There are people modifying their router so that ads stop appearing on their refrigerator

A man had to install an ad blocker directly on his router to stop his $1,400 refrigerator from showing ads. They tell it in the Wall Street Journal and, although it sounds absurd, it is just one of the experiences of those affected by the questionable decision that Samsung made a few months ago. What has happened? Samsung Family Hub refrigerators (those with a screen built into the door) began showing ads in September last year. Samsung admitted itconfirming that it was a pilot program for some users in the United States. Six months later, the ads are still appearing, some showing Samsung consumables like water filters, but others are third-party ads and in some cases they are full screen. Samsung says that the latter appear when the browser is opened and that it cannot control them. The problem of the official solution. Samsung allows you to remove ads from its refrigerators, but be careful because there is a catch. The advertising is integrated into a widget that also displays news, weather and calendar. To remove them, you have to delete the entire widget and there are users who do not want to lose it. The unofficial solution. Brian Bosworth is one of those affected by this decision, but he refused to give up the widget because he found it very useful, so he took the long route: he logged into his router, installed ad-blocking software, and made sure his refrigerator was included in the filter. Result: You keep the widget and don’t see ads. Discomfort. There are owners who feel directly deceived by this situation. They paid $1,400 for a premium appliance and now it has been turned into an advertising panel, all without their prior consent. One of them wants to return the refrigerator and has said that he will not buy any Samsung device again, which leads one to wonder if Samsung has correctly calculated the benefit of this decision. Making things worse. Cases like this are one more example of the drift that the internet and digital services are taking. It’s what was coined as ‘enshittification’which translated would be something like shit. It is a deliberate degradation of products and services that responds to an economic objective. Advertising is one of the forms of this degradation and we have seen it flood all types of services such as Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Instagram and even apps to control home cameras. We didn’t expect to see it also in refrigerators, but that’s the way things are. Image | Xataka In Xataka | “I take things that are good and make them worse”: Norway has a plan to reverse the decline of the entire Internet

Great white sharks are appearing off the Alicante coast. The problem is that we don’t know if it’s good news or bad news.

On April 20, 2023, by pure chance, some fishermen caught a juvenile-sized white shark. No one would have been surprised if it weren’t for the fact that the fishermen were in Spanish waters, right in front of the Alicante Cape of La Nao. Two meters 10 centimeters of white shark in the middle of the Mediterranean, what was happening here? Do we have to worry? That is the question that was asked at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography and, in collaboration with the University of Cádiz, has carried out a deep review of the presence of white sharks in the Mediterranean Sea. It is not something superficial: they have collected all the records (direct and indirect) from 1862 to 2023 and have reached a surprising conclusion. The presence of this type of specimen has been “persistent” (although “extremely rare”) in the Spanish Mediterranean. It is not something, a priori, worrying. As explained José Carlos Báezresearcher at the IEO-CSIC, “we have only found two attacks: one in 1862, in which a person died in Malaga who was swimming, and another in the eighties, when a shark bit a surfer’s board in Tarifa and caused serious injuries.” But the problem is not that. And, although “with the available data, it is not possible to affirm that the Mediterranean white shark population is recovering”, it is inevitable to think about what will happen in an increasingly warmer sea. In the end, “the presence of young individuals provides key information about the demographic structure of the species” and, one way or anotherthis leads us to seriously consider the risks of having breeding spaces in Spanish waters. However, everything seems to indicate that there is a relationship between the presence of the shark and the routes of the bluefin tuna. If so, it would be another symptom of the problems that sharks have to keep their populations healthy and robust. Should we worry? It doesn’t seem like it. Against the media angle about the “return of the monster”, international evidence tells us that attacks are extremely rare and the role of sharks in the conservation of aquatic ecosystems is very important. Be that as it may, monitoring and conservation programs must be developed. And it has to be done soon. Image | Oleksandr Sushko In Xataka | The white shark is an exceptional swimmer. Its secret is in its “teeth”

These dancers are one of the most disturbing traditions of La Palma and had a decade without appearing. Until now

Incredibly strange parties there are in Spain to give and take. And in summer, with the multiplication of patron saint parties And typical of each town, they are increasing. However, those of Santa Cruz de La Palma They are not strange because of their aesthetics and development, but also because of their frequency: the dance of the dwarves is celebrated every five years … but it was not seen ten. Dwarves to accompany the Virgin. With a denomination that has already been outdated but that, obviously, is still used by tradition, the dance of the dwarves has viralized in social networks by its comic visual spectacularity. This is the most famous number of the traditional parties of the descent of the Virgen de las Nieves, which takes place in the Canarian town of Santa Cruz, in La Palma. In these parties the image of the Virgen de las Nieves moves from her sanctuary in the mountain to the city on the coast. A series of popular acts are celebrated around the act, including dance. How dwarves dance. The image of the dwarves dancers (in reality, people of average height hidden after huge Napoleonic tricorn) has become popular so much that it has become a symbol of the entire island of La Palma. The music that dance is a polka composed in 1925 by Domingo Santos Rodríguez, and that lasts more than ten minutes. Then the dance is repeated again and again, between parade and dances in different places. This year they have come to be dancing for thirteen hours without stopping. Lustral dances. The feasts of the Virgin’s descent take place every five years, but the descent and dance of the dwarves had been held for a decade, since it coincided in the previous edition with the pandemic. Therefore, this year the reunion with the 24 dwarves has been special: since it is a show especially aimed at children, to whom the dwarves scare and increase in the parade, for many of them it was the first time they saw them. This year the celebration has recovered an element that was not done since 1925: before its transformation into dwarves the dancers appear dresses as kings. It has also been the first time that two women dance as dwarves. Viral dance. The ten -year waiting generated considerable expectation in networks, which has set in figures never seen before in the celebration. In Tiktok videos were published with the label #Dwarves2025with thousands of visualizations and comments. On Instagram, only online broadcast had more than 340,000 visualizations. Canarian public television also made intensive use of social networks, which exponentially increased scope and visibility of the event this year. Disturbing dwarves. The mystical component of the dwarves and the magical element of the narrative of the act (with the kings metamorphicing in dancers) sister this holiday with those of other locations where the macabre and the mysterious also prevail. For example, the Vijanera de Silió, in which 75 symbolic and pre -Christian characters represent ancestral forces in conflict; or the pilgrimage of Santa Marta de Ribarteme, in As Neves, where people who have survived a disease parade in coffins carried by relatives, as offering to the Virgin. In the Spanish parties we have abundance of monstrous cryoatures at our parties: the Castrillo Colacho of Murcia in Burgos, for example, is a demonic character of grotesque face and yellow and red suit, and jumps on babies placed in mattresses in full street during the eighth of the Corpus. And the piornal jarmplas is a character disguised with a cornuda mask and multicolored ribbons that becomes white from collective anger, with neighbors throwing tons of turnips, in an experience between the carnivals and the terrifying. Next to this, some chotescos heads that dance polkas are a children’s game. Header | Santa Cruz de la Palma City Council – Carlos Acieg In Xataka | In 1975 a photographer launched himself to document the popular festivals of Spain. The resulting book changed everything

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