When the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic in March 2020, slightly more than half of the world’s citizens had access to the internet. Connectivity allowed many people to work, receive services, and socialize without physical contact—a key factor in limiting the virus’s spread. Did people with internet access, then, benefit from reduced exposure to COVID-19?
Registration for the ICANN75 Annual General Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is open and the dedicated meeting website is live.
The meeting will be held as a hybrid event from 17 to 22 September 2022 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. All participants must be pre-registered by 14 September to attend the meeting in person. The meeting schedule will be published on the ICANN website on 29 August.
Continue reading Registration and Website For ICANN75, In-Person and Virtual, Now Live
The upcoming ICANN74 to be held both virtually and in-person in The Hague in June has some rather strange legalese when it comes to those attending regarding to COVID-19. There are some of the usual to be expected conditions such as to be vaccinated, wearing face masks and so on. But one that has stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest is the requirement of attendees to sign a liability waiver [pdf].
YouTube has said it will remove content that spreads misinformation about all approved vaccines, expanding a ban on false claims about Covid-19 jabs.
New Zealand’s ccTLD got a pandemic bump in domain name registrations in the year to 31 March, with registrations up almost 2% to what was then an all-time high to 723,451, according to the Domain Name Commission’s latest annual report released last week. Since then, registrations jumped another 1,002 to the end of June.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about huge changes in the world, mostly negative, but there were some positives and areas of growth. One of these was evidence many businesses went online that weren’t online before, and new business ideas were developed. For Canada’s .ca, the registry released data last week that suggests more Canadians are choosing a .ca domain name for their websites more than ever before with the growth rate nearly tripling since last year, from 0.35% in March 2020 to 0.99% in March 2021. As of the end of March 2021 there were 3,106,723 .ca domain names registered, up from 2,867,598 a year earlier. Today there are 3,157,305 .ca domain names registered.
Facebook said on Monday that it plans to remove posts with erroneous claims about vaccines from across its platform, including taking down assertions that vaccines cause autism or that it is safer for people to contract Covid-19 than to receive the vaccinations.
ICANN Thursday confirmed what everyone expected, and had been listed on their meetings page, that March’s ICANN70 will be held as a Virtual Public Meeting due to the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine are still spreading on Facebook and Instagram, more than a month after Facebook pledged it would take them down.
In 2011, as the hunt for Osama bin Laden was intensifying and honing in on a region of Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign as part of its intelligence operation. The campaign went door to door, under the pretense of public health, in the hope of finding evidence of bin Laden’s hideout.