James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is returning to Australia a free man
After spending years in a British prison, the former Australian hacker and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has left the U.K., reportedly having agreed to a plea deal with authorities in the U.S. Assange (pictured) had been wanted by U.S. authorities after famously publishing hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, ...
New York signs bill to counteract social media addiction in the young
New York Governor Kathy Hochul today signed a bill that would give parents the ability to block their children from seeing posts suggested by a social media platform’s algorithm, a move that addresses a years-long concern around the negative effects of social media on the nation’s youth. A second bill will address the problem of ...
Amazon’s first labor union partners with the Teamsters
Members of the Amazon Labor Union, the one and only unionized Amazon warehouse, have voted to join forces with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Workers at Amazon.com Inc.’s JFK8 fulfillment center in Staten Island voted to unionize in 2022, becoming the first and still the only Amazon warehouse to make such a decision. At the ...
US Surgeon General thinks social media should come with tobacco-style warning labels
One of the United States’ most senior health officials, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, today said in an op-ed for the New York Times social media platforms should have warning labels regarding the potential mental health harms they could create in the young. “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency – and ...
Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone joins OpenAI board
Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the U.S. Army and a former director of the National Security Agency, NSA, has just been added to OpenAI’s board of directors, it was reported today. Nakasone stepped down as NSA director earlier this year after becoming head under the Trump administration. He also served as leader of ...
Waymo issues another recall after driverless taxi crash
Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC is reportedly pulling in its robotaxis for software updates after one of its vehicles hit a telephone pole last month. The incident happened in Phoenix, Arizona, when the Jaguar I-Pace EV driverless car was on its way to pick up a passenger. It hit the pole at just 8 mph, causing ...
Elon Musk drops lawsuit that claimed OpenAI abandoned its founding mission
Elon Musk, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI, today dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that had accused the company of a breach of contract for abandoning its founding mission of creating artificial general intelligence to benefit humanity. Musk filed the lawsuit in a San Francisco court in February. He claimed ...
Meta faces backlash in Europe over training AI with Facebook and Instagram data
Noyb, the European Center for Digital Rights, today filed complaints in 11 European countries to prevent Meta Platforms Inc. from going ahead with its plan to train its artificial intelligence products on personal posts and images taken from the Facebook and Instagram accounts of its European user base. Meta will use public and nonpublic posts, ...
Major cyberattack causes chaos at London’s NHS hospitals
The former head of British cybersecurity said today that Russian hackers are believed to be behind a major ransomware attack that disrupted work at London hospitals and led to the cancellation of operations. The incident, labeled “critical,” affected seven hospitals run by the National Health Service Trust after Synnovis, a provider of lab services, was ...
X updates policies to allow some sexually explicit content and AI-generated porn
Elon Musk’s X Corp. may have rattled a few people today when it updated its policies to formally allow various kinds of sexually explicit content on the platform, including AI-generated prurience. X, which was formerly Twitter Inc., has always been home to NSFW, or “not safe for work” content, although the company has never been ...