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Behold, Amazon has announced the third generation of Kindles, just called Kindle. For Wi-fi only, it'll cost you $139 dollars, and with 3G it'll cost $189. That makes the new cheaper Kindle a better deal than the also wi-fi only Nook. Screen size is still just the same as it was before, but the device as a whole has gotten smaller, as you can see on the diagram below.

Read more at Computer World and see the products on Amazon.

(Tech Support | Victoria, Australia)

Caller: I hope this won't take much time.

Me: It won't, ma'am, it's only a few simple steps. First of all, I need you to double click on My Computer.

Caller: Excuse me?

Me: Ma'am, our records show you running a Windows computer. Has that changed?

Caller: I don't think so.

Me: Okay, now just double click on My Computer for me please.

Caller: How can I do that?

Me: It should be right there in front of you. Make sure all other windows are closed down and you should, hopefully, see it in the top left corner.

Caller: How am I suppose to click on your computer? You must be like hundreds of miles away!

Social engineering is the (morally vague) art of tricking someone out of their company's technical secrets just by talking to them. It often involves deceit and relies on the fact that the weakest link in any computer security system is a human.

At the annual Defcon event, held in Las Vegas this week, attendees, mostly professionals in the computer-security business, engage in several contests. A new this one year involves launching social engineering attacks, where contestants must obtain the answers to questions about a company's security defenses. People working at big companies such as Google and Apple failed to realize they were being social engineered by con artists.

This year, about 20 Defcon attendees in Las Vegas participated in the contest, which stirred a lot of controversy. The organizers of the conference were three security experts who know how to do social engineering: Chris Hadnagy, (pictured top right) operations manager for Offensive Security; Mati Aharoni (pictured middle), trainer of Offensive Security, and Jim O'Gorman (pictured left) of Continuum Worldwide. They created the site www.social-engineer.org for the contest, which occurred for the first time this year at Defcon and runs through Saturday.

The contest has proved so alarming to the targeted corporations that some called on the help of the FBI, which quizzed the organizers on why they were doing the contest.

We wanted to start a social engineering program because we believe in security through education, Hadnagy said at a press conference at Defcon.

The participants were instructing to engage in passive information gathering to find out some sensitive information, such as where its dumpsters are located. (Dumpster diving is a common practice by hackers who want to find documents with company secrets on them). By looking things up on the Web, the participants tried to track down company details, such as what kind of Web browser the employees used and what version of Adobe PDFs they were using. (The answers to these questions can be used to launch cyberattacks against the companies.)

Tipped off by the announcement of the contest, the FBI met with the organizers ahead of time, and the organizers enlisted the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil-liberties advocacy group, to represent them. In that meeting the Justice Department voiced its concerns about whether any laws would be broken in the contest. The EFF offered legal advice about how to structure the contest; for instance, participants were not allowed to impersonate law enforcement officers during phone calls, as that is a crime.

In almost every case, company representatives gave up secrets they should not have. The companies targeted included Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, BP, Shell,Google, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Ford. The contestants were given flag points as rewards for each answer they pulled from employees.

Contestants cold-called employees to get the information. In three cases, company employees did not give any details over the phone. But the contestants, posing as journalists or customers, still got data from every company. One contestant managed to get an answer out of his target company in just 22 minutes. The contestant used tricks, such as preying upon emotions, by saying that they had to finish the project and get answers that day.

Because of publicity around the case, a number of contestants dropped out. Some said their bosses would fire them if they participated in the Defcon event.

Companies: Apple, BP, Google, microsoft, Offensive Security, Procter & Gamble

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Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector.

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., made federal pay an issue in his successful campaign to fill Edward Kennedy's seat and is fighting for a pay freeze.

The federal government spent about $224 billion in 2008 on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees.

"The data flip the conventional wisdom on its head," says Cato Institute budget analyst Chris Edwards, a critic of federal pay policy. "Federal workers make substantially more than private workers, not less, in addition to having a large advantage in benefits."

But National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley says the comparison is faulty because it "compares apples and oranges." Federal accountants, for example, perform work that has more complexity and requires more skill than accounting work in the private sector, she says.

"When you look at the actual duties, you see that very few federal jobs align with those in the private sector," she says. She says federal employees are paid an average of 26% less than non-federal workers doing comparable work.

Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman Sedelta Verble, says higher pay also reflects the longevity and older age of federal workers.

USA TODAY used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare salaries in every federal job that had a private-sector equivalent. For example, the federal government's 57,000 registered nurses working for the Veterans Administration and elsewhere were paid an average of $74,460 a year, $10,680 more than the average for private-sector nurses.

The BLS reports that 216 occupations covering 1.1 million federal workers exist in both the federal government and the private sector. An additional 124 federal occupations covering 750,000 employees air-traffic controllers, tax collectors and others did not have direct equivalents, according to the BLS.

Federal jobs have more limited salary ranges than private-sector jobs, some of which have million-dollar payouts.

Key findings:

Federal. The federal pay premium cut across all job categories white-collar, blue-collar, management, professional, technical and low-skill. In all, 180 jobs paid better average salaries in the federal government; 36 paid better in the private sector.

Private. The private sector paid more on average in a select group of high-skill occupations, including lawyers, veterinarians and airline pilots. The government's 5,200 computer research scientists made an average of $95,190, about $10,000 less than the average in the corporate world.

State and local. State government employees had an average salary of $47,231 in 2008, about 5% less than comparable jobs in the private sector. City and county workers earned an average of $43,589, about 2% more than private workers in similar jobs. State and local workers have higher total compensation than private workers when the value of benefits is included.

