In its quest to justify its own value to its stakeholders, AFACT has decided to choose an ISP with a mere five per cent market share in a landmark court case to somehow make ISP's responsible for the content that passes through their pipes.

It is the same mistaken premise that has Senator Stephen Conroy convinced that the Internet can be effectively filtered at ISP-level without having adverse affects on network performance.

This is not a case about iiNet 'allowing' copyright theft. It has nothing to do with the technical reality of being an ISP. It is about media conglomerates losing control of their stranglehold on the content people enjoy, and desperately trying to stem the tide. Few of these studios who claim to be aggrieved by iiNet's customers have made any attempt to negotiate to sell their content on the web legitimately. They can only blame themselves.

This court case is symbolic. At best it could wipe out one per cent, if not less, of the total number of copyright infringers traversing the web in Australia. At worse, it will be a protracted legal battle that reduces competition for Internet connectivity in Australia by wiping out one of the few ISP's that has managed to grow at Telstra's expense.

If AFACT is serious, if they want to create a true precedent, they would go after an ISP that holds 50 per cent of the market, not five.

So go on AFACT. Take on Telstra's legal team. Then we'll know you're serious.

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The answer, if you take a quick trip around to the websites of Australia's major retailers, is startlingly clear: eBay assumed Australians would accept its PayPal-exclusive trading terms because Australian consumers have a total lack of alternatives in online shopping.

While there's no shortage of Australian start-ups with products ready to ship, the total lack of online presence from most major product distributors has seen eBay slip comfortably into a position of being the only substantial catalogue of goods Australians can buy online.

According to Jenny Wilson, lead technology partner for Deloitte Australia, consumer confidence with online transactions has been scaring even the major, trusted brands away moving beyond bricks & mortar.

"Online retail in Australia is two, three years behind," Wilson says.

While all major retailers claim they intend to expand their online shopping ranges, they feel no pressure to hurry.

"When eventually Australians do come to accept online transactions, the incumbent [retailers] will own the space, because the trust is there. There will be a few successful start-ups, purely online start-ups, but they'll be more confined to niche markets."

This in Australia while almost every major chain in the US or UK offers a staggering amount of products at their online stores.

Predominantly, Australian retail chains use their websites to spellcheck their catalogues and offer cryptic advice as to how to locate your nearest store. Any online shopping is restricted to baffling lines of merchandise that barely represents their total product range.

For example, the extent of Myers "For Him" online shop offers:

• one suit
• three shirts
• three pairs of underwear
• one tie
• six wallets
• two sets of cuff links
• two varieties of Armani cologne

(Obviously, a range selected by an executive who'd just lost his luggage...)

Myer's major competitor, David Jones, lifts the bar a notch by offering an online experience that only sells a broad variety of mixed dozens at its wine club. (I'm sure I wasn't the only one who had no idea that David Jones sold wine.)

Alternatively, the Kmart shop from home site markets towards the more lucrative forgot-your-child's-birthday crowd, with a total of nine items available. These include three Star Wars toys, an iPod, Barbie's Glamour Jet, and for the real parenting disaster, a 51cm television.

Big W seems to be leading the march with an arguably impressive entertainment section. Rolf Harris' Platinum Collection, sporting his 54 greatest hits on three CDs, currently headlines the deranged assortment of pop music & accessories. In case you couldn't find them anywhere else on the Web, Big W is also sporting an impressive range of ringtones to download.

There are certainly exceptions to this complete lack of imagination — most notably in the electronics world. Tandy is trying some good stuff, and despite being restricted to gaming, the Harvey Norman game store does show initiative.

Yet without a recognised brand taking the plunge and offering a rich online shopping experience, we can expect eBay to keep testing the friendship with its Australian users, safe and smug in its independence.

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The Apple Store in Sydney

But one very important question remains: are Australians prepared to line up for one?

Very few technology products attract enough hype to warrant queues. The midnight launch of the much-hyped PlayStation 3 had some reasonable crowds last year, but the event drew nothing of the naked panic that similar launches in Japan and the United States offer.

That said; Apple mania defies routine obsession. You don't even need a new product to attract a crowd, just the threat of one. In the US, lines have spontaneously formed in front of Apple stores for absolutely no reason. It requires just two alpha geeks to line up, and their pale brethren will soon emerge, convinced that by joining the herd they will soon, finally, obtain the product that defines them as an individual.

It's akin to the sociological retardation that compels clubbers to line up in front of one discotheque when there are quite clearly plenty of other establishments happy to take their money. Clearly, coolness is directly proportional to one's faith in the herd.

I won't be surprised if a few die-hard techies line up on George St, Sydney when Apple opens its flagship store next week — even if all the products inside it can already be bought from the Next Byte store four blocks away.

But lines in front of an Optus 'yes' store or a Vodafone store? The Optus 'yes' stores are cool, sure, the zoo animal theme is cute, and Vodafone stores are cool purely by virtue of their red-ness. (Red is cool, Richard Branson could vouch for that.)

