The bizarre case of the Drizzle, the yacht that is attributed to Amancio Ortega but in which no one has ever seen him on board

Follow the trail of the yachts and private jets of millionaires It is not simple because as a general rule they appear listed under the ownership of companies that are lost in the business network of their holdings. When that millionaire is someone so jealous of his private life like Amancio Ortegathe challenge is even greater. One of the simplest ways to establish a relationship between a millionaire and his yacht is to “hunt” him on board while enjoying his vacation or, by coincidence in time. For example, if the superyacht launchpad appears suddenly in Mallorcaand coincides with the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is seen in luxury establishments or restaurants on the island, it is one more indication to relate the yacht to its owner. The founder of Zara has always cultivated an extremely discreet profile and that has ended up causing a peculiar situation: there is a superyacht valued at about 300 million dollars that much of the sector specialist attributes to Amancio Ortega, although No one has been able to document that he was even on board.. The key to everything revolves around a name: Drizzle. The first Drizzle was linked to Amancio Ortega The story starts in 2012when the Dutch shipyard Feadship handed over to Amancio Ortega the superyacht Drizzlea 67.27 meter long boat with capacity for 14 people in five cabins and built for a client who, as the shipyard itself explained on the yacht’s page, had already owned another Feadship previously. Indeed, the Dutch manufacturer was in charge of building he Value Bthe yacht that both Amancio Ortega and his family have been using for more than fifteen years as family summer yacht. Furthermore, the millionaire has been seen on many occasions aboard the Drizzle of 2012, so its ownership or the millionaire’s connection with this yacht is beyond any doubt. He Drizzle It became one of the most recognizable boats in the private fleet of the founder of Inditex and for more than a decade it coexisted with the Valoria B, which became the most used by his daughter Marta Ortegacurrent non-executive president of Inditex. The Drizzle by Amancio Ortega The sale of the yacht and rumors about a replacement The situation began to change in 2023, when the millionaire put up for sale his Drizzle for an estimated price of 76 million. The operation coincided with rumors that Amancio Ortega had ordered a new yacht at the Feadship shipyards, a project known internally as Project 1012 and was valued at more than 300 million. Peccadillo for someone with an estimated fortune at about 139.2 billion dollars. The project remained surrounded by secrecy during much of its construction, something common in the superyacht market, where the identity of the owners is usually kept hidden by very restrictive confidentiality contracts. Project 1012 at the Feadship shipyards The problem came when it was officially presented Project 1012 and the shipyard confirmed the final name of the vessel: Drizzle. Suddenly, there were two different yachts with exactly the same name. In this case, it was a gigantic 91.8 meter long superyacht that became the first boat from the Dutch builder to obtain Hybrid Electric Class certification. On one hand there was the Drizzle 67-meter original associated for years with Ortega and, on the other hand, a new Drizzle of 2024 of almost 92 meters, built more than a decade later and handed over to an owner whose identity was never officially announced by Feadship. The coincidence in name caused numerous observers to automatically assume that the new ship It was the replacement of the previous one and which, therefore, also belonged to the founder of Zara. Current Drizzle, 92 meters long and worth 300 million dollars There is a detail that doesn’t quite fit The problem is that the known public evidence does not clearly support this theory and, in reality, Nothing indicates that Amancio Ortega is the owner of that yacht. Unlike what happened with other vessels linked to the Galician businessman, there are no known photographs of Amancio Ortega using the new Drizzle delivered in 2024. Nor have regular stops of the superyacht been documented in tourist destinations that have historically been linked to the family vacation of the founder of Inditexwhich is characterized by having a great attachment to following habitual habits and routines, as demonstrated by its annual presence in the Galician estuaries as soon as summer begins. Meanwhile, the businessman’s most recent public appearances continue to be linked to the Value B. This summer, for example, Ortega has been seen beginning his holidays in the Aldán estuary aboard that vessel. The navigation logs place the new Drizzle operating mainly in the Mediterranean under the Maltese flag, and quite a few movements between different Mediterranean ports which indicates that the yacht is, indeed, being used. Moving a superyacht of these dimensions it is even more expensive to keep it in portso if it were not used, changing ports would be a waste. In addition, the portals specialized in yacht charter (rental) indicate that he Drizzle (the one from 2024) is not on the rental market, so these movements and Port changes have no commercial justification. In fact, while Amancio Ortega was enjoying his first summer days in the Aldán estuary aboard the Valoria B, the supposed new yacht that many attribute to him was preparing to arrive at the port of Monaco in what seems like an approach to take positions in busy Port Hercule ahead of the Monaco Grand Prix. The lack of photographs of the millionaire on board his new yacht, the absence of official confirmations of his ownership and movements that do not coincide with the known habits of the businessman have ended up turning the new Drizzle in one of the most curious mysteries in the world of superyachts, in which Amancio Ortega continues to be the X of the equation to be solved. In Xataka | Amancio Ortega reaches an agreement for a million-dollar debt with a … Read more

