James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Amazon will pay more than $30M for Alexa and Ring privacy violation allegations
Amazon.com Inc. will pay more than $30 million to settle two separate lawsuits brought by the Federal Trade Commission, it was reported today. One of the lawsuits, brought by both the FTC and Justice Department, accused the company of collecting data on children who had spoken with its virtual assistant Alexa. It was alleged that ...
Twitter to expand crowdsourced fact-checking tool after Pentagon explosion deepfake video
After a fake image of the Pentagon on fire went viral recently, Twitter Inc. has decided that the platform needs to arm itself better against such deepfake skullduggery. The artificial intelligence-generated image was seen by enough people to upset the stock market briefly. Some news websites reported about the incident and later apologized when it ...
Paralyzed man walks for first time in over a decade with electronic brain implants
A 40-year-old Dutch man who was paralyzed in a cycling accident in China in 2011 has walked again thanks to a brain-machine interface. Gert-Jan Oskam was told he’d never walk again after his accident, but with the help of researchers in Switzerland, he has now walked up stairs and down the street for distances of ...
US Surgeon General warns social media is driving a mental health crisis in the young
Echoing countless studies on the subject, the U.S. Surgeon General said in a report released today that social media could be playing a significant role in a mental health crisis affecting the youth of America today. In a 19-page report, Dr. Vivek Murthy said it’s too early to understand fully just how harmful social media ...
Stock market wobbles after AI-generated image of Pentagon explosion appears on verified Twitter accounts
A fake image of the Pentagon on fire posted on Twitter today caused a brief dip in the U.S. stock market, which rebounded after officials had to explain that no such explosion had taken place. The image of smoke billowing from the headquarters of the Department of Defense spread like wildfire on Twitter, with the ...
DOJ charges former Apple engineer with stealing self-driving car technology for China
The Department of Justice today charged a former Apple Inc. engineer with stealing autonomous technology and giving it to a Chinese self-driving car company. The indictment, filed at federal court in the Northern District of California, alleges that Weibao Wang, who started working on Apple’s hardware and software for autonomous systems in 2016, had “broad ...
The IRS is building a government-run system for tax preparation
The Internal Revenue Service has been working on a system for Americans to file their taxes in one place, for free, according to an article in The Washington Post today. The Biden administration wants Americans to have an alternative to tax preparation software such as Intuit Inc.’s TurboTax and H&R Block. For a long time ...
Italy’s antitrust watchdog begins probe into Apple’s app market dominance
Italy’s antitrust watchdog announced today that it has launched an investigation into Apple Inc. for what it believes could be the iPhone maker’s abuse of its dominant position in the app market, a probe that follows similar European antitrust probes into American big tech. The watchdog, Italy’s Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, or ...
Wendy’s teams up with Google to release an AI chatbot that takes orders
Wendy’s International Inc. is partnering with Google LLC in the creation of a chatbot-powered drive-thru, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Amid what has become a generative AI boom of late, it comes as no surprise that a fast-food chain is playing with the idea of replacing human servers with bots. This first AI server, however, will ...
FTC wants to stop Meta from monetizing young people’s data
The Federal Trade Commission today shared some stern words with Meta Platforms Inc., accusing the company of breaching a child privacy protection order, adding that it’s time there was a “blanket prohibition” on Meta collecting the data of kids. The FTC, which has been something of a bête noire for Meta over the years, said ...