James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Report: Elon Musk has plans to show 75% of Twitter’s staff the door
Twitter Inc. might soon see much of its workforce depleted, according to a report by the Washington Post today. The report, which was based on interviews and internal documents, suggests Musk told prospective investors that his plan was to cull much of Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce. The Musk buyout is still not a done deal, but ...
SpaceX rolls out Starlink Aviation for private jets
SpaceX announced today that its satellite internet service will soon come to private jets, offering for a princely sum as much as 350 megabits per second per plane. Elon Musk’s company wants to disrupt the inflight WiFi market, a market that has yet to impress many of its customers. SpaceX said its package will ensure ...
Kanye West buys social media app Parler, claiming big tech censors free speech
Kanye West, the controversial U.S. rap star, will buy the conservative social media platform Parler, it was reported today. The app is pretty much a clone of Twitter, although with moderation being lax, it has attracted a certain amount of criticism for allowing views to air that have been called extreme. In 2021, the company ...
FCC is prepared to ban Huawei and ZTE equipment
Amidst the ongoing trade war, the Federal Communications Commission is ready to ban all future telecom equipment made by Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd and electronics giant ZTE Corp. The reason for the ban is an alleged national security risk from China, although the companies have said time and again that they pose no such threat. ...
After months of waiting, Trump’s Truth Social makes it into the Play Store
Google LLC today added former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social app to the Play Store, following months of delays stemming from the app’s content moderation policies. After Trump was kicked off Twitter in 2021, he warned that he’d take his 88 million followers elsewhere. He made good on that promise when he introduced Truth Social, ...
Report: As PC market slows down, Intel could lay off thousands of employees
Chip giant Intel Corp. may soon experience a significant reduction in staff, maybe in the thousands, to cope with the fallout of lower demand for personal computers, it was first reported by Bloomberg today. According to the International Data Corp., it has not been a good year so far for the PC business. The number ...
After backlash, PayPal reverses its policy to fine people for promoting alleged misinformation
PayPal Holdings Inc. today said it won’t fine people $2,500 for promoting misinformation, just days after it said it would. Last Friday, it was reported that the company would hit people with a fine if they were found to have promoted some kind of “misinformation” that may “present a risk to user safety or wellbeing.” ...
Leading robotics companies say they don’t want their technologies to be weaponized
Six well-known robotics companies today signed a letter stating they’re against any of their products being turned into weapons. The companies were Robotics, Agility, ANYbotics, Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics and Unitree Robotics. They each said that general-purpose robots should be used for society’s benefit, not for killing people – as seen in the ...
Google follows Meta in introducing text-to-video AI
Researchers at Google LLC’s AI lab, Google Brain, today unveiled Imagen Video, a program that can create high-quality videos from text, similar to what Meta Platforms Inc. introduced last week. Google calls Imagen Video a “text-conditional video generation system based on a cascade of video diffusion models.” With just a text prompt, it says, it can ...
White House releases ‘AI Bill of Rights’ to protect consumers from harm
The White House today issued a set of guidelines for artificial intelligence in the hope that technology companies will be more transparent about the AI systems they use and will put limits on how they employ them. The bill, which has been in the works for around a year now, is not binding, which may ...