From left: The late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. | Photos courtesy of David Paul Morris/Getty Images (Jobs); Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (Zuckerberg); Chip East/Reuters (Page); Mario Tama/Getty Images (Bezos).Gilbert Wong, the mayor of Cupertino, California, calls his city council to order. "As you know, Cupertino is very famous for Apple Computer, and we're very honored to have Mr. Steve Jobs come here tonight to give a special presentation," the mayor says. "Mr. Jobs?" And there he is, in his black turtlenec...

Some quick comments on using Siri in practice—for things other than asking it to open the pod bay doors. Siri’s voice recognition is very impressive, and the scope of what it understands is very good given the difficulty of what it’s doing. But it has a lot of trouble with certain sorts of names—Irish names, for example, which often are not written as pronounced. For example there are a lot of people in Ireland named “Aoife”—it’s a very popular girl’s name, pronounced “Eee-fah”. As you might expect, Siri can’t hand...

Comex, the hacker behind JailbreakMe.com, is joining Apple as an intern. JailbreakMe.com made it extremely easy for iOS users to jailbreak their devices simply by visiting a website. He announced the hiring on Twitter: It's been really, really fun, but it's also been a while and I've been getting bored. So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple.Forbes unmasked Comex as Nicholas Allegra, a 19-year old Brown University student from Chappaqua, NY, by Forbes. In that article, Allegra described jailbreaking as "like editing an English paper... You just go through and look ...

As I write this, I’m sitting in a cafe. Around me, there are five people on laptops — four of them are MacBooks. Four other people are using tablets — all four are iPads. Welcome to the Post-PC world.That phrase was one of the first things that jumped to my mind today when I heard the news that HP was not only killing off their TouchPad and Pre webOS-based products, but also trying to spin-off their PC business. The largest PC business in the world, mind you.And HP’s statements during their earnings call today only further reaffirmed...

Used in casting shadows off block-level elements (like divs)..shadow { -moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc; -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc; box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #ccc;}The horizontal offset of the shadow, positive means the shadow will be on the right of the box, a negative offset will put the shadow on the left of the box.The vertical offset of the shadow, a negative one means the box-shadow will be above the box, a positive one means the shadow will be below the box.The blur radius, if set to 0 the shadow will be sharp, the higher the number, the more blurred it will be.ColorExample...

I want to take a slight detour from usable privacy and security and discuss issues of design. I was recently at the Microsoft Faculty Summit, an annual event where Microsoft discusses some of the big issues and directions they are headed. In one of the talks, a designer at Microsoft mentioned two data points I've informally heard before but had never confirmed. First, the ratio of developers to user interface designers at Microsoft was 50:1. Second, this ratio was better than any other company out there. As someone who teaches human-computer interaction, I wanted to push on this poin...