Firefox 3.5 Party in Milan

Great fun and wonderful people

As usual, the entire set of photos of the Italian Firefox 3.5 Party is on Flickr.

Technorati Tags: firefox 3.5 party, mozilla italia

Mozilla Italia & SUMO in Geneva

This is the presentation we did, as Mozilla Italia, during the first great EU Intercommunity Meetup in Geneva.

In the last year I joined several Mozilla meetings – Whistler and Barcelona in 2008, Fosdem and Geneva in 2009 – and I feel that this last one in Geneva had the best format in terms of “productivity”: few people, around 20, with common experiences and problems can really try to identify and solve problems.

I have a lot of things to think about for the next months: localized Litmus (and localized tests) to expand the local QA community, how to reproduce in our site the “tasks” used by the Mozilla Hispano guys to track unfinished or new works, effective ways to involve new contributors (see also the previous post).

Technorati Tags: mozgeneva09, mozilla meetup, mozilla italia, sumo

Local communities, always the same faces?

This post will probably end up as a stream of disconnected thoughts more than a well structured analysis, but it’s something that has bothered me for months and it’s quite difficult to choose a starting point and not to get lost in the middle.

The problem is easy: is your local Mozilla community growing? If not, what are you doing to involve new people in the project?

I started contributing to the Italian community at the very beginning of 2004 (the community was just born), trying to help other people as a simple user on the local support forum.  Soon I became a moderator and then an administrator of the forum, after that I started working also on localization: first the integrated Firefox help, then web projects (Mozilla Europe, AMO) and now also software products (Firefox and Fennec).

It’s more than five years of active contribution to the Italian community. Why? Since I liked what Mozilla was (is) giving to me for free – Firebird and Mozilla Suite at that time – I wanted to give something back to the project: since I’m not a programmer but an advanced user, fond of my language, I contributed with support and localization.

If that was possible for me and a lot of the current contributors of the Italian community, why is so difficult to involve new people? Not counting that older contributors can stop helping for different reasons (personal, work, change of priorities), while the number of projects to maintain keeps growing.

Here’s a lot of questions, very few answers.

• Is this a specific problem of the Italian community? For what I see on the mailing lists (dev.l10n and dev.l10n.web), I don’t recognize a lot of new names, so I’m thinking that maybe it’s a problem also for other wide communities.
• Is this a specific Mozilla problem? Maybe the Mozilla project, seen from the outside, seems too big or too complex, and people interested in free software and Open Source choose to invest their time in contributing to smaller projects?
• People got used to “having things for free” and don’t even think about contributing?
• They don’t know how to contribute, or even that they can do it?

Honestly, for what I saw in the last year I’m not very confident about the future and that’s why I keep asking to myself: how can we change this trend? Looking forward to discussing these issues during the upcoming community-meeting

Technorati Tags: local communities

Firefox hangs because of malware

In the last few weeks, starting from the end of March, we noticed a strange spike in requests on the Italian support forum. The symptoms described were always the same:

• Pages stop loading after a few minutes of normal browsing.
• When the user tries to restart the browser he gets the error message “Firefox is already running but is not responding“.
• Other browsers on the same system are not affected and work without problems.

Since Firefox stopped working at the same time of the Firefox 3.0.8 release, a lot of people thought that the problem was caused by the last update, so they were searching the best way to go back to a previous version.

The usual solutions were not effective: safe-mode, disable plug-ins, temporarily disable antivirus and firewall, reinstall the last version in a different folder, create a new profile.

From the beginning we were able to restrict the problem to the Windows platform, so we thought of some sort of malware. By the evidences we’ve collected so far, the problem seems to be caused by a variant of the Navipromo Adware, not identified by most of the antivirus softwares (see this virus total’s analysis).

Users found suspect files in the local %Appdata% folder (C:\Documents and Settings\%User%\Local Settings\Application Data on Windows XP, C:\Users\%user%\AppData on Windows Vista):

• [random_name].exe
• [name_of_exe].dat
• [name_of_exe]_nav.dat
• [name_of_exe]_navps.dat

After killing the .exe process in Task Manager, Firefox returns to its normal behavior.

There are still two unanswered questions:

• Why does only Firefox (and not other browsers) hang?
• Why now and so hard in Italy? This adaware seems to be quite old.

If you’re interested, there’s a bug and an ongoing discussion on the SUMO Contributors’ forum.

Thanks to all the guys of the Italian project and SUMO for the support and the great team work of the last days

Technorati Tags: firefox, Firefox is already running but is not responding, navipromo

Photos from Fa’ la cosa giusta 2009

You can see on Flickr the complete set of photos that I took yesterday at Fa’ la cosa giusta in Milan (Italy).

It was a real pleasure to see again in person the other guys from the Italian localization project (we are spread all over the country, so it’s quite hard for us to meet all together in one place), and also our international guest William

Thanks to all for the great fun day!

Technorati Tags: fa’ la cosa giusta 2009, mozilla italia, milan