Stories by: Amanda Conroy

Qantas’ online booking site today breached the privacy at least two of its customers, with their personal details revealed to another party when they attempted to access flight check-in information online.

Toshiba has refreshed its Portege M800 with an upgrade following the launch of Intel’s Centrino 2 platform. Its performance and features make it a desirable unit for any mobile professional or student, although at 2.1kg it is slightly heavier than other ultraportable notebooks we’ve recently tested.

The Commonwealth Bank’s online business banking Web site went down at 9am this morning following a fault with one of the service's access points.

The Adult Industry Association (AICO) has signed settlements worth over $1 million to its members in its piracy actions against Prestige Club Australasia (PCA) and Venus Adult Shops (Venus).

The wireless broadband market is heating up, with Unwired Australia announcing an overhaul of its wireless broadband pre-paid pricing.

Symantec has announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Australian security vendor PC Tools. The privately held PC Tools, which is headquartered in Sydney, has risen to global prominence since hitting the world stage in 2003 with its security and privacy products for Windows-based PCs.

Telstra BigPond Music unveiled its new online music store today after cutting a deal with major record labels to provide their tracks on the site as MP3s. The deal also covers leading Australian independent music labels.

There's no doubt that PC vendors are making inroads into the sub-$1000 ultraportable notebook space, with the recent arrival of the upgraded ASUS Eee PC as well as the stablemate to this HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, the $999, 160GB hard-drive HP 2133 Mini-Note PC (FH441PA)

The CSIRO and NASA are in talks to develop exploration technologies currently employed by the Australian minerals industry for use on the Moon and Mars.

Dell's retail partnership with OfficeWorks to deliver its range desktop PCs and laptops will offer Australian customers the chance to configure their own Dell machines in selected OfficeWorks stores - but Ubuntu Linux will not be on offer just yet.

Last month a NASA spacecraft orbiting around Mars captured the first ever image of avalanches, or debris falls in action near the Red Planet's North Pole. The image showed tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down. Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who works on targeting the camera and has studied hundreds of HiRISE images, was the first person to notice the avalanches. We spoke to her about the work behind the historic photograph of the avalanche and her work on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project.