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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
There’s a movement to make it possible to repair our gadgets ourselves instead of having to send them back to the company that makes them or, you know, just get a new one. The “right to repair” movement in consumer electronics has made real gains in recent years. Several states, like California, New York and Oregon, have passed legislation requiring it. And it looks like Apple’s newest iPhone — the 16 — has made strides in that department.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
After another polarizing presidential election, Americans with widely ranging views are getting ready to sit across the Thanksgiving table from one another. And we’re anticipating some potentially tense conversations with friends and family about politics, beliefs and misinformation. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke to Whitney Phillips, assistant professor of digital platforms and ethics at the University of Oregon, about how to navigate awkward conversations this holiday season.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
All those fancy artificial intelligence systems need a lot of data centers to run, and those data centers need a lot of energy. One estimate from the Electric Power Research Institute suggests that U.S. data center electricity consumption will more than double by 2030, making up about 9% of all energy use. But the AI sector is coming up against the energy-hungry tech innovation of yesteryear — crypto mining.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
In this tense election year, polling is top of mind. But collecting polling data is harder than it used to be. First, it often relies on people actually answering the phone and then speaking frankly to a pollster, both of which are becoming less common. The result has been data that is less predictive, such as the significant underestimates of support for former President Donald Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. And those repeated misses have made the public much more skeptical.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Artificial intelligence tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will require 160% more electricity by 2030. That spike in energy demand has Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Until about a decade ago, independent cybersecurity researchers in the United States weren’t allowed to examine voting machines for potential vulnerabilities. But that ban was essentially lifted in 2015. Two years later, DEF CON — one of the largest hacker conventions — decided to invite hackers, cybersecurity researchers and election officials to find those flaws during its annual Voting Village event.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
A lot of personal data — stuff like your home address, phone number, marital status and more — is out there on the internet. Anyone can buy it from sites like Whitepages, PeopleFinders or Intelius, which aggregate data from public records and social media. You can contact each of these “people search” sites and request they take down your information. Then you might find yourself double-checking that they actually do it, then triple-checking that your identifiers aren’t popping up again.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
Artificial intelligence, according to its boosters, could help us unlock solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems, like climate change. But in the meantime, it’s become a key tool for fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron to maximize the extraction of emissions-producing oil and gas. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to freelance reporter Karen Hao, who recently wrote in The Atlantic about how Microsoft has courted the fossil fuel industry.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
The new kid on the block of social media, Meta’s Threads, hit 200 million active users in August. When it launched in the summer of 2023 as a rival to the platform formerly known as Twitter, Meta said the app would eventually be integrated into the so-called fediverse. This “federated universe” is the most prominent example of a decentralized social network in which users can join any affiliated platform and interact with content from the others.
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1 week ago | 
marketplace.org | Daisy Palacios |Daniel Shin |Jesus Alvarado |Jesús Alvarado |Rosie Hughes
This year’s election was one of the most closely watched in U.S. history, and international observers were watching as well. On election eve, Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams attended a meeting of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in Washington, D.C. Its members are responsible for running elections in countries all over the world. While there, she sat down with Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
