Mobile Tech & Gadgets

The eclipse divides the idyllic towns of Mallorca between fear of collapse and labor intrusion

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Next August 12, at eight o’clock in the afternoon, a random town on the Mallorcan coast will have two eclipses ahead of it at the same time: that of the Sun and that of its own mobility model. Work intrusion. That is the concept that is echoing through the streets of municipalities such as Calvià, Marratxí, Puigpunyent, Esporles, Valldemossa or Deià. From Palma airport to the nightlife corners, the city’s various taxi drivers’ associations complain about transport pirate to which not enough blockages are being put in place. While some neighbors promise not to take their car out of the parking lot so as not to get into the mess, others set up improvised businesses to take tourists to the best viewpoint. An ideal destination. Mallorca is literally located at the end of the totality band of the solar eclipse. It is the last point in Spain to see the day go out for just over a minute, with the sun setting over the Mediterranean. Precious. In Palma, the National Geographic Institute estimates that the eclipse will begin around 19:38 and will reach its maximum around 8:32 p.m., with the Sun just 2 degrees above the horizon. That is, so low that any building, hill or mass of pine trees can blur the postcard. And of course, if the Astronomy and Astronautics Foundation of Mallorca has been explaining for months that not all areas of the island will see it the same, part of tourism will be at the mercy of this dynamic. The Government and the UIB have even organized “visibility exercises” so that people go to their supposed viewpoint and check whether, in practice, the sunset can be seen or not: a general rehearsal of what the battle for a piece of clean horizon will be like. The best view. Which is the best balcony, the best stone house with an open view to the west or the natural viewpoint most privileged? We already anticipated it: the coast of the Serra de Tramuntana and some sections of the southwest and southeast will be the ones that will start with an advantage. And the social networks They have been echoing this for some time: rural hotels like Cas Facebook groups specialists, climbing colleagues and interactive maps: it is not difficult to find even technical discussions about whether or not in such a town the Sun will be hidden by a ridge of pine trees at the decisive minute. The price of the eclipse. But while agencies and local businesses They take boat trips to see the eclipse from the open sea, with guides, a sunset glass and approved glasses included. Irregularities in transportation are a problem that no inspection seems to solve. Pirate transportation beyond the airport, with unauthorized cars and VTCs that attract clientele directly on the street, upsets the bosses of the foreign part. We are not just talking about Magaluf or Santa Ponça: private cars offer to make transfers even in minibuses, posting advertisements on WhatsApp. On paper, sanctions ranging from 15,000 up to 25,000 euros They fly over any vehicle that does not have a pre-contract, according to Law 4/2014 on Land Transport of the Balearic Islands. As stated the BOEany vehicle that picks up clients without this pre-contracting – especially VTC or discretionary – is, legally, in the field of illegally attracting clients and is classified as a serious or very serious infraction. The Formentera Council, for example, has already imposed sanctions of 6,001 euros for offering taxi services without authorization. Supply and demand. If on a normal Tuesday in August there is already work intrusion on the road, what happens when thousands of people choose the same minute to go to the same place? The influx of tourism is such – there is talk of prices ranging between 30-50 euros per hour – that it seems to compensate for some. PIMEM-Taxi (the Mallorcan Association of Self-Employed Taxi Workers Federated in Pimem) carries years denouncing that, as soon as the season starts, the “pirate taxis” advance their return to Son Sant Joan, operating with half a dozen illegal companies that take advantage of the gaps in the official service. This is the reason why Palma City Council limited 25% of the fleet to operate at the airport one week a month to guarantee service and prevent excess demand from being covered by individuals. More inspectors, less pirates. In the face of a conflict that has been existing for five yearsthe Government has reacted by reinforcing inspectors. Already in June it activated the ‘Table against intrusion‘ in transport and illegal tourist offer, coordinated by the general director of Mobility, Lorena del Valle. Taxi drivers do not believe that it is enough and that only strict police control will be able to stop all those improvised private plazas carrying tourists from here to there. The astronomical event of the century, which in the Balearic Islands is sold as a unique observation opportunity, is becoming an open-air laboratory of how this conflict is managed between the traditional approved taxi, the VTC and everyone who gets in the car and earns a few euros without going through the exit flag. Glasses and anxiety. The other main protagonist of the eclipse are the glasses: the Majorcan Astronomical Foundation has warned that they will be needed at least 100,000 units to meet citizen and tourist demand. And be careful, neither ordinary sunglasses, nor x-rays, nor homemade inventions are useful. Pharmacies, opticians and souvenir shops are being the distribution points, more or less improvised, with specific campaigns to prevent eye damage. In this mix of cosmological enthusiasm and logistical anxiety—reservations months in advance, neighbors who plan to “not go up to the viewpoint that day” for fear of collapse, and mayors who look askance at their summer mobility plans—the road is the boss. Not everything is rosy on the good side of the story, of course: rates skyrocket and waiting lines, on the key day, can ruin the moment. The … Read more