Job comparison

Average federal salaries exceed average private-sector pay in 83% of comparable occupations. A sampling of average annnual salaries in 2008, the most recent data:

Job	Federal	Private	Difference
Airline pilot, copilot, flight engineer	$93,690	$120,012	-$26,322
Broadcast technician	$90,310	$49,265	$41,045
Budget analyst	$73,140	$65,532	$7,608
Chemist	$98,060	$72,120	$25,940
Civil engineer	$85,970	$76,184	$9,786
Clergy	$70,460	$39,247	$31,213
Computer, information systems manager	$122,020	$115,705	$6,315
Computer support specialist	$45,830	$54,875	-$9,045
Cook	$38,400	$23,279	$15,121
Crane, tower operator	$54,900	$44,044	$10,856
Dental assistant	$36,170	$32,069	$4,101
Economist	$101,020	$91,065	$9,955
Editors	$42,210	$54,803	-$12,593
Electrical engineer	$86,400	$84,653	$1,747
Financial analysts	$87,400	$81,232	$6,168
Graphic designer	$70,820	$46,565	$24,255
Highway maintenance worker	$42,720	$31,376	$11,344
Janitor	$30,110	$24,188	$5,922
Landscape architects	$80,830	$58,380	$22,450
Laundry, dry-cleaning worker	$33,100	$19,945	$13,155
Lawyer	$123,660	$126,763	-$3,103
Librarian	$76,110	$63,284	$12,826
Locomotive engineer	$48,440	$63,125	-$14,685
Machinist	$51,530	$44,315	$7,215
Mechanical engineer	$88,690	$77,554	$11,136
Office clerk	$34,260	$29,863	$4,397
Optometrist	$61,530	$106,665	-$45,135
Paralegals	$60,340	$48,890	$11,450
Pest control worker	$48,670	$33,675	$14,995
Physicians, surgeons	$176,050	$177,102	-$1,052
Physician assistant	$77,770	$87,783	-$10,013
Procurement clerk	$40,640	$34,082	$6,558
Public relations manager	$132,410	$88,241	$44,169
Recreation worker	$43,630	$21,671	$21,959
Registered nurse	$74,460	$63,780	$10,680
Respiratory therapist	$46,740	$50,443	-$3,703
Secretary	$44,500	$33,829	$10,671
Sheet metal worker	$49,700	$43,725	$5,975
Statistician	$88,520	$78,065	$10,455
Surveyor	$78,710	$67,336	$11,374

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, USA TODAY analysis

Mitch Joel, in my view, is a good guy. He's smart and his written and intelligent and popular book. We seem to agree on many issues. But one place where we are not joined at the hip is on our current views of Apple Computer.

Mitch thinks that all this negative noise--the Gizmodo incident, Ellen DeJeneris, FCC antitrust investigation, John Stewart and the most recent "antennagate" has done nothing to hurt the company.

Mitch sends evidence almost daily. He reports record lines in front of the San Francisco Apple Store, record sales for the year, and so on and so forth. Mitch offered to bet me $1,000 that a year from now, Apple will emerge unscathed from the current avalanche of unfavorable coverage. The loser would give the money to a favorite charity.

I am in no position to be gambling $1,000. Besides, unlike Mitch, I am not so very sure how all this will come out.

Someone else tweeted me, "Apple may be doing bad PR, but people don't care. I consider that an oxymoronic statement. PR, as I learned and practiced it, is about relationships with publics, not about hits from a press release or any such tactical nonsense.

Lately, Apple has been consistently doing a style of PR, that has surprised, angered and disappointed some people. I am one of them. At times I've considered them arrogant. At times they have played the part of the bully.

So long as they are the only ones making brilliant products, they can get away with such behavior. But the market is changing. Others have come out with very good phones and history suggests that those competitors will keep making better and better phones and with all that competition prices and margins are likely to slip.

This is where the PR gaffes come in. PR shapes how people feel about a company. They involve trust. On rare occasions PR, has a dramatic, sudden impact on a company's market position. Usually the process is slower than that.

For a very large company the erosion can take a very long time. It took General Motors, for example, more than 20 years, to hit the rocks and they coupled bad PR with building shoddy products.

Apple still builds fine products. But now there is a wart on the nose of the Apple hero image. Now, people who have not yet purchased an iPhone for the first time, may look at other options. Now, people who have contracts with AT&T expiring may shop around.

There is already a trickle of erosion. I know that because a small handful of folks on Twitter have told me they've switched or will. I do not think the number will swell dramatically immediately.

But I think that if Apple does not change how it converses with its publics soon, there is an excellent chance that it will begin feeling a loss of repeat customers and see new customer stray. I think that it's vendor-friendly service pricing [They get a share of AT&T's outrageous take] will go down and that impacts the bottom line.

In my view Apple needs to vastly upgrade the way it conducts conversations with customers. Currently, its demonstration of responsiveness is Steve Jobs reading cherry-picked emails sort of the way the late Perry Como used to read song requests on his TV show in the late 1950s.

What Jobs is doing is performance-oriented, not conversation-oriented. It wows a few people for a short period of time, but most folk understand that it's hokey.

There are thousand, perhaps millions of people who now have fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple. The best way to offset that is to join the popular social networks and to start using blogs and podcasts in a meaningful way.

We need to start seeing people who work at Apple, who are passionate about their work, who care about user concerns and who are not Steve Jobs.

I reduced my bet with Mitch Joel from $1,000 down to one drink, based on results of Apple sales/profit numbers one year from now. I am not extremely certain of winning. A large company is like a supertanker, running on an open throttle. It takes a lot of time and distance to change its direction. It takes a lot of time and distance also to change user perception.

What I am absolutely certain about is that Apple was in a much stronger market position six months ago than it is today. And if it does not alter course, the supertanker that is Apple Computer will eventually discover it is headed directly toward rocky shoals.

By then, it may be too late to alter course.

