appeared

The lynx in Spain is growing at such a speed that it has appeared in an unexpected place: Euskadi

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An Alava rancher checked his photo-trapping camera last December. He was looking for genets, badgers or wild cats on the plot he has in Campezo. And he found biological gold. The unmistakable brushed ears and sideburns make it clear: the video in question It shows for a few seconds the presence of a lynx in the middle of the night. A tourist from the south. The Hontza Natura Elkartea association spread the image and the environmentalist offices raised their eyebrows: something like this had not happened in more than a hundred years. The boreal lynx inhabited the Aitzkorri-Aratz mountain ranges, the Gorbea massif or Valdegovía at the beginning of the twentieth century. But this is different, it is a Lynx pardinuspure and simple Iberian lynx. The same one that is being tried to reintroduce in the Valencian Community. And he wears a radio transmitter collar. Apparently, it comes directly from the south of the Iberian Peninsula, crossing half of Spain without a train ticket – it is not in vain that they can travel up to twenty-five kilometers a day. Hence, this presence in Álava marks a brutal biological milestone… and opens a crack in the debate on the recovery of wild fauna. Avoiding extinction. It was close and literally. There were less than one hundred copies left at the beginning of the 2000s and today they exceed 2,700. The Ministry for the Ecological Transition (MITECO) he stuck out his chest before Europe with their official censuses, consisting of specimens in Zaragoza, Palencia or Cuenca. The WWF Spain celebrated also the success of the Iberlince program. The specimens released in Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha and Extremadura have managed to settle. And the natural expansion towards Aragon or the northern plateau demonstrates feline adaptability. However, this Disney story with a happy ending should also be read from rural sociology. Because this feline depends almost exclusively on the wild rabbit. 90% of your diet. Diseases, such as myxomatosis or viral hemorrhagic fever decimated its population. 212 died from accidents. And, when hunger strikes, the animal will seek new territories. That’s where the real problem begins. At some point, people will target the lynx. Beautiful and problematic. PACMA warned of the risk. Animal activists denounce deaths due to vehicles being run over and demand urgent and effective wildlife crossings. Ecologists in Action pointed out another enemy: illegal and poaching. Snares, poison and shooting kill dozens of cats a year. Artemisan Foundation, voice of the hunting sector, defended another position: that hunters have absolute control over predation in their reserves. When rabbits are scarce, lynx compete directly with shotguns. The school story has clothed the lynx with sympathy. He enjoys good press, with that amber look that is touching. Let’s take as an example the hatred suffered by the wolf or the brown bear. The demonstrations by ranchers against the wolf have paralyzed roads in Cantabria—although the story changes little by little–. The bear, in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountain range, falls even worse. After all, the lynx weighs less than fifteen kilos, is elusive and rarely attacks larger livestock or calves, settling for partridges, rabbits and, if lucky, some absent-minded chicken. A close precedent. The wild boar is the best example in Spain. A couple of decades ago, seeing a wild boar brightened the day of a Sunday hiker. Today they affect crops on the plateau and cause fatal accidents on secondary roads, becoming an urban drama. The Generalitat of Catalonia declared constant hunting emergencies due to overpopulation. So the animal went from being a majestic pig to an official and destructive pest. Raids have been carried out for five years. Germany underwent an identical metamorphosis with the gray wolf. Politicians celebrated its return as an unprecedented ecological triumph and Berlin urbanites designed welcoming campaigns, until the shepherds of Lower Saxony suffered the direct consequences. German Green and Conservative Parties Now Openly Debating Lethal Hunting Quotas. Canada saw how the populations of pumas and black bears They multiplied near high-income residential areas, where cities like Vancouver or Banff celebrate their mystical connection with nature, until they began attacking pets, scaring children in public parks and sneaking into gardens. The shadow of the Iberian lynx. Seeing how it is expanding, with Álava as the tip of the spear, the question is whether beyond the Gorbea massif they will begin to sneak into private farms with greater frequency, whether they will hunt poultry and attack small rabbit farms. Hontza Natura Elkartea documented the discovery but Euskadi lacks an official reintroduction plan for this species. And we want wild and vibrant nature, yes, but away from our garage, without personal risks. Image | Flickr (Gerardo González Fernández) In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it In Xataka | We have managed to make the dire wolves return after 10,000 years of being extinct. The problem is that “come back” may not be the right word.

