News Australia

In the face of an outcry over so-called ‘naked’ body scans at airports, US authorities have announced plans for a new scanning system that eliminates ‘passenger-specific images’. Transportation Security Administration administrator John Pistole said the agency would begin installing new software on its scanners ‘designed to enhance privacy’. The new software ‘will auto-detect items that [...]

Computer hackers have targeted The Sun website with visitors being redirected to a hoax story about Rupert Murdoch’s suicide. The group LulzSec, which has previously targeted companies including Sony, says it carried out the hijack, via messages on Twitter. Internet users trying to access thesun.co.uk were redirected to new-times.co.uk and a story entitled ‘Media mogul’s [...]

STRUGGLING retail and banking sectors dragged the sharemarket into the red yesterday amid persistent concerns about debt problems in the US. A forecast dip in sales for retailer David Jones and fears of a downgrade in the US’s credit rating added to the market’s woes. Yesterday the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 Index was down 24.1 points, [...]

A new security hole has opened up in Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, raising alarms about the susceptibility of some of the world’s hottest tech gadgets to hacker attacks. Flaws in the software running those devices came to light after a German security agency warned that criminals could use them to steal confidential [...]

US President Barack Obama has launched an initiative to develop new manufacturing jobs, in a move that will see more than 500 million dollars invested in advanced technologies. The initiative will team up government, companies and universities and aims to speed the development of a new generation of American-made high-technology products. The program will leverage [...]

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the web, The Wall Street Journal reports. The newspaper, citing ‘people familiar with the matter,’ said the FTC is preparing to serve Google with civil subpoenas ‘signalling the start of [...]

The government’s National Consumer Credit Protection Act regulations will become law as of July 1, after the Senate yesterday allowed the controversial regulations that ban exit fees in mortgages. However, the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA), which had sought an exemption for smaller lenders from the banning of exit fees, has said while [...]

Yesterday afternoon the Senate voted on a motion by  the Coalition and Independent Nick Xenophon to disallow the Government regulation to ban exit fees.  The strategy (backing MFAA’s campaign over the past few weeks) was to bring the Government to the table to prepare an amended regulation which would have exempted smaller lenders from the [...]

JAPAN has issued a tsunami alert after a magnitude-6.7 earthquake hit the northeast of the country, the meteorological agency said. The quake rattled the areas hardest hit by the March 11 quake and tsunami disasters. Japan’s meteorological agency said the latest jolt hit about 50 kilometres off the east coast of Miyako, Iwate prefecture, at [...]

Here is an excerpt from a story by Naomi Woodley on The World Today: “A bid to link up with the independent Senator Nick Xenophon to overturn a ban on mortgage exit fees is the next item on the list. It’s due to be debated later today and it doesn’t need to go to the [...]