One of the first disappointments a brand new iPad owner often faces is the fact they can't use their magic new toy right out of the box. New iPad users turn on their device and what greets their eyes? An iTunes activation screen; the same screen iPod touch and iPhone users see. To setup an iOS device, whether iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone, you need a computer running a compatible version of iTunes.

But why?

Other smartphones, tablets, and media players don't require a connection to a computer before you can use them. Moreover, iPad users learned recently what iPhone and iPod touch users already know: to upgrade their device's OS, they again need a computer. Other devices can do updates over the air. Software updates on a Mac or PC don't require a second computer, so why should iOS devices?

The initially obvious answer is the fact you need an account with iTunes to fully use an iDevice. That account manages the purchases you make on your iOS device. Since many users already have an iTunes account, this argument doesn't make sense. A new iOS device owner should simply be able to enter their account info (or create an account on the spot) when turning on the device for the first time. Instead, new owners have to hook up to a real computer.

Again, why?

Of course, having a computer synced with your iOS device is handy. You can back up your data and quickly sync data from your computer. Documents, music, movies, pictures, calendars and contacts all easily get transferred from the desktop. However, with our lives existing more and more in the cloud these days, transferring this data via a computer running iTunes seems to defeat the independence of the iPad. With the camera connector kit, the argument has even less relevance. We can use the iPad anywhere, but we have to race to a computer with an Internet connection to do updates or move content back and forth.

Why? Why? Why?

Cynics would say that it's about making sure that iPad sales don't cannibalize traditional computer sales. With Apple's market share though, sales shifting from desktops and laptops over to iPads is actually a benefit to Apple as evidenced by the recent earnings conference call when this issue was discussed.

There are probably a lot of PC users with older Windows machines who would be happy to replace their old PC with an iPad, which would handle almost all their computer needs. Apple's walled garden approach really shines through for these users. No worries about competing browsers and email clients, downloading and installing software (even in the Mac universe, how many times do you see people running apps off the disk image rather than dragging it to the Applications folder?) Malware isn't currently a concern, and the parental controls are quite handy. The price helps bridge the digital divide, making powerful computing accessible to everyone. That goal was one the motivators of the netbook movement. Apple changed the rules and added a new one: this magical and revolutionary device still needs a traditional and mainstream copy of iTunes running somewhere for setup and maintenance. Againwhy?

Because Steve said so, that's why!

Ultimately the iPad will probably gain independence. But for now, regardless of logic, market conditions, or technology, Steve Jobs sees the iPad as a companion rather than a replacement for the traditional desktop or laptop. It's both something more and something less than the typical computer. Will we see the day when the umbilical cord between traditional operating systems and the iOS devices is cut? One can dream.

Do you think iOS devices should require a separate computer? Why or why not?

Related GigaOM Pro Research (subscription required): Can Anyone Compete With the iPad?

There have been numerous blogs that have read into a story on Mark Zuckerberg's profile stating that he installed Facebook for Android as a sign that he's stopped using his iPhone. This is an inaccurate analysis as Mark Zuckerberg recently told an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View that he uses both an Android and an iPhone. At the time, he told the audience that he had both devices to check how Facebook functioned on both of them.

So for all those people who are reading into the feed story pictured below, there are two things to keep in mind: the story is old and it's just another phone, not a replacement.

Why Computers Don't Matter Anymore

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

An event occurred recently that was widely covered in financial and tech circles, but the significance of which may have been lost on most.

Apple's market cap rose slightly above Microsoft's, making it the largest tech company in the world. Now, market cap is based on current stock price and is a lousy measure of things to come and this is by no means a post about good and bad investments, but to me it marks a point in time that clearly points to the path we're headed for the next decade or so.

Apple, on the verge of extinction in 1996, rose up with laptops, but then bet the farm on hand held devices and applications. Apple now makes the bulk of its revenue from iPods, iPhones and iTunes in fact, it would be safe to suggest that Apple is not really a computer company. Apple built its store right next to the new freeway off ramp (the mobile freeway that is) and has benefited through this location dramatically.

As computers and even web browsers continue to lose significance by yielding ground to mobile devices and applications Apple is positioned to dominate for years to come. In the application world social networks like Facebook will continue to grow, cloud computing via applications will generate far more revenue than operating systems, software and hardware.

What all of this means is that Google must successfully nail a social strategy or even it's mobile plays will cut into it search ad revenue. Microsoft may be in big trouble as it clings to shrinking government and enterprise installations too big to move elsewhere.

Small business can and should seize the opportunity to claim low cost operating efficiencies found in the cloud. Marketers must find effective ways to play in social networks. Resistance to mobile tactics such as location ads, text messaging, and mobile applications must erode as they become the preferred method of content and information consumption.

In modern web interface design, no other principle has been heralded and pushed onto us as much as the concept of user-centered design. User-centered design tells us that we should do everything we can to make our user interfaces as easy to use and as intuitive as possible.

However, a big part of designing user interfaces that are easy to use also involves figuring out what things should be a bit more difficult to to use. It's a counter-intuitive notion that's central to effective user interface design.

Why Make Certain User Interface Items Difficult to Use?

I can think of 3 main reasons for making an interface element more burdensome to utilize:

1. When using the interface element is costly to the user if used by accident
2. When there's an overall improvement to the UI as a whole
3. When the cost of maintaining a feature is costly to the provider if used frequently

High Cost of an Error in Usage

When you accidentally delete a file or click on a button that you didn't mean to, there's going to be a cost. For example, recovering a deleted file in a traditional operating system such as Windows costs time. To get your deleted file back, you need to:

1. Minimize your current application so that you can see your desktop
2. Click on the Recycling Bin icon
3. Locate the deleted document in your bin (or type in a search term if you have many files in your bin)
4. Right-click on it to see and issue the restore command
5. If you want to continue working on the document, you need to reopen it

That's a costly mistake. Good user interfaces will have safeguards for this situation, such as obfuscating the visibility of the delete command and showing you a confirmation dialog that asks you if you really want to delete the file. Burdening the deletion process is a purposeful design choice to avoid the more costly event of accidentally deleting the document.