three hospitals on board to have exclusive medical care

There are many luxury superyachts …and then there is the Al Salamahwhich more than a yacht the size of an eight-story building, actually serves as a floating royal palace with own entrance on Wikipedia. When in 1998 the Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saudcrown prince and deputy prime minister of Saudi Arabia, made his list of requirements for what would be his personal yacht, the list was so long that it was necessary to build a 139-meter-long boat valued at more than 280 million dollars at the time, and whose annual maintenance cost It is estimated between 15 and 28 million dollars. However, beyond the shine of the marble and luxury equipmentwhich makes the unique Al Salamah It is your medical equipment. Instead of having a well-equipped infirmary to deal with medical emergencies that may arise during voyages, the Saudi prince’s superyacht It had three independent hospitals located on different decks: a hospital for the prince, another for his guests and a third center to care for the crew. The epitome of exclusivity and protocol. Ogres have capes, so do yachts He Al Salamah It was born under the name “MiPos Project” (from Mission Possible) and ended up becoming a naval monster of more than 12,000 square meters with 22 luxurious suites covered with teak wood and ostentatious decoration very much in the Arab taste. Its size and internal distribution not only sought to impress with its ostentation of luxury, but also intended organize life on board according to protocol which requires taking the heir to the Saudi crown on board. One of the interior rooms of Al Salamah In this way, the space on board was distributed in layers, so that the royals and the prince occupied the seventh deck, where he had his office, the secretariat and rooms for his trusted staff. For their part, VIP guests and senior Saudi officials remained on the sixth deck and up to 96 crew members necessary to operate the yacht worked and lived on the lower decks. The distribution has its logic, of course, because if one orders to build his own floating palace for him to act as an extension of his kingdomthe last thing you want is to have to share space with your subjects. This separation of spaces extended to all aspects of daily life. The yacht has five kitchens and, of course, three hospitals. Each of them located near the patients they are going to care for. That is, one on deck seven next to the prince’s suite; another on deck six to care for guests, and a third on the lower levels to care for the crew. Sultan’s private hospital, with an underwater treadmill As you can imagine, the best equipped infirmary is the prince’s, which even has an underwater treadmill specially designed for physiotherapy. More than a yacht, a floating kingdom In addition to having exclusive medical care, the yacht’s guests could use a beauty salon, private cinema, library, meeting room, spa, gym, four auxiliary boats, a rescue boat, heliport and even a dressing room for the artists who performed on board exclusively for the Saudi royal family. Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was not just any heir. For years he was minister of defense and aviation, and in 2005 he was named crown prince, so his relationship with the hierarchical structure, order and the powers that be was not exactly casual. He was also known as “the humanitarian prince”, for financing medical projects in Saudi Arabia through the Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Foundation. Among the projects he carried out, it stands out that the Sultan bin Abdulaziz Humanitarian City, inaugurated in Riyadh in 2002 at a cost of 320 million dollars. It is the largest rehabilitation complex of its type in the world, with ten major operating rooms, eight minor ones, a rehabilitation center with a capacity for 250 beds and another for seniors with 150 beds. What this prince did with health care was worthy of study. The Saudi president passed away in 2011 at 86 years old, but Al Salamah, and its three hospitals on board, is still in the power of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Xataka | The Emir of Dubai bought a 500 million superyacht but discovered that it had a serious problem: there was no mobile coverage inside Image | Lurssen, Wikimedia Commons

the day Naples rejected a Boeing 787 with 200 people on board because it would not enter the airport

