Lightest Ultrabook on the Planet? Gigabyte Unveils X11 Carbon Fiber Laptop

When you’re down to fighting over tenths of a pound, claims of “world’s lightest” are more about marketing than utility, but Gigabyte’s X11 appears to fit the company’s billing as such: Gigabyte just confirmed its 11.6-inch MacBook Air-lookalike exists and weighs just 975 grams, or about 2.15 pounds. Contrast with Dell’s top-selling XPS 13 Ultrabook, which weighs about three pounds.

Gigabyte teased the new laptop last week with a promo slide that read “Launch of the Lightest Notebook on Earth” followed by “Conquer the 6th Element” and a launch date of today, May 31. No, not The Sixth Element (a 2006 surfing film/documentary, according to Wikipedia) but the periodic table’s sixth-in-position, i.e. carbon, referring in this case to carbon fiber, an ultra-strong, lightweight material I’m mostly familiar with from when I used to cycle semi-competitively back in the early 1990s and forked over a boatload of cash to buy a road bike made from the material.

Of course Gigabyte then dated themselves by writing “Thus, we have discovered the 6th element.” A little late Gigabyte: Other Ultrabooks, including Dell’s XPS 13, already use carbon fiber, and boutique PC-maker Voodoo PC was building lightweight laptops wholly from carbon fiber back in the mid-aughts (I know, because I owned one). The X11′s also fully carbon fiber, save for the hinge, which is aluminum. Gigabyte touts the strength of carbon fiber as “6 times stronger than that of an aluminum notebook,” though there’s debate about which material is more durable in specific circumstances — some in fact argue that aluminum is the more durable material, especially when heated.

Spec-wise, the 11.6-inch X11 is as thin as it looks: 0.12 inches at its tapered front, 0.65-inches at the back. It sports an unidentified “3rd generation Intel Core” processor (Ivy Bridge), 4GB of DDR3 memory, 128GB solid state hard drive, a Mobile Intel HM77 Express chipset with Intel HD Graphics 4000 (according to Engadget), 1366 x 768 pixel LED, 1.3 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, one USB 2.0 and a second 3.0 port, microSD slot, audio in/out and a mini-display port. Interestingly, Gigabyte is touting the X11′s sound playback capabilities — anemic in most laptops this size — as “rich” and “large” thanks to “the large resonator and large diaphragm monomer in the extremely thin chassis.” (We’ll see about that.) You’ll also get a 4730mAh Li-ion sealed battery and a low-key, Apple-style keyboard. Gigabyte says the X11 will range in price from $999 to $1,299 and be “on the market” in July.

The company also announced two other products: The U2442, a lightweight notebook weighing 3.5 pounds with more powerful Ivy Bridge-based processors ($999 to $1,299, on the market in mid-June) and the U2440 notebook, a “light and thin” system that’ll also pack Ivy Bridge as well as discrete NVIDIA graphics (from $699, on the market by the end of June).

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Narmada Wedding Official Photos - ColomboZone.com

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Should the FBI Be Allowed to Wiretap Facebook?

We may all be getting a new Facebook friend soon: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI wants to shift its wiretapping from old-school telephone lines to person-to-person platforms like email and instant messaging and even social media like Facebook. To help it make the switch, the FBI is asking Congress to require tech companies to rewrite their software so it has a “back door” that the FBI can use to listen in.

It is all part of an initiative known as “Going Dark.” The FBI says that its ability to follow suspected criminals is eroding – or “going dark”—as people communicate more online and that it needs new powers to help it track down drug dealers, sex traffickers, and terrorists. But “Going Dark” has – not surprisingly – set off a major privacy battle, even though the FBI would still need to get court approval to place a wiretap. Civil liberties groups are sounding the alarm, warning that the changes would make all of our online communications potentially open to the prying eyes of the government.

The Internet has arguably interfered with the FBI’s ability to fight crime. In one case, the FBI was closing in on a child prostitution ring that used a social networking site to identify and recruit victims. Because the site had no “back door,” the FBI says its investigation was impeded – and the result was a weaker case and a lighter sentence than it might otherwise have gotten.

The FBI says it was also hampered in investigating a criminal organization that smuggled cocaine up from South America and trafficked guns to Africa. The group, according to a confidential source, intentionally used communications platforms that law enforcement could not intercept. The FBI told Congress last year that, as a result, the organization was still trafficking weapons.

The FBI argues that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 gives it all the legal authority it needs to monitor the sites it is interested in – from social media like Facebook and Twitter to messaging platforms like Google Talk to web-based email like Yahoo Mail. But the FBI needs these sites to do two things: create “back doors” in their software so it can monitor the communications, and give it a way to un-encrypt any messages that are encrypted. This month, FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress his agency would like to see the wiretap law change.

But the privacy threat is also very real. If the FBI gets the “back doors” it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public. That would give the government a power to monitor far beyond anything it has ever had. The ACLU has compared what the FBI is seeking to the government requiring every home to be built with pre-installed cameras and microphones. “It would provide little reassurance,” the ACLU has said, “to know that the government would have to get a search warrant to turn those cameras on.”

It is not clear the FBI will get its changes. Polls show that the public is deeply concerned about online privacy, and the White House and Congress may not want to be seen as coming out in favor of introducing government monitoring. And the tech industry is also pushing back. TechAmerica – an industry group with representatives from eBay, IBM and other major tech companies – is objecting to the FBI’s proposal as unduly costly and burdensome, CNET reports.

One of the great debates about the Internet is whether it is making people more or less free. On the side of “more free” are events like the Arab Spring, in which social media have been used to help organize opposition to authoritarian regimes. But proposals like the FBI’s “Going Dark” initiative show the other side – how government can use the Internet to monitor people in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital age.

It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.

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