Mobile Tech & Gadgets

Taking too long to change the timing belt is “a death sentence for the engine”

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At this point, it is clear that a car that has all its maintenance in order will end up giving us fewer unpleasant surprises during its useful life. That does not mean that it is not susceptible to failures, but if it is in our power to anticipate its maintenance, the better. And in this aspect there are certain critical elements of our vehicle in which it is preferable not to take risks. One of them is the timing belt, which is perhaps one of the most ignored or postponed parts in car maintenance, and which It can ruin your engine from one day to the next. if not changed to the proper frequency. What exactly does it do? The timing belt is a toothed rubber band that synchronizes the movement of the crankshaft and camshaft, the two main shafts of the engine. Thanks to it, the pistons and valves move in coordination, since the valves open and close at the exact moment when the pistons rise and fall. If that timing fails even slightly, the engine loses efficiency. If it breaks completely, the disaster can be total. Why is its breakage so dangerous? When the belt fails in motion, the motor stops dead without warning. In most modern vehicles, what happens next is that the pistons, which continue to move by inertia, violently collide against the valves. “It is a catastrophic event that can spell the death knell for the engine. The dull sound, followed by the absolute silence of the engine, is the beginning of a mechanical and financial nightmare,” they count from the specialized workshop C3 Care Car Center. When the tragedy ends, we can find bent valves, damaged pistons and, in more serious cases, a cracked cylinder head or a fractured camshaft. And of course, the price multiplies many times when it comes to repairing all that piphostio. Mileage. Most manufacturers set a change interval in kilometers, which depending on the model ranges between 60,000 and 240,000 km. But it is not the only number we should pay attention to, since the time of use also counts. From Rodi Motor they claim If there is no maximum date set in the owner’s manual, the usual recommendation is to check the belt every five years even if the kilometer limit has not been reached. The reason is that the rubber on the belt ages even if the car is stopped, and a dry or cracked belt can end up becoming a time bomb for our car. It will depend on the type of vehicle and car distribution system, but to have a universal reference, Juan José Ebenezer, mechanical expert and content creator, advises change it every 100,000 kilometers or every five years, whichever comes first. If we are already talking about oil-soaked belts from the Stellantis group, Ebenezer points out that “with 60,000 km you are already late”, and that it is normal to change them after 50,000 km. Normally, the workshops will change the complete kit, which includes the belt, pulleys, tension rollers, the water pump and all the hardware for installation. But if you prefer to make sure, it is best to tell them to change the complete kit. When to get ahead. There are specific situations in which experts recommend reducing the change interval between 15 and 25% compared to what is indicated by the manufacturer. Alejandro Pais, managing partner of Pais Automoción and Spanish champion of Group N in 2013 explains that “driving in an urban environment usually accelerates the deterioration of the timing belt. If this is your case, calculate between 20% and 25% earlier than recommended by the manufacturer.” In the end, it is not the same for a vehicle to be constantly exposed to cold starts, slowdowns and constant gear changes from exclusive use in the city, to taking it out more or less frequently on the highway. So if you can afford to change the timing belt in advance, the better. The climate also wears it out. High temperatures are another enemy for the belt. Precisely from Volkswagen Canarias, the brand’s official network on the islands, warn In areas with intense heat and suspended dust such as haze, they recommend advancing the visual inspection, even for engines whose official interval reaches 210,000 km. The same logic applies in areas of extreme cold or high humidity. The Midas chain of workshops also recommends advance the maintenance of this component in vehicles that regularly circulate in extreme climates. Better not to risk it. A preventive change of the distribution kit in Spain ranges between 300 and 1,000 euros depending on the vehicle and the workshop. The repair of an engine damaged by a broken belt can start at 1,000 euros and easily reach 6,000, according to they count from Rodi Motor. In more serious cases, when the damage affects the pistons, cylinder head or camshaft, it is possible that the failure is so serious that the entire engine has to be replaced, and then the cost ends up being exorbitant. So do your car a favor and take care of it. In Xataka | 2,000 million euros and 3,000 stations: BYD’s plan so that charging your electric car takes the same time as stopping for gas

Police intercept a modified electric scooter after a movie chase

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A souped-up electric scooter starred last Saturday a chase through the center of Benidorm after skipping a police check. The vehicle had been manipulated in such a way that it could reach a speed of about 104 km/h, four times above the legal limit, and ended up colliding with one of the Local Police motorcycles that were trying to intercept it. As expected, the driver has been reported for reckless driving. How it all started. The incident occurred during one of the routine controls that the Benidorm Local Police carries out daily on personal mobility vehicles (VMP). Quique Tortosa, spokesman for the body, explained to Radio Sirena COPE that these devices serve to verify that users circulate in the authorized areas and that their vehicles comply with the required technical conditions. In one of these controls, the agents detected a scooter which was moving at a clearly higher speed. When they tried to stop him, the driver went through everything and chose to flee. Drain. Just like they claim According to the media, the scooter traveled approximately two kilometers through several streets in the urban area before being intercepted. During that journey it reached a top speed of 104 km/h, a figure subsequently verified by Police measurement equipment. The chase took place in the heart of Benidorm, and it all ended when the scooter collided with one of the police motorcycles. Image shared by the Benidorm Local Police on networks Inspection. Once intercepted, the agents subjected the vehicle to a technical inspection. That was when the results confirmed that the scooter had been manipulated to be able to greatly exceed the 25 km/h that the regulations establish as the maximum speed for this type of device. He also did not have civil liability insurance or a homologation certificate, two requirements that are now mandatory to legally drive one of these vehicles. The sanctions that fall on you. The driver thus accumulates several complaints: reckless driving, driving a vehicle with altered technical characteristics and lack of regulatory documentation. The fine for carrying a souped-up scooter can reach 500 euros, but the lack of insurance increases that amount significantly, with penalties that can reach 3,000 euros, depending on the case, according to they point in We Are Electric. The scooter was confiscated. A recurring crime. It is not the first nor will it be the last of this type in Spain. Another recent example was the incident in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last April. Here, just like point In the middle, an electric scooter also reached 104 km/h, with the added peculiarity that the driver also tested positive for drugs. “VMPs are not toys and their manipulation and improper use is not only prohibited, but can put human lives in danger,” counted Tortosa in the middle of all of Alicante. The use of this type of vehicle has become widespread in Spain, and the fact that it is relatively easy to trick them makes them even more dangerous. Cover image | Yiting He In Xataka | The bridge that Seville has been waiting for for decades: 3.5 kilometers over the Guadalquivir and a height that no other bridge in Europe reaches

Threads already boasts 500 million users. The missing figure remains the most important

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Threads was born at the time when competing with X seemed more possible than ever. The old Twitter was going through a period of profound changes under Elon Musk and Meta decided to enter with its own app in a field that X had dominated for years: brief, immediate public conversation supported by text. What was not clear was whether that window could become sustained use, community and real scale. Almost three years after its launch, the company already has an answer to teach the market. The data comes from the Goal itself, which has announced that Threads It has reached 500 million monthly active users in June 2026. The application would have added about 100 million monthly users since August of last year, when it was already around 400 million. It is a huge figure for such a young network and enough to place it in a very different conversation than in its first months. The company led by Mark Zuckerberg has presented the milestone along with several new features, with special emphasis on reinforcing the role of communities within Threads. In its official announcement, Meta maintains that these groups, organized around conversations on topics such as books, basketball, parenting or musichave helped shape the application. That’s why Communities It is now out of beta and adds functions such as a center to find communities, own icons, progress indicators for topics that are close to becoming a community and more recognition for outstanding users. The figures we have and the figures we are missing Part of the explanation is that Threads didn’t have to convince the user to start from a blank page. It’s no secret that upon its initial launch it benefited from a highly optimized growth strategy: the app was able to build on the connections that millions of people already had on Instagram, and some viral Threads posts even appeared on Instagram and Facebook. This advantage helps to understand why its adoption was so rapid, although it does not solve the underlying question: how many of those users have turned Threads into a commonly used app. This pace places Threads in a striking position if we compare it with other large networks, although with an important caution: not all of them were born in the same conditions nor did they communicate their metrics in the same way. TikTok/Douyin reached 500 million monthly active users in July 2018a little less than two years later of the launch of Douyin in China. Instagram reached that barrier in June 2016some five years and eight months after its premiere. Facebook announced 500 million active users in July 2010a little more than six years after its birth, although that communication did not formulate the metric with the same detail as MAU. Threads did it just before turning three years old. There is the missing figure. Meta has given the global number, but has not published the breakdown by country: we do not know what Threads’ main market is, where the growth is concentrated or how many monthly active users it has in Spain. That gap matters because a social network is not only measured by its aggregate size, but by the weight it achieves in each local conversation. And in Spain, without a public figure that allows it to be measured, Threads does not yet seem to occupy a place comparable to that of X, Instagram or TikTok. Some clues help to read this incomplete map, although none replace the official breakdown that we do not have. In its announcement, the company led by Mark Zuckerberg mentions that local communities will start with native language labels in Japan, Korea and Taiwana clue as to where you are putting the focus. Meta claims to be seeing more traction in Asia, especially in South Korea and Japan, where usage time has increased by 80% and 130%, respectively, compared to the previous year. This is useful data, but it is not equivalent to knowing how many monthly active users there are in each country. Images | Goal In Xataka | “Deepfake” calls have become a top-level security problem: Google believes it has the answer

Airra Labs has thought just the opposite

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We have become accustomed to the mouse being a mature, almost closed tool, as if there was little room left to change what we do with it every day. Its design has improved a lot: it has gained precision, better materials, more capable sensors and, in some very specific models, such as gaming ones, a number of buttons that years ago would have seemed excessive. But just look at how we scroll through a page to find a surprising continuity: a finger that pushes, the content that goes up or down and a gesture so assumed that any alternative is born with an obvious disadvantage. First he has to convince us that the habit was not untouchable. At my desk, this gesture is almost always solved by a Logitech MX Master 3Sa mouse designed for productivity that relies on a very precise and comfortable physical wheel to scroll through long documents or endless pages. In the backpack, however, I have a Magic Mousewhich eliminates that wheel and turns the top of the mouse into a touch surface. Both seem natural to me in different contexts, and perhaps that is why this proposal draws attention: it does not try to polish what is known, but rather to change the movement that we take for granted. A mouse to rotate, not to scroll That’s where the Rotary Mouse comes in, Airra Labs’ proposal to change a very specific part of our relationship with the computer. The idea is not to add more buttons or improve the usual wheel, but to replace it with a rotary mechanism integrated into the mouse itself. According to the companythe user places their finger on that piece and turns it as if it were a dial, with tactile clicks and direct control over the speed and direction of movement. The goal is to move more fluidly through web pages, documents, spreadsheets, code or timelines. On paper, Airra Labs does not focus its speech only on speed. The company claims that the Rotary Mouse can scroll up to 2.5 times faster than a conventional mouse, but it accompanies that figure with another equally important idea: more control. Its rotating wheel includes tactile clicks, supports traditional vertical scrolling and, according to its creators, allows you to move with precision by turning slowly or advance quickly by increasing the pace. The ergonomic part comes with the so-called ROM, acronym for range of motion, a range of motion exercise with which Airra Labs says it wants to reduce the tension accumulated in the fingers. When you see it in images, the first thing that appears is not a certainty, but a strange sensation. This circular movement of the finger is not very similar to the gesture we make with a traditional wheel or sliding on a touch surface like that of the Magic Mouse. It may seem uncomfortableperhaps because we have spent years training our hand for something else, but that visual impression has an obvious limit: it does not replace the real experience of use. And that is precisely what is interesting. Sometimes an idea seems strange not because it is poorly stated, but because we do not yet have the necessary habit to understand it. Where the proposal can gain meaning is in those jobs in which moving is not a secondary action, but a constant part of the task. Airra Labs mentions very specific examples on its website: video timelines, long spreadsheets, long documents, code, JSON files and long web pages. In all these cases, the problem is not only getting to a point sooner, but doing so without losing precision along the way. It even proposes the use of the rotary wheel as a kind of small steering wheel for driving simulators. There is, however, a necessary caution: the Rotary Mouse arrives in the launch phase through a financing campaign and we have not been able to test it yet, so it is advisable to keep a certain distance before drawing conclusions. Airra Labs now places its estimated price between 49 and 109 dollarsa fork that will depend on the version chosen. Even so, the idea has something valuable even if it later has to pass the most important test: it reminds us that even the most established gestures can be put back on the table. Images | Airra Labs In Xataka | The trackpad on laptops is a real pain. So Logitech has invented the foldable mouse to put an end to it

the new series from the author who left ‘Stranger Things’ behind with his shocking thrillers

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David Burroughs has been locked up for years for killing his son. And he didn’t. The moment someone shows him a photo that suggests the child could still be alive is the start of ‘I will find you‘, the new series by Harlan Coben, which comes to Netflix on June 18. It is also the first time that, eight years after writer and platform began collaborating, the adaptation is set, shot and produced in the United States. When Netflix signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Coben in August 2018 to adapt 14 of his novels, production in English fell to a British production company based in Manchester. Until this installment, all English-language adaptations had translated the original American settings of the novels into British equivalents. ‘Safe’ took place in the suburbs of Manchester. ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ and ‘Deceptions’, in the north of England. With this new adaptation, Netflix is ​​going to try to continue Coben’s streak of success. ‘Deceptions’ was the most viewed series globally in the first half of 2024 on the platform, with 107.5 million total views, which placed it in seventh place in history among the most viewed English series on Netflix. Already in 2026, ‘On the run’ generated 15.6 million views in its first week and It surpassed ‘Stranger Things’ at number one in the United States. It is clear why they like Coben’s series, in what seems like a template that ‘I will find you’ will also follow with complete certainty: premises that hook you from the first minute, cliffhangers to cholon and continuous shocking revelations. Coben’s novels are perfect for a platform where users devour episodes in one sitting. ‘I’ll Find You’ also has a novelty: the protagonist, played by Sam Worthington, is not only a father who investigates, but also a fugitive pursued by the FBI. A welcome novelty that aims to refresh the Coben style with unexpected twists. In Xataka | If you think that ‘Vikings’ is faithful to Nordic history, sign up for this movie that you can watch for free streaming this week only

In Barcelona, ​​hoteliers have grown tired of the competition from Mercadona’s ‘mercaurantes’. So they are denouncing them

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Until now they might have liked the outlook more or less, but it was certainly clear. Traditional hoteliers basically competed with other members of the trade, restaurant chains, fast food and (maybe) some other food truck. Now that list adds a new rival that has made the bars on their guard: the ‘merchants’a hybrid that allows the customer to choose freshly cooked dishes in their supermarket, pay for them at the cashier and then eat them without even leaving the store. The model is so similar to what they themselves do in their premises that the hoteliers of Barcelona have decided take action. As? Denouncing dozens of ‘merchants’ in the city for intrusion and breaking the regulations. What has happened? What could be expected: that hoteliers have gone from threats to action. After several months questioning the legal reserve of the ‘mercaurantes’ (or at least sowing doubts), restaurateurs have decided to take action on the matter. Their objective: to stop the growing competition from what they consider “low cost restaurants”. Yesterday the Restoration Guild (the association that represents the restaurants, bars and cafes of Barcelona) advertisement the presentation of an administrative complaint against 30 Mercadona stores that, in your opinioncommit two irregularities: a “regulatory breach” and an “intrusion” that harms traditional bars. Gremi has also warned that this will only be his first step. In the coming weeks it will extend the complaint to other supermarket chains alleging exactly the same reason. Is it a novelty? Yes. And no. In December the state association of hoteliers (Hostelería de España) I already recognized that the competition of the ‘mercaurants’ was beginning to be “a controversial issue” and just a month ago its president, José Luis Álvarez Almeida, went further by accusing them of “unfair competition.” The novelty is that the Gremi de Restauració has taken the next step: presenting a formal complaint in which 30 establishments in Barcelona are identified and details the points of the ordinance that, in the association’s opinion, violate Juan Roig’s chain. What exactly are they denouncing? The technicians of the Gremi de Restauraciò remember that Barcelona regulations expressly prohibit “the area between the cash registers and the exit doors” of supermarkets “from being used for any commercial or service activity”, a guideline that they believe is not complied with in the 30 stores reported. “They are catering spaces, conceived and conditioned as such. And proof of this is that they have the necessary assortment: napkins, glasses, cutlery, buckets to separate waste and even microwaves. Some have up to 30 seats,” underlines the association, which recalls that licenses “are subject to rules and limits. The rules must be met and the limits respected.” Has Mercadona spoken? Yes. In statements to The Worldthe Valencian chain has defended that its activity does not go against Catalan regulations: “From the checkout line we are not charging for any service. The commercial activity is located before reaching the payment area.” From his point of view, what he has basically done is adapt “to the rhythm set” by his customers and add extra space in part of his stores: “It is not a restaurant area, but rather a rest area, with different uses: from those who heat a plate and eat it to those who sit down to read the newspaper.” In them, arguesThere is not the same furniture as in restaurants or waiters. Why that crash? Because the ‘mercaurantes’ are becoming a rival increasingly important for hoteliers, who until now were basically forced to compete with other union colleagues, restaurant chains or (perhaps) some other local self service either food trucks. Business lines such as Mercadona’s ‘Ready to Eat’ add a new competitor to that equation. One that also completely hits the model of the daily menu, immersed for years in a deep crisis of profitability. In a Mercadona with this service (and there are more and more of them) a worker can choose their own freshly cooked food, pay less for it than in a bar and eat it later at home, a park or the store itself. Are the dishes at the supermarket of worse quality than those at the corner bar? What the figures suggest is that customers prioritize other issuessuch as the money and time they will save or the flexibility when choosing what, where and when they eat. Is it just theory? No. Although the business model is relatively young (Mercadona’s ‘Ready to Eat’ was launched in 2018) we already have some data that reveals the competition exercised by the ‘mercaurants’ over the hospitality industry. Recent reports from Worldpanel by Numerator show that the sale of prepared meals in supermarkets has skyrocketed 55% from 2022 and that the number of customers who choose to eat in stores does not stop growing: in the last year they opted for that option 1.3 millionalmost double that of the previous year. We also know that there are chains of retail obtaining huge profits through this new activity. In 2025 Mercadona billed 700 million of euros through its ‘Ready to Eat’ section, a figure that rises to 3,000 million if we also include the offer of pre-cooked products (refrigerated, trays…) and the joint business volume in Spain and Portugal. Is this something new for the hospitality industry? No. The Gremi de Restauraciò has already shown on other occasions that it is willing to fight. Since 2019 the entity has in the spotlight to tasting bakeries, businesses that in their opinion violate municipal regulations, exceeding the maximum surface area that they can dedicate to tasting or marketing other products, including alcohol. The group has decided to file a new complaint against 50 bakeries in which you believe this situation occurs. Images | Mercadona, Wikipedia and Simon Karemann (Unsplash) In Xataka | We knew that freezing bread was convenient, cheap and fashionable. What we are not clear about is that it is “so good” for health

