James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Twitter gets serious on trolls with zero-tolerance anti-abuse measures
Twitter Inc. has taken more serious measures to curb abuse adding a flurry of new crime-fighting tools to the platform, with engineering vice president Ed Ho declaring that making Twitter “a safer place is our primary focus and we are now moving with more urgency than ever.” Chief Executive Jack Dorsey in December asked Twitter users ...
Bill Gates on Steve Jobs, the woes of the world and why he wears hats in public
Bill Gates once again moved from wholly serious to wonderfully whimsical in his annual Reddit Ask Me Anything discussion Monday with the public. The 61-year-old Microsoft Corp. co-founder covered a wide range of topical subjects, from education, artificial intelligence and global disease to political schisms and how the Internet divides us. On a lighter note, ...
New Uber exec forced out over undisclosed sexual harassment allegations at Google
Ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. can’t seem to stop driving deeper into the mud. Just a month after getting hired as senior vice president of engineering at Uber, former longtime Google Inc. search executive Amit Singhal (pictured) has been let go from the ride-sharing company. Recode reported that the dismissal came after he failed to disclose ...
Rogue intelligent agents? Bots have spent years battling on Wikipedia edits
It’s not just humans who wrangle over revising entries on Wikipedia. A new study reveals that automated bots have been engaging in ongoing editing wars on the crowdsourced online encyclopedia for at least a decade. The new study, undertaken by scientists from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, has revealed that the ...
Amazon claims First Amendment protection for Alexa digital assistant – even in a murder case
Amazon.com Inc. is asserting its right not to hand over a user’s data in an Arkansas murder trial, stating that the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to privacy. Amazon was first approached by police in December, when it was revealed they were working on a case concerning a man, Victor Collins of Bentonville, Arkansas, ...
Google’s Waze makes hay with carpool service as the rain pours on Uber
As Uber Technologies Inc. is beset by a worsening sexual harassment scandal, Google Inc.’s new carpool service, Waze, is making hay. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, Google is set to launch Waze in several U.S. cities and cities in Latin America in coming months. This follows successful testing of the Waze Carpool ...
Bill Gates hopes technology and education will break us out of our filter bubbles
Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates believes we are stuck inside “filter bubbles,” hardly making use of the wealth of information out there on the Internet, television and social media, our worldviews reinforced inside our own private echo chambers. But all is not lost, Gates said in a recent interview with Quartz. Gates, whose philosophizing on the ...
Uber vows investigation into new sexual harassment allegations, but criticism intensifies
Amid new accusations of sexual harassment inside Uber Technologies Inc. made by former engineer Susan Fowler, #DeleteUber is once again going the rounds. On its first time out of the blocks – dictated by anti-Trump fervor – it’s thought the hashtag resulted in the loss of about 200,000 customers. This time, it seems to have picked ...
Robots should be taxed when they eliminate jobs, says Bill Gates
The looming prospect of human jobs getting quickly replaced by robots and other automated processes has spurred a wide range of potential solutions, from a universal basic income to retraining. Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates has another idea: Tax the bots. In an interview with Quartz, Gates said such a robot tax would pay for creation of ...
New app from IBM can warn of bad weather even when network is down
A hurricane is on its way and it would be sensible to get out of its path. But the Internet is down, and you don’t know it’s coming to rip the roof off your house. This is a more likely scenario in developing nations than we’d like to imagine, according to IBM Corp., so this ...