internet

In the face of the fires that devastate Madrid, Ávila and Toledo, Starlink supports free with its satellite internet service

by

The fires that They devastate the Community of Madrid, Ávila and Toledo They have become hell for thousands of families. The list of evacuees and confined almost reaches 100,000 peoplebut it has not been the only aggravating factor, since many of them have also lost the possibility of communicating with other people. Given this blackout, starlink communicated to users who will be able to connect directly with the mobile phones of those affected through their satellites, without the need for antennas or additional applications. What has happened? The fire has destroyed antennas and fiber cables, in addition to generating interference that has further complicated communications in the area. While Movistar, Orange and Vodafone worked on the ground to restore their networks, from BandaAncha confirmed that many users were beginning to witness a change in their networks. And several people claimed to see the “Orange Space X” network on the interface of their mobile phones. Satellite connectivity. Starlink itself confirmed through its official account on X, ensuring that “Starlink Mobile is providing free connectivity to MasOrange and Movistar customers in the regions affected by the forest fires near Madrid.” The same goes for Movistar, Orange and Vodafoneteleoperated companies that have confirmed the activation of this emergency satellite service in their networks. The company explains that families, communities and companies with compatible LTE phones can continue to communicate by SMS even if terrestrial networks do not work, since mobile phones automatically connect to this satellite network. Of course, they warn that the service “will work better with a clear view of the sky”, since it requires a direct connection with satellites in low orbit. Months in testing. According to they count From Broadband, Orange had been testing for months in Valladolid to offer mobile satellite coverage directly to conventional terminals, thanks to a special permit from the Ministry to use its terrestrial frequencies from space. Everything indicates that this technology being tested has been advanced and urgently activated through an agreement between the Ministry, Orange, Movistar and Starlink, also opening the signal to other operators in roaming mode to provide coverage in the fire area. Without European alternatives would you be. The service is not suitable for browsing the internet or making calls. Its capacity is limited to sending SMS and very low data usage. But in an emergency situation, that connection thread can make the difference, allowing you to notify that you are safe, coordinate an evacuation or for rescue teams to locate someone, just when traditional telephone towers have been disabled by the fire. In the absence of European alternativesStarlink is positioned as one of the most effective solutions to obtain satellite connection in domestic environments. Today there are several European agencies that are sending satellites to low Earth orbit, although most projects are not aimed at offering Internet connection on a commercial level, but rather are specialized constellations for companies, governments, teleoperators, defense or aviation. Some well-known proper names are OneWeb, the Luxembourg SES either Hispasatthe latter being a relevant actor in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. All of them are beginning to move, but at a pace and efficiency that is still much lower than SpaceX. This means that in emergency situations, such as the one thousands of families in Spain are experiencing with the fires, communication depends on a completely private company. Hence, the fact that there is a European alternative, detached from the control of a private company of the stature of SpaceX, is important and makes sense as part of the technological sovereignty strategy of the continent. And now what. Starlink had already resorted to this same free connectivity formula in other disasters, such as the earthquake that shook Venezuela just a few weeks ago. In Spain, for now, the service remains as an emergency measure and not as a commercial launch. Orange had already planned to market this technology in the future, but its actual deployment as a public network has arrived earlier than expected, driven by the magnitude of the fire. It will be necessary to see if, once the flames are controlled, the service is withdrawn or if this crisis accelerates its definitive release to the market. Cover image | The reason and Starlink In Xataka | The Ministry of Labor reminds that no one has to “choose between their security and their job”: four days of paid leave

An AI model did not have access to the internet. So he thought it was better to have it and decided to hack something along the way

