internet

Orange’s “life insurance” to protect the internet

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More than 95% of international internet traffic travels over cables that are at the bottom of the sea. Africa and Europe start from very different positions, but they are essential to sustain essential services on both continents, such as the cloud or financial systems. Thus, while Africa It is the continent where demand grows the most bandwidth in the world and faces the problem of relatively old cables designed for much lower traffic than the current one, Europe has consolidated strategic nodes in places such as Marseille, Lisbon or the south of England, but is still exposed to the same risks of concentration and aging. Via Africa is born from both needs, the new submarine cable that Orange and an open consortium of seven operators have announced. The Via Africa cable. Via África is a new submarine fiber optic cable that will connect southern Europe with South Africa bordering the Atlantic. It will have European connection points in the United Kingdom, France, Portugal and the Canary Islands. On the western African coast, its nodes will be in Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, although both the final complete route and other points in southern Africa are still pending definition. In any case, The reason for this cable is improve the diversity and resilience of international communications between both continents. Sketch of the layout. Orange Why is it important. To start with, this cable is the answer to that veteran and undersized infrastructure of the African continent and its growing demand at a time when cloud services, artificial intelligence and teleworking are skyrocketing traffic. Furthermore, the African Atlantic coast has some critical points due to the high concentration of marine infrastructure, such as the Ivory Coast, where several cables converge in the same physical place. This example is not coincidental: in March 2024 they failed the four cables that were there at that time at the same time due to a rockslide. The result? 13 West African countries with connectivity at minimum levels for weeks. But the problem is not only African: when these cables fail, Europe loses traffic capacity to the continent, dragging down operators, companies and cloud services that depend on that route. What Via Africa proposes is precisely a geographically different route, that is, an alternative that breaks that dependency. Six cables, the same physical point in the Ivory Coast. Submarine Cable Map Context. The African Atlantic coast is already served with cables such as SAT-3/WASC (2002), WACS (2012), ACE (2012), MainOne (2010) or Google’s Equiano (2023), but some of these systems are aging or have proven to be vulnerable. This new cable adds to a wave of investment in African submarine infrastructure, such as the recent 2Africa in Meta (2025) or the Medusa in the Mediterranean (2026). Orange needs few introductions: it manages more than 450,000 kilometers of submarine cables around the world through its subsidiary Orange Marine and in fact, last year charge two new cable carrier vessels to reinforce its maintenance and deployment capacity in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, with delivery scheduled in 2028 and 2029. How are they going to do it?. At the moment the only thing that there is closed It is a Memorandum of Understanding for its construction by a group of investors among which are CanalinkGUILAB, International Mauritania Telecom, Orange Group, Orange Côte d’Ivoire, Sonatel and Silverlinks. From here, the process starts with a route study to determine the optimal route in terms of resilience, technical feasibility and economic efficiency. Likewise, the business consortium will prepare the bidding process to select the cable manufacturer, the next step. Yes, but. The announcement is a memorandum with big names behind it, not a construction contract, which means that the stage of the operation is extremely early: it could take years until it is operational or even never materialize. In this sense, logically there are still important unknowns pending that range from the total layout and its length, all the nodes, the manufacturer and installer and the route sheet with a date for its entry into operation or the cost. Furthermore, Via África is going to enter a space that is not free: Google already operates Equiano on the same coastal strip and Meta has its own cable circumnavigating Africa with the very long 2Africa of 45,000 kilometers. In short, it will have to compete with the infrastructure of the large hyperscalers. In Xataka | The submarine cables belonged to the teleoperators, and now the big technology companies are controlling them In Xataka | The first great Atlantic submarine cable that connected us to the internet says goodbye for a simple reason: it was too expensive to repair it Cover | Bryan Christie Design and Orange

Reddit was one of the last refuge platforms for Internet users. You just took a step in a worrying direction

