Credit to the people that wrote and maintained bugzilla, both as software and this particular instance. It's still ticking, much longer than (I assume) they planned it to.
If you are interested in this type of activism, and live in a city that offers its own form of ID (notably SF or LA), you can do this now by signing up for a city ID card. There is considerable concern that the city ID databases will be used as registries of illegal immigrants, so the more legal residents who take advantage of it, the weaker that signal becomes.
Plus, it's nice to have a second form of photo ID sometimes.
Years ago I worked for a company who was building a piece of networking hardware, and we had bought some code that implemented various well-known routing protocols. This included the TCP/IP layer, but it was just the BSD stack.
Our dev hardware had a boot loader that would use FTP to download the most recent images to finish the boot. After we cut over to this code, we started having an occasional problem where this download would fail -- the box would send a spurious RST and kill the connection. I was one of the protocols people, and it ended up on my plate.
I spent 3 days staring at tcpdump, adding enormous piles of debug traces, and finally going through the code line-by-line with a copy of the Stevens book open on my lap. Eventually I found the problem - they had made one single change to the BSD code, and in so doing introduced the bug. It was compiler-dependent.
This is not an uncommon SV story archetype, but as many people have pointed out before me, it's one that highlights the concept of privilege with particular clarity. In the US, both men and white people are more aggressive at this sort of bluff than non-men and non-white people, and there are strong implications that this is because it's a much easier bluff for them.
There's not a lot to say. I didn't have any huge role in the project, although the experience working on it was hugely influential in the way I thought about programming. Maybe I'll write it up some day.
As for Hyatt, it just seemed like something he would do as a joke. Blink was a ridiculous feature, but it was a standard, which was a wedge that Mozilla leaned on heavily in those days.
I fixed blink in Mozilla twice (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89065) in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. The first time it broke was a result of Dave Hyatt's rewrite of the style system; I always suspected he had broken it on purpose. The second time seemed like it was just a mistake.
Margo Seltzer taught CS50 for much of the 90s -- at least '95, '97, and '98 and also, I believe, for a couple years prior to that. (She was on leave in 1996, and Brian Kernighan taught the course.)
Nice addition, although as a marginal Mozilla contributor at the time (and frequent IRC lurker), I remember a few other principals being involved -- notably Ben Goodger and and Matthew "mpt" Thomas, who seemed to me to be Blake Ross's primary co-conspirators. For a while it was just this skunkworks project called "m/b" (for "mozilla/browser", I believe), and there was a lot of implied frustration/drama related to AOL/NS-internal development process (the pinnacle of which was the doomed Netscape 6.)
I would love to read a real oral history of Firefox someday.