by

Last week, OpenAI I was evaluating the offensive capabilities of two of its most advanced models. On the one hand, GPT-5.6 Sol, publicly available. On the other, a second model not yet presented and which in fact is described as superior to the first. It was about measuring their capabilities in the field of cybersecurity, and although the testing environment was theoretically airtight and isolated, both models managed to connect to the internet and hack a very popular AI models and testing platform, Hugging Face. what has happened. Both models were being evaluated using ExploitGyma cybersecurity benchmark developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The goal is to try to find real vulnerabilities in real software. Instead of searching for them on their own, the models detected that the (unspecified) packet logging cache proxy, the only component with limited external access, had a flaw that they could exploit. A study by the AI ​​Security Institute reveals the advances of the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models in cybersecurity. Hello, internet connection. The models did not have internet access, but they exploited that vulnerability to achieve it. Once this was done, they assumed that Hugging Face, the reference platform for models and data sets (datasets) of AI, probably had data on ExploitGym that would allow them to overcome the requested challenge. Hack Hugging Face. So they searched, found and exploited several attack vectors at once, including both stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities. With all this, they managed to access Hugging Face’s production database (that is, the one used publicly on their website), and from there they achieved the solutions to the benchmark. GLM-5.2 to the rescue. The OpenAI security team detected anomalous activity, but Hugging Face I had already detected it a few days ago without knowing what was happening. The curious thing is that to respond to that attack they first tried to use proprietary US AI models to contain them. Those models were blocked by automatic security filters, and Hugging Face turned to the GLM-5.2, the surprising open model from Z.ai that was launched a few weeks ago. The chat with all the details. Adrien Carreira, Infrastructure Manager at Hugging Face, I summed it up in X: “We fight with open models, in the open. AI security will not be solved by a single company acting in secret. Open source puts these tools in the hands of all defenders.” This expert also shared the conversations that they maintained with the AI ​​model to address the problem. Brute force works again. At OpenAI indicated that this was an unprecedented (involuntary) milestone, although some cybersecurity experts reduced the relevance of what happened. “This is not an AI problem. It is negligence on a forty-year-old standard,” explained David Ottenheimer. However, as with Mythos, what this event demonstrates is that AI can apply brute force and analyze possible vulnerabilities (and combine them) in a way that human researchers could not due to lack of time. A fundamental problem. OpenAI acknowledges that the deployment filters that would have blocked the model’s behavior were intentionally disabled because the assessment was intended to measure vulnerabilities. Dierdre Mulligan, professor at Berkeley, indicated that “it seems to me that OpenAI did not properly create the sandbox for the testing environment.” It was not clear to her that passing a test would outweigh the potential damage that an AI model could cause if it “escaped” and gained access to the internet. The end matters, not the means. The models did not have the objective of hacking Hugging Face: that was only a means to achieve their ultimate goal, which was to beat the ExploitGym benchmark. Everything they did along the way—finding the vulnerability that gave them access to the internet, hacking Hugging Face’s database—was simply part of their plan to pass the proposed test. What have each other learned?. Following the incident, OpenAI indicated that they are implementing stricter controls in the configuration of their infrastructure, in addition to collaborating with the developers of the affected component and with Hugging Face to improve their defenses. They have also promised improve “alignment” of their models and the monitoring tasks during this type of tests. In Xataka | Daniel Púa, head of security at Magnific: “Video calls are going to arrive with a video of a family member and things are going to get complicated”

This is how Google’s AI is absorbing the rest of the internet

by

ChatGPT had been up and running for less than a month and Google was already talking about a “code red”. The technology that many assumed would end Google’s core business—replacing the search engine with any chatbot—is doing just the opposite. Since Google introduced Gemini into its search engine with AI Mode, it has replaced link lists with conversational responses. AND it’s working for thembecause people spend more time than ever within Google itself. The problem is for everyone else. We love AI Mode. According to three studies compiled by The New York Timesusers spend between one and nine minutes more in AI Mode than in a traditional search. They also write queries up to three times longer than the questions in which we used usual keywords, according to data that Google itself presented at its May event. From snippets to this. A Growth Memo October Studya company specialized in search and marketing, detected that in 75% of sessions users do not even leave AI Mode: they are very comfortable there and forget about the rest of the website. It’s something the company has been doing for years.and they certainly tried before AI arrived to conquer almost everything: snippets and other elements designed by Google they have always had the goal to be sufficient for we wouldn’t have to click in any link. Google Zero. Nilay Patel, director of The Verge, has long been warning of a phenomenon he calls “Google Zero”, when traffic from Google would fall to practically zero for the media. According to him “for publishers, Google Zero has already arrived.” With AI Mode people could see that that initial slow trickle became a real turning point. On Google they say it’s not that big a deal. Google Vice President Liz Reid assured on an official Google blog last year that the company continues to send a “relatively stable” number of clicks to the media, and that reports of traffic drops used “flawed methodologies.” The clear example: Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation has registered an 8% decrease in human visitors in the last year. What has grown, of course, are bots that crawl your content to train AI models. Its director of product and technology, Selena Deckelmann, highlighted that “my job is to make sure that people don’t forget about us because the Google interface has changed.” Human trafficking plummets in media. According to Cloudflaremore than half of all current web traffic is no longer human, and between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites in sectors such as finance, media or retail e-commerce sites has fallen by 40%. Before, if we wanted to know the performance of a footballer in the World Cup, we would ask on Google and look through links. Today it is enough to ask the AI ​​mode to obtain that information and then continue talking with the Google chatbot in that mode if we need it. background voltage. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Webalready warned in 2024 that AI had accelerated a trend that had been underway for years: that of locking users in closed ecosystems designed to maximize profit, instead of directing us to an open and borderless web like the one he imagined in 1989. Bad future for media companies. In May Vox Media, owner of media outlets such as The Verge, began selling some of its websites. Jim Bankoff, its CEO, explained that “decimating search traffic” as Google was doing had influenced his decision to look for other ways to reach audiences. From there went on to sell him half of Vox Media to James Murdoch. In Xataka | I asked the AI ​​any nonsense and now I’m writing a news story about it