WhatsApp usernames seemed like a good idea. Then the shadow of identity theft appeared

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Almost all of us know that it is not a good idea to trust an unexpected message that asks for money, personal information or a verification code. But we also know how these scams work: they arrive at the right time, use the name of a well-known company and rely on a profile photo that looks official. A supposed shipping company, a package held, a small fee to pay. There is identity theft, in that mixture of legitimate appearance, urgency and misplaced trust. The new piece. The change that WhatsApp has begun to prepare now comes to that familiar terrain. The application has started username reservation ahead of a broader rollout planned for this year. The idea is simple: that we can find and write to each other using an identifier instead of always depending on the phone number. On paper, it makes a lot of sense from a privacy standpoint, but there are nuances to this. Privacy with fine print. The discussion isn’t about whether usernames are a good or bad idea. In fact, reducing phone number exposure can provide a clear benefit for millions of people. The point is another: every new way of identifying ourselves also becomes a new way of recognizing ourselves. And when that identifier resembles that of a company, a bank or an institution, the line between a legitimate identity and a fake one may be less obvious to some users. The first alert. TechCrunch put the system to the test at an early stage and found several usernames available reminiscent of Indian figures, companies and institutions. Among the examples he cited “indiamodi”, “shahrukh.actor”, “teamamitabh” and “rbi_verify”, references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bollywood actors and the Indian central bank. The nuance is important: the outlet did not claim that these identifiers were already being used to scam, but rather that they appeared available for reservation and, therefore, raised a reasonable doubt about the scope of the preventive reservations announced by Meta. The Binance case. The conversation took a step further when another user showed on X that “cz_binance” appeared as unavailable when trying to reserve it on WhatsApp. Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance, He then responded that he had tried it too. and that he had not been able to do it: “I tried, I couldn’t reserve that name. So, it definitely wasn’t me.” His comment clears up only one mystery: it was not he who booked it. Everything else, from a possible preventive reservation of Meta to any other internal criteria, remains unconfirmed. India asks to stop deployment. Doubts about the new function took a step further when they arrived at the offices of the Indian Government. In a notification sent Regarding WhatsApp, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology maintained that usernames could facilitate the impersonation of citizens, public organizations, financial entities and government agencies. For this reason, it asked WhatsApp to justify the function and demanded that its deployment in India, the application’s largest market, be paused while consultations with the authorities continued. Meta’s response. Faced with the doubts raised in recent days, the company defends that the system incorporates measures to limit the risk of identity theft. These include the preventive reservation of names of public figures, governments and certain variants, in addition to the possibility for creators, companies and organizations to claim the same username on WhatsApp that they already use on Instagram or Facebook. It’s not a new idea. The discussion about usernames didn’t start with WhatsApp either. Telegram and Signal already allow you to contact other users using identifiers without sharing that input data, while WeChat combines formulas such as your own ID and QR codes. What changes now is the scale. If WhatsApp completes the deployment planned for this year, this way of identifying will reach a platform with billions of users, expanding both its advantages and the questions that accompany it. The underlying problem. There is no reason to think that cybercriminals will ignore WhatsApp usernames. If a new tool can help them appear more credible, it is logical to assume that they will try to take advantage of it, just as they have been taking advantage of for years unknown numbers, profile photos, visible names, company accounts or leaked data. The question, therefore, is not whether there will be attempts at abuse, but to what extent Meta’s measures and user attention will be sufficient to reduce their impact. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | The new WhatsApp usernames have a reason for being. Advertising, specifically

24 years ago Oliver Kahn sued EA and won. Then a new goalkeeper appeared in football games: Jens Mustermann

