Hanwang Technology, a Chinese firm specializing in facial recognition software, says it can now identify people that are wearing masks to protect against the coronavirus. The company says it used a sample database of around 6 million unmasked faces and a smaller database of masked faces to create the system. The Next Web reports: The Beijing-based firm, which also goes by the English name Hanvon, began to develop the tech in January, as people in China began donning face masks in their droves. The system was rolled out just one month later. Hanwang Vice President Huang Lei says the system's recognition rate reached about 95% when people wore a mask -- still some way below its regular success rate of 99.5%. China's SenseTime, the world's most valuable AI startup, announced in February that it had also adapted its product to identify people wearing masks. Such developments have led critics to claim that the coronavirus is being used as an excuse to ramp up surveillance. In the case of Hanwang, there is still one way to hide from its system: wearing the fashionable combination of both a face mask and sunglasses.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Remember Yahoo? It's back... in phone-plan form. The Verizon-owned company is trying to get customers excited with a new "Yahoo Mobile" service that combines Verizon's 4G LTE network with Yahoo mail, for some reason. Why even put the word "Yahoo" on a re-branded Verizon data plan? Because the service comes with Yahoo Mail Pro, the ad-free version of Yahoo Mail that normally costs $3.49 a month. Yahoo Mobile also includes "24/7 Yahoo account customer service." Verizon says Yahoo Mobile has "no hidden fees" or "clingy contracts." "We're the only plan that gives you Yahoo Mail Pro for ad-free email across ALL your devices," the Yahoo Mobile website says. (Fact check: True.) Yahoo Mobile costs $40 a month and provides "unlimited" data, with a caveat. "In times of traffic, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic," the announcement said. With the more expensive Verizon-branded unlimited service, customers have the option of buying plans with no data slowdowns until they use 25GB, 50GB, or 75GB in a month. With Yahoo Mobile, the speed limits can be imposed any time the network is congested, regardless of how much data a customer has used. Yahoo Mobile also comes with an "unlimited mobile hotspot for use with one connected device at a time," but those hotspot speeds are capped at 5Mbps. The Yahoo plan doesn't have access to Verizon's 5G network, though that's not really a big deal yet. Aside from the Yahoo-specific aspects, Yahoo Mobile is essentially the same plan offered by Visible, a Verizon subsidiary.

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The U.S. should take a slew of steps today to prevent a major cyberattack that could wreak wide-scale devastation on the U.S., a year-long study mandated by Congress reported Wednesday. From a report: "A major cyberattack on the nation's critical infrastructure and economic system would create chaos and lasting damage exceeding that wreaked by fires in California, floods in the Midwest, and hurricanes in the Southeast," the report predicts. What they're saying: "This is like doing the 9/11 Commission before 9/11 happens. We want to avoid that situation," Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a co-chair of the panel, said at an Axios event Monday. At the same event, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), the other co-chair, said the U.S. does not currently have an effective deterrence policy in place to discourage hostile cyberattacks. "We are getting killed by a thousand cuts," he said.

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We were warned.

I've been reading about and hearing from friends in Italy. My fellow Americans think panic is the problem. They've been trained by terrorism, where it is. This is different. The faster you grok the danger, the less danger there is.

Instead of listening to podcasts about the virus I started listening to a great audiobook today -- James Taylor's memoir. The audiobook is the way to go because he plays his guitar while he's narrating. Many of his famous songs are all autobiographical. And his story is surprising. I didn't know anything about him. (Hold on. It's an audio memoir. There is no written version. Makes total sense.)

Tsunami is an apt analogy. Until it hits, everything is perfectly normal.

Google is stepping up its measures against the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: The tech giant will recommend that its workers across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa work from home starting on Thursday March 12, Business Insider has learned. This comes a week after Google advised US workers in its Washington state and California offices to work from home, as well as those in its 8,000-strong Dublin office in Ireland. Google then widened that to all 11 of its offices in North America. Google has around 100,000 employees in total, most of whom are based in North America. Google has yet to report any confirmed cases of the virus in its US staff, but a worker in its Zurich office tested positive at the end of February. A Dublin worker also reported flu-like symptoms, but tested negative for COVID-19. The tech giant also announced last week that it was suspending in-person job interviews.