It hasn’t been long since dawn and the passengers are stretching one day in June 2025 thousands of meters above sea level. They left Philadelphia last night and are about to land in Naples. They are about to discover that, whether they slept better or worse, they are going to have a bad awakening. And when they approach eight hours into the trip and already see the Italian coast on the screens in their seats, a voice informs them that they will not land in Naples. There is not much to fear, everything is in order. All. Except for a small bureaucratic error that is currently diverting them to Rome. They will probably find out about that later. All they know is that their flight from Philadelphia to Naples has had to be diverted. And this time it was not due to a breakdown, a storm or a health emergency. The reason is simple: the plane is too big to land in Naples. Two meters, specifically. Two meters that no one noticed The Philadelphia-Naples route operated by American Airlines is a very good option if you want to travel from the United States to Italy and do not have the need to go through the large airports of New York or Rome. It also has the advantage that it flies at night, which makes it easier to deal with jet lag. Encouragement that, surely, was appreciated by the 231 passengers who had to travel on a Boeing 787-8, according to C.B.S.. However, that day, the airline could have put someone else on board. And, for operational reasons, American Airlines used a Boeing 787-9 On that trip June 3, 2025, a plane slightly larger and with greater capacity than usual on a route that It has been operating since 2024. The aircraft are almost carbon copies. Of course, a Boeing 787-8 measures 57 meters long but the 787-9 already extends to 63 meters long. A difference that has implications beyond the number of passengers. And, according to air safety regulations, a Boeing 787-8 can land in RFFS Category 8 airports (Rescue and Fire Fighting Services) or higher. But a Boeing 787-9 does not have it so easy, it needs to do it at airports in Category 9 RFFS. The difference is small but it is substantial. A Category 8 RFFS airport can accommodate aircraft up to 61 meters long. Yes, two meters shorter than the Boeing 787-9. And you can imagine what category Naples airport has. Indeed, about 70 miles awaythe American Airlines flight asks for a runway in Naples but from the control tower someone realizes the problem: the aircraft is not the same as always. For logistical reasons, the airline was using this second, larger version of the Boeing 787 and therefore exceeded the maximum permitted limit of 61 meters. No one in the company updated the documentation or notified of the change. Technically the problem is not in the size of the trackthe problem is in the security measures. And Naples is not prepared to deal with a possible incident involving a plane of this size. Airport categories are not only classified based on the size of the runway, but also take into account their ability to accommodate emergency and firefighting services. From the control tower they see it clearly, there is no choice but to warn the pilots: they must land in Roma Fuimicino. The capital’s airport is the closest airfield where flights the size of a Boeing 787-9 can land and is therefore where the passengers were ultimately taken. From there, they were finally transferred by bus to Naples, a trip that takes between two and three hours. A lesser evil for a problem that would have been much more serious if the aircraft had had a problem when landing. Photo | Dominic Bieri and Flightware In Xataka | The inevitable increase in air travel is leading us to a reality: there are no places, no planes, no planet for so many tourists.

Norway debuts its first bus without supervision on board

Mobility is undergoing a brutal transformation and it is not just due to electrification: total automation is just around the corner. We have seen it in tests, but Norway has just taken a step forward: It is the first time in its history and a pioneering case in Europe in which a bus goes from pilot tests with a human driver on board to real autonomous commercial operation. In a nutshell: a fully autonomous bus, without a driver just in case The new Norwegian autonomous bus. A few days ago the General Directorate of Highways of Norway gave the green light to the operators Vy and Kolumbus to eliminate that driver in case the flies from the testing area in Stavenger, present since 2022. This authorization allows operating on public transport routes without supervision since it reaches a high autonomy, Level 4 according to the SAE scale. That is, it does not require human intervention: if it detects an error that it cannot resolve, the vehicle looks for a safe place to stop. The vehicle is the Karsan e-ATAK, equipped with ADASTEC autonomous driving software and managed through the xFlow fleet management system, developed by Applied Autonomy. It can travel up to 50 km/h day or night and in any weather condition. It is capable of autonomously managing stops, loading and unloading of passengers, intersections and traffic lights. Why is it important. Although SAE Level 4 autonomous buses can now drive themselves under certain conditions, until now they still required a safety operator on board for legal or technical reasons. And although we have been hearing about completely autonomous vehicles for years, in practice in real environments they are rare and even more so in bus format. Stavenger breaks the pattern in urban public transportation with a system designed for a single remote operator to supervise several vehicles at the same time, which opens the door to scale autonomous transportation in areas where hiring human drivers is not viable. This advance has its relevance in terms of costs, which can translate into being able to operate routes during low demand times or in peripheral areas where there is no rental. On the other hand, automation eliminates human error, responsible for the vast majority of traffic accidents. This system does not get tired and is also optimized to optimize consumption. Context. It all started with a specific problem: Forus is one of the most important industrial areas in Norway (there are 3,000 companies and 40,000 people working there), but public transportation was scarce and insufficient. So in 2018 Kolumbus deployed there its first autonomous vehicle, an EasyMile EZ10 electric minibus as a last mile solution: transported people from the main stop to the offices using laser sensors to map the environment in 3D and connected to a remote control center. It was small, slow and operated in a closed area, but it planted the seed. Since that pilot project, the evolution has been progressive, slowly but surely: in 2022 a full-size bus was already deployed in open traffic and from 2023 opera on a more demanding line that involves lane changes when there is traffic, higher speeds or tunnels. Leaving the Nordic countrythere are tests in Germany or Finland, in American cities such as Detroit and Jacksonville and if we go to Asia, since June 2024 China is already testing the first tests of autonomous driving on public roads and Singapore also has a pilot program. How have they done it. The project is a consortium: Karsan manufactures the bus, ADASTEC provides the autonomous driving software, Applied Autonomy supplies the xFlow control center for remote monitoring and assistance, Vy Buss operates the service, and Kolumbus is the public transport authority. The Rogaland County Council and the Municipality of Stavanger are the owners of the road and approved the route, while the Highway Directorate authorized driving in autonomous mode. The project has been gaining trust step by step. The video of 2018 It already shows the basics of operation: LiDAR sensors to see the environment, high-precision 3D maps to know the exact position, and a remote control center that supervises the operation. The consortium applied this same logic but on a real urban scale. On the other hand, Stavanger also has exclusive bus lanes, which considerably simplifies the operation. Yes, but. The road from Forus to the center of Stavanger has taken eight years. Scaling this to the rest of the world will also be slow. A paper from 2025 published in Future Transportation identifies cybersecurity, sensor technology and shared lane management among the critical barriers. On a global scale, the industry must overcome everything from legislation to high costs to cybersecurity risks and public trust before eventual deployment. On the other hand, the Norwegian project itself, although it has taken a giant step, recognize which is a trickle: it is in a controlled environment, not a generalized deployment. In Xataka | I have boarded the first autonomous bus that operates in Barcelona. I haven’t noticed any difference with a normal one In Xataka | Madrid has big plans for autonomous buses within the city. And it has started in Mercamadrid Cover | kolumbus and Majestic Lukas

The board game that was removed for making children steal food rations from Titanic survivors

There have always been games with a morbid theme, but they are certainly not a thing of today. Already in 1975, board game creators were racking their brains to come up with the darkest and most impactful idea for the whole family. And what better way to spend an afternoon of harmless fun in the company of loved ones that one of the greatest tragedies in the history of modern locomotion. It sinks. When in 1975 Ideal Toy Corporation put on the shelves ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’the slogan printed on the box left no room for imagination (or interpretation): “Play while the ship sinks… and then face the dangers of the open sea.” From 8 years and older, be careful. The controversy, of course, was immediate, the game was withdrawn from the market, and although it was reissued under different names, today it is a sought-after piece for collectors of classic board games. How to play. The game has two phases. First, players are ship’s officers who must navigate the cabins of the Titanic rescuing passengers and stocking up on food and water rations as the ship sinks. In the second phase, with the liner already under water, survivors in boats race to reach the rescue ship. The first to arrive with two passengers, two rations of food and two of water wins. What does it look like? The board is cleverly articulated into two pieces joined by clips. Every time someone rolls a 1 or 6 with the dice, the board “sinks” into the bar, and more and more squares of the ship’s hull disappear under the water. If an empty lifeboat touches the water, it is removed, and if the player cannot find a place in any boat, he loses. In 1975, the idea was very ingenious: a board that is transformed. Ideal itself had already explored these possibilities with a previous success, ‘Mouse Trap‘, in 1963. Storms and cannibals. But the real morbidity (and, let’s face it, the distancing from historical facts) came with the modifying cards that threw the players against “violent storms, cannibals, the cruel sea and each other,” as the instructions. Actually, the game has little to do with what happened on the Titanic, and in that sense it is quite modest: there are no mention of real passengers and the tropical islands with cannibals have nothing to do with the frigid North Atlantic where the real ship sank. The controversy. Ideal received criticism for turning tragedy into entertainment. The game was withdrawn from the market and re-released under the name ‘Abandon Ship’, with all references to the Titanic eliminated, something not difficult because as we have said, the game had few authentic elements, except perhaps the unmistakable silhouette of the cruise ship on the box. Because of this, the original version of ‘The Sinking of the Titanic’ has been revalued and It is easy for it to reach approximately 150 euros on websites like eBay. Too soon. The Titanic sank in April 1912 and Ideal recovered from the tragedy 63 years later. What is significant is that the remains of the ship, located by oceanographer Robert Ballard in 1985, had not yet been found. The 1,500 bodies that lay four kilometers deep certified, with bodies included, the magnitude of the tragedy. But ten years before, after the sinking of the Titanic, there were only ghosts missing in the sea, a myth about the unfathomable dangers of the ocean. In 1975 you could still make a board game about it. In Xataka | AI is so good at chess that it is changing something: the way humans play it

We Spaniards love low-cost telephone operators. So PcComponentes has gotten on board

In the middle of the operators’ war to offer low cost ratesthe Murcian PcComponentes has decided to enter the battlefield. The company debuts with fiber and mobile rates thanks to Likes Telecom, a Spanish company focused on the creation of telecommunications brands and with the support of XFERA MÓVILES (MásOrange). A new participant. From the PcComponentes website You can now contract fiber and mobile. At the moment, there are three fiber and mobile packages, and three possibilities to contract a mobile line. To stand out from its rivals, PcComponentes ensures that customer service support will be especially taken care of. The rates. At its launch, these are the three rates offered by PcComponentes. Core rate oNers rate hyperuser rate fiber 300MB 600MB 1GB mobile 30 GB cumulative + another 30 GB gift line 100 GB cumulative Unlimited additional Basic TV +3€/month Additional mobile lines from €5/month Basic TV +3€/month Additional mobile lines from €5/month Premium TV +5€/month Additional mobile lines from €5/month permanence No 6 month stay 6 month stay In the case of mobile line only rates, we have these three options. 30 GB Mobile Line for 6.90 euros per month. Mobile Line 100 GB for 13.90 euros per month. Unlimited Mobile Line for 19.90 euros per month. All of them have MásOrange 5G coverage, unlimited national calls, Roaming Zone 1 in the EU, the possibility of eSIM and cumulative gigs without permanence. The conditions. PcComponentes only sets a six-month permanence for two of its rates, which is conditional on the quality of the service. In the event that the client suffers more than two connection incidents for which the operator is responsible, it will be cancelled. Likewise, in rates like Hyperuser, there is a commitment to quality. If there is an incident caused by the operator that prevents the client from connecting to the internet, nothing will be paid during the current month. Go deeper. The company adds that, as customers of its mobile and fiber service, we will access discounts on the PcComponentes website. At the moment, there is no concrete data on how they are going to raise them or what exactly they consist of. The challenge. Digi is staying with practically all the ports in Spain, stealing customers from Telefonica, MásOrange and Vodafone. A fight for low prices that practically no rival is able to match, including PcComponentes. Despite this, it remains to be seen how this small proposal on PcComponentes’ “own MVNO” coexists with Digi, Lowi, Simyo or Finetwork. In Xataka Mobile | The uncomfortable truth about fiber: the speed that the operator promises us can never be maintained

Campo de Montiel has rare earths to cover 33% of European demand, according to a mining company. The Board has said “no, thank you”

Oil may be the resource that makes most of the headlines today, but the rare earthare “the cover” of the technology industry: they are decisive practically in any sector and also set the geopolitical agenda at a time of tariffs and vetoes. And if there is a country that cuts cod into rare earths (spoiler: They are neither earth nor are they rarebut 17 metals) that is China: there is no one to cough or in reserves neither in production. There was a time when The United States dominated this sectorbut that time passed away. And Europe? Well, at the moment rare earths are not produced, but we are working on it: has stepped on the accelerator at the Per Geijer superminein Kiruna (Sweden), where you could get 18% of what you need. Meanwhile, in a place in La Mancha whose name I don’t want to remember, there is who points that could obtain 2,100 tons per year of lanthanides, enough to cover 33% of European needs. There is only one little problem: the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha has said that they are not interested. And they are not alone. Campo de Montiel is a (potential) mine. Back in 2013 the Spanish company Quantum Mining put under his magnifying glass the region of Campo de Montiel, in Ciudad Real. Next to Torrenueva is that promising site that is the object of your desires: Matamulas. According to their analysis, it is full of monazite (along with bastnasite, the main rare earth ore) gray. But really loaded: the company assures that in Campo de Montiel more than 2,100 tons could be produced per year. Is that a lot or a little? According to the company, it is approximately a third of European consumption needs, although Eurostat figure in 12,900 annual tons imported by 2024, which would leave the percentage around 16% (the company does not publicly detail with what reference it calculates that third). The firm lands it with applications such as the construction of 350,000 electric cars or 10,000 wind turbines. Quantum Mining Production Estimates “We’re not interested.” A month ago Quantum Minería tried again and you already have an answer of the autonomous government: Mercedes Gómez, the Minister of Sustainable Development, explains that they are not interested in holding a competition so that tastings can be carried out at the Matamulas site. Not again: in 2013 the Board granted the mining company (and two other companies) exploitation permits, which was rejected in 2017. In 2024 came back to request permits, this time framed within the Neodimio project, again encountering a no. The EU also left them outside of their strategic projects. What Quantum wants to do. The mining plan It involves temporarily removing a half-meter layer of vegetation (mainly cereal) so that, once the process is finished, it can be reused in the restoration. Afterwards, backhoes extract two meters deep to reach the gray monazite. That material is taken to a concentration plant to be screened using physical processes, without chemical additives, so that the soil can be returned to its site later. Then the land is leveled and the crop is replaced. These works are carried out hectare by hectare, so that it does not interrupt the agricultural processes in the surroundings. According to the company, when the land is restored it can be cultivated “even in better conditions than the original ones.” Why not. Given the insistent interest of Quantum, the citizen platform ‘Yes to the Living Land‘ and other citizen activism movements once again opposed, in addition to one of the wineries in the region. A decade ago Ecologists in Action detailed that the environmental impact of this operation on the 27,500 hectares included in the project would be severe. One of the bottlenecks is water: for this operation they estimate that between 310,000 and 500,000 cubic meters of water would be needed annually during the estimated ten years of exploitation (washing and processing are two processes that consume a lot of water). In that area the water pressure is high, with droughts, reservoirs in states of emergency, overexploited aquifers and intense grassroots agricultural activity as icing on the cake. In addition, in the region there are two Special Protection Areas for Birds and it is the habitat of the lynx. In Xataka | The world’s rare earth reserves, laid out in this graph showing the brutal dominance of a single country In Xataka | Europe seeks its sovereignty in rare earths and knows how to achieve it the fast way: with a supermine in Sweden Cover | ダモリ and Karen Paredes Carabantes

France was moving its aircraft carrier without revealing its location. Until a runner on board uploaded an activity to Strava

Putting on some sneakers, stretching your legs and running for miles and miles outdoors is not (a priori) a reprehensible habit. Quite the opposite. Neither is recording race data with a smartwatch and then publish them on Stravaan app that is used to share routes, times and performance data. All this, we insist, is “a priori” because things change if the person running is a Navy officer and his publication on Strava ends up revealing the near real-time location of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. That is what has happened in France. Trotting on the high seas. A few days ago the newspaper reporters Le Monde they found each other with something curious: a publication on Strava that showed someone running in circles in the middle of the Mediterranean, dozens of kilometers from the coasts of Turkey and Cyprus and hundreds from the Egyptian coast. The question was obvious… What the hell was a runner doing trotting like a top in the middle of the sea? A look at Copernicus. Over the last few years Le Monde has published various items in which he warns about how Strava can be used to reveal the position of ships and bodyguards, so the reporters had their suspicions about that publication in the Mediterranean. They didn’t last long. By using the Copernicus online viewer they checked that very close to the location registered by Strava the silhouette of one of the most important ships in France, the powerful aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, could be seen. Click on the image to go to the tweet. What had happened? That one of the officers mobilized alongside the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was better served by his runner than by the caution expected of a member of the French Navy. As reveals Le Mondethe Strava publication belongs to a young officer who on the morning of March 13, around 10:35 a.m., decided to jog around the deck of his ship. While he covered 7.23 kilometers in 35 minutes, the watch on his wrist recorded all the training data and then shared it on Strava. Once there, since their profile is public, anyone could see them. From his friends and gym colleagues to journalists in Paris. The problem is that with that small gesture he revealed the location of the Charles de Gaulle and its naval escort, which was then making its way towards the northwest of Cyprus. Something more than an oversight. We cannot know if the indiscreet runner was aboard the Charles de Gaulle or one of the ships that escorted him, but one thing is clear: his Strava account gives clues to more than just his sporting achievements. On February 14, the same officer posted another graph with data from a race off the Cotentin peninsula, also in the middle of the sea. Days later he ran in Copenhagen (probably after landing) and on March 13 he can already be located in the Mediterranean, just 100 km from the Turkish coast. A worrying snitch. It is not that the deployment of the Charles de Gaulle and the rest of the French ships was a secret. On March 3, Emmanuel Macron himself ordered publicly that they moved from the Baltic to the Mediterranean after the attack by Israel and the US on Iran and it is known that days later The aircraft carrier crossed Gibraltar escorted by the frigate Christopher Columbus. The problem is that the young officer’s publication on Strava reveals the movements of the convoy in detail and almost in real time, also revealing a worrying security breach in the Navy. Especially if you take into account that in recent weeks Iran has attacked French forces in the Middle East, leaving several wounded and one dead. “The appropriate measures”. The incident may seem more or less serious, but one thing is incontestable: Strava data allowed reporters from Le Monde accurately identify the location of the aircraft carrier and its accompanying frigate. The question that remains is… What if, instead of a newspaper, this same exercise had been done by other people with other interests? The General Staff of the Armed Forces has recognized that Strava’s publication “does not comply with current regulations” or the precautions that its staff must take at the digital level. Hence, it is proposed to adopt “appropriate measures.” But is it so worrying? Once again the problem is not only the race recorded on March 13 in the middle of the Mediterranean, but its context. This is not the first time Le Monde warns that Strava can become a breach for national security, depending on who, when and where uses it. The French newspaper has even coined the term “StravaLeaks”. Maybe it sounds excessive, but in 2025 He already warned that there were publications by French sailors that revealed the activity of nuclear submarines and months before, in November 2024, he revealed that Strava allowed thousands of Israeli soldiers to be identified. They are not isolated cases. The most dangerous oversights They were probably committed by the bodyguards of the presidents of France, the United States and Russia. By sharing their training data publicly, they left a trail that helped to partially anticipate the movements of the leaders they protected. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | Things have to be bad for the US to have made an unprecedented decision: extending the life of its dinosaur aircraft carrier

Programming is the new board of AI. OpenAI and Anthropic have made it clear with GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6

When ChatGPT broke out in November 2022, OpenAI seemed unrivaled. And, to a large extent, that was the case. That chatbot, despite its errors and limitations, inaugurated a category of its own. However, in the technology sector advantages are rarely permanent and, in 2026, the position of the company led by Sam Altman It’s a far cry from what it had then. Google has managed to attract the general public with Nano Banana Prowhile Gemini steadily gaining ground as an artificial intelligence chatbot. At the same time, ChatGPT’s market share has fallen significantly in some markets. Anthropic, for its part, has established itself as a reference in software engineering and has become one of the preferred tools among programmers. In this race to set the pace of AI, this Thursday we witnessed a curious movement: the almost simultaneous arrival of two models focused on programming, GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6. The coincidence does not seem coincidental and reflects the extent to which the major players in the sector compete to define the next step, in a scenario where the main beneficiaries are, once again, the users. With these new models already on the table, the question becomes what they really contribute. There are plenty of promises and they are also beginning to appear benchmarks comparable that help to place them. So, therefore, it is time to look in a little more detail at what OpenAI and Anthropic propose for those who use AI as a development tool. GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 4.6 enter the scene: what each promises to developers GPT-5.3-Codex is presented as a model focused on scheduling agents which seeks to expand the scope of what a developer can delegate to AI. OpenAI claims that it combines improvements in code performance, reasoning and professional knowledge over previous generations and is 25% faster. With this balance, the system is oriented to prolonged tasks that involve research, use of tools and complex execution, while also maintaining the possibility of intervening and guiding the process in real time without losing the work thread. One of the most striking elements that OpenAI highlights in this generation is the role that Codex itself would have had in its development. The team used early versions of the model to debug training, manage deployment, and analyze test and evaluation results, an approach that accelerated research and engineering cycles. Beyond that internal process, GPT-5.3-Codex also shows progress in practical tasks such as the autonomous creation of web applications and games. The company has published two examples that we can try right now by clicking on the links: a racing game with eight maps and a diving game to explore reefs. Anthropic’s turn comes with Claude Opus 4.6, an update that the company presents as a direct improvement in planning, autonomy and reliability within large code bases. The model, they claim, can sustain agentic tasks for longer, reviewing and debugging its own work more accurately. The idea is that we can use these capabilities in tasks such as financial analysis, documentary research or creating presentations. Added to this is a context window of up to one million tokens in beta phase, a leap that seeks to reduce the loss of information in long processes and reinforce the usefulness of the system. Beyond the core of the model, Anthropic accompanies Opus 4.6 with a series of changes aimed at prolonging its usefulness in real workflows. Among them there are mechanisms such as the so-called “adaptive thinking”, which allows the system automatically adjust the depth of your reasoning depending on the context. Configurable effort levels and context compression techniques designed to sustain long conversations and tasks without exhausting the available limits also appear on the scene. Added to this are teams of agents that can be coordinated in parallel within Claude Code and deeper Excel or PowerPoint integration. While OpenAI’s product, GPT-5.3-Codex, is not yet available in the API, Anthropic’s is. Maintains the base price of $5 per million entry tokens and $25 per million exit tokenswith nuances such as a premium cost when the prompts exceed 200,000 tokens. Measure who wins with numbers? When trying to put GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 face to face, the main obstacle is not the lack of figures, but rather their difficult correspondence. Each company selects evaluations that best reflect its progress and, although many belong to similar categories, they differ in methodology, versions or metrics, which prevents a direct reading. In this type of models, this fragmentation of results is part of the state of the technology itself, but also requires cautious interpretation that separates technical demonstrations from truly equivalent comparisons. Only from this filter is it possible to identify the few points where both systems can be measured under comparable conditions and draw useful conclusions for developers. If we restrict the analysis to truly comparable metrics, the common ground between GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6 is limited to two specific evaluations identified through our own research: Terminal-Bench 2.0 and OS World in its verified version. The results show a distribution of strengths rather than a clear supremacy. GPT-5.3-Codex marks a 77.3% in Terminal-Bench 2.0 compared to 65.4% for Opus 4.6, which points to greater efficiency in terminal-centric workflows. On the contrary, Opus 4.6 reaches a 72.7% on OSWorldsurpassing the 64.7% of GPT-5.3-Codex in general interaction tasks with the system, a contrast that reinforces the idea of ​​specialization according to the environment of use. So we could say that the capabilities described by each manufacturer point to tools that are no longer limited to generating code, but rather seek to participate in prolonged processes of analysis, execution and review within real professional environments. This transition introduces new selection criteria that go beyond punctual performance. In Xataka | OpenAI has a problem: Anthropic is succeeding right where the most money is at stake

