James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
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 ...
Amnesty says Meta amplified hatred during Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of Rohingya
A lengthy report published today by Amnesty International had some stern words for Meta Platforms Inc., saying the company’s “algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya.” When Meta was still called Facebook, the company was accused of not doing enough to silence the hatred against the Rohingya ...
Pornhub is now using AI to persuade people not to search for illegal content
The world’s largest pornography website, Pornhub, today will begin employing artificial intelligence to prevent people from seeing child sexual abuse content. When people search for such material, and it seems they do, a chatbot will pop up on their screen and tell them they are attempting to find something they should not be looking for. ...
Oracle set to pay $23 million in second SEC foreign bribery settlement
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Oracle Corp. will pay a settlement of $23 million after being charged with bribing foreign officials in a number of foreign countries. The regulator alleged that between 2016 and 2019, subsidiaries of Oracle in India, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates created slush funds to bribe officials ...