James Farrell

James Farrell is the former editor-in-chief of Chiang Mai CityNews, where he wrote and managed daily news, features, op-eds and blogs on a diverse range of topics. Prior to this, in the same city of Northern Thailand where he lives, he was the longstanding deputy editor of the monthly magazine Citylife. He has written on culture, politics, travel, tech, business, human rights, for local, national, and international news services and magazines. He has a keen interest in the role technology is playing in the transformation of society, culture and politics, especially in developing nations. This is reflected in his not-so-successful first novel.

Latest from James Farrell

Microsoft-Intel ‘mixed reality’ partnership will be more than interesting

Mixed reality, merged reality, augmented reality. Everyone is talking about it, not least because a game called Pokémon Go seemed to render the abbreviation AR (augmented reality) mainstream. But lest we forget, a long time before Pikachu started rearing his cute head from the Empire State building all the way to Trafalgar Square, Microsoft had ...

Killing one bird with two stones: Twitter’s woes continue with scathing report

Following a report recently released by Buzzfeed, “A Honeypot For Assholes: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment,” which details Twitter Inc.’s decade-long struggle to fend off trolls on its white-man-managed platform, the company has responded saying the report is inaccurate. A statement by Twitter said, “We feel there are inaccuracies in the details and unfair ...

Intercepted IoT: The unsecure sex toy that snitches on its users

The security of a sex toy is very serious business. This is the conviction of a New Zealand hacker that goes by the name of Follower. The hacker, speaking at a talk named Breaking the Internet of Vibrating Things at Def Con in Las Vegas earlier this month, is talking about the We-Vibe 4 Plus ...

Google Now wants to get personal, experiments with touching second base

Google’s digital assistant for Android, Google Now, might not have been given a proper human-sounding name — but in terms of intimacy it could soon be graduating to another level. Google Now is already at the very least an adequate app that can pull up information for you on demand, such as flight times, can buy movie tickets and ...

Experience floating in space from your living room with world’s first virtual reality satellite

Imagine drifting through space and not having to leave the cloisters of your familiar armchair. That could soon be a reality following a deal struck up between SpaceVR and NanoRacks LLC – a company that develops products and offers services for the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceVR, whose mission is to bring space tourism to ...

Pokémon Go won the West, but will struggle with world domination

If we look at the stupendous rise of Pokémon Go in the U.S., we might have thought the mobile game would experience a similar meteoric ascent in the rest of the world. Nothing that good could surely not catch on, right? Nonetheless, the numbers right now are telling us Pokémon Go is pretty much a U.S. ...

The scariest thing right now about AI is the slasher movie it’s writing

A naked, bloody body in a bathtub, a large knife and a kid singing a nursery rhyme in creepy cadences not exactly as it should be sung. Sound like a cliché? Of course, and in this particular film for good reason as the script was partly written by a computer … and the computer basically ...

The Microsoft beat-down of Google Chrome continues

Microsoft doesn’t want you to use Google Chrome because apparently it’s bad for your battery, and in turn your well-being; Microsoft wants you to use its own browser, Edge. Edge is good, says Microsoft. Chrome is bad, says Microsoft. Google Chrome is quite notorious for sucking your device battery juice, in spite of Google’s promise ...

Microsoft is finally letting HoloLens loose on the public with a view to the enterprise sector

Let’s face it, if you’ve not been living under a rock for the last year then you’ve probably heard about Microsoft’s augmented reality headset HoloLens. Much of the world might be entranced right now with a little AR game called Pokémon Go, but it was Microsoft’s demos of its own AR reality headset that really blew ...

New York Governor says sex offenders could be luring their prey by playing Pokémon Go

Registered New York sex offenders will not be able to join the madding masses and play the augmented reality game, now a global phenomenon in terms of online gaming, Pokémon Go. Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has asked the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to ban sex offenders from playing the game ...