You want what you can’t have. This fundamental aphorism of human psychology means that full-stop censorship is the wrong approach to hiding ideas and information. The taboo, by definition, makes the information desirable, regardless of whether the content is revelatory or mundane. The insight is that you can use this knowledge on yourself to reshape your own behavior.

China’s great firewall carefully circumvents the want-what-you-can’t-have desire. When I last visited Beijing I tried to access the BBC expecting it to be blocked. Instead, the site came through slowly and erratically. If I waited long enough, refreshed often enough, the page just might come through. Because of the sporadic experience, I found my frustration was directed at the BBC and not at the firewall. Even with a conscious knowledge of what was going on, I had a visceral reaction that it was the BBC’s fault and not a country-wide censor.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza How China’s Great Firewall Can Make Us More Productive

There are two modes people use for finding information: browsing and searching. Browsing is for when you don’t know exactly what you want to find, and search is for when you know exactly for what you are looking.

A supermarket makes a good example of the browse versus search distinction. Say you want to make a salad. When you go to a supermarket your browse for ingredients: you wander through the vegetable section picking up the the ingredients that strike you as delicious. You don’t know exactly what you want, but seeing the vegetables helps you make the selection. That’s browse.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Firefox Panorama: Search proof-of-concept

I am happy to announce that Tab Candy is coming to Firefox 4. Starting today, Tab Candy will be called Firefox Panorama and be available as a feature in Firefox betas. Head to the Firefox 4 feature list, or watch the video below, to learn how to organize your tabs into groups and reclaim your browsing experience from clutter and information overload.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Firefox Panorama: Tab Candy Evolved

Update: Since putting this post up, it looks like Bing has fixed the issue and there are now some results that appear in Google only because of the popularity of this article.

Let me start by saying that, at least in the US, Google does not censor Tiananmen Square. Nor does Bing. Nor Yahoo. But we can make it look like they do. If you don’t believe me, click here, here, and here.

As you can see, I’m linking to the real Google domain and the looks and acts legitimately. The URL looks normal. You can even change the search, say remove “massacre” and Google still doesn’t find anything. Try it with quotes. Remove square. Still no results. The “censorship” certainly feels fairly real, and the hoax would be even harder to detect if if I had said that they were only censoring links from some third party sites.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Does Google Censor Tiananmen Square? How To Create an Internet Hoax

The power of the browser has grown substantially in the last ten years. We now use the Web to multi-task the activities we juggle every day, like vacation plans, purchases, sharing pictures, listening to music, reading email, and writing a blog post.

It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have. Worse, how many of us keep tabs open as reminders of something we want to do or read later? We’re all suffering from infoguilt.

We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives.

Enter: Tab Candy.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Tab Candy: Making Firefox Tabs Sweet

It’s not often that you learn something from spam, besides that there are an extraordinary number of generous Nigerians (replete with theme song) and amazing number of variations in the spelling of viagra. Yet, I recently got spam where the offer was written in pristine English: no numbers replacing letters, no images, and no misspellings. How had such a brazen piece of spam got through my filters? The answer, it turns out, was some clever CSS that caused the HTML markup to be garbled but its visual rendering to be readable. I’ll show you how to use this for both good and evil.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza How To Phish, Protect Your Email, and Defeat Copy-And-Paste with CSS

There are currently two proposed additions to CSS to make animating easier and with better performance: CSS Transitions and CSS Animations. Both are unfortunately named. The later is complicated, overkill, and probably won’t be supported by non-Webkit browsers, which leaves CSS Transitions as becoming the de-facto way to natively animate on the Web. Besides reducing power-hungry Javascript-based animation, the declarative CSS Transitions opens the door for hardware acceleration and commercial quality games. iOS devices and Safari already do so for buttery smooth results, and hardware acceleration just might make it into Firefox 4.

How Do CSS Transitions Work?

Normally, when you change the value of a CSS property, it changes instantly. With CSS Transitions, they automagically animate over time. Imagine you want to have a rollover indication for links where, on hover, the link changes its background color and jigs up a bit. With CSS Transitions instead of having the effect happen instantly, it can smoothly animated. Here’s how you’d do it.

a{
  transition-property: all;
  transition-duration: 350ms;
  transition-timing-function: ease-in-out;
  position: relative;
  background-color: white;
  color: black;
}

a:hover{
  top: -2px
  background-color: black;
  color: white;
}

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Animation with CSS Transitions Made Easy

I was recently looking at some of my father’s, Jef Raskin, old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principals Apple holds now that were set in play three years before the Macintosh was released. Much of this is particularly apropos in understanding Apple’s culture and why we have the walled-garden experience of the iPhone/iPad and the App Store.

Even better, I found some sometimes-snarky annotated comments Jef made to the memo as part of the Stanford Computer History project. The annotated memo follows my commentary.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Macintosh Project Genesis and History

Non-designers are often called upon to make judgments about interfaces. Perhaps you are a business owner evaluating your new website, or a project manager looking at mockups from your designer. What do you look for in the design? And how do you give feedback in a more meaningful way than “It looks nice” or “It seems hard to use”.

While the full-depth of understanding design cannot be covered in a short article, here are some guidelines to help you out.

To get you started, here is an example of a critique I recently did of the interface for the yet-to-be-released Add-On Builder* for Firefox. The Add-On Builder is part of the Jetpack project and is a web-app of medium complexity that allows you to easily build Firefox and Thunderbird extensions online and then publish them to the world. I took screenshots of each screen of the interface, put them into one large document, and commented ex vivo.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza How To Critique An Interface

The web is a generative and wild place. Sometimes I think I missed my calling; being devious is so much fun. Too bad my parents brought me up with scruples.

Most phishing attacks depend on an original deception. If you detect that you are at the wrong URL, or that something is amiss on a page, the chase is up. You’ve escaped the attackers. In fact, the time that wary people are most wary is exactly when they first navigate to a site.

What we don’t expect is that a page we’ve been looking at will change behind our backs, when we aren’t looking. That’ll catch us by surprise.

Continue Reading » | RT @azaaza Tabnabbing: A New Type of Phishing Attack