Apple ships Air

Apple has begun shipping its skinny MacBook Air laptop, a product that's managed to generate more controversy than even the iPhone has.

The notebook is between 4mm and 19mm thick. It has a length of 32cm, a width of 22.7cm and weighs in at just 1.36kg. It has an LED-backlit 13.3in display and a full-size keyboard. The Air comes with a choice of 1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo processor. For storage, it packs a 4200rpm, 1.8in 80GB HDD, though a rather pricier 64GB solid-state drive is also available.

There's no on-board optical drive, but that doesn't appear to have bothered many folk. What gets the goat of a fair few Register Hardware readers is the lack of portage, in particular an Ethernet socket, though Air owners can buy dongle that clips into the machine's USB port and provides an Ethernet port.

But then there's no other USB port to plug a mouse or a memory key into. In addition to the solitary USB port, there's a headphone socket and a mini-DVI port to drive an external monitor.

Apple's pitch is that the Air's first and foremost a wireless device - it has 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 with Extended Data Rate (EDR) technology on board. The machine comes with software that allows any Mac running OS X 10.4.10 or above, or a PC with Windows XP or Vista, to 'lend' the Air is optical drive over the airwaves for software installation - but not media playback, it seems.

The other irritation most commentators cite - well, apart from the whole Apple hyperbole thing, which probably pisses more people off than the hardware does - is the lack of a user-removable battery. That's a worry given Apple's record on battery replacement programmes and issues over the last couple of years.

Still, early looks at the Air have revealed replacing the battery's just a matter of unscrewing the laptop's base and pulling out the power cell. We reckon it won't be long before cheap third-party alternatives hit the market.

But that's still not going to be much use to folk who like to travel with multiple batteries to extend the away-from-the-mains life of their machines.

The 1.6GHz, 80GB Air costs £1199 in the UK and $1799 in the US. The 1.8GHz, 64GB SSD model costs £2028/$3098.

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By Tony Smith

Faulty cable blacks out internet for millions

Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.

The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.

Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.

The line in question runs under the Mediterranean, from Palermo in Italy to Alexandria in Egypt. It is not clear what caused the break. The cable is one of only a handful of connections, and part of the world's longest undersea cable, 24,500 miles long, running from Germany, through the Middle East and India before terminating in Australia and Japan.

Reports suggested that the lack of alternative routes for internet traffic meant only a small proportion of surfers were managing to get online. Egyptian officials said that around 70% of the country's online traffic was being blocked, while officials in Mumbai said that more than half of India's internet capacity had been erased, which could have potentially disastrous consequences for the country's burgeoning hi-tech industry.

"There has been a 50% to 60% cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India told Reuters.

The shutdown highlighted the often frail nature of international communications: despite the vast number of individuals who have access to the web, nearly all internet traffic is routed through a small number of cables submerged deep below the oceans. It is then forwarded through an internet backbone consisting of just 13 servers which handle and direct all online requests.

Amr Gharbeia, a blogger from Cairo, said the inability to communicate with the outside world had caused confusion and concern among Egyptians. "When I woke up this morning there was no internet at home, and then I visited two or three other places during the day and they had no access either," he told the Guardian.

He said the lack of information about the outage meant that many people had been left wondering if the Egyptian authorities - who have previously jailed online critics and threatened to close down websites they deem a threat - had blocked web access in an act of censorship.

"We started getting paranoid because we've seen the internet temporarily shut down before in countries like Pakistan," he said. "But I think we only have two internet gateways that go outside of Egypt, so perhaps only the smaller one is currently working."

The outage will take several days to fix, and could have a drastic impact around the region and across the globe. As well as hitting communications, businesses and the hi-tech industry in affected countries, it could also have repercussions for banks and even stock market trading.

By Bobbie Johnson

UK should learn lessons from Japanese on broadband

The UK government must set a deadline for ensuring ubiquitous access to high-speed broadband if any plan to improve access is to succeed, a Japanese minisiter has advised.

At an address to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Kiyooshi Mori, the Japanese vice-minister for communications policy, said that Japan had already rolled out 100Mbps fibre broadband to 85% of households.

Japan expects ubiquitous access for businesses and consumers to high-speed broadband by 2010 - the result of a four-year government programme designed to improve access.

"Studies showed that the ICT industry accounts for 40% of real Japanese GDP. This helped the government realise the importance of starting a programmme for ubiquitous access with a deadline."

Mori said the government also introduced competition policies to make it easy for new ISPs to enter the market and for open, shared access to networks. As a result, the price of broadband per 100kbit/s is 0.07 dollars compared with the UK where it is 0.69 dollars.

According to Ofcom research, DSL broadband availability covers 99.6% of the UK, although the Communications Management Association has questioned this figure and the average speed users actually get.

"Although we think of cable modem and DSL services as "high speed" today, they are too slow to support networking of applications envisaged for the future such as high-definition IPTV," said Ovum analyst Matthew Howlett.

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Nationwide rolls out chip and Pin for online transactions

Nationwide building society is rolling out more than one million chip and Pin card readers to customers to help secure their online banking.

The readers are based on remote card authentication technology. The system improves the security of e-banking services for the consumer in a convenient form factor, said Nationwide.

It said that now UK consumers are frequently using chip and Pin for retail purchases, using the same process at home is easy to understand.

With a personal chip and pin reader, Nationwide registered internet bank users will be able to benefit from the same convenient security as Nationwide already provides for any face-to-face transaction.

The Xi-Sign 4000 APACS reader is a portable, unconnected smart card reader that provides an extra layer of security for customers, by authenticating both them and the transaction.

The user inserts their Visa debit card into the card reader, enters their four-digit Pin number, and enters a reference number (an eight digit number) provided by the online bank.

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Russian FSB 'protecting' Storm Worm gang

The creators of the Storm Worm botnet are known to US authorities but a lack of co-operation from their counterparts in St. Petersburg, Russia, is preventing action being taken.

St. Petersburg was the centre of the infamous Russian Business Network. It's also reckoned by some to be the city the Storm Worm (more properly Trojan) authors call home.

Dmitri Alperovitch director of intelligence analysis and hosted security at Secure Computing told The Washington Post that Russian President Vladimir Putin and political influence within the Federal Security Service (Russia's successor to the Soviet KGB) was hampering prosecution efforts. The implication is that elements of Russian intelligence agencies are protecting the city's cybercriminals.

"The right people now know who the Storm worm authors are," Alperovitch said. 'It's incredibly hard because a lot of the FSB leadership and Putin himself originate from there, where there are a great deal of people with connections in high places."

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