James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
The company formerly known as Twitter will now allow people to hide their blue checkmarks
X Corp., formerly Twitter Inc., announced today that if users so choose, they can hide what they might now feel are their embarrassing checkmarks. Twitter Blue, which was originally launched before Elon Musk took over Twitter as an ad-free service with some other paid-for inducements, supplanted Twitter’s verification badge altogether once Musk got his feet ...
Want advice from Abraham Lincoln? Meet Meta’s new multi-persona AI chatbots
Meta Platforms Inc. is on the verge of releasing a tribe of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots that each have an individual persona, and if today’s report in the Financial Times is correct, one of those personas will sound something like Abraham Lincoln. FT said it spoke to three people who have seen what’s going on inside ...
X is going after an anti-hate speech organization over ‘baseless’ claims
Twitter Inc., recently renamed to X Corp., is threatening to take legal action against a British anti-hate speech and misinformation nonprofit organization for allegedly making untrue claims that hurt the company’s business. The Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, which has offices in London and Washington D.C., today posted screenshots of a letter showing ...
Study: Facebook might not be as politically polarizing as we think
A series of studies published today tells us that Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms do not explicitly divide people politically, and tweaking the algorithms won’t change someone’s political attitudes. The four studies, two of which were published in the science journals Nature and Science, address the concern regarding so-called “echo chambers” on social media platforms dividing ...
Waymo changes course from its self-driving truck ambitions to focus on ride-hailing
Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC announced today that it’s putting the brakes on autonomous truck operations and will now focus its efforts on the self-driving ride-hailing part of the business. Waymo Via, the company’s trucking division, was launched six years ago. Until recently, it has been testing its Class 8 heavy-duty trucks, operated by Waymo Driver, ...
TikTok announces new text and e-commerce features amid social media battle to become meta
The popular Chinese-owned video streaming app TikTok today announced that it will introduce a text-only feature, now competing with Elon Musk’s newly named X and Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads. TikTok said it’s currently “expanding the boundaries of content creation,” which in short means providing a feature that will look a lot like ...
Stanford researchers sound alarm on Mastodon’s significant child sexual abuse material problem
Researchers at Stanford’s Internet Observatory released a paper today revealing some worrying insights concerning the social media platform Mastodon, which they say is rife with child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM. The researchers said in the study that the issue has become a big problem on decentralized social networks, more so than centralized networks ...
Apple warns it will pull popular apps from UK if surveillance law changes as planned
Apple Inc. warned today that if British surveillance laws change with the upcoming Online Safety Bill, it might have no choice but to pull iMessage and FaceTime from the country. Under the new bill, there will be significant changes to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The amendment will give the British Home Office the power ...
Microsoft and Activision agree to a new deadline as UK approval still not certain
The drama of the biggest tech acquisition of all time seemingly won’t end, with Microsoft Corp. and Activision Blizzard Inc. today announcing they’ve agreed on a new deadline of Oct. 18 to finalize their mammoth $69 billion transaction. “Given global regulatory approvals and the companies’ confidence that CMA now recognizes there are remedies available to ...
Pay up! Thousands of authors tell AI leaders they want to be paid when their work is used
Around 8,500 authors, many of them household names, have signed an open letter to leaders in the generative artificial intelligence industry telling them either to compensate them for their work or to leave it alone. The list of names in the letter includes award-winning authors, arguably the most famous writers in the world today. That ...