The new Chinese model Kimi K3 is already number one in Frontend Code Arena. And it’s unleashing madness on the Internet

by

It seems like yesterday when DeepSeek R1 called into question an idea that many took for granted: that the race for advanced artificial intelligence It still had a clear owner in Silicon Valley. The emergence of the Chinese model helped trigger a massive sale of technology and led NVIDIA to suffer a loss daily capitalization unprecedented until then. As the months passed, that image lost intensity, but the message remained: the Chinese technological ecosystem was not willing to limit itself to keeping pace with the United States. The following notice now has a different name: Kimi K3. Moonshot AI has just presented a model with 2.8 trillion total parameters that, as soon as it arrived, was placed at the top of Frontend Code Arenaahead of some of the most powerful proposals from Anthropic and OpenAI. But the story is not limited to a classification: developers and fans are already using it to create interfaces, games and recreations that anyone can see and, in some cases, try. That’s where this article really begins. It is worth dwelling on the details of that classification. At the time of writing, Kimi K3 reaches 1,679 points in Frontend Code Arena, ahead of Claude Fable 5with 1,631, and GPT-5.6 Sol xHigh, with 1,618. The improvement compared to the previous generation is also striking: Kimi K2.6 was in 18th placewhile his successor leads six of the seven domains evaluated. For now, Arena maintains the label of preliminary result, so it is convenient to read this position as a very significant photograph, but still susceptible to change. We are not facing a universal programming exam, but rather a very specific test. Frontend Code Arena compares web applications created by different models and lets users evaluate which one solves the task better, which one works more reliably, and which one presents a better experience. That approach is especially useful for measuring visible and practical capabilities, but it also has obvious limits. That Kimi K3 leads here tells us a lot about its frontend performance, although it doesn’t automatically allow us to extend that advantage to complex repositories, backend, mathematics, or general reasoning. Outside of this specific terrain, photography remains favorable, although more balanced. Vals AI places Kimi K3 second among 38 models, with 74.70%just behind Claude Fable 5, which reaches 75.14%, and above GPT-5.6 Sol, with 73.12%. Artificial Analysis also places it among the most advanced systems in its classification, with 57 points and third place overall. Where Kimi K3 seems to feel most comfortable is in tasks that combine programming, visual context and several chained steps. Arena supports its ability to build web interfaces, while Vals AI also records high performance in agent programming tests. Moonshot adds that the model can traverse large repositories, use terminal tools, and review screenshots of its own work to correct the output on the fly. That last capability, which the company calls “vision in the loop,” helps explain why it excels at transforming visual references into interactive products. There are also several cautions before interpreting Kimi K3 as a definitive victory. Moonshot presents it as an open weight model, but those files have not been published yet and the company promises to release them no later than July 27. Nor should we confuse this openness with complete open source, because details about the license and the rest of the system are still missing. Its 2.8 billion total parameters belong to a sparse architecture that activates 16 of its 896 experts. The company itself recommends configurations with 64 accelerators or more, very far from what a conventional computer can offer. The community reaction helps understand why Kimi K3 is attracting so much attention. One of the most striking examples is a recreation of macOS 27 which works within the browser and which its creator attributes to a swarm of model agents working for about three hours. They add to it Ballista, an interactive panel with a 3D balloon and several comparisons against Claude and GPT. They are not independent benchmarks, but demos shared by their own creators, but they allow you to see what kind of results the model is producing outside the tables. To create something like the macOS simulation or the ballista game, we don’t need to model every element by hand from scratch. We can describe the resultattach a reference and commission Kimi to build a functional application, for example with HTML, JavaScript and various graphics libraries. The project is then tested, modified, and finally published or recorded for sharing. Kimi K3 can be used from Kimi.comKimi Work, Kimi Code or tools connected to its API, although it is not confirmed which specific environment was used in several of the examples we have seen. It is still early to turn this launch into a definitive change of leadership. Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sun They are still ahead in several evaluations, the Kimi K3’s weights are not yet available and many of its capabilities will have to be verified with more time. Even so, what we have seen is already difficult to ignore: a Chinese company can compete for leading positions, offer competitive results and get the community to transform that capacity into real applications almost immediately. The race continues, but the margin between its main protagonists seems increasingly narrower. Images | Kimi | Screenshot In Xataka | China has a plan to win the AI ​​war against the US. And DeepSeek is its champion

