There have been several significant developments in the battle against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and the resulting illness COVID-19. This story gathers a selection of stories from across the web.WHO Director-General's Opening Remarks at the Media Briefing on COVID-19 - 24 February 2020upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 - 24 February 2020:
An Anonymous Coward writes:Music charts have them, Rotten Tomatoes is built on them, it's why we vote on polls, and now Netflix will show the top 10 shows for users to see and will badge shows with their top 10 number in the listings.
Car & Driver and other outlets report on the latest customization available (for a price) when you order a Porsche, https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31082234/porsche-911-fingerprint-paint-customized/
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months:
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow4275_:Mathematicians propose new way of using neural networks to work with noisy, high-dimensional data:
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:Canadian Privacy Commissioners to Investigate Creepy Facial Recognition Firm Clearview AI:
Multiple Soylentils have written in to let us know about the death of Mike Hughes:"Mad" Mike Hughes Dies in Rocket CrashRandomFactor writes:Michael 'Mad Mike' Hughes, staunch flat Earth conspiracy theorist, launched himself into the skies above Barstow in San Bernardino county Saturday, February 22nd.He was attempting to reach an altitude of ~5000 feet (1,500 meters). Unfortunately his parachute did not open during descent causing him to plummet to his death.
RandomFactor writes:NASA engineers are preparing another tactic to get the troubled "mole" instrument on the Mars InSight lander burrowing into the regolith as intended.
The Mighty Buzzard writes:Bleh. Apparently not caring what you do on other sites or even requiring any personal information isn't good enough for the state of Confusion^WCalifornia, so we have a shiny, new, temporary Privacy Policy posted on every page and linked at the top of the nav bar.If you feel like prettying the language, layout, or whatever up before I get around to it, feel free to do so and submit a pull request.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
canopic jug submitted a story which was the inspiration for:Helsinki-based software developer, Henri Sivonen, has written a pair of blog posts about UTF-8; why it should be used and how to inform the user agent when it is used.The first blog post explains problems that can arise when UTF-8 is used without explicitly stating so. Here is a short selection from Why Supporting Unlabeled UTF-8 in HTML on the Web Would Be Problematic: