Apple hears MacBook whine

Apple has finally acknowledged that reports of whining MacBooks are not unsubstantiated. An updated knowledge base article advised owners of 15in MacBook Pros that emit 'a high-pitched buzzing sound' to contact AppleCare. Noise is not the only problem that Apple has had with the MacBook Pros: in April it began shipping Rev D models with a new motherboard; in May a firmware patch was released to prevent overheating. ...more

MPs bid to tackle online extortion

The All Party Internet Group (APIG) is to put forward a bill to update the venerable 1990 Computer Misuse Act. The amendments, if accepted, would explicitly make a crime of distributed denial of service attacks and raise the punitive measures for hacking from six months to two years. The amendments are mainly directed at tackling the rising incidence of blackmail and extortion against online services, such as bookmakers, where organised gangs demand sums of money or threaten to take the service offline with such an attack. ...more

Sony reconsidering CD copy protection

Sony BMG is reconsidering its approach to the copy protection of CDs following the discovery that both the systems it has been using open security holes for PCs. Thomas Hesse, who heads up Sony's global business unit, told the BBC that the bad publicity has forced it to re-evaluate, although that does not mean that the record company is going to take a more permissive line. 'The key point to remember is that copyright infringement is a huge issue for the recording industry as a whole and that's where we came from originally,' he said. ...more

UK online retail set to boom

Forrester's latest research expects online sales to fatten to ?10.4bn by the end of the year - a girth-widening increase of 46 per cent increase year on year. Forrester Senior Analyst Rebecca Jennings: 'Today, 65 percent of online adults have bought and paid for a product or service online, and UK Net shoppers spent an average of ?237 online in the past three months. ...more

Price check: Keyfob Flash drives

They are the modern day floppy and a boon for those on the move. Keyfob Flash drives are the best way around for swapping data across several computers. And with prices always falling, we thought it was time for a price check. ...more