They work surprisingly well… until the Internet fails

by

A few weeks ago I traveled to China to attend the Beijing Auto Show. If the three or four trips I have made to China have taught me anything, it is that there nobody, practically nobody, speaks English. Communicating is therefore a combination of hand signs, signals and three or four loose words. That, or use a translator like Google Translate, which has several problems: The live interpretation function requires an Internet connection, something that in China, for whatever reason, is not always available. You can download the languages ​​and write to translate, but only they understand you. Your interlocutor is still unable to communicate. You have to be with your phone in your hand all the time, something that is not always possible, comfortable or viable. Then it dawned on me. The last time I went (not here, but the previous one) I noticed that in all the stores I had entered they had a little gadget from a local brand called iFlyTek that translated in real time. And I thought, what if I try one of their devices in China? And that’s what I did. I took with me the iFlyTek AI Translation AirBudsheadphones with real-time interpretation, to try them out. And very well, until the connection stopped working. Now I understand everything iFlyTek AI Translation AirBuds | Image: Xataka The headphones are of the type clip in semi-open formatthat is, they hook to our ear from behind to leave the ear more or less free and bring the microphones closer to our mouth. Because no, they are not headphones for listening to music (which we can do, mind you, but it is not the best experience by any means), but for making calls and talking to people. And there they deliver beautifully. It’s curious. Almost all the headphones I have tried tend to bend their knees when making calls. The music is very enjoyable, but the calls are a bit meh. These are the complete opposite. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone to listen to music, but I have never tried headphones that pick up my voice better. and the voice of our interlocutor (we will return to this later). The key to these headphones is that they translate and interpret in real time. Already I tried some from another brand years ago and the experience was mixed, but with these I was frankly surprised. They connect to an app called Bavvo which, as we will see later, I had to test in beta version, but in this case it worked correctly. I hope you have wide pockets | Image: Xataka The headphones pick up voice very, very well, even in distant and busy environments. In the middle of the BYD hall they were doing a demo with a frozen car and the presenter not only spoke Chinese, but she did it at a somewhat low volume. Added to the hustle and bustle of the hall, it sounded average. Well even there, The headphones were capable of picking up your voice, translating it and interpreting it to Spanish directly in my ear. The translation takes a while to start, but when it starts it doesn’t stop. The problem is that, by default, the voice is a little slow. I ended up setting it to x1.2, because at x1 I felt like I was falling behind in the conversation. The voice is a bit-quite robotic and makes it not overly pleasant to listen to for a long period of time, but that’s better than… not understanding anything. Then the connection stopped working and I was left without Internet. For much eSIM with VPN or a lot paid VPN Whatever you wear, the reality is that connectivity in China is a real pain and can fail. When I lost the Internet I was left without simultaneous interpretation. Luckily, it was shortly before I left the event, so it served me well enough. iFlyTek AI Translation AirBuds | Image: Xataka When I got home, and with a proper connection, I tried them again and, indeed, it is another movie. If in China they knew how to measure up whenever there was a connection, the question was whether they would be able to help me in one of the most tedious tasks you can do in this, our work as tech journalists: attending a conference in Chinese without subtitles or translation. Like the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, for example. Well yes, the answer is that they fulfill their mission with great solvency. By having a nearby audio source in a quiet place, the headphones pick up voice beautifully and translate well. I didn’t watch the entire conference, but the time I watched it I was able to follow it without the slightest problem. It has its things, because Chinese can be very poetic sometimes and the translation is sometimes too literal, but otherwise I must admit that I have no complaints. When the connection is good, the translation performance is very good If we talk about a conference in English, French or German, three quarters of the same. The interpretation is good and more than enough to follow the thread of a presentation or a talk. I did the exercise of following this TED talk in German without watching the video or activating subtitles, as if it were a podcast and, although the robotic voice that speaks in my ear in Spanish becomes heavy, I have been able to follow it without problem. iFlyTek AI Translation AirBuds | Image: Xataka It’s also possible to give a headset to another person and translate in real time between headsets, which is fine if the other person is trustworthy, but for me personally, It makes me a little sick. It is true that the headphones do not go into the ear and well, okay, but sharing headphones is, for me, like sharing a toothbrush: just because you can, doesn’t mean you have to do it, and even less so with someone you probably don’t … Read more

When Jeff Bezos asked his parents for $240,000 to found Amazon, they asked him only one thing: “What is the Internet?”

by

In 1995, Jeff Bezos decided quit your stable job and well paid as an analyst on Wall Street to set up a business selling books online. At that time, Jeff Bezos was not the millionaire he is today, so he went to his parents and asked them for help investing in Amazon. His father’s first question was clear and direct: “What is the Internet?” Miguel and Jacklyn Bezos didn’t know much about this new technology, but they knew that their son was determined to make the most of it. According to the writer Brad Stone in the book “The dream store. Jeff Bezos and the era of Amazon“, Bezos warned his parents: “There is a 70% chance you will lose everything. “I just want to make sure I can come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work out.” Without hesitation, the Bezos invested a good part of their life savings in their son’s project. Today, that initial investment has grown by 38,200% and is worth more than the GDP of Iceland and the Maldives combined, making his father so rich (his mother died in August 2025 at age 78) that, according to what he said The Wall Street JournalMiguel Bezos is hiring a CEO to manage the assets of his Family Office. The origin of a historic fortune In the mid-nineties, Mike Bezos, of Cuban origin and with family ties in a small Valladolid municipalitydecided to entrust the family savings to his son Jeff and, in the process, becoming the first investors after the founding of Amazon. According to documents According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Bezoses’ initial investment was through the purchase of 582,528 Amazon shares and, just a few months later, they expanded their investment by purchasing 847,716 more shares. In total, 1,430,244 shares at a purchase price of 17 cents per share. That leaves a total investment of $243,141.48. As and as revealed Bloombergit is quite a fortune for a couple formed by a single mother who had to raise her son alone with a very poor salary while studying a career, and of a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the United States at the age of 16. After thirty years, if the initial investment had remained intact it would amount to about $92.9 billion. However, after various sales and donations of shares, the family wealth of Jeff Bezos’ parents exceeds $40 billion. CEO wanted for a fortune According to estimates by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, Aurora Borealisthe company in charge of managing Miguel Bezos’s assets, was founded in 2020 and, if it were a person, it would rank 48th among the largest fortunes in the world. list of Forbes millionaires. Aurora Borealis is currently one of the family offices most relevant in the world due to its volume of assets. The company manages assets of a very diverse nature, from those founding shares of Amazon to investments in funds and philanthropy projects through the Bezos Family Foundation. The growing assets of Jeff Bezos’ father reached such levels that it became necessary to professionalize the team that manages it from Aurora Borealis, signing as CEO to Valeria Alberola, an executive with experience in managing large assets. For reference, the new manager of Amazon’s founding fortune managed the investment and philanthropy activities of Ben Walton, heir to Walmart. Their goal, to make Miguel “Mike” Bezos even richer. The story of Miguel Bezos’s fortune is not only relevant for having facilitated the founding of one of the largest companies in the world, it is also a unique phenomenon since it is unusual for a family loan of just under $244,000 to end up making the founder’s parents millionaires, and not external investors. Was a risky bet which turned out well, but could also have left Jeff Bezos banished from Thanksgiving dinners and his parents with a serious financial problem. In Xataka | Technological millionaires boast of ecological awareness. Their superyachts and private jets tell another story Image | Flickr (George W. Bush Presidential Center)

Jeff Bezos asked his parents for their life savings to found Amazon. They only asked him one question: “What is the Internet?

