Firstly, a new development in the Middle East internet cable story has come in. Earlier this week, two cables were supposedly cut in the Mediterranean Sea by a boat anchor during a storm. The fact has now been revealed that those two cables were in a restricted area that no boats were allowed into. The cables are only 2 cm thick. It also seems that a third and possibly fourth cable has been cut and Iran had a short outage but is now operating at %40 capacity. Repair of the cables has been delayed so all traffic going through the Middle East and some of India will be significantly slowed.

EDIT: According to this article, a fifth internet cable has been cut.

Windows Vista SP1 has recieved an RTM status, which means that it is slated for a release in mid-March. Although it fixes some driver problems, it reportedly introduces some more, so Microsoft has made it a non-automatic update for those who have known errors. At least Microsoft knows that they have made mistakes. SP1 will increase operating speeds and should fix some other errors, but we’ll have to see once it comes out.

In other news, IPv6 may be getting more popular soon. IPv6 is, to put it simplistically, an ip address with six groups of numbers instead of the current four. Only about %15 of IPv4 addresses are left to use so they will run out soon. The news is that IPv6 is officially supported by DNS services now, meaning that it can be used once the operating systems support it. It will take some time.

IBM researchers in San Francisco have begun experiments with ultra-high capacity hard drive technology. We’re talking about exabytes (an exabyte is a billion gigabytes) here. They are testing ways to produce hard drives at current capacity that consist of only several molecules.

Need some extra RAM but don’t have the cash? Cnet’s Download.com has the solution with a free program called RAMBooster 2 . You set it to free up RAM when a certain percentage used is reached and then it pulls non-system and unessential or idling programs out of the RAM (it presumably deposits them on the hard drive.)

This week, Apple also made big news, doubling the size of its iPhone and iPod Touch to 16 and 32 gigabytes respectively. These models will cost $100 more than the version below them. The new models ship with the latest firmware, with the ability to rearrange the home screen and triangulate one’s position for a GPS-like feature.