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There are two things that I have to eternally thank my love for football simulators: locating places on the map and being familiar with a good part of the new talents that emerge in the quarries. I got off this annual roulette a long time ago, when the textures of the grass or the expressions of the players were not so important, but their faces were already well understood and you could recognize them thanks to the transfer of image rights, a tricky and lucrative topic even at that time. And for example, a button: Oliver Kahn’s. The name of the legendary goalkeeper of Bayern Munich and the German national team in the 90s and early 2000s disappeared from soccer games to return almost a quarter of a century later, it became an icon to close one of the longest and most curious legal disputes. Oliver Kahn’s lawsuit. Coincidentally, while searching for images of the special FIFA game for the 2002 World Cup, I found in the Xataka newspaper archive it is which illustrates the cover of this article and which is great for us. Because it was just then that the German goalkeeper filed a lawsuit against EA for image appropriation, as stated in the Ace article of the time: He believed that they were commercializing his identity without having given his permission or receiving compensation for it. The video game company faced a fine of up to 250,000 euros or up to six months in prison. Why is it important. This trial changed the rules of the game because it showed that video game companies cannot use the image of a famous athlete without their direct permission. In fact, it marked a before and after: from then on companies had to be much more careful with contracts, thus preventing big brands from taking advantage of the fame of footballers for their faces. After all, Kahn was a pioneerbut it could have been the tip of the iceberg of a barrage of similar lawsuits, such as explains the law firm Pinsent Masons. Context. It was the 2000s when football games began to look very real and in that image quality significantly improved compared to that FIFA 94 original Having the real names and faces of the stars was a powerful and attractive selling point. EA had signed agreements with FIFPro to be able to use player identities en masse, so in the hit FIFA series were represented virtually 800 players from 40 countries. The problem? That the union did not have the rights of everyone. It was one of the first train wrecks between the ambitions of a huge American technology company versus European privacy laws. Kahn 1 – EA 0, So titled Der Spiegel the goalkeeper’s victory in the German courts in 2003, ruling that the agreement that EA had with the FIFPro union did not cover the use of Kahn’s image, since the goalkeeper was not part of that organization. But it was more a moral victory than a practical one: Kahn managed to stop the distribution of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, but by the time he won, EA had already launched FIFA 2003. In fact, the goalkeeper tried to make ads featuring a blonde goalkeeper disappear, but the judge dismissed the petition: “Not all blonde goalkeepers are Oliver Kahn.” EA removed Kahn from the national team but kept him as Bayern’s goalkeeper under a separate agreement with the German league. The most striking thing is what happened next: to avoid any problems, the character based on Kahn was simply called “Jens Mustermann”, the equivalent of a completely generic and anonymous name like John Doe. Paradoxically, that name bears quite a similarity to that of Jens Lehmannthe goalkeeper who sent Kahn to the Mannschaft bench in the 2006 World Cup. Yes, but. Kahn won, but did not convince: The director of EA Germany stated that FIFA 2003 would still be on the market and that the new contracts were “even more solid” than before. EA did not change its business model: it continued to use block licenses and continued to operate normally. Kahn was absent from EA video games for years and It was not for legal reasons, but because he did not want to negotiate with them again. It has been now, with nostalgia and the evolution of modern game modes based on micropayments, when it has returned in the form of ICON card in EA Sports FC 26 actively participating in promotions and profiting from it. In Xataka | The most important thing about the ‘FIFA’ games was that they were called ‘FIFA’: EA is proving the hard way the weight of a franchise In Xataka | It’s World Cup time and millions of fans will pay for it with sleep: the graph that shows which countries suffer the most from FIFA’s schedules

Since the 70s, every time it rains heavily, west London floods without anyone being able to do anything. Until, in 2023, the beavers appeared

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The truth is that the headline is irresistible: a family of beavers have resolved in a handful of months a problem that London Underground engineers had been unable to solve for years. Rodents 1 – humans 0. The problem is that, as almost always, the story is more complex. It is true that engineers have spent years trying to find the best way to fix it, but the truth is that they did find a way to do it. And that way, it included beavers. What really happened to the London Underground beavers? On October 11, 2023, a family of five Eurasian beavers were released into Paradise Field, a former golf course west of the British capital. In that area of ​​Ealing and every time it rained, the Costons Brook stream overflowed and caused enormous flooding. Since the 70s, whenever it rained heavily, the area became an improvised swimming pool. 2024 was the first year in which this did not happen. “The UK’s first urban beaver count”. Sourced from wild populations in Scotland and financed by the city’s mayor’s office, the project has been a success. Now, in fact, There are now eight beavers that live in the area. Why has it happened? That beavers have “beavered.” Little by little they have built a dense network of dams that retain and release the water slowly, turning the Paradise Field into a sponge. This has protected the subway tracks, the station and the rest of the urban environment. Why is it interesting? For many things, but especially for money. Between 2015 and 2021, the United Kingdom spent about 2.6 billion pounds in flood defenses and estimates spoke of doubling that figure. The beaver colony and urban park system are a bargain by comparison. And not only at the urban level, everything is said. The River Otter trial, in Devon (2015-2020), does allow us to talk about effectiveness and points to a reduction in flood peaks of 30-60%. Can we learn something from it? In reality, we will have no other choice: for years There are people releasing beavers all over Spain. The question is whether we can do something to solve the eternal problem of recurring floods (in a context in which DANAs are going to become increasingly frequent and intense). But, of course, for that we have to understand well what has happened. It’s not like five beavers snuck into London’s sewers like ninja turtles and solved everything. A team of engineers and biologists have designed an intervention in which beavers have turned out to be wonderful. It remains to be seen what happens in the future and begin to accept that it is still better to collaborate with nature than to continue fighting against it. Image | Xataka In Xataka | After centuries of disappearance, there are people releasing beavers into the Tagus and other rivers in Spain. The problem is that we don’t know who

The last link that Huawei was missing to do without the West in chip design has appeared

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There is an indispensable component to the semiconductor industry that often goes unnoticed: the software used to Design cutting-edge integrated circuitsknown as EDA by its English name (Electronic Design Automation or automation of electronic design). It is currently in the hands almost exclusively of US controlled companies and its allies, so China needs to have its own software tools specialized in chip design. And little by little he is having them. One of the Chinese companies that are already working in this area is SEIDAand, curiously, its leader knows the American idiosyncrasy very well. Liguo “Recoo” Zhang is Chinese, but he has lived in the US for several decades and has worked at Siemens EDA, the US subsidiary of this German company that dominates the chip design software market in China. SEIDA promised to have its OPC software ready (Optical Proximity Correction or optical proximity correction) by early 2024, but has since disappeared from the news radar. OPC software is very important because it corrects in advance the optical distortions that occur during the photolithography process. When ultraviolet light is shined onto a silicon wafer to “print” the chip design, the light diffracts and the resulting shapes are not exactly as designed. Edges are rounded, corners are deformed and fine lines are narrowed. OPC software anticipates and compensates for these distortions by modifying the original design before it reaches the lithography machine. In this way, the final result on the wafer conforms to the intended design. The EDA that changes the rules In October 2025 Qiyunfang, a subsidiary company of YesCarrier and Huawei, advertisement that your EDA tools They were already being used by more than 20,000 engineers in China. This data has not been independently verified, so it is most prudent to collect it with some reservations. In any case, SEIDA and Qiyunfang are not the only assets that China has in the field of integrated circuit design software. LogicFolding architecture folds transistor-level logic within a single chip into multiple vertical layers And a group of researchers from Peking University has presented a prototype of an EDA tool that is compatible with Huawei’s LogicFolding architecture. The goal of the latter company is to produce chips by 2031 capable of matching the performance of 1.4nm integration technology from TSMC, Intel or Samsung, but without depending at any time on Western chip manufacturing tools subject to US export restrictions. The LogicFolding architecture folds transistor-level logic within a single chip into multiple vertical layers. This optimization requires the use of location and routing tools capable of working on the entire vertical structure simultaneously, instead of working on separate layers. Peking University addresses this problem precisely because its prototype treats the multi-layer structure as a unified design space from the beginning, as opposed to conventional designs, in which each layer is optimized separately and then stacked. During initial testing with industrial-grade open source integrated circuits, this EDA tool has achieved, according to its designersreduce the total length of internal wiring by 30%. Besides, has introduced performance improvements and thermal management versus conventional EDA workflows. It doesn’t look bad, but we will have to wait until Huawei places its first commercial chips with LogicFolding architecture on the market to assess whether this technology is really up to the task. This company has anticipated that its next generation of Kirin chips, arriving this fall, will be the first to incorporate these innovations. Image | YesCarrier More information | SCMP In Xataka | The condemnation that afflicts China: after decades of manufacturing a competitive desktop processor, it is six years behind

Jupiter appeared just in time to retain the elements that would allow life

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Jupiter it’s a big planet and inhospitable, but it is quite possible that we owe life on Earth to it. And, according to a study recently published by scientists at Rice University with the support of NASAthe largest planet in the Solar System acted as a kind of gravitational dam to retain in our neighborhood some of the essential ingredients for the proliferation of living organisms. Phosphorus and nitrogen. These scientists have been based in measuring the ratio between phosphorus and nitrogen (P/N), two elements that are considered essential for life in adequate proportions. Thanks to the analysis of the composition of two different types of meteorites, it was possible to verify that, initially, the appropriate P/N ratio was concentrated in the outer part of the solar system, very far from where the Earth ended up forming. However, when the giant Jupiter was born, its great mass caused a kind of gravitational barrier that prevented the phosphorus from continuing to flow outwards and concentrate inside, in such a way that the Earth had the correct proportion of those pieces that, joined to others, could little by little give rise to the life that our planet houses today. 4.5 billion years of history. The solar system was formed from a large cloud of gas and dust 4.5 billion years ago. First, gas and dust merged to form celestial objects known as planetesimals. These collided with each other, releasing small pieces that over time became the planets and moons that the Solar System houses today. Some, however, did not constitute either of these two objects, but continued to wander in the form of asteroids. Furthermore, if these asteroids impact the Earth They are considered meteoriteswhich can be of two types. On the one hand we have iron meteorites, which are dense, metallic and composed mostly of iron and nickel. Secondly we have the chondrites, which They are rocky. The latter constitute the majority of meteorites that have been recovered on Earth. Some older than others. Today we know that iron meteorites are older than chondrites, since they were formed from a first batch of planetesimals. Chondrites were formed about 2-3 million years later. Taking this into account is very important, since it is precisely what was analyzed to verify how nitrogen and phosphorus were distributed during the dawn of the Solar System. Two other elements come into action. There are two other elements that indicate the origin of meteorites that have impacted the Earth. By analyzing the ratios of nickel and molybdenum isotopes it is possible to know whether the meteorites come from the external or internal part of the Solar System. This is important, since thanks to a series of laboratory experiments and geochemical models it was possible to verify exactly where the meteorites came from and how the levels of phosphorus and nitrogen fluctuated between them. The asteroid belt separates the outer and inner part of the Solar System From outside to inside. We already know that the first phases of the solar system can be studied in iron meteorites and the newer ones in chondrites. We also know that both can come from the external or internal part of the solar system and that this is found out by analyzing the isotopes of nickel and molybdenum. Thus, these scientists saw that the greatest high P/N was initially concentrated in the outer part of the solar system. However, later the tables turned and it began to focus on the internal region, precisely where the Earth was formed. The causes. In its initial phases, the protoplanetary disk in which the planets formed would be very hot and turbulent. These turbulences cause a strong flow of materials outwards. With increasing temperatures, phosphorus condenses inside the disk, as part of a mineral called schreibersite. Then, due to turbulence, it flows to the outside of the disk, which is much colder. The result is a buildup of phosphorus on the outside. As for nitrogen, through oxidation it is freed from some minerals that contain it, but it is very volatile, so it is maintained at lower levels. That means that in the outer layers there is a high P/N ratio. That is, much more phosphorus than nitrogen. Turn of tables. In chondrites it is observed that the tables turn. The elements of life flowed inward. This is partly because the disk is already colder after 3 million years, so there is less turbulence. But it is not enough to explain what these scientists have seen. For this reason, they consider that there is also a great influence from Jupiter. The changes occur more or less from the moment this giant planet formed. The main suspicion is that, being so large, it exerts a great gravitational influence that acts as a barrier preventing the schreibersite from escaping outward. On the other hand, due to the cooling of the disk, the nitrogen-bearing minerals stabilize on the outside. This means that the exterior is enriched in nitrogen, while the interior is impoverished. Added to the retention of internal phosphorus, the result is a high internal P/N ratio, which coincides with what we have on Earth today and, possibly, served as a starting signal for the formation of life. In short, Jupiter gave us a cable. He didn’t give us the ingredients to live, but he did prevent them from escaping our neighborhood. That was the key. Image | Comparison of the size of Jupiter and Earth (NASA) | Solar System (NASA) In Xataka | We have been studying the planets of TRAPPIST-1 for years with great hope. James Webb just knocked it down

Wallapop believed it had conquered the second-hand market in Spain. Until Vinted appeared