Half of Spain has gotten hooked this Christmas on a board game that is not a board game: ‘El Impostor’

The Impostor game has dominated Spanish family gatherings during the 2025 holidays, going massively viral on social networks and causing the downloads of mobile applications to multiply that adapt the rules of an entertainment that, in reality, can be played without any type of add-on. We’ve dug into its origins and impact to find out why it’s making a splash this Christmas. The phenomenon. While families gathered over nougat, a dynamic of social deduction as simple as it was addictive crept into the dinners, turning every word into suspicion and every look into infallible proof. This is not a new game, but its massive viralization through TikTok During December, downloads of specialized applications such as “Imposter – Party Game” in the App Store or “Imposter: Word Game” on Google Play. It has not been an exclusively Spanish phenomenon, as articles such as this one from a Mexican digital. But the practical reason for its success is very clear: very simple and quick to explain rules, guaranteed light psychological tension and no preparations, only a handful of people are needed. How to play. The game works through an information asymmetry that starts with all participants knowing a secret word (“meatballs”, “Cuenca” or “car)” except one player. Your survival depends on pretending you know the word. Each person must offer a clue related to the word without saying it directly, balancing being specific enough not to seem suspicious and vague enough not to give away the answer to the imposter. After the clue round, the players debate and vote who is the imposter. If he manages to go unnoticed, victory is his. It can be played with paper and a human moderator, but apps facilitate randomness and word choice, sometimes online, sometimes with a single device passed from hand to hand that secretly assigns roles, which speeds up the pace of the game. Origins of the game. These date back to 1986, to the classroom of a psychology student at Moscow State University named Dimitry Davidoff. It began as a pedagogical exercise to teach “visual psychodiagnoses” (the interpretation of body language and non-verbal signals) and was named “Mafia.” Popular Mechanics He said that Davidoff’s objective was to create “a conflict between an informed minority and an uninformed majority”, that is, between gangsters and innocent citizens. The werewolves arrive. The thematic leap that would define the game came a decade later, in 1997, when designer Andrew Plotkin invented a reconversion: the gangsters were transformed into werewolves, the citizens into medieval villagers, and the game cycle adopted the day/night structure that suited the lycanthropic transformations under the full moon. This version introduced the role of the Seer (a villager with the ability to investigate other people’s identities every night), adding an additional strategic layer. Over time, these games (which fall into the category of “social deduction titles”) have been examined under multiple academic lenses, from the playful to the psychological. For example, in 2024 a paper It explored optimal strategies from a game theory perspective and built mathematical models to calculate what strategies each faction should follow to win. Institutions such as MIT developed their own regulatory variants and experts such as those on the web No Rolls Barred They theorized that these games work because they operate in “an information asymmetry where knowing something that others don’t know becomes a currency of social exchange.” The ‘Among Us’ revolution. It was this seemingly modest video game that would catapult the genre into the global mainstream. Developed by the small studio InnerSloth, it was launched in June 2018 for mobile and PC and for almost two years it languished in obscurity, averaging between 30 and 50 players connected simultaneously, a number so discreet that the studio considered abandoning the project. But when Twitch streamer Sodapoppin discovered the game in July 2020 and hosted a four-plus hour session with other content creators, he set off a chain reaction which would lead ‘Among Us’ to reach 3.8 million concurrent players in September, a growth of 1600% in just eight months. It was then spoken of the opportuneness of timing pandemic, with the world in confinement: ‘Among Us’ offered a form of remote socialization that replicated the experience of board games but without the need for physical proximity. In addition, the game was very accessible economically and technically: free on mobile devices and only five dollars on PC, with very simple mechanics thanks to which anyone with a phone could participate. Third, finally, he was ideal for the streaming: Watching games of ‘Among Us’ was almost as entertaining as playing them. Additionally, the game refined the original mechanics: there were tasks that players had to complete while investigating, eliminating the role of passive eliminated players. The viralization. TikTok has established itself as the true catalyst for the Impostor’s Christmas explosion. Unlike ‘Among Us’, the Impostor found its perfect ecosystem in the short vertical videos of TikTok, with grandmothers accusing grandchildren, groups of friends yelling at each other and entire families breaking up with suspicious laughter. The platform functioned as a visual instruction manual and eliminated the barrier to entry that ‘Mafia’ and ‘Werewolf’ had historically had, as well as mechanically inspired board gameslike ‘Little Secret’ or ‘The Liar’. The secret of the game’s success is that it has transcended generations: a 70-year-old can lie as convincingly as a 15-year-old. Grandparents have learned from their grandchildren how the game worked, parents have discovered that their children lied terrifyingly well, leading to a curious reversal of the usual roles in the family. Quite a game. Header | Alvaro Garcia

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