by

In 1995, Jeff Bezos decided quit your stable job and well paid as an analyst on Wall Street to set up a business selling books online. At that time, Jeff Bezos was not the millionaire he is today, so he went to his parents and asked them for help investing in Amazon. His father’s first question was clear and direct: “What is the Internet?” Miguel and Jacklyn Bezos didn’t know much about this new technology, but they knew that their son was determined to make the most of it. According to the writer Brad Stone in the book “The dream store. Jeff Bezos and the era of Amazon“, Bezos warned his parents: “There is a 70% chance you will lose everything. “I just want to make sure I can come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn’t work out.” Without hesitation, the Bezos invested a good part of their life savings in their son’s project. Today, that initial investment has grown by 15,500% and is worth more than the GDP of Iceland and the Maldives combined, making his father so rich (his mother passed away a few weeks ago) that, according to what he said The Wall Street JournalMiguel Bezos is hiring a CEO to manage the assets of his Family Office. The origin of a historic fortune In the mid-nineties, Mike Bezos, of Cuban origin and with family ties in a small Valladolid municipalitydecided to entrust the family savings to his son Jeff and, in the process, becoming the first investors after the founding of Amazon. According to documents According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Bezoses’ initial investment was through the purchase of 582,528 Amazon shares and, just a few months later, they expanded their investment by purchasing 847,716 more shares. In total, 1,430,244 shares at a purchase price of 17 cents per share. That leaves a total investment of $243,141.48. As and as revealed Bloombergit is quite a fortune for a couple formed by a single mother who had to raise her son alone with a very poor salary while studying a career, and of a Cuban immigrant who arrived in the United States at the age of 16. After thirty years, if the initial investment had remained intact it would amount to about $72.6 billion. However, after various sales and donations of shares, the family wealth of Jeff Bezos’ parents exceeds $40 billion. CEO wanted for a fortune According to estimates by The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, Aurora Borealisthe company in charge of managing Miguel Bezos’s assets, was founded in 2020 and, if it were a person, it would rank 48th among the largest fortunes in the world. list of Forbes millionaires. Aurora Borealis is currently one of the family offices most relevant in the world due to its volume of assets. The company manages assets of a very diverse nature, from those founding shares of Amazon to investments in funds and philanthropy projects through the Bezos Family Foundation. The growing assets of Jeff Bezos’ father have reached levels that have made it necessary to professionalize the team that manages it from Aurora Borealis, signing as CEO to Valeria Alberola, an executive with experience in managing large assets. For reference, the new manager of Amazon’s founding fortune managed the family office of the Walton familyfounders and owners of the Wallmart supermarket chain. Their goal, to make Miguel “Mike” Bezos even richer. The story of Miguel Bezos’s fortune is not only relevant for having facilitated the founding of one of the largest companies in the world, it is also a unique phenomenon since it is unusual for a family loan of just under $244,000 to end up making the founder’s parents millionaires, and not external investors. Was a risky bet which turned out well, but could also have left Jeff Bezos banished from Thanksgiving dinners and his parents with a serious financial problem. In Xataka | Technological millionaires boast of ecological awareness. Their superyachts and private jets tell another story Image | Flickr (George W. Bush Presidential Center)

The strangest museum on the internet has a collection of plugs from around the world that reflect electrical chaos

by

Between 1880 and 1930, different countries around the world made an important electrical decision: choosing a type of plug. More or less, everyone did it on their own. When they wanted to realize the amalgam of pegs they had created, it was too late: they were trapped in the infrastructure they had installed. Bridging the distance, like It happened to the Madrid metrowhich turns left. As a consequence, more than a century later you have to put an adapter in your suitcase when you go on a trip. As you travel around the world you can discover them all, or more quickly and educationally: you can also visit the Museum of Plugs and Socketsa Dutch website (one of the old school ones, judging by its design) that has catalogued, photographed and rigorously explained all the domestic sockets that there are and have been on the planet following the technical references of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the international organization that has to bring order to this chaos. The 15 plugs in the world. The IEC uses the letters A to N (curiously, Thailand’s O came later) to classify the types of domestic plugs existing in the world and Here you can consult the complete list. The museum links each letter with its corresponding standard: the NEMA for North America (letters A and B), the CEE for continental Europe (letter C), but be careful because Switzerland has the SN 441011 standard and the J plug, BS 1363 for the United Kingdom (letter G), AS 3112 for Australia (letter I)… each with its dimensions, voltages, pins and safety standards. From my own experience, I forgot to buy specific adapters a long time ago and opted for a universal adapter to live quietly in the hodgepodge. Because why not say it: from the point of view of practicality, this horde of pegs is a glaring failure of technical coordination unmatched in any other industrial sector. Types of plugs in the world SomnusDe via Wikipedia The failed attempt at a universal standard. In the 1930s, the IEC set itself an impossible mission (judging by the results): to achieve international standardization of domestic plugs and sockets. In 1986 he published IEC 60906 standard with that ambition. No need to say it went wrong. Only Brazil in 2002 and South Africa in 2013 adopted the IEC 60906-1 standard and even then, both countries allow multiple standards. The EU said “no, thank you” remembering Rocío Jurado and her “it’s too late now, ma’am.” With complete honesty, the European Commission recognized in 2017 that harmonizing the continent’s plugs would require transition periods of more than 75 years, an investment estimated at 100,000 million euros and would generate some 700,000 tons of electrical waste. That oddity called Switzerland. That strange case called Switzerland. It is no surprise that the Swiss citizenry likes to go it alone: ​​it is there, between Italy, France and Germany, but it does not belong to the EU nor does it use the euro. So, as we mentioned above, has its own plug defined by standard SN 441011 (until 2019 it was SEV 1011) and the J plug, which is only used there and in the Principality of Liechtenstein. In addition to being an “exclusive” plug due to how little it is used compared to others, it also has a particular geometry in the shape of a hexagon. Paradoxically, when the IEC designed what was to be the universal plug in 1986, it based its shape on the Swiss T12 plug, although with differences in the diameter of the pins and the displacement of the ground pin. The world tried to copy Switzerland to create a global standard, but Switzerland continued on its way. The plugs that said goodbye. The museum has an entire section dedicated to plugs that were developed as alternatives to current standards and have been out of production for years and some almost extinct. Some of the most striking cases are the British Wylex and Dorman & Smith, the impractical hook-shaped Hakenstecker or the Greek Tripoliki with three pins arranged in a triangle. Surely all of them now coexist in physical museums and in this digital museum that constitutes the best archive of the failure of global electrical standardization. In Xataka | What plug do I need depending on the country I am going to travel to and what are the best universal adapters Cover | Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets

There is a million-dollar industry selling stoicism on the internet. His recipe for success is to do just the opposite of what Stoicism says.

by

“My father is hooked on stoicism.” A few days ago, a Reddit user told thatin the last six months, his father had been deep into all kinds of YouTube videos about stoicism. “He spends hours watching (…) what seems AI-generated self-help garbage, made to validate ego and increase paranoia of the people.” “The strange thing is that real Stoicism seems like it is made to teach you self-control and emotional discipline, but it has become more reactive, cynical and critical,” he explained. And, really, It’s not strange at all. ‘Stoick’ is a soccer player Shiromani Kant The truth is that, today, becoming a Stoic does not mean reading Marcus Aurelius but rather following accounts, buying books, subscribing to newsletters, watching videos and consuming content. A content that, by the way, is adjoining with pop psychology, “CIA manipulation tactics,” mind games, “reading people” techniques, and other genres of conspiracy thinking. We have been hearing for years that philosophy “is back”that masculinity is in crisis and does not stop looking for alternative options, that a handful of ideas from 2,000 or so years ago are changing the way thousands of people face their daily lives. It’s time to treat that “wave” for what it is: a huge lie. No matter where we look (and except for a small group of popularizers that fit in the trunk of a car), Stoicism is neither a real philosophical movement nor a collective practice. Modern stoicism is a niche market for content creators—books, newsletters, subscriptions, merchandising, courses—who make a living precisely from the discomfort they claim to alleviate. The boom of pop stoicism Jan Demiralp As I have told on other occasionsin 1965, during the Vietnam War, the pilot James B. Stockdale He was returning from a combat mission when he was hit by enemy fire. Passed seven years in unspeakable conditions; between torture and humiliation specifically designed to break him from the inside. But he was lucky. In his own words, the only thing that helped him overcome captivity was the memories of a small book that had been given to him during his time at the university: the Enchyridion, the best-known book by Epictetus, one of the great Stoic philosophers in history and to whom the motto “sustine et abstine“(“endures and renounces”). In it, in the EnchyridionStockdale understood that the “reflective mind” could distance itself from brute and instinctive emotion and return to what was experienced with clarity of judgment and equanimity to find peace of mind. Not only did he understand it, but he spent much of the rest of his life spreading and defending it. In general terms, Stockdale is the fundamental piece of the reconversion of classical Stoic philosophy into pop culture; the place where Epictetus connects with late US capitalism. I tell this to make it clear that the fashion for stoicism is nothing new. It has been on the rise for half a century and, at least a decade, completely out of control. What has happened in recent years is that this ‘boom’ has been consolidated as an industry. The r/Stoicism subreddir (where I got the story that opens this text) went from 840 members in 2012 to 610,000 in 2024. On TikTok, the hashtag #stoicism gathers 645,000 posts. Ryan Holiday He has sold more than 10 million copies of ‘The Daily Stoic’, has more than three million followers on Instagram and two on YouTube. And, in Spanish, we also have examples of this genre of philosophical self-help. Philosophical self-help? We might think that calling a philosophy more than 2,000 years old “self-help” is audacious on my part. However, academic criticism specialized in Stoicism has reached (it has been difficult, but it has reached) the same conclusion. Massimo Pigliucci (professor at the City College of New York and one of the most important and rigorous neo-Stoics) coined the term ‘broicism’ in 2019 to discover the ‘masculinist’ appropriation of this philosophical school. In 2022, Mark Dery published “How Stoicism Became Broicism“. This is a very interesting text (and debatable in some points) that very clearly x-rays the problem I am talking about. In 2025, in fact, the researcher Erhan Ağaoğlu published an analysis about stoicism on TikTok which makes clear the identification between this “stoicism” and the patterns of aggression, self-isolation, self-improvement and the vindication of traditional masculinity. There are those who believe that this is problematic and those who argue that it is not. What there is no doubt about is that it is not stoicism, neither classical nor modern, nor of any kind. It is, in any case, ‘ultra-processed pseudo-philosophy’ ready to consume in the context of the attention economy. A very successful one, yes: not all cultural products show that ability to scale in this marked way. Why is this happening? Jaime Spaniol Sociologists who are working on the topic agree that there are, at least, three factors that explain it. The first is the “replacement of traditional frameworks related to the in-person community (religious or not).” The hypothesis is that a sector of the population has emerged (especially young and male) that does not have ‘frameworks of meaning’ to manage adversity. Stoicism, like all the movements that are emerging around it, have become a kind of ’emotional toolbox’ without religious or therapeutic component. The second factor would be a certain “crisis of masculinity.” That crisis is what They have been trying to suture the ‘manosphere influencers’ since Jordan Peterson and it is part of the tectonic movements that are turning Stoicism into ‘pseudophilosophy’. Finally, the ‘platformization of absolutely everything’. That is, the dynamics that facilitate and promote platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube or X. Where some people want to see a renewed interest in philosophy, there is a push by algorithms for short, imperative and motivational content. And what’s the problem with all this? The first consequence of this phenomenon is that what we now understand as ‘stoicism’ is nothing like classical stoicism. But surely that is not the most important thing. Because the … Read more

