James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Samsung goes bumper-to-bumper with Apple as it prepares to test self-driving cars in Korea
Korean electronics giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has joined a long line of companies in the business of developing a fully autonomous vehicle. On Monday, South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport gave permission to Samsung to start testing its autonomous car technology in the country. Samsung will team up with Korea’s biggest car ...
Trump will round up tech titans again to revamp the government’s IT systems
President Donald Trump will round up some of the biggest names in computer technology sometime in June with a view to creating a technology council to “transfer and modernize” what the government does with technology. While Trump is not renowned for being tech’s favorite president, the man who once called the Internet “the cyber” does ...
Retreat of the nerds: Study finds bullying, sexism and racism costs tech industry billions
A first-of-its-kind study has found that people of color and women are being driven away from the tech industry, citing racism, sexism and a toxic work environment as the reasons they left. The Kapor Center for Social Impact and Harris Poll surveyed 2,000 adults that have left the tech industry over the last three years. ...
Despite protests, FCC chairman will issue plan today to roll back net neutrality rules
The Trump administration’s plan to roll back net neutrality was met with stern opposition, yet the Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai plans to go full speed ahead with a detailed plan to be released today. In one press release, the FCC attempted to address what it perceives to be mythology surrounding net neutrality, the notion ...
Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales says he holds the kryptonite to stop fake news
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales wants to create a crowdfunded news service that will be run by volunteers and feature content from professional journalists. Wales said his site, Wikitribune, will be factual and neutral. “The news is broken, but we’ve figured out how to fix it,” states a demo for the site, referring to the dilemma ...
Unroll.me isn’t ‘heartbroken’ about giving up your data to Uber
Unroll.me, an email de-cluttering service owned by California-based data firm Slice Intelligence, wrote a seemingly disingenuous letter to the public on Sunday relating to its involvement in the latest consumer data-mining scandal, one that involved — would you believe it? — beleaguered Uber Technologies Inc. It is “heartbreaking,” states chief executive of Unroll.me, Jojo Hedaya, in the letter (skirting ...
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 ...