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Wallapop, formerly known as Fleapster. Wallapop It was founded on May 23, 2013 in Barcelona with that name that referred to the famous “flea markets”. Its promoters, Agustín Gómez, Gerard Olivé and Miguel Vicente, started with the support of the Antai Venture Builder accelerator and an initial catalog that they had obtained by shopping at flea markets. The app was designed to meet someone nearby and do the exchange in person, so geolocation was essential for this first version. The team understood a couple of ideas that gave the app a definitive boost: sending a sofa from Seville to Vigo is a pain, and trust between buyers and sellers grows when the seller is three streets away. To make themselves known, they gave part of the company to Atresmedia in exchange for television advertising space. The result was a campaign that turned “Walla!” into a recognizable catchphrase before anyone knew quite what it meant. Vinted, the power of moving. Vinted has five more years of history. Milda Mitkute ​​founded it in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuaniawhen I was 22 years old and needed to get rid of more than a hundred clothes before moving. At a party he met Justas Janauskas, a computer engineer who built the first version of the site in ten days. The original name was manodrabuziai.l (“second-hand clothes” in Lithuanian) and in the first version they forgot to include a buy button. The platform expanded to Germany the following year, under the name Kleiderkreiseland did not arrive in Spain until many years laterwhen Wallapop already dominated the local market. Differences in use. The most visible difference between both platforms, and the one that most influences the behavior of their users, is who assumes the costs of the transaction. At Vinted the seller does not pay commission. Publish, sell and receive the full price in your wallet. The buyer assumes a protection fee of 0.70 fixed euros plus 5% of the price of the item, which covers incident management and payment retention until confirmation of receipt. Vinted eliminated seller fees in 2023. At Wallapop, in-person sales have no commission, which for bulky or high-priced items is more profitable for the seller. When Wallapop Envoys is used (the logistics service integrated into the app, which generated 74 million euros in 2024) the platform applies a management fee of around 10% of the sales price. There is also a second way of monetization for the platform, which has grown strongly: visibility services that give more relevance to an ad. generated 22 million euros in 2024, 27.6% more than in 2023. An important income for Wallapop, since it represents money for the platform regardless of whether the sale closes. The figures. Let’s look at some figures from 2024 and 2025 that allow us to trace the real state of each company. Vinted closed 2024 with 813 million euros in revenue36% more than the previous year, and a net profit of 76.7 million, which represents an increase of 330% compared to 2023, its first positive year. In 2025, Revenues rose to 1.1 billion (+38%). Net profit, however, fell 19% that year to 62 million due to spending on the expansion of Vinted Go to Spain and Portugal and the launch of Vinted Pay. Wallapop, for its part, closed 2024 with 101 million in revenue (+13%)consolidated losses of 25 million and the first break-even operating in the Spanish market since its foundation. In an average year, platform users generate sales of between 2,000 and 2,500 million euros, according to the company itself. Since 2013 it has accumulated more than 120 million euros in lossesalthough the trend is for a sustained reduction in those red numbers. Enter Korea. This same year, Naver, South Korea’s largest technology company, completed in January 2026 the acquisition of 100% of the company in an operation valued at 600 million euros. The transaction makes Wallapop the European spearhead of Naver in the recommercejoining Poshmark, which already performs these functions in the US and which the Korean group bought in 2023. The CEO of Naver Europe, Seokjoo Han, declared in Barcelona that the group intends to use the city as a base to expand into more European cities, relying on the parent company’s capabilities in artificial intelligence and search. Southern Europe: here we are. What is happening right now in Spain is the clearest reflection of the evolution of the sector. The trade in reused items in Spain reached a volume of 13.8 billion euros annually by 2025equivalent to 0.86% of the national GDP. It is a market that has been growing at a faster rate than general consumption for years, driven by inflation since 2021. Vinted has responded to this situation with the launch of Vinted Go in 2025. The company already operates this network in five markets (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain), following the leap that Wallapop made some time ago from being a second-hand app to having a delivery infrastructure (although Vinted has its own logistics operator and Wallapop works with InPost). Wallapop, meanwhile, has been expanding its catalog beyond household objects for years. The engine is one of the categories where it maintains leadership in Spain. And the entry of Naver introduces the possibility of technological improvements in search and personalization that until now were out of reach. Both are getting closer to their rival as time goes by: Vinted is becoming less specialized in clothing, Wallapop is becoming more technological. A final and personal appreciation. Without this implying tipping the balance towards one of the two apps (which is not the purpose of this article), I would like to express my personal experience, linked to my long career selling items especially related to leisure (books, comics, movies, video games). For some time I have noticed how Vinted, which just a couple of years ago did not allow you to buy much beyond clothing, has made a very notable leap towards collecting: its presence in … Read more

Sudan hid hundreds of unknown tombs of a lost civilization. They have appeared thanks to satellites

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If there is a known civilization within the African continent, it is Ancient Egypt and figures like Ramses or Cleopatra. However, relatively nearby there was another kingdom studied at length by archaeology: Nubia (although less famous to the general public). And between the two, a desert to pass by, literally and figuratively. Because there is the Atbai desert, a region between the Nile and the Red Sea where an archeology team just discovered hundreds of tombs from more than 5,000 years ago arranged in a monumental way, as you can see on these lines. The discovery. An international archeology team has identified 280 stone funerary monuments scattered throughout the desert, of which only 20 were known to exist. That is, 260 are “new.” The funeral complex has been called Atbai Enclosure Burials and its construction probably dates back to between 4500 and 2500 BC. These structures consist of large circular or ovoid enclosures delimited by large walls made of local stone, whose diameters vary from five meters in the most modest examples to reaching 82 meters. Inside they have found remains of both humans and cattle, sheep and goats. The internal layout of some tombs points to a certain social inequality: in several landmarks there is a central burial that dominates the structure, with other humans and animals arranged around it. In fact, the tomb with the most grave goods contained the remains of about 18 cows. Why is it important. Because these tombs suggest that the region was not a mere passageway between civilizations, but the home where pastoral people lived. The Atbai Desert was not a no man’s land between Egypt and the Red Sea, but had its own identity. As suggests the paperthe monuments are the cultural expression of a society with social strata in which wealth was evidenced with rituals, these stone milestones and livestock, like other neighboring regions. Context. According to previous excavations and the radiocarbon used on them, these monuments were probably built during the decline of the African Humid Period, when that area located in northeastern Africa went from more humid conditions to aridity because at that time the Atbai desert was not such: it contained vegetation and water sources, even if they were seasonal. As the climate became harsher, herding cows also became a more arduous task, so they adapted their herds: sheep, goats and finally camels. How they discovered it. In a word: satellites. The team made up of archaeologists from Macquarie University, France’s HiSoMA research unit and the Polish Academy of Sciences used satellite remote sensing over the eastern Sudan desert to map 1,000 kilometers of desert in search of more clues to its history. Why would an archaeologist want to avoid digging? Basically because in Sudan there is an armed conflict which means that field work can be directly lethal. But in addition to locating the tombs, the satellite images also revealed dense networks of ancestral trails engraved in the landscape by the repeated passage of livestock between grazing areas and water sources, a direct and visible trace of livestock activity linked to the funerary sites. That is, they not only found where they buried their dead, but also the paths they traveled in life. Yes, but. The first “but” is obvious: the majority of this funerary display has only been seen on satellite and has not been excavated, which leaves basic information such as precise dating in the air. On the other hand, this discovery located in the Atbai Desert could be just the tip of the iceberg: others may have been lost due to erosion, floods or even modern mining, which is very active in the area. The authors themselves acknowledge that they do not know with certainty whether these structures are exclusive to the Atbai or if they existed in neighboring regions and simply have not survived. The million-dollar question is: if in a desert as little studied as this one, 260 monuments have just appeared at once, how much history of the pastoralist Sahara will still be hidden under the sand waiting to be discovered? In Xataka | We just discovered that a semi-legendary Nile king really existed thanks to a 17th century document found in trash In Xataka | A Spaniard claims to have solved how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built: the answer was right under our noses Cover | Atbai Enclosure Burials: Monumentalism, Pastoralism and Environmental Change in the Mid-Holocene East Nubian Deserts edited with Gemini

There is a battle to have the AI ​​model that programs best. And a good, pretty and very cheap rival has appeared in it: Cursor

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Cursor has introduced Composer 2.5a generative AI model specifically intended for one thing: programming well. How good? Well, according to this startup, it does it as well as the best models of the moment, Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, but it also does it for a lower cost. The challenge is striking not only because of what it means for Cursor, but because of how they have created that model: it turns out that it is based on a Chinese AI model. AI models specialized in one thing. While OpenAI and Anthropic try to develop general-purpose models—they do a lot of things really well— Cursor you have decided to focus on a specific task. The AI ​​startup has created an AI model specialized in programming, and has done so by arguing that a billion parameters are not necessary to compete with the best. Devoting yourself to a single thing allows you to not only gain efficiency, but also costs. This is not a decathlete, but a specialist in the 200 m event, so to speak. As good as GPT-5.5 or Claude Opus 4.7? That’s what they say in Cursor, because according to their tests with several specific programming benchmarks, the performance is on par with those two models that today are the great references both in programming and in other areas. And much cheaper. These results are also especially interesting when we add the cost factor. The average cost per task in the CursorBench 3.1 benchmark showed that Composer 2.5 managed to solve almost 65% of all tests for a cost of just $0.3. Opus 4.7 max and GPT-5.5 xhigh managed to reach that 65%, but at much higher costs: just over 4 dollars in the case of GPT, and 11 dollars in the case of Opus. The difference is abysmal. He API access price demonstrates the differences: 0.5 dollars per million input tokens 2.5 dollars per million output tokens, when Claude Opus 4.7 is 5/25 and that of GPT-5.5 is 5/30 respectively. Textual feedback. Unlike models that only learn from the final result, Composer 2.5 has been trained with a reinforcement learning technique (Reinforcement Learning) that allows us to offer clues about what is happening if errors are being made. This allows the model to recalibrate and act as a transparent teacher. One that also corrects word by word as it solves the exercise, not just when seeing the final result. 85% of the training budget has been dedicated exclusively to reinforcement learning, calibrating the model not for chat, but to execute code refactorings or fix bugs in real time. A model “born” in China. Those responsible for Cursor themselves have explained that Composer 2.5—like its predecessor, Composer 2launched at the end of March—is a model derived from Kimi K2.5, the AI ​​model of the Chinese startup Moonshot. Although that is the basis, already in Composer 2 the training and post-training tasks manage to improve the behavior in a very notable way in programming benchmarks and also in others such as Terminal Bench that evaluate the agentic behavior of these models. Cursor gets older. This startup became famous for creating a programming AI agent that was a pioneer in that fever we live for vibecoding. The user experience is no longer that of programming, as in traditional IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), but rather that of directing the machine to program it for you. Composer 2.5 doesn’t just program: it understands the structure and relationships between files, and turns Cursor into a much more competitive AI company, because it no longer depends on being able to work with Anthropic or OpenAI models, for example. Having both the AI ​​agent and the model processing everything makes it a much more competitive solution. Elon Musk has Cursor in his sights. Cursor’s good performance has led to growing interest in buying this company even before it becomes too big. Elon Musk knows this well and Grok, xAI’s model, is not so popular in the programming field. In April we learned that SpaceX had reached an agreement that gives you the option to buy Cursor for 60,000 million dollars. It would be a promising deal for both, because Composer 2.5 has already used Colossus’ infrastructure to train, and xAI could thus try to gain market share in the juicy enterprise sector. In Xataka | Elon Musk knows that TSMC is overwhelmed: Terafab is his idea to completely change the global chip industry

