SanDisk have announced that they are launching a new range of Solid State Drives (SSDs) designed specifically for netbooks. The SanDisk pSSD-P2 and SanDisk pSSD-S2 SSDs, expected in February this year, will be available in capacities of 8, 16, 32 and 64GB – which, with the latter two, would allow for a full installation of Windows Vista (or any large operating system for that matter), something not possible on netbooks with smaller capacity SSDs.

The new range is said to have improved performance for netbooks, at a lower cost. Unlike the previous range of netbook SSDs, the new range is to feature a SATA interface, following a change in design requirements. "Netbooks represent the fastest growing PC segment in 2009 and 2010 yet widespread adoption of SSDs in netbooks has been limited by speed, capacity and cost constraints," said SanDisk.

The drives will use 43-nanometer Multi-Level Cell (MLC) technology as opposed to Single-Level Cell (SLC) technology, which has better performance but at a higher production cost. However, this is good news for SSD technology, which until recently hasn't been embraced, due to the high cost and some performance issues.

Although no price or performance details were released, SanDisk hinted at cheaper prices – how much cheaper - and in reference to what - we don't know. But at the very least, this shows that, with time and advances in production techniques, the Solid State Drive is coming ever-closer to where tradition hard disk drives are.

Comcast is fighting back against what it calls excessive bandwidth users. The company confirmed that it has successfully deployed throttling technology to all its markets. Comcast claims that the technology is to help make everyone get the same experience and have equal opportunity to the bandwidth.

The throttling works in a manner that your data can be put in two classes; PBE (Priority Best-Effort) or BE (Best-Effort) with preference being PBE. This is determined by "sustained use of 70% of your up or downstream throughput triggers the BE state, at which point you'll find your traffic priority lowered until your usage drops to 50% of your provisioned upstream or downstream bandwidth for up to 15 minutes. A throttled Comcast user being placed in a BE state may or may not result in the user's traffic being delayed or, in extreme cases, dropped before PBE traffic is dropped." Essentially if your little brother decides to download the internet he will be placed into BE and experience much slower speeds to help spread the bandwidth out to other Comcast users.

On top of this throttling technology Comcast has also placed a 250 GB monthly cap for all users. If you exceed the 250 GB monthly cap your account can be terminated and you can be banned for using the Comcast service for up to one year.

Comcast is cracking down hard on heavy users of the internet. If you have Comcast and have experienced any of these barriers we would like to know your story!

To the outrage of civil liberties groups and the government opposition, the UK Home Office has begun permitting police and MI5 officers to hack ("remote search") people's computers without their knowledge and without a court warrant. Information gleaned can then be shared with other European forces, in line with a shift in EU policy. The goal, as with all such moves, is to track down terrorists, paedophiles, and cybercriminals.

One method for stealth surveillance involves installing spyware on targetted individuals' computers, normally by sending people emails with infected attachments. This can, of course, be done from anywhere. Another method entails hacking directly into people's wifi networks from close range. A third involves law-enforcement officials breaking into people's homes and directly installing spyware, such as keyloggers, or attaching physical monitoring devices to their machines. Any material on such hacked computers would be admissible in court.

This situation is not unlike the controversial powers granted by President Bush to the National Security Agency (NSA) to tap people's communications without their knowledge and without a warrant. In the UK, all that would be needed to justify such an operation would be that an officer "must believe that... it is necessary to prevent or detect serious crime and [the] action is proportionate to what it seeks to achieve," according to ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers).

Shami Chakrabarti, head of the UK civil-liberties group Liberty, questions the legality of the practice, saying, "These are very intrusive powers--as intrusive as someone busting down your door and coming into your home. The public will want this to be controlled by new legislation and judicial authorisation. Without those safeguards it’s a devastating blow to any notion of personal privacy."

The ongoing "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit against Microsoft took an interesting turn the other day when an expert witness for the plaintiffs claimed that the Redmond company made more than $1.5 billion through their "Vista Capable" marketing campaign.

The origins of the trial itself are to be found in the months prior to Vista's release when many computers were sold with Windows XP and the promise that they would be capable of running Vista. However, many of these PCs, which sold at a premium and bore the "Vista Capable" label, turned out to be only capable of running Vista Basic. Hence, Microsoft is being sued for what many would call false advertising.

It is unclear, however, how much of the more than $1.5 billion was earned from those PCs that were only able to run Vista Basic. (It is also unclear how many consumers bought these sub-par PCs at higher prices mainly or even partly because of the claim that they were "Vista Capable", but this would not be relevant to the case.)

The plaintiffs, however, are not the only ones with a complaint against Microsoft. Emails made public during the trial reveal Hewlett-Packard's fury at a last-minute decision on Microsoft's part to lower the minimum specifications for PCs that would be able to receive the "Vista Capable" label. This move benefitted Intel, who were keen to sell off lower-spec stock, but enraged HP, who had invested heavily in meeting the earlier, higher set of minimum requirements. In one of these emails, Richard Walker, an executive at HP, writes to Kevin Johnson and Jim Allchin, co-presidents at the time of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division:

"I can't be more clear than to say you not only let us down by reneging on your commitment to stand behind the WDDM requirement, you have demonstrated a complete lack of commitment to HP as a strategic partner and cost us a lot of money in the process. Your credibility is severely damaged in my organization. I have engineers who've worked their tails off to qualify new platforms to support WDDM who are wondering why they put so much effort in when Microsoft changed the rules at the last minute and didn't even consult us before making the announcement."

Should the plaintiffs win the case, punitive damages against Microsoft could also be applied. Whether or not the plaintiffs are successful, this may not be the end of things, as the EU may want to have their say on the matter.