Marketplace Tech

Meta and News Corp reached a licensing deal this week. Plus, defense contractors untangle Claude from their workflows.

But first, the online prediction marketplace Kalshi lets users bet on the outcome of many things that can happen in the future. One bet that saw a lot of action was whether Ali Khamenei would be ousted as the supreme leader in Iran. Khamenei was killed over the weekend during a U.S. military strike.

Kalshi didn’t pay out the bets that were placed after Khamenei’s death. Instead, it reimbursed those traders. And this outraged some users on the site. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, about all these headlines from the week in tech.

As the war in the Middle East intensifies, one risk facing American banks is the possibility of cyber attacks by hackers linked to Iran.

There is some historical precedent for this: from late 2011 to mid-2013, nearly 50 financial institutions in the U.S. were attacked repeatedly by a group of hackers aligned with the Iranian government. The attacks disabled bank websites and prevented customers from accessing their accounts.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Rafe Pilling, Director of Threat Intelligence with the cybersecurity firm Sophos about what those attacks looked like and whether banks are better equipped to fend off those attacks now.

You've probably heard of search engine optimization, or SEO. That's what you need to do to get your shoe brand or your coffee shop or your public radio show picked up and pushed out by a search engine. Now, with more people using AI to search for things, these brands have to work on what's being called AEO, or "answer engine optimization." When someone asks Chat GPT "where do I get good coffee in Baltimore?" Your brand shows up. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Erin Griffith, a reporter at the New York Times, about what companies can do to make the AI look their way.

As tech companies rush to build data centers to power their AI models, they're eating up power, money, and memory. Specifically, memory chips. The research firm IDC says demand from data centers has driven up prices for these chips and that we are dealing with an unprecedented memory chip shortage. That has knock-on effects for other devices that need these chips, including smartphones, PCs, and external hard drives.

Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Linda Tadic, a digital archivist and founder of Digital Bedrock, about how the memory shortage is affecting her work right now.

We create digital breadcrumbs all the time — when we buy something online, when we post on social media, and even when we look up directions on the internet. This is data generally collected by private companies — but how and when should the government be able to access it?

There have been lawsuits filed recently against the Department of Homeland Security over its collection and use of consumer data. Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Surveillance Oversight Program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, explains how the government collects data about us.