one where Google, Amazon and Microsoft pay a toll so that we all have internet

by

In March 2024, several countries in East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia began experiencing strange internet outages and massive slowdowns in digital services. The origin was not in a cyber attack or an electrical blackout, it was on a ship reached during an attack in the Red Sea that had accidentally dragged its anchor onto the seabed and damaged several undersea cables essential for global communications. Iran’s plan B. For decades, the Strait of Hormuz was seen as the great bottleneck energy of the planet, the route through which much of the world’s oil circulates. It happens that the war with the United States and Israel has made Iran discover something much more important: the Internet also circulates under those waters. As? Apparently, CNN told that Tehran has understood that the submarine cables that connect Europe, Asia and the Gulf are an infrastructure as strategic as oil tankers, and it wants to convert that geographical position into a new source of power. The idea that begins to emerge in Iranian discourse is very clear: if the world needs to pass data under Hormuz, large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Meta should accept some kind of tolllicense or submission to Iranian rules. In other words, Hormuz would no longer be just a lever about global energybut also about the digital economy. The invisible cables. The great Iranian strategic discovery is born from an inconspicuous reality: almost all global traffic data depends on physical cables laid on the seabed. Banking payments, cloud services, military communications, streaming platforms, stock market operations and much of the artificial intelligence infrastructure pass through them. Some of these cables cross areas near Iranian waters, especially in the Persian Gulf. Although many of the international routes were designed to directly avoid Iranian territory, Tehran understands that proximity is enough to put pressure. The regime has understood that interrupting or threatening these corridors could generate enormous economic and psychological damage, even without firing a missile. The threat of submarine warfare. At this point it should be noted that Iran has not promised to sabotage cables directly, but it has launched deliberately ambiguous messages about possible interruptions or damages. Precisely this ambiguity is part of the strategy. The country has underwater drones, mini-submarines and capable naval forces to operate in the Gulfwhile its regional allies have already accidentally demonstrated in the Red Sea the enormous impact that a simple underwater incident. The real Western fear is not, therefore, a total internet blackout, but rather a chain of disruptions: financial delays, problems in data centers, degradation of business networks or difficulties in repairing critical infrastructure in the middle of a military crisis. In a world completely dependent on data, touching these cables means little less than touching the global economy. The inspiration of the Suez Canal. Tehran clearly looks to the Suez Canal as a model. Egypt has been monetizing for decades its strategic position by charging tolls and taking advantage of the passage of submarine cables between Europe and Asia. Iran wants to partially replicate that logic, although applied to a much more hostile and militarized environment. In fact, the media linked to the Revolutionary Guard they already talk about compulsory licenses, passage fees and exclusive rights for Iranian companies in charge of maintenance. Legally the scenario is complex and many operators will probably ignore the threats while US sanctions are in place, but the simple fact that Iran is openly raising this idea demonstrates how it has changed his strategic vision on Hormuz. The new discovered power. In short, and as we have already seen with crude oil, what is truly important is not whether Iran will one day manage to collect money from the big Western technology companies, but rather that it has discovered a new form of pressure global. For years, Tehran believed that its greatest weapon it was oil. Now you have understood that the world depends even more on invisible data flows that happen under the sea. That is possibly the great geopolitical transformation that Hormuz is currently revealing: a classic maritime strait is also becoming a critical point for the global digital economy. And that means that future international tensions will no longer revolve solely around the control of energy, that too, but also the control of the infrastructure that supports nothing more and nothing less than the internet. Image | Nara, Wikimedia, Collinpetty In Xataka | The war in Iran is doing something that not even Ryanair imagined: making 20 euro flights a relic of the past In Xataka | Dubai has come to the same conclusion as Russia. To protect your oil from drones there is something better than missiles: giant cages

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.