TECHNOLOGY

Australia’s second mainland National Broadband Network (NBN) site has been switched on this morning, with residents in the Kiama Downs and Minnamurra, south of Sydney, set to experience superfast fibre broadband.

British police officials revealed on Wednesday the arrest of an 18-yea-old teenager that authorities tagged as the mouthpiece of a hacking group identified as responsible for breaching the security protocols of Sony Pictures and a host of other websites.

Westpac-owned St.George Bank now has one of the most competitive rates in the market for two-year fixed home loans, following an interest rate decrease of 0.10 per cent pa to 6.89 per cent pa for Advantage Package customers.

Owners and managers in Australia are warned of cyber security risks and are advised to take the necessary measure to protect their businesses from hacking.

Anticipation in the consumer electronics world is soaring for the launch of Apple's iPhone 5, which is rumored to be hitting store shelves this fall. About 35 percent of consumers plan to purchase the latest iPhone upon its release, according to a survey by PriceGrabber, a part of online shopping site Experian.

Mozilla announced on July 25 that it is planning to launch its own mobile operating system. Tentatively called "Boot to Gecko" or B2G, the OS is based from Mozilla's open-source "Gecko" layout engine that is already in use with other Mozilla apps like Firefox.

Microsoft announced Tuesday the next version of the Windows Phone operating system, code-named Mango, has been delivered to manufacturers and carriers.

While at the start it was Google Plus that was highlighting Facebook's shortcomings, Facebook is now turning the tables around by providing a one-stop-shop (it's free) that would aid businesses take advantage of Facebook's mass user base.

Zynga Inc., the largest developer of games on Facebook, will offer a version of "CityVille" in China, the world's biggest Internet market.The free online game, named "Zynga City", will be offered through an alliance with Chinese internet service provider Tencent Holdings Ltd. The game will be launched in open beta on Tencent's Pengyou network in the next few days. The game will be later accessible on QZone, China's main social games platform. Tencent had about 101 mil...

Almost always, Apple never fails to please its loyal followers and tech watchers, the same way that it did last week when the Cupertino, California-based tech giant unveiled the upgraded MacBook Air that is juiced up by Intel’s Core i5 and i7 processors.

The iPhone 5 will be out this fall, that is, if it will be launched simultaneously with the iOS 5.

Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry smartphones, said it will terminate 2,000 jobs, or almost 11% of its workforce, amid losing market share to Apple Inc.'s iPhone and smartphones running on Google's Android operating system.

SanDisk Corp. has introduced SanDisk Ultra, a new line of solid-state drives for old laptops and desktop computers. SanDisk is marketing the new SSD's -- which it says is more cost effective than purchasing a new computer -- directly to retail consumers instead of PC makers.

Should Australia have tighter privacy laws to avoid a similar phone hacking scandal involving the media? Treading on press freedom and creating policies to protect individual privacy are delicate issues that government authorities and law makers are assessing amidst the phone hacking issue in the United Kingdom involving News Corp owned by Rupert Murdoch, serving as a test case for media organizations in the country.

An innovative, Australian-first electronic logbook system that is set to modernize and transform company tax reporting is about to launch into the Australian market.

Consumers are given better access to lower-priced internet service, according to Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy citing one of the key benefits of the National Broadband Network (NBN) network.

Reports on the Apple store that isn't has prompted Chinese officials to launch an investigation in the city of Kunming on the electronics store.

Search giant Google Inc. had this entrance strategy for its new social network -- launch the service without fireworks, release a beta version of the service to select individuals, and have others join via a by-invitation scheme. So far, the technique, the same done for Google's gmail, appears to be working as Google+ has already gained 20 million unique visitors just three weeks into its release, according to estimates by Web-traffic watcher comScore Inc.

Dr. Charlie Miller, Accuvant LABS principal research consultant, will demonstrate at the Black Hat USA 2011 security conference next week that the batteries of Apple's Macbooks, Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs are vulnerable to hacking attacks. Yes, the batteries!

Microsoft Corp.'s Windows continues to be the world's most popular operating system for personal computers. The problem is that laptop and desktop sales have been slowing down while the demand of tablets has skyrocketed.

The success of American retail giant Costco in the suburbs of Sydney's Auburn has prompted the warehouse store chain to explore opening a second shop in Canberra.

An American in Kunming, southern Yunnan province in China said in her BirdAbroad blog at Wordpress that she found three shops masquerading as bona fide Apple stores in the city.

Google is winding down Google Labs, the site where users explore prototypes to aid development of new projects.

The MacBook Air features the latest generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 dual-core processors. With a processor of speeds up to 1.8GHz and faster memory, the new MacBook Air gains 2.5x faster processing performance over the previous generation. It also has the Intel HD Graphics 3000 processor, which includes an on-chip engine for video encoding and decoding.

Larry Page’s recent tinkering on Google’s in-place structures were meant to reposition the internet giant and keep its competitive posture despite the enormous success that the company has achieved in so short a time.

Now with Activision ready for another record-breaking installment of the CoD franchise, the game publisher has filed a complaint with the National Arbitration Forum last week to stop Scottsdale, Arizona-based Domains by Proxy, Inc., the current operator of the ModernWarfare3.com, from further using the site.

Aside from looking for markets outside China, Lenovo now has three new tablets in a market that is dominated by Apple Inc.'s iPad. Lenovo has unveiled the IdeaPad Tablet K1 for consumers, the ThinkPad Tablet for business customers, and the IdeaPad Tablet P1 for home and office use.

Lenovo has stormed the tablet market with a triple threat, launching the IdeaPad Tablet K1 for consumers, the ThinkPad Tablet for business customers, and the IdeaPad Tablet P1 for home and office use.

Hewlett Packard will be launching its new TouchPad tablet in Sydney next Tuesday, July 26.