James Farrell

James Farrell is the former editor-in-chief of Chiang Mai CityNews, where he wrote and managed daily news, features, op-eds and blogs on a diverse range of topics. Prior to this, in the same city of Northern Thailand where he lives, he was the longstanding deputy editor of the monthly magazine Citylife. He has written on culture, politics, travel, tech, business, human rights, for local, national, and international news services and magazines. He has a keen interest in the role technology is playing in the transformation of society, culture and politics, especially in developing nations. This is reflected in his not-so-successful first novel.

Latest from James Farrell

Facebook bans content denying Holocaust, but rules don’t apply to Armenian or Rwandan genocide denials

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

Content that “denies or distorts the Holocaust” will be banned from the Facebook Inc. platform, but other genocide denials won’t. The move, announced today, is an about-face for Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured), who has been criticized in the past for not being bold enough to remove such content. In 2018, Zuckerberg said in an ...

Google disclosing search keyword data to law enforcement worries privacy advocates

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

Google LLC has been helping federal agents by handing over data related to the searches people do online, it was revealed earlier this week. Court documents show that the company disclosed the IP addresses of anyone who had searched for a certain address where an arson took place. Usually police would need a warrant in order ...

Google and Oracle plead decade-long copyright case before Supreme Court

APPS - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

Google LLC and Oracle Corp. were back in court today — the U.S. Supreme Court this time — fighting a landmark case that has gone on for a decade. Over the years there have been three trials and two appeals. This time the arguments were heard via teleconferencing tech due to the Covid-19 pandemic and social ...

House antitrust committee suggests big tech should be broken up

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

Some of the largest tech companies in the United States have grown too big and need to be restructured, a House antitrust panel said today following a 16-month investigation. A 449-page report presented by the Democratic House antitrust subcommittee said Amazon.com Inc., Google LLC, Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. have turned into monopolies and have ...

Excel spreadsheet issue blamed for missing COVID-19 cases in UK

APPS - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

A total of 15,841 COVID-19 cases were recently not reported in the U.K., Public Health England announced Sunday, and it seems Microsoft Excel was to blame — along with a dash of human error. PHE said that from Sept. 25 to Oct. 2, those cases were not reported in the daily figures announced to the public. ...

New EU regulations aim to address power of US big tech monopolies

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

The European Union has drafted rules that could result in profound changes to big tech’s hold on power in Europe, according to a report today. Under the “Digital Services Act,” companies such as Google LLC, Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. might have to start sharing data they’ve collected on Europeans with EU companies. ...

TikTok launches US elections app to fight misinformation

APPS - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

In an effort to fight misinformation, TikTok announced today that it’s launching an in-app guide for the 2020 U.S. election. The guide will be available today to all users inside the U.S. and will be accessible either on TikTok’s Discover page or will appear with various search results related to the election. The company said ...

Leaked data indicate Trump 2016 campaign used targeted ads to suppress Black votes

BIG DATA - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

The 2016 Trump presidential campaign used ads to try to persuade millions of Black Americans not to vote, according to a Channel 4 report published today. Channel 4 reported that it had exclusively obtained a 5-terabyte cache of data used by Trump’s campaign. It included information on more than 200 million Americans and included 5,000 ...

Facebook and Twitter take down fake Russian accounts ahead of US election

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

As the U.S. election season enters its stretch run, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. announced today that they have removed hundreds of accounts linked to so-called bad actors in Russia. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said in the blog post that coordinated inauthentic behavior had been discovered on the platform. The accounts were ...

Facebook says it won’t pull out of EU after all but insists something must change

POLICY - BY JAMES FARRELL - 6 YEARS AGO

After a court document this week suggested Facebook Inc. might be forced to close its business in the EU, the company now says it’s not going to happen. Earlier this month, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission stated that its investigation found that Facebook wasn’t substantially protecting EU users’ data from the prying eyes of the U.S. ...