But are they cool enough to queue in front of?

I would hope that, despite the lessons of my limited clubbing experience, we Australians differ to our American cousins. Australians, being more rational (read: significantly more apathetic), would surely not lower ourselves to line up for the release of a mobile phone.

Optus is obviously expecting high demand and has announced pre-orders for the 3G model — asking customers for a $100 refundable deposit to get ahead of the queue.

I say ahead of the queue, but still in it. This $100 deposit gets the customer an iPhone a whopping two hours before the rest of the customers that might otherwise be lining up.

To put that in perspective — it's a $100 deposit, to get your hands on a mobile phone two hours earlier than your friends. Meanwhile, several thousand Aussies already have an iPhone — the black-market imported 2G, hacked variety.

Hardly sounds like you'd be a "first mover", an "early adopter", a "cutting edge" cat. Half a million Chinese people already have one. Queuing up for a 3G iPhone will show nothing of the dedication it takes to hack and re-hack a 2G one with every new firmware update.

And all of this assumes of course, that our local carriers get a decent amount of the new iPhone by July. Apple is ambitiously looking to ship some 10 million iPhones in 2008, and Australia is one of 22 nations getting the 3G model on 11 July, with a further 48 countries following later in the year.

Optus's pre-registration offer includes this disclaimer: "Stock limits apply. This does not guarantee you a phone."

What's that? No guarantee? But what if I miss out? What if that annoying guy in HR gets one before me?

Guess I'll be seeing you in line then.

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I say "good sense" because the excuse the carrier has been using to keep its network information close to its chest — that network security was a "matter of national security" — is looking a little ridiculous in light of some other Telstra-related news in my inbox.

Earlier this month, it was reported that some 10,000 residents and businesses in the Blacktown area spent a weekend planted firmly in the 20th century, after two Telstra fibre-optic network cables were severed in what the carrier described as "vandalism". These cables are small, and splicing them back together is no easy feat. It took 30 technicians two days to get Blacktown and surrounding suburbs back online.

While Telstra insists that the damage was the work of "vandals" ("we believe the cables were deliberately cut ... you certainly couldn't do this by accident," said a spokesperson for the carrier), the NSW Police are taking a more measured approach. And with good reason — the cables were cut in a telecommunications pit, access to which requires "specialised equipment", "skill" and "effort" to access.

All of which makes the term "vandalism" seem a bit light on. I thought vandals were angsty teenagers who broke windows and spray-painted bus stops. They do not halt business operations of major portions of the city, and they certainly don't do it at 8am on a Saturday morning.

It certainly wouldn't be implausible that the severing of the cables was the mistake of a Telstra employee or contractor, a disgruntled ex-employee perhaps, or some other person with inside knowledge.

Nearby shopkeepers at Westfield Blacktown believe that the outage was caused by organised criminal elements, who were in fact looking to cut EFTPOS network cables as a means of committing mass fraud.

Certainly, the presence of men in "safety vests" cutting cables doesn't sound like "vandals" but something else entirely.

NSW Police have said that "the motive of cutting data cables for the purpose of fraud is something we are looking at," but also said that such a motive could be discounted by the fact that the cable cuts took down all the communications west of the telecommunications pit — Westfield is in the opposite direction.

But regardless of who the NSW Police (hopefully) find responsible, all Telstra's talk about network security and "the national interest" sounds a trifle overblown.

It is pretty alarming to think that a hacksaw or some clippers is about all you need to cause as much chaos as the Blacktown outage did. If Telstra thinks network information is "a matter of national security", indeed if the telco wants to keep winning AU$160 million networking contracts with Defence, it might first want to focus on tightening up the physical security of its networks.

It's not like such information is too difficult to find anyway.

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Take Charlie Lovick.

Charlie is, according to Telstra's press release, "the man who taught actor, Tom Burlinson, everything he needed to know about brumby chasing, cattle mustering, and stock whip cracking to star in the 1987 hit movie, The Man from Snowy River."

There's no more bona fide "man of the bush" to speak out about the strength of Next G.

ZDNet.com.au is yet to talk to Charlie, as every time we've tried to call, his mobile was out of range.

But according to Telstra's press guff, he's a big fan of Next G — check out the start of his testimonial below.

Charlie is a big fan of Next G.

"In areas where I was getting only marginal reception with CDMA, I can now get as good as, if not better reception, with the Next G network," he says in the Telstra release.

"For me, the Next G network isn't so much about time saving as just knowing that people can contact me and that I can make calls, even when I'm out in the bush," he told Telstra.

So there you have it. The word from the one man we all should trust, the real-life "Clancy of the Overflow."

Unfortunately for Telstra, the comments of one of their spin doctors overflowed into the final copy.

"(Please confirm there is Next G coverage in these areas of bush where the customer frequents)."

Screenshot from a Telstra marketing document

Oops!

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In the countless reflections I've had on the state of the computer industry, the subject of laptop bulkiness has hardly surfaced.

