James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Uber hid its ‘stolen’ self-driving tech from court, Waymo charges
Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car unit Waymo Inc. has claimed in a new legal filing that Uber Technologies Inc. is involved in a “cover-up” regarding technology Waymo says Uber stole in its bid to develop a fully autonomous vehicle. In February Waymo sued Uber for infringement of a patent and theft of trade secrets, claiming it had ...
Trump misses his own deadline for a cybersecurity plan
In January, the-President-elect Donald Trump assured the public he would be appointing a crack team to deal with cybersecurity issues following reports from U.S. intelligence that Russia had meddled in the election. Trump’s Jan. 6 statement said that to keep America safe — his “number one priority” — he would “appoint a team to give ...
Facebook is developing mind reading and skin hearing technology. Seriously.
In perhaps its most startlingly far-out initiative yet, Facebook Inc. on Wednesday said it’s developing a way for people to type with their mind and hear with their skin. Regina Dugan (pictured), head of Facebook’s innovation skunkworks Building 8, laid out a plan for a brain-computer interface at Facebook’s F8 developer conference Wednesday that allows you ...
‘We need more data!’ Steve Ballmer releases USAFacts to provide info on government spending
Former Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer released his new project into the wild: a website that gives people easy access to government data without taking them on a maze-like journey into confounding digital archives. USAFacts is pretty much the everyman’s website for access into what the government is spending money on. It’s also a massive ...
A murder video posted to Facebook was inevitable, but our reaction wasn’t
On Easter Sunday, 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. was shot in the street in downtown Cleveland. The scene was filmed by 37-year-old Steve Stephens, and then posted to Facebook where it was subsequently, not surprisingly, watched and shared thousands of times. The video is less than a minute long, with the actual impact of the bullet ...
Report: Robots to take one in three UK jobs, requiring billions for retraining
More than 10 million jobs will be automated out of existence over the next two decades, and the poor will be hurt the most, the Institute for Public Policy Research said in a new report. The robots are coming, said the report from the British think tank, and it will be jobs in the lower-skill ...
After a very bad year at Uber, Susan Fowler starts developer publication at Stripe
Online payment processing firm Stripe Inc. said Thursday it’s launching Increment, a quarterly publication aimed at a software engineering audience with input from many of the world’s leading tech companies. But the bigger news is the editor-in-chief: Susan Fowler. Fowler, who famously detailed what sounded like a year in hell at Uber Technologies Inc., had ...
Tech giants unite against Trump administration’s plans to overhaul net neutrality
A lobbying group representing some the world’s biggest Internet companies, including Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc., is fighting to save net neutrality. Following a draft of revised net neutrality conditions by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, which could overhaul the regulations put in place by the Obama administration, the Internet Association ...
Uber loses another top exec, this time PR boss Rachel Whetstone
Uber Technologies Inc.’s senior vice president of global public policy and communications, Rachel Whetstone, is the latest in a long line of top executives to leave the ride-hailing giant. Whetstone, who left Google Inc. to join Uber in 2015, said she was proud of the work she had done at Uber, but didn’t go into ...
US drone sales are going through the roof, doubling from last year
U.S. drone sales more than doubled from February 2016 to February 2017, according to a report from the NPD group released on Tuesday. In spite of drones being considered a rather expensive gadget, the report revealed that high-end drones were in demand. “Drones with a price tag over $300 drove 84 percent of dollar sales ...