James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
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 ...
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 ...