Stories about: OECD

The National Broadband Network (NBN) will encourage more people to work from home and make it easier to live and work in rural and regional Australia, the federal government says.

Communications minister, Senator Stephen Conroy, has revealed that a memorandum of understanding has been signed between the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and his department.

High-speed broadband is now available in two NSW communities, as the federal government's $36 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) gains momentum amid promises of further rollouts.

Federal communications minister, Stephen Conroy, has switched on the National Broadband Network (NBN) in a south coast NSW community, hailing it as a "significant milestone" in the federal government's vision to roll out high-speed broadband nationally.

The OECD on Wednesday issued a communication on developing Internet policy that puts pressure on ISPs to take responsibility for policing their networks.

To measure the progress in realising its vision by 2020, the government has set several goals

Unlike a fixed server in your office or at a data centre in Australia, data in the Cloud can potentially be located anywhere in the world — even in multiple data centres in multiple copies worldwide. A Cloud service provider may not even know where the data resides at any one time. The Cloud may not be tied to any particular location but this is clearly not the case with the laws of each country. Any ‘global’ technology solution will be impacted by the laws of a large number of nation states. As a result, sending and processing data around the globe could, in the process, fail to comply with data protection and privacy laws in various countries.

The Cloud can be cheaper, more flexible, easier to manage and efficient. But users and providers of Cloud services have to weigh these advantages against the risks or perceived risks — such as regulatory compliance, security, performance, availability of service, and liabilities and remedies under the governing contracts.

Reports out of Algeria say the North African country has shut down Internet access and eliminated Facebook accounts as pro-democracy protesters seek to topple the government much as Egyptians did in their nation this week.

The Egyptian government's five-day block of Internet services cost the national economy at least US$90 million, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said Thursday.