Example: Deleting Content in WordPress

In older versions of WordPress, when you deleted content by accident (such as that post draft you've been working on for a month), there was no simple way to recover from the mistake. There was a confirmation dialog window that asked you if you did in fact mean to delete the content, but if you're quickly going through, say, spam comments and deleting them one by one, there will be accidents. In older versions of WordPress, when you delete something, it was irreversible.

To fix this, WordPress added an additional feature called Trash. It works much like the Recycling Bin in operating systems that temporarily house files you've deleted in case you want them back.

Although it's now harder to permanently delete WordPress content since you have an additional step to go through to remove the stuff you deleted inside your Trash, by intent, the deletion process was extended and made more difficult to prevent the more costly event of accidentally deleting a post or comment.

Improving the Overall UI System

When there are a lot of interface items competing for your attention, the result is an intimidating and cognitively burdensome UI.

For newer users of the system, having too much noise going on all at once can slow down their ability to learn how the system functions.

But we want people to have ready access to all of these awesome features, so the tendency is to fit as many things as we can into our screens.

Fitt's Law

To help explain the value of making some interface elements more difficult to use for the overall good of the system, I'll borrow from Jeff Atwood's discussion of the opposite of Fitts' Law.

Fitts' law is a human-computer interaction (HCI) model that predicts the speed in which someone can move to an objective. It applies to any human-computer interaction situations that involve human movement and a target.

In the context of graphical user interfaces on computer screens, the model attempts to quantify the factors that improve someone's ability to, for example, point and click on an interface element such as a call to action button.

If that sounds too complicated, we can simplify the model this way: Things that are important and frequently used should be bigger and closer to the user^[1].

It makes sense: Bigger things that are closer to us are easier to get to and touch than those that are smaller and farther away.

So, if Fitts' Law states that interface elements that are essential to the user should be bigger and closer to them or in the context of a computer screen, easier to find and see Atwood looks at the problem in reverse and asks, "What should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on?"

The answer is simple. By logic, we make those UI elements more difficult to use, locate, and find by making them smaller and more distant to the user.

Doing this forces us to prioritize what interface elements are more important. In turn, this creates visual hierarchies in our UI elements that help the user understand how the system works.

Example: Freshbooks

One of my favorite apps, Freshbooks, demonstrates this point well.

The web app's design smartly implements a logical visual arrangement of its interface elements to make things easier and more intuitive.

For example, in the Expenses tab, there are 6 commands you can perform from the top interface command set:

1. Add a new expense
2. Archive
3. Delete
4. Copy
5. Convert to an invoice
6. Search

Look at the variations in size, grouping and spacing of those commands. Some are close together, some are farther down to the right, Search is deemphasized.

Which command is the most important? Which one is the least important?

Counter-Example: Microsoft Word

Just because they're our favorite whipping boy, let me follow the trend and pick on a Microsoft product: MS Word 2007.

MS Word has a cluttered main menu, and there's not a lot of thought put in, in terms of Fitt's Law. They all seem of equal value and thus, it's harder to find the things you need.

How many times do you need to adjust your document margins or theme? Probably just once.

How many times do you need the Acrobat tab? (Never in my case).

Should all of these options be shown by default, or should they be hidden and more difficult to access for the overall good and simplification of the UI?

By hiding some interface elements or by making them smaller, you are afforded with more room to work with for commands that are truly important and often used (such as styling commands for bolding and emphasizing text).

High Cost to the Provider

Some features might be too costly to us as providers if they're used regularly. An example of this situation is in obfuscating or burdening the customer support process so that users are encouraged to help themselves before submitting a help ticket.

Let's use a real-world analogy to explore this topic: Toilet paper in public restrooms. Toilet paper in public restrooms are typically provided free of charge as a courtesy to bathroom goers. You can guarantee that toilet paper in these restrooms will be as rough as sandpaper and manufactured as cheaply as possible.

The reason this is so is that it's a free service. One of the ways to cut costs is to get the cheapest toilet paper possible.

But what if the public restroom operator had some spare money to spend? Should he/she improve the quality of their toilet paper?

Nope.

There are other benefits to keeping toilet paper as crappy as possible. By making toilet paper difficult to use, they discourage people from taking advantage of the offering unless they absolutely need to.

For instance, many would hesitate to take rolls of toilet paper home because they're unbearable to use and they probably have better stuff waiting at home. Some might even refrain from using public restrooms if they know that in five minutes they'll be at home and in the comfort of their own restroom.

It doesn't take away from the user; they still have the feature (toilet paper) but they're just less likely to use it if they can avoid it. There is no lack of feature availability, so it's okay.

Example: Download Feature in Design Instruct

I'll use an example closer to home. On Design Instruct, everything is free: You don't have to pay a subscription fee to access the site, you don't have to register to use any site feature, and you don't have to jump through hoops to download stuff (such as Photoshop files and freebies).

On similar sites that provide free downloads, they'll often have large call to action buttons placed prominently at the top of the web page, enticing the user to download their source file.

In retrospect, on Design Instruct, the download feature is at the very bottom of the tutorial, as a link with a purposefully intimidating heading ("Download Source Files") and link name ("some_file_name").

Our reasoning is to discourage the feature's use unless you really need to. This is because the download feature, although great for our users that need it, costs us an arm and a leg in bandwidth and servers (we need a dedicated server and CDN just for these downloads).

The download option will be used more by long-time readers who are already familiar with the interface and less by one-time visitors who'll never return to the site again.

The objective here is simple: we want to prioritize our resources in such a way that the readers who've been with us longer are the ones that are likely to take advantage of this feature.

Example: Minimizing Free Signups in Basecamp

Another example where this concept can be seen is in Basecamp's pricing page. Basecamp offers a free plan, but they'd much prefer you sign up for their premium plans.

In the screenshot below, I'd wager that many people miss the "free plan" option and find it more difficult to click on because of the option's size and position, especially when compared to UI elements around it.

Even though they want to make this option available, minimizing free signups versus premium signups is the objective of this screen.

Further Reading

Here are a few articles related to this topic.

• The Opposite of Fitts' Law
• Visible Narratives: Understanding Visual Organization
• Visual Hierarchy 52 Weeks of UX

References

1. Fitt's Law

Related Content

• Negative Space in Webpage Layouts: A Guide
• An Introduction to Website Split Testing
• How to Increase Conversions on any Website in 45 Minutes
• Related categories: User Interface and Web Design

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He's also a web developer/designer who specializes in front-end development and a book author. If you'd like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

Ian Drew, executive vice president of marketing at ARM Holdings, a Cambridge, U.K.-based company that makes semiconductors powering a majority of the smartphones, tablets, 70 percent of world's hard drives and half the world's printers, is on a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley. And what everyone (including me) wants to talk to him about is servers, or rather low-power server chips that can power the data centers of tomorrow.

With this foray into the fast-growing data center business, the company, which can trace back its roots to Apple Computer, is slowly becoming a bane to Intel's existence. And the funny thing is, it does so not by making chips, but instead it develops technology and licenses it to all comers.

Some special companies Qualcomm, Marvell and Infineon get access to all of ARM's entire technology stack, so they can build their own chips which in turn compete with Intel. The latest company to sign-up: Microsoft, the long time partner of Intel and the other half of the Wintel' monopoly. What Microsoft will do with ARM's technology remains to be seen, but it is a notable move nonetheless. It is a sign that the company is killing it.

Check out their American Depository Receipts: at the close of trading they were up nearly 165 percent over past twelve months. In the second quarter of 2010, its revenues jumped 42 percent to $150.3 million versus $105.5 million in Q2 2009. Earnings per share leaped 147% percent to $2.34 a share versus 95 cents a share it earned in a year ago quarter. From the looks of it, things seem to be going well for these guys.

The main reason ARM has done so well is because it has focused on developing low-power technologies that it licenses in turn to others, thus eschewing the headaches that come with manufacturing and selling your own chips. More importantly, ARM as a company sits at a unique position in the technology ecosystem. Because it licenses its chip technology to others, it has a good idea of what kind of products are coming to market, how well certain type of products are doing and more importantly where the industry is headed. In short, it talks to chip makers, device makers and these days even software companies that are developing software for these consumer devices.

And what Drew and his cohorts are seeing is a radical revolution in the data centers. While the x86 world focused on pure megahertz, we have focused on the megahertz per milliwatt, Drew said during our conversation earlier today. We focus on quarter-to-half milliwatts as a key metric. Most of the new devices such as the iPhones don't have heat sinks in them, he joked.

If you look at our heritage (of low power chips) it makes perfect sense for us to be looking at the servers and the data centers, said Drew. With cooling making up nearly half the capital expenditure and almost two-thirds of the operation expenses, Drew said power is going to be a bigger part of the conversation.

Everyone is using the Web and the Web is more demanding today which means all of the stuff is going to run through data centers, he noted. Two things are very clear: there is going to be a lot of data and need for less power. By getting the world to buy more edge devices (iPhones, iPads etc.), ARM is at the same boosting demand for back-end computing infrastructure. Now by diversifying into the data center server business, it can make more money selling its low-power chip technology to server makers. In other words, ARM wins on both sides of the trade.

Stacey, in a post earlier this year noted:

The news shouldn't come as a surprise to our readers, since I profiled Smooth-Stone, one company trying to build low-power servers earlier this month, and in that same post pointed to ARM's server ambitions. And it's not just startups that are interested in using the low-power ARM architecture inside data centers, either. Google recently acquired a secretive startup called Agnilux that was rumored to be making a server with the ARM architecture.

We also reported on a Microsoft job listing that sought a software development engineer with experience running ARM in the data center for the company's eXtreme Computing group. For the last couple of decades, Intel's x86 chips have gained dominance in the data center, but as power considerations begin to outweigh the benefits of a cheap, general purpose processor, other chip makers have started to smell blood. Nvidia is pushing its graphics processors for some types of applications, while Texas Instruments is researching the use of DSPs inside servers.

But don't expect this to happen overnight, Drew cautioned. We are going to see some pilots over next year, but this is a long term initiative. He believes that this long, continuous transition to lower-power server chips is going to take between three to five years. When I asked Drew what are those pilots, he declined to comment. From our reporting, we can easily tell you Microsoft, Smooth Stone and Marvell are experimenting with ARM-based server processors.

And while ARM tries to build a server business, the company, Drew said has plenty on its plate. For instance, the upcoming/next generation Cortex-A class processor codenamed Eagle, which is likely to help redefine the smartphone landscape again.

Related content from GigaOM Pro: (sub req'd.): Are Green Enterprise IT Pastures Within ARM's Reach?

(Hospital | Perth, Australia)

Me: How can I help you today?

Patient: Um. I think I have an STI.

Me: Okay. What symptoms do you have that makes you think that?

Patient: Well, I don't really know. My computer told me to be here.

Me: Oh, did you do a self-analysis online?

Patient: No. I'm not sure. I'm here, I need to be here!

Me: Exactly what did your computer tell you?

Patient: Don't judge me! Stop it! I need to be here!

Me: I can assure you that I am not judging you. Can you explain to me exactly what happened before you came here?

Patient: Well, I was looking at some porn last night online and this morning I turned my computer on and it told me I have a virus!

Me: Uh.