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Law enforcement agencies in India used facial recognition to identify more than 1,100 individuals who took part in communal violence in the national capital last month, a top minister said in the lower house of the parliament on Wednesday. From a report: In what is the first admission of its kind in the country, Amit Shah, India's home minister, said the law enforcement agencies deployed a facial recognition system, and fed it with images from government-issued identity cards, including 12-digit Aadhaar that has been issued to more than a billion Indians and driving licenses, "among other databases," to identify alleged culprits in the communal violence in northeast Delhi on February 25 and 26. "This is a software. It does not see faith. It does not see clothes. It only sees the face and through the face the person is caught," said Shah, responding to an individual who had urged New Delhi to not drag innocent people into the facial surveillance. The admission further demonstrates how the Indian government has rushed to deploy facial recognition technology in the absence of regulation overseeing its usage. Critics have urged the government to hold consultations and formulate a law before deploying the technology.

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There is only one god, and his name is Death. And there is only one thing we say to Death: not today.

Scientists say a fossil from Myanmar represents the tiniest dinosaur ever found.

Amazon has sold millions of Fire TV streaming devices in recent years, but its efforts to expand the Fire TV platform to smart TVs and cable set-top boxes have been slow-going. That's not by accident, according to industry insiders: They say Google has long prevented consumer electronics manufacturers from doing business with Amazon, reports news outlet Protocol. From the report: At the center of Google's efforts to block Amazon's smart TV ambitions is the Android Compatibility Commitment -- a confidential set of policies formerly known as the Anti-Fragmentation Agreement -- that manufacturers of Android devices have to agree to in order to get access to Google's Play Store. Google has been developing Android as an open-source operating system, while at the same time keeping much tighter control of what device manufacturers can do if they want access to the Play Store as well as the company's suite of apps. For Android TV, Google's apps include a highly customized launcher, or home screen, optimized for big-screen environments, as well as a TV version of its Play Store. Google policies are meant to set a baseline for compatible Android devices and guarantee that apps developed for one Android device also work on another. The company also gives developers some latitude, allowing them to build their own versions of Android based on the operating system's open source code, as long as they follow Google's compatibility requirements. However, the Android Compatibility Commitment blocks manufacturers from building devices based on forked versions of Android, such as Fire TV OS, that are not compatible with the Google-sanctioned version of Android. This even applies across device categories, according to two sources: Manufacturers that have signed on to the Android Compatibility Commitment for their mobile phone business are effectively not allowed to build Fire TV devices.

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The COVID-19 viral disease that has swept into at least 114 countries and killed more than 4,000 people is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced Wednesday. From a report: "This is the first pandemic caused by coronavirus," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Eight countries -- including the U.S. -- are now each reporting more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19, caused by the virus that has infected more than 120,000 people worldwide. A severe outbreak in Italy has now caused more than 630 deaths and the country's case total continues to rise sharply. It's now at 10,000 cases, second only to China. There are 9,000 cases in Iran, and more than 7,700 in South Korea. Those countries are all imposing drastic measures in an attempt to slow the virus, which has a higher fatality rate for elderly people and those with underlying health conditions.

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BTW, you can read this blog without using Twitter. I try to make sure of that. But imho it is way better if you do use Twitter. I see this as expediant. I could clone Twitter, and wait for everyone to use it, and I might end up waiting forever. And I don't have that much time. Or I could just use Twitter. It's like driving my car with Exxon gas. I'm sure some of the gas I put in the car actually comes from a hated company. But what the fuck. I can't fight every battle.

The bigger the landslide, the greater the optimism, which is what the recovery will be built from, not mere votes in Congress. Whoever wins should create a bond with the electorate that lasts past the election. Not a fake bond, a real one.