features, price and technical sheet

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At the beginning of this year, and with the crisis of mobile components and prices looming, Carl Pei, CEO of Nothing, commented that it was not necessary launch a new high-end mobile every year. He didn’t say anything about the mid-range ones and, after the Nothing Phone (4a) and Phone (4a) Pro a few months ago, it is time to discover all the details and features of the Nothing Phone (4b). Next, we go with the company’s new mobile phone that has arguments to convince anyone who needs a mid-range mobile phone, but which is an example of the impact of the current component crisis. Technical data sheet of the Nothing Phone (4b) nothing Phone (4b) SCREEN 6.77-inch Super AMOLED panel Resolution of 2,344 x 1,080 pixels 381 dpi density Refresh up to 120 Hz 480Hz PWM 2,000 nits peak brightness Highlight brightness of 1,200 nits Typical brightness of 600 nits DIMENSIONS AND WEIGHT 164.4 x 78.2 x 8.6mm 210 grams PROCESSOR Snapdragon 6 Gen 4 RAM 8GB LPDDR4x STORAGE 128 or 256 GB UFS 2.2 FRONT CAMERA 16 Mpx, f/2.4 REAR CAMERAS Main 50 Mpx f/1.8, OIS 8 Mpx f/2.2 wide angle BATTERY 5,200 mAh 33W charging 7.5W wired reverse charging OPERATING SYSTEM Android 16 CONNECTIVITY 5G NFC Bluetooth 6.0 Wi-Fi 6 GPS, CALILEO, GLONASS, BDS, QZSS OTHERS IP64Glyph Bar PRICE From 326 euros Very Nothing design with a bit of iPhone 17 Pro Where the crisis does not impact is in the design and, as the company is accustomed to, the Phone (4b) boasts very particular lines. The new terminal is a mix between the Phone (4a) and Phone (4a) Pro. For example, it has the unibody design of the second, as well as the LED Glyph interface at the top of the back to notify of notifications, battery or general status of the mobile of the first. It has an even more marked industrial design than its generation brothers, with interesting elements such as a camera module that is reminiscent of the iPhone 17 Pro, but is covered by a completely transparent polymer. I’m looking forward to seeing it in person, although we’ll have to see how it stands the test of time with everyday micro-scratches. Regarding durability, the mobile phone has IP64 certification, so it is resistant to dust and splashes of water and, although this has not been confirmed in the analysis, the side buttons seem to be located at an ideal height for the thumb. It has volume and blocking ones on the right side and an extra one on the left. If we move on to the front, we have a Samsung flat screen, a Super AMOLED panel that makes good use of the front, which has the typical notch for the front camera in the central part. The panel is 6.77 inches, so we are not talking about a compact one, and the pixel density is 381 for a total resolution of 2,344 x 1,080 pixels. It has adaptive refresh rate of up to 1,200 Hz, peak brightness of 2,000 nits, but a more realistic HBM brightness of 1,200 nits and the PWM stays at 480 Hz. It is not too much, but in the end we are talking about an entry-level mobile in the mid-range. Qualcomm interior with a very personalized Android 16 Inside we see curious decisions, and it is here where we see that the power/price relationship is marked by the component crisis that is currently destroying the market. Nothing is betting on the Snapdragon 6 Gen 4, although they claim that it has similar performance to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 of the Phone (4a). Maybe they’re going to take it further than it could thanks to a 4,400 mm2 vapor chamber that they say keeps the device a couple of degrees cooler during demanding tasks, reducing performance loss caused by heat. Come on, thanks to better dissipation, they can keep a modest chip “at full” for longer. If we look at the RAM and storage, we have the same as in the Nothing 3: 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM with 128 and 256 GB of UFS 2.2 storage. It’s not the fastest, but We already know how the patio isunfortunately. And the battery in Europe has 5,200 mAh, a capacity that promises a lot with a low-consumption SoC like that Snapdragon. The charge is 33 W and has 7.5 W wired reverse charging, interesting for headphones. And regarding the system, Android 16 with Nothing 4.1 above with all the animations, aesthetic section and functions of the brand. The most interesting thing is that they point to three years of Android updates and six years of security patches. Double camera without surprises In the photographic section, this camera module concentrates a main camera signed by Samsung with a 50 megapixel sensor with a size of 1/2.76″, f/1.8 aperture and optical stabilization. The accompanying camera is an 8 megapixel wide angle in a 1/4 inch sensor with f/2.2 aperture. On the front, 16 megapixels f/2.2 and maximum video functions at 4K 30 frames per second with the possibility of reaching 1,080p and 120 frames per second to make slow motion. According to Nothing, the system adds a series of algorithms to optimize portraits. Nothing Phone 4(b) launch and price Given the features, it’s time to talk about the price of the Nothing Phone (4b). In the configuration with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, the price is 329 euros. It is the same one that he already had Telephone (3a) with better features, but as we have already mentioned, the situation is… what it is. What is clear is that, in the sections in which Nothing can continue pushing, which is that design so pampered even in mid-range devices, they nail it. In Xataka | Nothing has done with CMF what OnePlus and Xiaomi did not know: divide before betraying each other