Patient: Stop judging me!

Behold, Amazon has released the third generation of Kindles, just called Kindle. For Wi-fi only, it'll cost you $139 dollars, and with 3G it'll cost $189. That makes the new cheaper Kindle a better deal than the also wi-fi only Nook. Screen size is still just the same as it was before, but the device as a whole has gotten smaller, as you can see on the diagram below.

Read more at Computer World and see the products on Amazon.

Do we really want to escape our cages?

Things are getting awfully complicated, aren't they? The custom parallel CPUs, proprietary communications networks, and encrypted data ports require extensive training, special tools, and a computerized reference library to comprehend, much less debug. And the manufacturers, who derive much of their money and differentiation from warranties and authorized repair centers, are loathe to see independent shops get a piece of the action.

Yes, today's automobile market sure is complex. Did you think I was talking about computer systems? The current state of the retail auto industry has a lot to teach us in the computers and communication devices! There are many parallels between cars and computers, after all.

Selling an Ecosystem

The Lincoln Highway gave early motorists a reason to want a car

Early automobiles were a lot like early computers: Many were hand-made and none was all that useful. Sure, Bertha Benz managed to drive to Pforzheim in 1888 to visit her mother, but she had to repair her husband's motorwagen multiple times during the 60 mile trip. While automobile technology has certainly improved since then, the real innovation that drove the world to drive cars was the ecosystem that surrounds them.

Carl Fisher may not be familiar to most, but he deserves as much credit as Henry Ford, Billy Durant, Ferdinand Porsche, Eiji Toyoda, and so many other engineers and industrialists. Fisher realized that, in addition to being technically sound and affordable, the automobile must be embraced by the public to succeed. He switched from supplying headlights to convincing the public that car ownership was a desirable thing, creating a multi-brand dealership, founding the Indianapolis 500, and redirecting the Good Roads Movement to support highways suitable for long-distance automobile trips.

Fisher's insight was similar to that of Steve Jobs' at the first incarnation of Apple: People want a place in an ecosystem not just a piece of technology. Fisher's Lincoln and Dixie Highway projects gave the public a reason to buy a car. Similarly, Jobs' Apple II and Macintosh projects focused as much on what people would do with the computers as what they were made of. Much of Apple's current success is due to the way customers experience the company, from the upscale yet inviting Apple Stores to the curated iOS App Store.

Apple's walled garden approach to computers and mobile devices may draw derision from techies but the public loves it. They don't want a Macintosh, iPhone, or iPad; they want a thing that lets them do what they do. The ability to easily install and use applications and accessories easily outweighs the arbitrary and capricious limitations placed on them by Apple and AT&T. Regular people don't want multiple windows on screen with multitasking applications; they want instantly to turn on their pad, perform a task, and set it aside. The Apple ecosystem empowers this.

Total Customer Experience

Lexus set the benchmark for modern automobile ownership after their 1989 debut in the United States. The company created a total customer experience, from inquiry to sales to ownership and support, recognizing that upscale buyers would pay a premium to be coddled by their car company, not just their car. In fact, if Apple is copying anyone with their glass Stores and Geniuses and AppleCare it is Lexus.

Every premium automobile marque labors to offer a Lexus-like customer experience today. Basic mechanical warranties became bumper-to-bumper service, and dealer service bays transformed into destinations with free car washes and cappuccino bars. Like Apple, today's carmakers want to coddle their customers and shield them from the cruel world of discount stores and independent repairmen.

Right to Repair and DMCA Exemptions

Proprietary systems and "Total Customer Experience" threaten to marginalize independent shops

But Apple and the automakers might have stepped a bit too far, turning from walled garden to gilded cage. Worried that openness would corrupt both their pristine equipment and customer experience, manufacturers began to lock out unauthorized parts and modifications. But in so doing they also imposed restrictions that threaten to turn owners into mere users at the whim of the companies.

My Mazda MX-5 Miata is far from a walled-garden experience luxury car. I love it, in fact, because it's a wonderfully basic, visceral, and mechanical car. But the Bose audio system that came with it is as complex and locked-down as anything in a Lexus. Adding a basic auxiliary input required decoding a proprietary bus and creating a custom chip to emulate the tape deck module, an admirable piece of work indeed!

With even a simple car's audio system gaining this kind of complexity, it's no wonder that independent repair shops are feeling squeezed out. This is why the Massachusetts Right to Repair law is getting such widespread attention. Independent repair shops (and yes, aftermarket equipment makers) are attempting to force automakers to allow them access to the proprietary technology in their cars. Yet even if they break open the gilded cage, the walls of total customer experience may prove harder to crack.

The exemptions to the DMCA handed down by the copyright office this week are remarkably similar. Although the Office did not go as far as many would have liked, they firmly stated that companies shouldn't use copyright law to restrict the use, preservation, and repair of certain products. Of particular interest to both DMCA opponents and Right to Repair fans is the long-term implication of walled-off technology. What happens when a dongle or key is no longer manufactured or supported? Will anyone be able to repair a Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Lexus, or Apple in 20 years?

Stephen's Stance

Consomers like living in a gilded cage

Unquestionably, the world is worse off if manufacturers completely restrict basic access to their products. The short-term impact on buyers, though concerning, are trumped by the long-term implications. The copyright office is wise to realize that DRM, encryption, hardware lock-in, and dongles threaten to effectively delete audio, video, print, and entertainment properties once their manufacturer decides they are obsolete. And Right to Repair is urgently needed to keep historically-important automobiles from becoming useless hunks once their manufacturers stop supporting them.

