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Mozilla Persona sign-in launches in beta, skips the social networking ball and chain (video)
We all know those web pages where the only alternative to a site-specific login is a social networking account. That's not very reassuring for anyone skittish about linking their commentary to a Facebook account relatives might see, if they're even willing to join a social network in the first place. Mozilla has been aware of that hesitation long enough to have just released its long-in-development Persona sign-in service as a beta. Although it has the same kind of simple approach to a login as a Facebook or Twitter pop-up window, Persona's emphasis is on privacy: it stops paying attention the moment credentials go through, keeping any diatribes or subscription details from landing in social streams or central databases. Users don't have to play a rousing game of guess-the-username, either, as they just need to sign in with one or more familiar e-mail addresses and a single password. Persona faces an uphill battle in getting web developer adoption when the establishment sign-in services are open to hundreds of millions of internet citizens, but it does have The Times' online crossword section, OpenPhoto and Voost as early poster children -- and anything that lets the privacy-minded join the party has our vote.
Mozilla demos WebRTC integration, browser-powered video chat (video)
Last week at IETF 83 in Paris Mozilla gave a little demo that went almost completely unnoticed. The team behind Firefox showed off an experimental built of its flagship browser with integrated WebRTC support. To showcase the real-time communication plug-in's capabilities, the foundation built a simple video chat client based around Persona and SocialAPI. Whether or not such a feature will ever make it into an official build of the browser remains to be seen, but for now you can check out the simple, yet impressive, HTML and Javascript demo after the break.
Playing Hulu on Google TV is as easy as changing one setting
We know Google mentioned it would be a "good citizen" and allow Hulu to block its browser ID, but that doesn't mean you have to be one too. By default, accessing the website from a Google TV device yields a prompt hoping you'll wait for the two to work out some kind of agreement on Hulu Plus access, but with a Flash enabled browser at the ready, we're sure all you want to do is press play. The fine folks over at GadgetWhore first discovered that by digging deep into the advanced settings of the Chrome browser app and changing the browser ID to "Generic" or any custom string one may prefer, Hulu streams immediately start playing with no problem (users may want to change back to default afterwards to make sure other pages render properly.) That's one benefit of having a "run-of-the-mill" desktop browser integrated into your set-top box, so w while early adopters may only be moments away from discovering the dark side of Google TV, it seems like a few easy browser tweaks may take care of most issues -- let us know if you've run into any others.