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The social network Reddit has become the best source of human data on the internet. It is in fact one of the few remaining refuges from that “human network of networks” with which it all began, but this singular and anarchic social network has just taken a disturbing step: wants to force you to install their app when you use it from your mobile. uncomfortable notice. Millions of people use Reddit daily on their mobile, but in recent days they have encountered an uncomfortable message: a notice that forced them to use the Reddit mobile application instead of being able to continue using the browser to enjoy the famous thematic subreddits. There are many those who they have warned of the problem with diverse messages in the forums of the platform. In one of the most popular subredits, r/technology, the message that talks about the topic has nearly 20,000 positive votes and 4,200 comments. What Reddit says. Company spokespersons indicated at Ars Technica that Reddit has launched a test “for a small subset of mobile users that encourages them to download the app after visiting the site. These users are already familiar with Reddit and we have seen that the experience is much better for them on the app.” Personalization = data collection. The platform argues that if users take advantage of the app they can have a tailored news thread and better searches, but criticism has not been slow in coming. The Ars Technica editor who wrote on the subject himself commented how this notice has also reached him—not us, perhaps because we are not in the United States—and this sounds disturbing. And it sounds like that because it is just how apps like TikTok, X or Instagram work, which have managed to polish their content recommendation algorithms so that the user ends up condemned for doomscrolling. And that would point to Reddit’s ambition that we simply do nothing but be on Reddit. The danger of making your users angry. It is ironic that a platform like Reddit, which has always largely depended on the traffic brought to it by Google, decides to break with that way of reaching its forums. Those responsible for the platform seem to be confident that its content is essential enough for its users to convince them to download and use the app. The question is whether this will not cause an exodus of users. A small solution. Apparently is it possible avoid the message if we clean and we empty both the cache and the cookies of the mobile browser that we use to browse Reddit. This temporary patch can help you continue using Reddit directly from the mobile browser you use. Wall Street rules a lot. This apparent degradation or evolution of the service certainly seems to be aimed at maximizing profit. By going public, Reddit has to prove to shareholders that it can generate growing revenue. And if you can lock users into your official app, you can ensure that no one (including AI) can access that valuable content without going through your controls. Image | Brett Jordan In Xataka | Reddit, nude scenes and a forum out of control: this is how a Dane ended up being convicted in a case that sets a precedent

Vevo was all over the internet in the 2000s. Today is just another forgotten episode of the old music industry

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In December 2009, two of the biggest record labels on the planet organized a party in New York with Bono as the guest of honor to celebrate the launch of something that, according to them, was going to give them back control of the music business on the Internet, which, as we will now see, was not going through its best moment. It was called Vevo, an acronym for “Video Evolution.” The (r)evolution lasted less than a decade: the fundamental changes in the business and the arrival of a different way of understanding music videos relegated it to the secondary level of nostalgia for millennials which is today. Bad times. In the late 2000s, The music industry was collapsing.. Income from record sales had been falling for years due to the combined effect of piracy and chaotic digitalization, unbeknownst to the labels, and which was very far from the orderly and official moment that it is experiencing today thanks to streaming platforms. For example: YouTube (which had already been bought by Google in 2006) accumulated hundreds of millions of video clip views without the labels seeing a single euro in compensation. Attempts were made to renegotiate the terms of that relationship, without success: Warner Music was the first to withdraw their entire catalog from YouTube in 2008. Ideaca. Doug Morris, then CEO of Universal Music Group and a central figure in the creation of Vevo, envisioned a way to enter the internet and video clip business when he saw his grandson consuming online video clips with advertising, which led him to ask how much money Universal was generating with those reproductions… The answer was obvious: zero. From that point on, Morris pressured companies like Yahoo and MTV to compensate him for playing his videos. He did end up reaching an agreement with Google. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Vevo! Vevo officially launched on December 8, 2009 following an agreement between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI, with Warner Music Group joining years later, in August 2016. Vevo would provide the official catalog in high definition, YouTube would serve as a mass distribution platform, and both parties would sell advertising on that inventory. In October 2009, the Abu Dhabi Media Company already had invested about 300 million dollars to operate in the United States and Canada. Immediate result? Spectacular. In its first month it was already the most visited music site in the United States, surpassing Myspace Music. The economic impact was also rapid: according to Vevo’s CEO at the time, the average CPM of an online music video went from $3 before launch to more than $30 in 2013. In 2012, Vevo accumulated 41 billion views annually across its network, with a catalog of around 75,000 videos. By August 2013, Vevo had surpassed MTV in terms of digital viewership: 609 million video views versus MTV’s 261 million that month. Vevo Certified for artists who surpassed 100 million streams became an indicator of cultural relevance comparable to a number one on sales charts. Issues. However, Vevo’s structural problem was not the audience, but your delivery model. Although the company had a turnover of $250 million in 2013, more than 90% of that income was shared between labels, Google and music publishers. Universal and Sony captured 55% of the total and Vevo operated at a loss. It was, in practice, an advertising inventory manager without its own capital: it generated value for its shareholders, the labels and Google, but not for itself as an independent operating entity. In 2014, the company hired Goldman Sachs and The Raine Group to find a buyer willing to pay nearly $1 billion for the company. None appeared. Vevo ruled out the sale and announced that it would seek profitability through its own means. Change of course. In April 2015, Erik Huggers (creator of the famous BBC iPlayer) arrived as the new CEO. Vevo then wanted build your own applications for mobile and connected TV, reduce its dependence on YouTube and eventually launch a paid subscription service. They began developing apps for iOS, Android and connected TV platforms, but it was short-lived: the paid subscription project was canceled in February 2017, and Huggers left the position. Sizes and layoffs took place and the commitment to technological autonomy ended. Coup de grace. In January 2018, YouTube automatically migrated subscribers from Vevo-branded channels (such as “RihannaVEVO” or “JustinBieberVEVO”) to YouTube’s new Official Artist Channels. That same week, YouTube relaunched YouTube Music as a paid subscription service, directly competing where Vevo had tried to enter. Paradoxically, Vevo had broken even that year for the first time. But the proprietary model had never caught on, and without it, there was no reason to maintain the infrastructure. What’s left of Vevo. Vevo has not completely disappearedlike other projects of the time. The company pivoted to the connected television business and FAST channelsthe free shelves with advertising. Its library exceeds 900,000 video clips and generates approximately 25,000 million monthly views. The model is, ironically, the one that MTV never managed to make happen: a free music network supported by advertising, although in the case of Vevo, distributed over the Internet instead of cable. Vevo’s footprint is not entirely negative: it set the standard for the official high-definition music video on YouTube, created the monetization infrastructure that allowed video clips to become a business again, and demonstrated that the recording industry could negotiate on an equal footing with technology platforms. But the fact that the video clips have ended up becoming amateur choreographies on TikTok is something that, of course, the CEO of Universal could not foresee. In Xataka | MrBeast created an extreme survival challenge with the goal that no one could overcome it. Until ‘Juan the Mexican’ arrived