If with chatbots energy consumption had already skyrocketed, with agentic AI this consumption is multiplied by 136.5

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For a time, one of the controversies surrounding the consumption of artificial intelligence had to do with water. Some time later we learned that the calculations (even consuming a lot) They were not accurate and we begin to look at something so worrying: the tremendous amount of energy What data centers, and AI, need to function. It is something that is endangering the energy integrity of some countriesbut as AI approaches adolescence and agentic stagewe will enter a new phase. That of obscenely multiplied consumption. In short. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, has conducted a study in which he has quantified the energy cost of AI agents. Unlike a chatbot, which is a system to which we make a request, it gives us a result and that’s it, an agent is a chain of operation in which the software performs different actions autonomously. That, obviously, implies that the hardware that is moving that software spends more time doing things In the study, they measured the energy consumption of both chatbots and agents and concluded that, using a large-scale language model comparable to current commercial AI services, a single complex request to an agent consumed 348.41 Wh of electricity. depending The agent and model you use will also consume more or less. For example, a framewoprk called LATS used 62.1 times more energy in tests compared to an AI chatbot, while one on Meta’s Llama-3.1 Instruct 70B model consumed a peak of 136.5 times more per query. GPUs waiting (and consuming). There is another key, and it is time. Those queries consume more energy because more resources come into the picture and have estimated that agents take up to 153.7 times longer than conventional chatbots to process responses. During that time, GPUs remain idle more than half the time, but still consume electricity. They are not at full capacity, but they are “on guard” waiting for the response from external tools and websites so, when that response arrives, they start processing the data and performing the corresponding action. This issue of stopped GPUs is not new and a few weeks ago it was noted that the vast majority of the equipment that the hyperscalers had purchased They were doing nothing most of the time. The electrical network. And the problem is projection. Currently, this technology is in the era of chatbots, but the industry is moving towards agents. Right now platforms like Nvidia’s Vera Rubin just for that, and when they come into play, the study’s projection is that energy demand will reach an equivalent to half of the electricity consumption of the entire United States. It is estimated that in 2023, US data centers “barely” consumed 4.4% of the national total and will double by 2030, but KAIST’s estimates far exceed previous forecasts. Redesign. While those data centers continue to grow, the power grid cannot say the same. Renewables are not enough to satisfy the voracity of AI and we must resort to nuclear, gas and even coal and, in Europe, already we are seeing reactions of some countries that either move new data centers away from their large cities or reject them outright. The reason? Saturated networks and data centers that would have a demand greater than that of the population itself, generating problems in the energy infrastructure. It doesn’t look like the hyperscalers are addressing these issues because, as Jensen Huang himself, CEO of Nvidia, pointed out some time ago, it remains more than five years of wild investment in infrastructure for AIbut the South Korean study commented that a solution to energy demand would come from a redesign of the entire network. From microchips to AI models and the electrical infrastructure of data centers themselves. As if that were simple, and even more so now that Big Tech is in the race to deploy AI agents in both business and consumer applications. We’ll see if the power grid can keep up with that pace. In Xataka | Talking about artificial intelligence is talking about energy, and the fashionable term is ‘bragawatts’