But the rosy picture painted by the EFF, iPhone jailbreakers, independent mechanics, and other freedom-loving folks aren't entirely justified. As Carl Fisher and Steve Jobs proved, consumers want an ecosystem, and enjoy luxuriating in a gilded cage. The success of the iTunes store demonstrates that buyers value convenience over freedom when it comes to entertainment, making Apple's move to remove DRM from their audio content gratifying indeed. And Apple and Lexus buyers remain loyal to the companies despite widely-publicized product defects. Perhaps Right to Repair and the DMCA exemptions are about protecting consumers from themselves rather than from predatory manufacturers.

Image credits: Lemur Cage 2 by Stephen Foskett, Lincoln Highway Bridge, Tama, IA by cwwycoff1, Mechanic Shop by Tomas, The View Through The Furry Handcuffs by Annie in Beziers

sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Walled Gardens, Gilded Cages, and Right to Repair
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer history, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

HTC will ship all Android phones in China with Froyo on board, fuels fire for immediate update closer to home originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

New Labour, the FCC, and G.K. Chesterton are known for third ways. But when it comes to copy ownership, there's no such thing. The mostly-awesome Copyright Office 1201 report wishes there was, however.

Imagine a booksay, The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams. The copyright to this literary work is owned by Teddy Ballgame, or his ghostwriter, heirs, and assigns. Now imagine the physical copy of this book that I have right here in front of me. This one. I own itnot the ghost of Ted Williams, not Fireside publishing. Me. While my ownership of this copy does not entitle me to make a movie out of the book, or scan it and put it up on the web, it does mean that if I sell the book I do not infringe the distribution rights of the author. The first sale doctrine hinges on this distinction between copy ownership and copyright ownership.

This distinction is also important in the world of software. If you own a copy of software, you're specifically allowed to run it under the law, without needing to get special permission from the copyright owner. But you don't need permission to read a book or listen to a record. So why do you need special legal permission to use a copy of what you own? Because under our law, running a program is considered making a copy of it in the computer's RAM, and copyright owners have the exclusive right, with limited exceptions like the one I just mentioned, to authorize the making of copies of their works. If for some reason you don't own the copy (say, you're leasing it), you can only run the program if you have a license (that is, permission) that allows you to make RAM copies.

Software companies have taken this notion of a license to ridiculous levels, to the extent that they claim that, when you walk into a store and pay money for a physical good (the CDs software comes on, for instance), you don't really own those physical CDs. You only license them. It's never been totally clear what that means, since you can't license a physical gooda license refers to legal permission to do something you otherwise couldn't do. (Okay, it sometimes means the piece of paper or other legal instrument that embodies the actual license.) But when it comes to physical goods, there aren't many options. You can own them, borrow them, or lease them. Maybe you're a bailor. But the concept of license is totally separate from and orthogonal to any form of dominion over a physical piece of property. In fact, Public Knowledge is involved in a case that hinges on whether you actually own copies of software that you buy. Software owners should have the same rights as other copyright ownersbut they shouldn't have the extra super-right of claiming that the hundreds of millions of physical copies of things that they've sold over the years don't actually belong to the people they sell them to.

Because the law in this areas is in flux, the Copyright Office ducks and ducks hard when it comes to the issue of whether you actually own the physical copy of the software that's installed on your mobile phone. First, let's review: I have an iPhone. Apple owns the copyright to iOS. But the phone is minenot AT&T's and not Apple's. Mine, mine, mine. Thus, if there are any copies of software embedded in that phone, I own them. If I own a slab of vinyl, I own a copy of the music on it. Those little grooves are mine. If I own some bound pages with ink squiggles on them, I own a copy of a book. Phones are no different. But the Copyright Office kind of wishes they were. In the Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, it writes:

The Register concludes that the law relating to who is the owner of a copy of a computer program under Section 117 is in flux. In light of this uncertainty, the Register is reluctant to take a firm position on whether a purchaser of an iPhone is, or is not, the owner of the copy of the computer programs on the device. Where the law is unclear, the regulatory process (as distinguished from the legislative process) should be used to resolve difficult issues only as a last resort, especially when the issue is to a large degree a matter of contract interpretation.

Page 90. Later, it continues that

[T]he state of the law with respect to who may be an owner of a copy of a computer program under Section 117 appears to be in flux, and the determination whether the owner of a handset is also the owner of the copies of computer programs contained in that handset may depend on an evaluation of a number of circumstances.

Page 167. There is also similar language in the Federal Register notice:

The Register cannot determine whether most mobile phone owners are also the owners of the copies of the computer programs on their mobile phones.

The problem with this reasoning is that there is no difference between the ownership of the mobile phone, and the ownership of any software copies embedded in it. There is no third way. If you own the phone, you own the copy. If you don't own the copy, then you can't own the phone. Copyright is an intangible right, but copy ownership definitely isn't. It's a flesh and bones idea: copy ownership can't be metaphysically separated out from the ownership of the physical hunk of stuff.

I appreciate that the Copyright Office doesn't want to make a stand on pending litigation, but that litigation is about who actually owns some hunks of plastic after an economic transaction. It is not about the creation or destruction of a new kind of intangible copy ownership right that floats unmoored from both copyright and the ownership of physical copies. Maybe such a new kind of intangible right is a good idea that would better comport with the law. But it isn't the law. If the Copyright Office is satisfied that iPhone owners actually own their mobile phones, then it should also be satisfied that they are also the owners of the copies of the computer programs on their mobile phones, because one necessarily follows from the other. Elsewhere in the Recommendation, the Copyright Office does indeed find that "[t]he fact is that proponents ... have made a prima facie case that owners of mobile phones are also the owners of the copies of the software that are fixed on those phones and that as owners they are entitled to exercise the Section 117 privilege." (pg. 132). In fact, when it comes to copy ownership, there is no third way.

Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they're hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We've chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar specifically women with coding skills please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are Internet famous. Some, less so for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We've even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She's a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation's CTO. She's also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she's affectionately known as The Open Source Diva in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she's a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she's the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how's this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen's goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we'd guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She's done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She's an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an Internet engineer, a self-applied job title we don't see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can't argue with the description. She's a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She's an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she's the company's VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she's particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take that means she started out before blogging was called blogging. She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she's perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She's currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda's Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute's Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration's 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan's Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O'Dell's Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix's Dev Chix

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

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Newspapers are now less important than the Internet as a source of information, yet the majority of online users say most online information is not reliable, according to the 10th annual study of the impact of the Internet on Americans by the Center for the Digital Future.

The study also found that 70 percent of online users believe that Internet advertising is annoying, yet 55 percent of users said they would rather see Web advertising than pay for content.

Among the study's findings:

• Americans on the Internet For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans now 82 percent. Weekly hours online The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
• Gaps in Internet use in age groups Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
• Low adoption of new media Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
• Does technology make the world a better place The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
• Internet and Political Campaigns although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
• Buying online 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
• Internet impact on traditional retail declines 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores down from 69 percent in 2008.
• Top 10 online purchases 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).
• The study found that as sources of information their primary function newspapers rank below the Internet or television. Only 56 percent of Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them a decrease from 60 percent in 2008 and below the Internet (78 percent), and television (68 percent).
• Even lower are the percentages of users who consider newspapers important as sources of entertainment for them, now considered important by 29 percent of Internet users, and down from 32 percent in 2008 also last among principal media.
• Eighteen percent of Internet users said they stopped a subscription to a newspaper or magazine because they now get the same or related content online down slightly from 22 percent in 2008, but nevertheless a strong indication that print newspapers can be sacrificed by a significant percentage of Internet users.
• Internet users were asked where they would go for information provided by their newspaper if the print edition ceased, 59 percent said they would read the online edition of the publication; only 37 percent said they would instead read the print edition of another newspaper.
• Twenty-two percent of users who read newspapers said they would not miss the print edition of their newspaper.
• Sixty-one percent of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable a new low level for the Digital Future Project.
• Even more disturbing is that 14 percent of Internet users said that only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable a percentage that has grown for the past three years and is now at the highest level thus far in the Digital Future Project.
• Also revealing is the percentage of users who have limited trust even in the Web sites they visit regularly: although 78 percent said that most or all of the information on the sites they visit regularly is reliable (a decline from the previous two years), 22 percent of users say that only one half or less of information on sites they visit regularly is reliable.
• Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo traditional stalwarts of online credibility have lost some of their luster. While 53 percent of Internet users said that most or all of the information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, that percentage declined slightly in the current Digital Future Study and is well below the peak of 64 percent in 2006.
• 36 percent of users said only about half of information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, and 12 percent said only a small portion or none of it was reliable.
• Only 46 percent of users said they have some trust or a lot of trust in the Internet in general. Nine percent of users have no trust in the Internet.

Among the study's findings:

• Americans on the Internet For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans now 82 percent. Weekly hours online The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use have been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
• Gaps in Internet use in age groups Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
• Low adoption of new media Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
• Does technology make the world a better place The percentage of users age 16 and older who said that communication technology makes the world a better place has declined to 56 percent of users from its peak of 66 percent in 2002.
• Internet and Political Campaigns although more than 70 percent of users agree that the Internet is important for political campaigns, only 27 percent of users said that by using the Internet public officials will care more about what people think, and 29 percent said that the Internet can give people more of a say in what government does.
• Buying online 65 percent of adult Internet users buy online (the same as in 2008), and make an average of 35.2 purchases per year (up from 34.1 per year in 2008).
• Internet impact on traditional retail declines 61 percent of Internet users said that online purchasing has reduced their buying in traditional retail stores down from 69 percent in 2008.
• Top 10 online purchases 59 percent of Internet users said they purchase books or clothes online, followed by gifts (55 percent), travel (53 percent), electronics/appliances (47 percent), videos (46 percent), computers or peripherals (41 percent), software or games (40 percent), CDs (40 percent), and products for hobbies (38 percent).
• The study found that as sources of information their primary function newspapers rank below the Internet or television. Only 56 percent of Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them a decrease from 60 percent in 2008 and below the Internet (78 percent), and television (68 percent).
• Even lower are the percentages of users who consider newspapers important as sources of entertainment for them, now considered important by 29 percent of Internet users, and down from 32 percent in 2008 also last among principal media.
• Eighteen percent of Internet users said they stopped a subscription to a newspaper or magazine because they now get the same or related content online down slightly from 22 percent in 2008, but nevertheless a strong indication that print newspapers can be sacrificed by a significant percentage of Internet users.
• Internet users were asked where they would go for information provided by their newspaper if the print edition ceased, 59 percent said they would read the online edition of the publication; only 37 percent said they would instead read the print edition of another newspaper.
• Twenty-two percent of users who read newspapers said they would not miss the print edition of their newspaper.
• Sixty-one percent of users said that only half or less of online information is reliable a new low level for the Digital Future Project.
• Even more disturbing is that 14 percent of Internet users said that only a small portion or none of the information online is reliable a percentage that has grown for the past three years and is now at the highest level thus far in the Digital Future Project.
• Also revealing is the percentage of users who have limited trust even in the Web sites they visit regularly: although 78 percent said that most or all of the information on the sites they visit regularly is reliable (a decline from the previous two years), 22 percent of users say that only one half or less of information on sites they visit regularly is reliable.
• Even search engines such as Google and Yahoo traditional stalwarts of online credibility have lost some of their luster. While 53 percent of Internet users said that most or all of the information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, that percentage declined slightly in the current Digital Future Study and is well below the peak of 64 percent in 2006.
• 36 percent of users said only about half of information provided by search engines is reliable and accurate, and 12 percent said only a small portion or none of it was reliable.
• Only 46 percent of users said they have some trust or a lot of trust in the Internet in general. Nin