Setting up guest Wi-Fi seemed like a good idea. Until the latest vulnerability has appeared: AirSnitch

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I’m the first one I have activated a guest Wi-Fi network to facilitate access to Wi-Fi connectivity for my friends and family, without compromising the security and privacy of the Wi-Fi network to which the rest of me is connected. devices in my home. The coffee shop I usually go to does it too. Separating the main network from the one used by visitors or clients seemed enough to prevent someone connected from snooping on other people’s computers, cell phones or printers. However, that model just took a major setback. A group of researchers has presented in the NDSS 2026 a attack called AirSnitch which shows that this separation can be broken even when the router has isolation between devices activated and uses modern encryption such as WPA2 or WPA3. The problem with AirSnitch is that it is not a brute force attack against these protection systems, but rather it has found an alternative path in which this protection simply does not arrive. AirSnitch is not an attack, it is an alternative AirSnitch is not an out-of-the-box malware, but rather a technique that exploits a vulnerability in the way many access points implement client isolation. This function, present in all home, business or public Wi-Fi networks, should prevent two devices connected to the same Wi-Fi from being able to communicate directly with each other. The problem, according to the study presented in it Network and Distributed System Security Symposiumis that this isolation is not part of a single standard and each manufacturer implements it in its own way. In their tests, the researchers analyzed 11 different devices, from home routers to professional equipment and alternative firmwares. They found vulnerabilities to AirSnitch techniques in all of them. In statements collected by Ars TechnicaXin’an Zhou, one of the authors of the work, stated that AirSnitch “breaks Wi-Fi encryption around the world and could have the potential to enable advanced cyberattacks. Our research physically taps the entire wire for these sophisticated attacks to work. It is truly a threat to the security of networks around the world.” How AirSnitch works The key is that, although the devices are “isolated” from each other thanks to the customer isolationshare certain internal mechanisms of the router that allow data traffic to be organized. AirSnitch takes advantage of that feature to trick the access point and make some of the information that should go to another device pass through the attacker first. In practice, this allows you to place yourself in the middle of the communication without the victim realizing it, generating what is known in cybersecurity as a Man-in-the-Middle (man in the middle), in which all the information on that device first passes through an intermediary. From there, the attacker can observe data and, in certain cases, modify it before it reaches its destination. That is, it is not about guessing the Wi-Fi password, but rather taking advantage of how the device itself router manages connections internal once someone is already connected. The researchers showed that this technique can facilitate additional attacks, such as redirecting the victim to fake pages or manipulating certain internal communications if they are not adequately protected. Isolation, which was supposed to prevent precisely this scenario, stops be an effective barrier. The main problem is that all devices connect to the same router that manages them. Why public networks are the most delicate scenario The risk is especially relevant in open or shared networksF for many people: cafes, airports, hotels or coworking spaces. In these environments, any user can legally connect through the password provided by the establishment and, if the access point is vulnerableattempt to exploit the flaw against other clients connected at that time. In one home network the impact is much more limitedbecause the attacker needs to know the password to enter first. That is, it has to be one of the guests to whom you have given the password, not someone external. Still, research shows that activating a guest network does not alone ensure that devices are completely isolated. Being a recent discovery, there is still no immediate universal solution for the end user. The fix depends largely on firmware updates by manufacturers or deeper changes in how they design their device isolation systems. Meanwhile, in enterprise environments it is recommended to segment networks more strictly, using configurations that truly separate devices into different internal environments and do not depend solely on a router function. For individuals, keeping equipment up-to-date, using strong passwords, and avoiding sensitive operations on public networks without additional protection are reasonable measures to reduce risk that continue to be in effect. Need a password to connect to a Wi-Fi network It is not a guarantee of security or privacy. In Xataka | VPN Buying Guide: Nine Services to Consider for Safer Browsing Image | Unsplash (Bernard Hermant)

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