the questions you have sent us (and their answers) about this vacuum cleaner and upholstery cleaner

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We will respond to your doubts about Rowenta Clean It Hot&Coldan upholstery vacuum cleaner capable of leaving your sofa like new. We have been testing it for several days, and now we bring you a video with all the answers to the questions that you have been sending us about it at our Instagram profile. Rowenta Clean It Hot&Cold Q&A We all have vacuum cleaners at home that allow us to clean the floor, dishwashers for our dishes, and washing machines for our clothes. But What about the sofa and other upholstery? Because this is a place where we spend part of our life at home, and it is exposed to all types of stains, from coffee to food remains, it always gives the vacuum cleaner extra points. To begin with, you ask us if this is an easy-to-use device, a logical question considering that it is a device that is not so common in our homes. And the answer is yes, anyone without knowledge can use it. You just have to fill its water tank, add detergent with a meter, and use its hose. The device has two buttons, one for power and one for the temperature, because the device can clean both cold and hot. Then, on the hose head you have a spray button, and then you just have to start vacuuming the areas that you have wet. You ask us if the product is valid for all upholstery. Here, we clarify that it is designed to remove stains on thick fabrics, such as a sofa, a rug or the upholstery of your car. Therefore, we do not recommend it for thin fabrics. Another question is whether it can also remove old stains, and here it all depends on what stains you used and how long you left the stain on. It is advisable to clean them as soon as possible, because the longer it takes and the deeper it is, the more difficult it will be to remove it. You also ask if it comes with several heads, and we take the opportunity to tell you the four there are, what they are like and what they are for. In fact, it includes a pet head. We also explain how to use accessories such as self-cleaning. In the video we also answer you about the capacity of the tanks, their measurements, some more technical questions about their use, and how appropriate it is for pets. We also give you a demonstration on how to use it. But the best thing is that you watch the full video to see all the answers we give to the questions you have sent us. This content is a collaboration and sponsorship between Xataka and the brand, but there is no agreement on the script or the selection of the topics. The editorial content is created entirely by Xataka.

“We are going to see more and more cases like this.” There are six mysterious spheres on a beach in Australia, and everything indicates that they came from space

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In 1979, the Skylab space station disintegrated over Western Australia and left so many remains scattered across the land that the authorities of the town of Esperance decided to fine NASA with 400 Australian dollars for “littering.” The sanction began as a joke, but ended up becoming one of the most curious episodes in the history of space exploration. A discovery that no one expected. The residents of Forrest Beach, a small town in the Australian state of Queensland, first thought in a jokethen in an accident and there were even those who made jokes about UFOs. However, the appearance of six large metallic spheres on the shore ended up mobilizing firefighters, hazardous materials specialists and the Australian Space Agency. What seemed like a strange object dragged by the sea actually pointed towards an origin much more unusual. From space. The first inspections indicate that the spheres They are pressure vessels used in space rockets for store gases and propellants during launch or in-orbit operations. Although authorities are still working to definitively identify the vehicle from which they came, they consider that they are compatible with remains of a foreign launcher that recently re-entered the atmosphere. This hypothesis explains both their shape and the material with which they are made and the fact that several similar pieces appeared in the same coastal area. Space Balls. Experts believe that they could be the well-known like “space balls”spherical tanks made of titanium alloys capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures. Unlike most parts of a rocket, which often disintegrate during reentry, these containers can survive the heat and end up falling to Earth even years after release. In fact, they constitute one of the types of space debris that most frequently appear in different places on the planet. The real risk. Authorities apparently did not cordon off the beach for fear of a meteorite or an explosive device. The concern was that these deposits could retain hydrazine residuesan extremely toxic rocket fuel. For this reason, specialized teams recovered the spheres using protocols for hazardous materials and asked the population to will not manipulate any object similar that could appear in the coming days. More and more will fall. The incident also reflects a phenomenon much broader. More space launches have been carried out in the last five years than in the entire previous history of space exploration, which implies a parallel increase in the number of re-entries of rocket and satellite stages. Most of these remains end up disintegrating or falling into the ocean, but some especially resistant components they manage to survive and reach solid ground. Australia already knows it. Because it is not the first time that Australia has received an unexpected visit from space debris. In 1979, fragments of the Skylab space station fell on Western Australia and, in 2022, pieces identified as part of a capsule SpaceX Dragon. The difference is that the six Forrest Beach spheres arrived all together and aroused such curiosity that local businesses took advantage of the commotion to sell food boxes inspired by “space junk”. Between jokes about aliens and photographs for social networks, the episode has served to remind us that, with growing space activity, finding objects from the sky will probably become less and less exceptional. As ditch archaeologist Alice Gorman: “We are going to see more and more cases like this: the more rockets are launched, the more space debris there will be.” Image | Forrest Beach Takeaway In Xataka | The Milky Way is 10% larger than we thought, and we have discovered it by looking at explosions in other galaxies In Xataka | The only black hole in the Milky Way hid an unsolved mystery for astronomers. Until now

the macro study that supports a great longevity ‘hack’

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Science and society in general do not cease in their attempt to achieve a formula to be able to extend life a little more, or at least reach have an older age with a better quality of life. In this sense, there are numerous articles that promise this type of improvement, although logically there is nothing miraculous here, but many different factors influence it. A new rule. A trick that has begun to have a presence among specialists In the world of healthcare it is the 5-2-½ rule. According to this premise, it is enough to sleep five more minutes, do two extra minutes of exercise and eat half a serving more of vegetables a day to mathematically gain an entire year of life expectancy. Its origin. This statement is supported by science, and specifically by a study recently published in The Lancet. The work in this case sought to answer a very specific question: what is the minimum change in our daily habits that achieves a measurable impact on longevity? To find out, the researchers did not take a dozen volunteers, but rather went to the UK Biobank, one of the most complete medical databases, to analyze a total of 59,078 participants with an average follow-up of 8.1 years. The analysis. With all these people they decided to measure sleep time, moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, and diet quality using a dietary scoring system. The mathematics. By cross-referencing the data and applying statistical models, the scientists found a “minimum combination” that was statistically associated with adding a year to life expectancy. The exact numbers of the andstudio were: 5 more minutes of sleep a day. 1.9 more minutes of moderate-vigorous physical activity daily, which is rounded up to two minutes. 5 points of improvement in the dietary quality index, which is approximately equivalent to half an extra serving of vegetables per day. The small print. As with other similar studies, this is an observational study on a population whose lifestyle habits were studied. But it is not a trial that was 100% controlled, where one group was forced to sleep five more minutes and another not to sleep to compare what happened. And this takes a little weight off it. Furthermore, the “extra year of life” is a statistical model at the population level. This means that, if an entire society applied these slight changes, global life expectancy would increase in mathematical models. The problem is that at the individual level, biology is not that mathematical and that is why you cannot compensate for smoking or a severe genetic disease by eating half an extra tomato for dinner. Microhabits. Despite the nuances, the underlying message of the study is tremendously positive. Historically, public health messages have been overwhelming, advertising phrases such as “do 150 minutes of exercise a week”, “radically change your diet”, “get 8 hours of sleep without fail”. This study scientifically demonstrates the immense power of microhabits. It basically tells us that we don’t need to prepare for a marathon or embrace extreme diets for our body to notice it. Adding a handful of spinach to your meal, getting off the subway a stop earlier to walk for two minutes at a good pace, or going to bed a little earlier are actions with almost zero friction. Images | Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | The problem that we read less and less is not a lack of time or discipline: it is that we do not do ‘habit-stacking’

Waymo has not confirmed that it will arrive in Spain. But your documentation says things

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Waymo has registered three legal entities in Europe in fifteen days: Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam. They add to the I had already been in Munich since June. However, no release announcement accompanies the records. what has happened. The French company has an explicit corporate purpose: passenger transportation with autonomous vehicles. That is, the activity for which we know Waymo. Waymo Iberia was established in Madrid at the beginning of June. And the Dutch company points to something else, computing infrastructure, not transportation as such. The four share a shareholder and management team. What it doesn’t mean. A commercial registration like this is not equivalent to a launch date or an assured landing. Uber promised robotaxis in Madrid this year and, when asked for details, there was no response. In fact, the DGT was not aware of any request from him at that time. What does it say?. The name chosen for Spain is not coincidental. Waymo Iberia, and not Waymo Spain, suggests that the target includes Portugal, which A few weeks ago it opened a convenient legal framework for testing autonomous vehicles. Three of the four subsidiaries are in countries with advanced level 4 regulation. Only Holland breaks the pattern, and its subsidiary looks at data, not transportation. So it seems clear that Waymo is registering subsidiaries where the regulatory framework is in its favor. The precedent. Waymo just broke its alliance with Uber in Phoenixhis first city, and has recovered the cars for his own app. The number is small (a little more than a dozen vehicles), but the signal is not: as soon as a fleet gains its own brand and demand, as Waymo has presumably done after years of service, it has an obvious incentive to stop sharing between 20% and 30% of each run with an intermediary. In this case, Uber. The contrast with France. France allows commercial driverless operations from 2021 in specific areas, and An autonomous WeRide van is already circulating in Valence under that framework. The pending question It’s not if Waymo lands this year. It is whether Spain will have a completely ready legal framework, also in terms of insurance companies and municipal regulations, before the question becomes urgent. Waymo has purchased the option of being ready to disembark in Spain whenever it wants, but it remains to be seen if the country will also be ready by then. In Xataka | What happens if you are in a self-driving taxi and someone wants to get into the car and attack you? Waymo’s response is not encouraging Featured image | Xataka

There’s a reason China doesn’t fire nuclear missiles from its most dangerous submarine. You just broke that rule

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The greatest strength of a nuclear submarine is not its firepower, but that no one knows where it is. This ability to remain hidden for months has made these ships the most important pillar of nuclear deterrence since the Cold War and explains why each movement related to them is analyzed with a magnifying glass. It wasn’t just any test. China has insisted that the launch was part of its annual training and that it had previously notified the countries of the region. However, few maneuvers generate as much attention as the ballistic missile shot from a strategic nuclear submarine into the Pacific Ocean. Not only that, since it was an action practically unpublished in decades. Beijing had been avoiding a public demonstration of this type for years and, precisely for this reason, the test has been interpreted as a message directed far beyond the military exercise itself. The letter that is never shown. Missile submarines are the most discreet and valuable component of any nuclear power. Its main advantage is in remaining hidden for weeks or months, guaranteeing a retaliatory capacity even if the country suffers a first attack. This need to maintain secrecy explains why China has barely made public launches from this type of platform and that each demonstration has enormous strategic weight. The signal was directed to the United States. Although the Chinese authorities they emphasized that the missile carried a training warhead and was not directed against any country, the context tell another story. Western analysts believe that the test was intended to demonstrate that Chinese submarines can now launch very long-range missiles. from nearby areas on its own coasts and continue hitting targets thousands of kilometers away. In other words, Beijing wanted to remind that its maritime deterrence capacity is entering a new phase of maturity. Type 094 Submarine A doctrine designed to reduce risks. Everything indicates that the launch took place from protected waters close to China, a strategy known as “bastion.” Instead of sending its submarines to the center of the Pacific, the idea is to keep them under the cover of national aviation, fleet and anti-missile systems while retaining the ability to attack very distant targets. If the new JL-2 or JL-3 missiles They fulfill the benefits attributed to them by analysts, these submarines no longer need to travel too far from home to reach US territory. Nuclear expansion continues. Because the test comes in full modernization process of Chinese strategic forces. Beijing is building new silos for intercontinental missiles, deploying more advanced generations of land-based missiles and increasing the number of ballistically capable nuclear submarines. Pentagon estimates suggest that the Chinese arsenal could exceed a thousand nuclear warheads before 2030a transformation that is changing the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. The Pacific responds worried. Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan reacted criticizing a pitch which they consider destabilizing for the region, despite having received prior notification. The criticism was not directed solely at the missile, but in the context of a rapid increase in Chinese military capabilities and an increasingly visible naval presence in the Pacific. For many governments, the test represents a new step in a show of force strategy that had already included tests of intercontinental missiles and naval maneuvers increasingly distant from Chinese coasts. The real novelty was not the missile. It is known that China has had ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons for years. What is really new is that he has decided show publicly how one of its strategic submarines can use them, something it had almost completely avoided until now. In fact, the demonstration increases the credibility of your ability of retaliation, forces its rivals to assume that these submarines are fully operational and confirms that Beijing is willing to use its military tests as another tool of political and strategic deterrence. Image | PLA In Xataka | Satellite images leave no doubt: China has launched an underwater creature into the sea that defies naval engineering In Xataka | From cultivating the field to sailing underwater: the Chinese farmer who makes homemade submarines in his free time

Elon Musk’s two companies merge because Wall Street loves simplicity

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SpaceX is no longer SpaceX and xAI is no longer xAI. Instead, the company has decided to merge both names, and from now on it will be called SpaceXAI. That new name makes one thing very clear: the company is selling itself to Wall Street as an AI company that also launches rockets, not the other way around. A fusion that was sung. SpaceX bought xAI —and with it, both the Grok AI model and the social network X— in early February. He did so in a 100% stock move that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The name change is above all a marketing “punchline” about that de facto merger. The strategy has as one of its probable arguments a simplification that will undoubtedly be liked on Wall Street: Musk has created many companies that seemed to operate independently, so consolidating them gives that vision of a unified purpose and objective. This is not just about image. After the merger that occurred in February there was a clear reason: the dream of orbital data centers. Musk has been talking for some time about how ground infrastructure can’t meet AI’s global electrical demand, and SpaceX has already asked the FCC for permission to deploy up to a million satellites that work like computing nodes in low orbit. Therefore, having SpaceX and xAI completely merged also by their name simplifies this entire ecosystem. Going public helps. The decision comes shortly after SpaceX debuted on the stock market in June with the largest IPO in history. It raised $75 billion and earned a valuation of $1.77 trillion. The milkmaid’s tale? Before going public, SpaceX spoke of the “Total Addressable Market” (TAM), an estimate of the total size of the business they could access if they captured 100% of the demand and the figure is colossal: 28.5 billion dollarsof which 26.5 billion would correspond to AI, 1.6 billion in connectivity (Starlink) and only 370,000 to the space segment. Part of the animation of the “fusion” between both names showed this aspect. Grok and Cursor as pieces of the future. Grok continues and will continue to operate under the SpaceXAI umbrella, and of course the infrastructure agreements already signed are also maintained. The most important, the one that Anthropic recently signed and for which will pay 1,250 million dollars monthly to SpaceXAI for access to computing in the Colossus data centers. Google will pay 920 million monthly for the same. The other piece of the future is Cursor, the AI ​​agent for programming which is key so that the company can infiltrate companies. And Tesla, what? Since the merger with SpaceX was closed, there has been speculation on Wall Street with a plausible future: that Tesla will be the next to disappear as an independent company. SpaceX’s own president, Gwynne Shotwell, recognized the day of the IPO that there is a clear “convergence” between both companies, although he avoided talking about dates. Both are already collaborating on projects such as the ambitious Terafab, and Tesla maintains an investment of $2 billion in SpaceX which, after the merger with xAI, has already generated a capital gain on paper of around 64% due to the rise in the value of SpaceX shares. A very strong option. This “merger” with Tesla seems certainly likely. Wedbush consulting analyst Dan Ives esteem that there is an 80% probability that the movement will occur, and the Kalshi betting platform handles in these moments a 51% chance of that move arriving before May 2027. Some of the groundwork is already done in practice: both companies share engineers and both face bottlenecks in the form of power supply and cooling for their AI systems. In Xataka | “The idea of ​​making a cell phone makes me want to die,” said Musk. Two years later, it is very deep with its prototype of a mobile phone with AI

AI browsers arrived with the promise of changing everything. Not only have they not done it: they are a danger

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Artificial intelligence browsers did not come promising a smarter tab or a search engine with better answers. They arrived with a much greater ambition: OpenAI talks about getting closer to a “true super assistant”, Perplexity summarizes Comet as “the browser that works for you” and Google presents Gemini in chrome under the idea of ​​a new era of navigation. The promise is clear: that we stop moving around the web alone and start delegating part of the way. The problem is that that same promise is beginning to show a more delicate side. The warning. The University of Washington has now focused on this emerging risk. In an investigation Presented at the Agents in the Wild workshop, and released by the university itself on June 30, a team analyzed seven popular agentic browsers to see how they relate to basic protection of the modern web: the same origin policy. Their conclusion was clear: four of them opened relevant risk avenues and the researchers managed to run a complete proof of concept in ChatGPT Atlas in Agent Mode. The bottom jump. A traditional browser shows us pages and waits for our decisions. We can open a service, copy data, paste it somewhere else, compare options or fill out a form, but each step depends on us. Agentic browsers alter this logic because they incorporate systems capable of interpreting what appears on the screen and moving forward within the browser itself. We are no longer just talking about summarizing a page, but rather coordinating tasks between tabs, operating on open pages and completing actions that were previously left in the hands of the user. A new front. The risk does not arise just because a page is malicious, but because the agent can interpret that page as part of its instructions. That’s where he comes in prompt injectiona technique in which external content tries to alter the behavior of the model with hidden, camouflaged or simply inserted commands where the user does not expect to find them. In a chatbot, that is already a problem. In an agentic browser, the scope changes, because the system can process information from a page and convert it into actions within the browser. The barrier that was there. The same origin policy is one of those protections that we rarely see, but that underpins much of the modern web. Its function, simply put, is to prevent one page from freely reading or manipulating information from another just because both are open in the browser. Thanks to this separation, any website should not be able to simply access what we have in a bank, an email or a private service. The problem arises when an agent groups together information that was previously much more separated. Let’s imagine that we visit a seemingly normal page and ask the agent to summarize it or help us complete a task within it. Under certain conditions, that page may include content from another source, such as an iframe, along with a malicious instruction intended for the model and not for us. If the agent has sufficient permissions, it could access content that the attacking website should not be able to read directly and move some of that information to a form controlled by the attacker. The web would not have directly broken the barrier; he would have used the agent as a bridge. The important nuance. It should be noted that the study does not say that all users will suffer an attack or that any browser with AI is insecure by definition. The researchers analyzed specific versions, at a specific time, and worked with proofs of concept, not with attacks against real services or with sensitive user data. They also observed relevant differences between products: browsers that granted fewer permissions to the agent tended to reduce risk. The paradox. These browsers are attractive because they promise to save steps, understand pages, relate information and execute tasks with less intervention from us. But that same capacity is what makes the failure weigh more: it does not occur only in an isolated tab, but in an environment where there may be open sessions, personal data and pending actions. They may not yet be a massive habit, but the security debate is already here, precisely because their proposal consists of giving them more margin. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | Selecting all the traffic lights is no longer enough to prove that you are not a robot. Now you have to scan QR codes

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