Madrid is a black hole of workers and students who live outside Madrid. And they just took away their transport pass.

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No Autonomous Community lost as many inhabitants as Madrid in 2025. No Autonomous Community gained as many inhabitants as Madrid in 2025. It may seem paradoxical but is what the data says. Madrid has become a labor and economic black hole. And the consequences are obvious. It is the region that attracted the most population last year, adding more than 100,000 new residents. But it is also the one that lost the most population, with just over 12,000 people who have gone to live outside the Community of Madrid. The increase in house prices and the day-to-day cost of living is expelling some of its workers from the city. Some of them simply go to live far enough away to find more affordable housing with the promise that a quick train connection allows them to be just over an hour from their work. A good example is Valladolid. Those, perhaps, are the luckiest. Others have simply grown up outside the region, in a rural environment, and have come to Madrid to try their luck to get one of those jobs. statistics place only in large cities. Workers who, perhaps, simply They arrived in Madrid during their university days. and they have ended up staying. Unlike when they were in their twenties and returned to their place of origin every summer. Or workers who do not appear anywhere because they are irregular immigrants who have arrived in Madrid with the same promises as any other profile we have talked about before but that remain outside of any type of statistics. Madrid has decided to remove their transport pass from all of them. Or make it much more complicated. Unnecessarily unnecessary registration All the previously mentioned profiles could have access to the transport subscription of the Community of Madrid without any type of hindrance. All that was necessary was a DNI, a residence permit or a passport and to pay the corresponding fee each month. This transport pass allows you to take Metro, bus and Cercanías throughout the Community of Madrid, which is divided into zones. These areas even reach the closest towns in Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León and They range from 32.70 euros to 79.00 eurosdepending on the extension we seek to cover. Obviously, the pass is especially useful for those who travel by public transport to go to work or school, since it is a flat rate that in zone A is compensated after 40 or so trips. That is, if every week you take a train, a subway or a bus twice a day, the investment is already worth it. Much more if we take into account that the cost of the youth subscription (from 15 to 26 years old) is just 10 euros. But the Community of Madrid has announced something: you will have to be registered in the region or in one of the municipalities covered by the transport pass. (even if they are in one of the Castiles) to enjoy the flat rate. That is, this leaves out all those who have left the city to more distant municipalities, the students who do not register in the city because they return to their places of origin once the school year ends. Or immigrants who cannot prove their stay in the city. And the latter is what, everything indicates, has served as fuel for the Community of Madrid to make this decision. When the Government of Spain opened the door to the regularization of thousands of immigrants in April, some conditions were placed. One of them was to demonstrate certain rootssuch as receipts for rent, purchases… or being the holder of a public transport pass. The latter, because it is the simplest, filled the transportation offices with immigrants who wanted to get said transportation pass.. In response, in the Community of Madrid the requirements to obtain this card have changed and now they require proof of registration (unless you are a large family) in a municipality in Madrid or in surrounding regions. The result is that, automatically, immigrants in an irregular situation cannot get this transport pass but, as we said before, neither can workers expelled by the city itself, those who come to try their luck for a few months or university students. In The Country They point out that the Community of Madrid estimates that around 200,000 people are affected by this change, which will also be extended to all renovations in the future. That is, if you are not registered in Madrid and you renewed your transport pass last year, you will not have problems in a decade but it will be more complicated for those who renew it next year. The measure has sparked great controversy. And there are those who have pointed out the measure as “racist and exclusive”, as Oscar Lopezminister of the government of Spain and general secretary of the PSOE in Madrid, and of course numerous associations in defense of immigrants such as Regularización Ya, as reported in the newspaper. From the Community of Madrid they defend that The measure has been approved since 2011 and that has been delayed due to technical issues but in addition they have already opened the door for some autonomous communities to co-finance Madrid transport so that Your students can benefit from this flat rate. Those 200,000 affected barely exceed 3% of Madrid’s public transport users, but the economic hole is especially harmful to them. Right now, a university student who lives and goes to class within the city of Madrid pays 10 euros. If you take a bus and a subway each day there and back, you will make a minimum of 80 trips a week (Monday to Friday only). Without registering, you will start paying 58.40 euros. If you live in Madrid but study in another area beyond the city, you will pay at least 85 euros. The punishment is even greater if you combine the metro and/or the municipal bus with the Cercanías service. The situation is … Read more

Freepik became Magnific to embrace AI. Now it proposes an ERE for almost a third of its employees in Spain

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Generative artificial intelligence is not only changing the tools we use to create images, videos or designs. It is also forcing many companies to ask themselves what they want to be in a market that moves at an unusual speed. freepik It is one of those cases that we have seen up close: it was born associated with graphic resources and for years it was a reference for those looking for images, vectors or templates. Your conversion into Magnific He wanted to tell precisely another story, that of a company that embraced AI to leave its previous stage behind. We are faced with news that fell this Wednesday afternoon: Magnific has raised a ERE in Spain. According to the information collected by Xataka, the procedure is still in the negotiation phase and involves around 30% of the 350 employees that the company has in the country. The nuance is important because Magnific is today a company with an international presence and some 450 employees globally: the ERE, according to what we know so far, affects its Spanish organization, not the entire global workforce. An ERE in full transformation towards AI It is worth stopping for a moment on the term. An employment regulation file is not equivalent, in itself, to dismissals already carried out, but rather to the legal procedure provided in Spain to propose a collective dismissal for economic, technical, organizational or productive reasons. The Workers’ Statute establishes that a period of consultations must be opened with the legal representation of the workers, a phase designed to negotiate the scope of the processits conditions and possible measures to reduce or mitigate its impact. In other words: what is now open is a procedure with prior negotiation before an eventual final decision. After hearing the news, we have contacted Magnific to find out its position. The company confirms the procedure and refers to the following statement: “We are in an internal process that affects part of the organization in Spain and is subject to a period of negotiation with the workers’ representation. As long as this process remains open, we are not going to make public evaluations out of respect for the people involved and the process itself.” To understand the context it is advisable to return to the starting point. Freepik became known as a platform for graphic assets: images, vectors, icons, templates and other materials that designers, content creators and marketing teams could incorporate into their projects. Magnific represents another ambition. The company now presents itself as a creative platform based on generative AIwith tools to generate, edit and transform visual content, and integrating models and capabilities that no longer fully fit with that initial idea of ​​a large repository of digital assets. Images | Magnificent In Xataka | Meta laid off 8,000 people and relocated 7,000. The result: the work environment is unbreathable

