James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
US says pay discrimination against women at Google is ‘extreme,’ a charge it denies
In an ongoing investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor has accused Google Inc. of paying its female employees less than its male counterparts. A week after Equal Pay Day in the U.S. and reports surfacing that suggest the tech industry is still rife with wage abuse against women, the Department of Labor said Google is breaking ...
Updated: Twitter sues US government after order to reveal identity of Trump dissenter
Twitter Inc. Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the government tried to force the social media platform to reveal the identity of one of its users. * Updated: On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security dropped its attempt to reveal the owner of the account, prompting Twitter in turn to drop its ...
Tech unicorn Okta raises target again ahead of Friday’s IPO
San Francisco-based security services company Okta Inc. has raised the target for what it expects to raise in its initial public offering to $215 million. The company, which plans to sell shares to the public starting Friday, had originally filed for a $100 million offering in March, though that amount was widely seen as a ...
Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award but worries about the Web he invented
The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday made Tim Berners-Lee (pictured), the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, this year’s winner of the prestigious Turing Award for his achievements in computer science. The award, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for computer science, came with a $1 million cash prize courtesy of Google ...
No surprise: Women in tech still getting shortchanged on wages
Wage equality for women working in technology in the U.S. is making some progress, although sexual discrimination still persists. That’s according to a new report from Hired Inc. The San Francisco-based tech recruiting company released the report today on Equal Pay Day. Within the tech industry Hired found that 63 percent of the time women are offered a ...
Trump’s crackdown on H-1B visas: ‘downward spiral’ or tempest in a teapot?
President Donald Trump’s administration crackdown on H-1B visas got a little more real Monday with the opening of the annual race to hire workers from abroad. But just how real remains in question. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced on Friday that it was taking multiple measures to stop what it called H-1B visa ...
Uber adds much-needed app update: Users can now change pickup locations
Uber Technologies Inc. has made a major adjustment to its app, one that should make aficionados of the ride-hailing giant happy: Users can now change the pickup point after booking a car. Unfortunately, the update is now only available to iOS users in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, with no word as to when the ...
Will Lyft’s new fixed-route service Shuttle work where Uber’s Smart Routes didn’t?
Ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. is looking at making its service a little more attractive to people wanting to share a ride from the same pick-up point each day, rather than take a bus. In an effort to cut down on costs for the consumer and reduce traffic congestion, Lyft has introduced Lyft Shuttle to its ...
Uber’s unsurprising diversity report: Top execs and tech staff are almost all white men
After taking considerable flak recently for all manner of transgressions, Uber Technologies Inc. has maintained that one thing it’s going to sort out is its reputation as a “bro” workplace hostile to women. That may be why it’s the right time to release a diversity report. The surprise, for some, is that Uber’s numbers especially for ...
Half of America’s population is on the FBI’s facial recognition database
Some 117 million Americans are on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s facial recognition database without their knowledge or consent, and 80 percent of them are stored as non-criminal entries. A review by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week presented some worrying facts on the FBI’s use of the database, which is mostly ...