But then there was the Apple keynote in January. It somehow touched a feeling deep within me, so deep I didn't even know it was there. Of course I need a stupidly thin laptop. I need it so much that I want to sacrifice features I hadn't even realised I didn't need anymore.

Sure, some of the big laptops are more than four kilos (which to me says two big bottles of milk), a totally uncivilised weight to forever carry around if you're on the road as much as I am.

But I get the feeling it's not just the jetsetters getting excited about the MacBook Air — I'd say there are currently thousands of housebound coders frantically rationalising an upgrade to a... slower, smaller computer.

When I say smaller, I mean in it in the ethereal sense. When you start to look at it, what you're getting isn't actually physically much smaller at all — Apple's laptops have been freakishly small for years, they just never focused a keynote on it.

A standard MacBook is 2.75cm high, which, just quietly, you can fit into an envelope.

MacBook in an envelope

At the thickest point there is a 9mm difference in girth between a standard MacBook and the MacBook Air, which isn't even a shoe size. The Air does get as thin as 4mm, but that's actually just this slick taper towards the edges. The clamshell iBook, released last century, was also 4mm wide at the edges.

As far as weight is concerned, upgrading to a MacBook Air will save you 900 grams of travel mass, or the equivalent of a Powerade and Snickers bar.

So what's the compromise for these staggering advancements in space and mass? Going off the Apple Web site, for AU$2,499 I could get a MacBook Air with an 80GB hard drive with a 1.6GHz processor and 2GB of RAM, or opt for the bulky, clumsy MacBook with a 50 percent faster processor, three times as much space, equal memory, and save AU$400 cash. What's more, they'll throw in a DVD-writer, a removable battery, and also some Ethernet, firewire and USB ports.

Now they're off the Air, all those peripherals will be obsolete soon enough. Jobs clearly has something big in mind, and I can't wait to see it.

It's a funny reminder though; over the last decade, Apple devotees (myself included at times) have defended Apple through thick and thin off the back of superior performance. But this time, as we rush out for a slower unit, there's no hiding we were always just there for the cool.

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Apple fans around the nation suffered coronaries this morning after a post on an Apple community Web site claimed Apple resellers have been given Australian release dates for the much-hyped iPhone.

The post suggests that Apple resellers have informally been told that they will be able to sell the iPhone in late June, with access to multiple carriers and no lock-in contracts.

But seven large Apple resellers in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra contacted by ZDNet.com.au, said they have heard nothing from Apple about an Australian release.

David McMahon, CEO of Fone Zone, parent company of massive Apple reseller network Next Byte, says he is still in the dark. "Others may well have been told something but I've heard nothing," he said.

"These things are kept very secret," said a sales manager at a Mac1 store. "We never get told anything. The first thing we do in the morning is check the Apple Web site to make sure nothing new has been released".

"Absolutely not," said another in Melbourne, who said that new Apple products tend to arrive wrapped in black plastic to stop information leaks. "We haven't been told a thing."

"Haven't heard anything at all," said another in Sydney. "You will let us know if you hear anything, yeah?"

The author of the post, a former employee of Apple reseller Computers Now, said that only a handful of sales managers from key Apple partners have been told informally of the plans.

He said that four different store owners had been given four different release dates, close together in mid to late June, so that Apple would know who released the information should it be made public.

ZDNet.com.au contacted all four resellers, none of which revealed any information.

Either Apple is bizarrely selective in who it's sharing its product release information with, or somebody is stirring the pot...

What do you think?

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For a long time, we digital nomads have been told we can't communicate from the air for fear of our mobile signal interfering with essential aircraft systems.

Airlines would counter any questions as to the logic of this claim with the same flaccid conviction as explanations linking the relevance of a nice tight seatbelt with a collision at Mach one. But hey, air travel is spooky enough; I'm all for mitigating risk, if that's what the ban was about.

What I often pondered, however, was whether the technical argument for not allowing this connectivity was actually a front for a far more sensible reason. How could anybody enjoy the miracle of flight with a plane full of people talking on the phone?

With Qantas' recent announcement, I'll ponder no more.

For a start, the type of in-flight system Qantas is investing in allows for an ample amount of data traffic, while voice traffic suffers from some "very definite limitations".

"There is a misconception around that these systems allow for a plane full of passengers talking," says Vanessa Hudson, general manager of product and services at Qantas.

Phew.

But even more interestingly, Qantas' trial of the service, conducted in the second half of 2007, shows that most business-related passengers don't care much for voice calls anyway.

In the feedback gained from the 11,000 passengers that used the service, the most glaring peculiarity is that very few passengers care to be making calls while hurtling through the sky at unfathomable speeds.

"Our customers told us that their need is definitely e-mail and data and that such a need is growing," says Hudson. "The rate of taking up that technology is growing — customers are telling us that staying connected is about e-mail and SMS — they don't need the phone calls as much as the data."

In the sky, it appears, voice is dead, and data is king.

The concept of passengers talking to each other, of course, remains unimaginable.

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