You can live without the condemnation of the username-password

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Ah, the passwords. Unlivable, but irreplaceablewhat Sabina would say. For Spotify they certainly are, because they want to get rid of them. In a message it is sending to its users, it warns them that username-based logins will stop working on September 1, 2026. Enough of so much user-password. The company’s message is striking and breaks with a tradition that is the norm in practically throughout the industry: If you want to access a service on the Internet, you normally log in with the traditional user-password pair. Existing alternatives. Spotify currently offers various shapes to log in. This can be done with a username and corresponding password, with an email address and password, or through associated Google or Apple accounts. From now on, use email. The company’s notice only refers to the username option as the one that will be removed, and it does not appear that other forms of login will be removed. In the message they do indicate that “Instead, you will be able to log in with your email” And you know what? Is a great idea. Long live passwordless authentication. In recent years, an authentication system that stops using passwords and focuses on other methods has been gaining strength: Magic links: the user enters their email address, and the system sends a unique URL to that email. As soon as the user clicks on the address, a tab opens in the browser showing how the user has authenticated using that link. One-time passwords: instead of having a permanent password, the user enters their email address and in a few seconds receives a code (usually numerical, for example six digits) that they must enter in the application or web service. Once entered, authentication is completed. Many advantages… This type of email authentication eliminates the need to memorize passwords or manage them with a specialized application. This also allows us to prevent our data from being part of those traditional and disturbing massive password theftsand it is a very simple alternative for the user. No route-forcing attacks, weak passwords or reusing the same password for everything. And of course, nothing stops change them every so often. …and some disadvantages. . The bad thing is that the security of the method depends exclusively from the email address. If someone hacks the user’s email, they will have access to all accounts linked to that email address. This method is also vulnerable to attacks from advanced phishing: A fake website that imitates the design of a legitimate one can ask the user to enter the email, request the real code from the legitimate server and then ask the user to enter instead (Man-in-the-Midle attacks). In Xataka | There is one person who knows more than anyone else in the world about password theft. And they just stole his

I need a compact keyboard that fits in my backpack, but I don’t want a ‘toy’ one. This is the one I have in the cart

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When the heat and good weather arrive, I usually leave home even if I’m not on vacation yet. It’s time to continue working and, although I have a laptop, I usually connect it to a monitor and use a separate keyboard. Mine (a Logitech full format) It is big and it is not at all comfortable to carry it everywhere. I could buy one of these small or foldable travel ones, yes. But I don’t like them: I prefer something more conventional. Since I don’t want to spend more than 100 euros on a wireless one, the one I have in the cart is the Corsair K70 Core TKL: a keyboard that is currently out 82.63 euros on Amazon. Corsair K70 Core TKL RGB Tenkeyless Mechanical Gaming Keyboard – Pre-Lubricated Corsair MLX Red v2 Linear Switches – SOCD – Acoustic Dampening – ABS Caps – QWERTY ES – Black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links A compact keyboard that’s easy to carry everywhere If we go to a store like Amazon and look for a travel keyboard, we can find models like the Logitech K380s which is one of the most popular. This and others like it are good peripherals, I’m not saying otherwise. But this is more about sensations and I prefer a conventional keyboard more, especially when I know I’m going to spend a whole day writing. And there comes this one from Corsair. It’s a TKL format keyboard, which already represents a considerable reduction in size (I barely use the numeric keypad, so it’s not a big loss either). Besides, Its USB cable is removable and can be stored separatelywhich makes it even easier to take it outside the home. And, when the summer passes, it is a resistant keyboard that I will be able to continue using in my daily life. The switches it uses are pre-lubricated MLX Red V2 and have an acoustic damping system. This, translated into simple words, means that we will have ora very fast pulsation and with a very contained soundso it is a very interesting option to write and even to play a game. As I say, there are easier to carry options for trips. However, in search of something compact to carry with me on the go and then also use at home, This Corsair K70 Core TKL seems like a top option to me. Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Corsair In Xataka | Best keyboards for writing and working at value for money. Which one to buy based on use and seven recommended models In Xataka | Best mice in quality price. Which one to buy based on use and seven recommended models

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