James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Apple responds after investors express worries kids are addicted to its devices
A day after two large Apple Inc. investors said they’re concerned kids are too addicted to their digital devices, the company today said it provides protections and has more planned. In an open letter, New York-based Jana Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System said that after they reviewed evidence supplied by psychologists, they ...
Fired Google engineer James Damore sues for discrimination – against white men
James Damore, a former senior software engineer at Google LLC, was fired in August after writing an internal memo that discussed the issue of diversity in the workplace and more controversially argued that women were less biologically suited to become engineers. Now he has turned the tables, filing a class action lawsuit charging Google with discriminating ...
CES 2018
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai cancels CES appearance after reportedly receiving death threats
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will not be attending this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas after allegedly receiving death threats. The man who controversially once said he would take a “weed whacker” to former net neutrality regulations has met with fierce resistance since from consumers and activists and much of the world’s ...
COMMENTARY
Don’t blame YouTube for Logan Paul’s suicide in Japan video
Logan Paul, a young man with the dubious title of “YouTube star,” last week uploaded a video to the video platform that saw him stifling a guffaw in front of a dead body hanging from a tree in Japan’s “Suicide Forest.” Following a tsunami of criticism, Paul (pictured, left) took the video down, offered a lackluster ...
Spotify sued for $1.6 billion by major publisher Wixen Music
Music streaming firm Spotify AB is being sued for a massive $1.6 billion by Wixen Music Publishing, even as it reportedly made a confidential filing for an initial public offering. The IPO filing, according to Axios, could happen in the first quarter. But the suit by Wixen, which handles more than 2,000 clients that include The Doors, ...
Jewish journalist says Twitter sided with neo-Nazis
A senior journalist for Tablet magazine, Yair Rosenberg, says Twitter Inc. took the side of neo-Nazis after a bot he had helped create to expose bigoted trolls was banned by the platform. Rosenberg described the events leading up to the banning in the New York Times on Wednesday, explaining that the bot he created with ...
Energous brings full wireless charging one step closer to reality
Boosting your device’s battery out of thin air is closer to becoming a reality after the Federal Communications Commission Wednesday approved an “over the air, power at a distance” wireless charging technology. The company behind it, San Jose-based Energous Corp., had its first-generation WattUp Mid Field transmitter certified, which could mean a door opening to an ...
Apple admits to throttling the performance of older smartphones – to avoid sudden shutdowns
Apple Inc. admitted something Wednesday that some of its smartphone users had feared for a while: The company purposely slows down its older phones. Although the conspiracy theory has turned out to be true, it turns out that Apple was doing it for the right reasons, at leasts according to Apple and some of its supporters. ...
Facebook accused of enabling potential age discrimination with targeted ads
Facebook Inc. has in the past been found guilty of abetting race discrimination by how it allowed its users to be targeted with advertising. A new investigation released today revealed that the company also allows advertisers potentially to discriminate by age. The investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica revealed that numerous companies’ ads for employment would not ...
Microsoft ends arbitration in sexual harassment cases
Microsoft Corp. is taking steps to eliminate the contractual requirement that employees pursue sexual harassment claims through arbitration rather than through the courts, a move that comes on the back on numerous sexual harassment claims in the tech industry and other industries. President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said that although Microsoft had never ...