETF) and Web API (standardized by the W3C) for bidirectional communication on the web. It provides multiplexed streams and unreliable datagrams on top of HTTP/3 and HTTP/2.

This talk explains how WebTransport works at the protocol level, how it maps to QUIC when run on top of HTTP/3, and how its capabilities differ from WebSocket. The session will also cover the current state of browser and server support, and where the ecosystem is heading next.

Links:
- Slides https://mxinden-bot.github.io/slides/12-webtransport-berlin/
- https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/webtrans/about/
- https://www.w3.org/TR/webtransport/
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTransport_API

About the speaker: Max is a software developer interested in networking, distributed systems and type theory. He works at Mozilla on Firefox's networking stack, focusing on HTTP3 and QUIC. Previously he was stewarding the peer-to-peer networking project libp2p, and before that the monitoring system Prometheus and its integration within the Kubernetes orchestrator. To find out more visit https://max-inden.de/

19:30 - Age assurance is coming for you: The quiet dismantling of the web as we know it

Governments around the world are requiring online platforms to verify, estimate, or infer the age of their users in the name of protecting children. This talk examines age assurance not as a technical compliance problem but as an infrastructure question: what kind of web does age assurance build, what freedoms does it restrict, and who does it serve? Drawing on legislative developments across the EU, UK, US, and Australia, it maps the gap between the stated goals of age assurance frameworks and their likely effects on privacy, access to information, and the open web itself. It asks what surveillance infrastructure is being normalized, where that infrastructure travels next and what alternatives could look like.

About the speaker: Svea Windwehr is a policy manager at Mozilla where she works on issues relating to privacy, user rights and the open web.