Gulf upgrades e-governance

The Gulf Finance Ministry has signed a memorandum of understanding with Injazat Data Systems to assess and identify its IT requirements, says Gulf Daily News.

It was signed by the ministry`s industry under-secretary Yunis Haji Al Khouri and Injazat Data Systems chief executive Ibrahim Mohamed Lari.

The Abu Dhabi-based IT outsourcing and business process outsourcing company will be responsible for upgrading programmes to boost efforts in establishing electronic-based governance.

Web applications have allowed users to create virtual identities that can conduct most of the social and financial transactions that typify life in the real world, reports IHT.com.

The incidence of data theft is soaring, resulting in governments around the world passing and enforcing laws that increasingly hold businesses financially accountable for avoidable data losses.

In response, they are coming up with new protocols and frameworks for collecting, using and governing identity data. Given that virtually all businesses today collect and use these kinds of data, they aim to shift the status quo in ways that could help companies both improve their reputations with customers and avoid the mounting legal liabilities that now face companies that lose control of customer data.

European Union justice and interior ministers met in Lisbon early this week to discuss how to inoculate the Internet against forces that can threaten the free world, says Washington Post.

By November, they expect to put together a raft of proposals to somehow secure the Internet from, say, Web sites that recruit terrorists or teach you how to make a bomb.

States have come far in such discussions and in reaching some levels of consensus. International standards have greater impetus, evidently, when they seek to cap that which they perceive as threatening to the civilised world: child pornography, organised crime, terrorism, and spam.