Government & Public Sector

The European Parliament has filed a request with the highest court of the European Union (E.U.) to quash a deal to hand over sensitive airline passenger data to U.S. authorities.

High-speed Internet will not be coming to hundreds of rural and northern Ontario communities anytime soon after the Ontario government scrapped its Connect Ontario: Broadband Regional Access Program (COBRA), IT World Canada learned Tuesday.

A U.S. Senate committee has approved a bill that would exempt voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service from most government regulation.

How a new enterprise application integration (EAI) patent potentially affects the US$70 billion EAI market and thousands of customers remains to be seen, industry experts say.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.and the U.S. Department of Defense have been accused of force-feeding radio frequency identification (RFID) to the world, insisting that they will do business only with RFID-enabled suppliers by various drop-dead dates. But a new survey indicates that there are other factors influencing RFID adoption, including strategic ones. Among the reasons companies give for implementing RFID technologies are lowering labor costs (54 per cent) and making their business processes more efficient (43 per cent).

The newly appointed IT and Communications Minister Helen Coonan plans to undertake widespread consultation with industry before making any firm policy decisions.

The Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) said Tuesday that certain provisions in license agreements between Microsoft Corp. and Japanese PC vendors violate Japan's antimonopoly code.

Fraudsters who create authentic-looking Web sites in an effort to get customers of a legitimate e-commerce site to provide financial or other personal information could go to jail for up to five years under legislation introduced by a U.S. senator.