James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Report finds tech workers should look far beyond Silicon Valley for jobs
Tech workers might be better off looking beyond the mecca of Silicon Valley for jobs, according to a new study by career marketplace firm Hired. The company’s just-released second annual State of Salaries research report found, unsurprisingly, that software engineers in San Francisco earn considerably more than their counterparts in the rest of the U.S. and other tech ...
Google Brain ‘hallucinates’ to make blurry images clearer
Google Inc.’s deep learning research arm, Google Brain, has just made a whole bunch of science fiction and crime procedural shows from Star Trek to CSI come true — at least the parts where somebody points at a blurry image on a screen and commands, “Enhance.” A new technology it has developed called Pixel Recursive Super ...
Email Privacy Act may finally pass, making government snooping harder
Amid fears that newly elected President Donald Trump would make good on his promise to expand the government’s surveillance powers, consumers worried about their privacy were just given a glimmer of hope today. The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday passed an email privacy bill, the Email Privacy Act (H.R. 387), that requires law enforcement to ...
UPDATED: Silicon Valley’s vocal opposition to Trump is turning to action
It’s no secret that the relationship between technology leaders and newly elected President Donald J. Trump has been less than cordial. Now, it could get downright ugly. “Silicon Valley is stepping up,” Sam Altman, president of the startup incubator Y Combinator, said in the New York Times today. And some, especially employees, are doing so literally ...
Newly appointed FCC boss Ajit Pai is already making waves
After President Donald Trump appointed Ajit Pai, an outspoken critic of net neutrality, to head the Federal Communications Commission, many believed we would soon see the end of an open Internet – the policy of “net neutrality” that Internet content should be equally accessible to all users. It didn’t take long for Pai to make ...
Tech companies intensify opposition to Trump immigration orders
President Donald Trump’s two recent strikes regarding immigration issues have sent shock waves through the tech industry, and now they’re starting to ripple back to the Oval Office. The President’s first bombshell was executive orders limiting travel and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations, the second a proposal to make changes to the H1-B work visa that tech ...
Ahead of mega-IPO, Snap said to be working on groundbreaking augmented reality technology
Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., is reportedly working on smarter lenses that will allow smartphone camera users to interact with landscapes in the real world. According to a report in The Information, the new lenses, similar to its World Lenses, are still being tested and tweaked. The difference between the new technology and World Lenses ...
Donald Trump’s proposed changes to work visas slam Indian outsourcing giants
This week’s revelation that President Donald Trump has proposed to make changes to the H-1B work visa has led to a maelstrom of worry in the world of Indian tech. The proposed changes to the work visas, whose biggest beneficiaries are Indians, are aligned with Trump’s slogan to bring jobs back to America. The proposal ...
Silicon Valley’s next battle: Trump’s proposed work visa program
President Donald Trump’s next move likely to provoke the ire of Silicon Valley could leave companies scrambling to find staff. On the back of Trump’s highly controversial immigration ban comes the possibility of new work visa regulations aligned with Trump’s promise to “brings jobs home.” The administration has reportedly drafted an executive order that would affect the ...
ACLU gets millions in donations from tech companies, execs
The overwhelming and highly critical response from the tech industry to President Donald Trump’s immigration ban has now manifested into hard cash. The American Civil Liberties Union has received $24 million over the weekend, in defense of its opposition to Trump’s executive order that bans immigration from seven select majority-Muslim countries – Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, ...