compulsive internet use

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For decades, the image of teenage rebellion has been linked to the bottle, secret tobacco or the first joint you take. However, young Spaniards are currently greatly reducing the consumption of these productsalthough to replace it they are choosing to have a quite compulsive addiction to the internet or to the scroll infinite in some applications like, for example, TikTok. The decline of alcohol and tobacco. The data that gives us joy regarding the most harmful consumption among our young people comes from the survey STUDIES 2025 prepared by the Ministry of Health through the National Plan on Drugs. Here you can see how, while in 1994 81.4% of young people between 14 and 18 years old admitted to having tried alcohol on some occasion, now in 2025 this figure has fallen to 73.9%, with consumption in the last 30 days standing at 51.8% of cases. If we focus on both alcohol and cannabis, we also observe all-time lows in consumption in the age group between 14 and 18 years. Although the current problem is focused on flavored vapers or electronic cigarettes, which do have a large presence in this age group compared to the attempts made to regulate it. The new drug. If we were left with only this half of the photograph, we might think that today’s teenagers are simply the healthiest in history. But here the same Ministry of Health, via another report of research, points to the relationship between young people and technology, which explains, in part, why they spend less time on the street drinking bottles or trying tobacco. In this way, there are several important data here: 19.4% of students aged 14 to 18 have problematic use of the Internet. 15.3% show clear signs of problems with social networks, trapped in addictive design mechanics, which is what we know as doomscrolling. 5.2% present symptoms compatible with video game addiction, something that has also been motivated by the famous ‘loot boxes’ that promote addiction to games of chance, since if they are looking for a specific aesthetic change, they must be lucky to find it in a virtual box or envelope. We have a great challenge. What these reports tell us is nothing more than that the problem that we suffered in our youth has mutated and has been updated to something much more modern and difficult to detect. Before, the smell of tobacco was a clear sign that something was happening, but today a teenager may be developing a severe addiction locked in his room, while his parents think he is just “on his cell phone.” This has meant that public policies are now focused on this type of addiction, also with some measures that are already being heard, such as the veto on access to social networks. to minors under 16 years of age in our country to control these addictive practices that the applications try to reinforce. In Xataka | Snapchat has almost 1 billion users and invented the king format of the Internet. He still doesn’t know how to make money with it

The age verification thing is nothing. Greece wants to completely eliminate anonymity on the internet

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Greece will hold elections in early 2027 and its rulers have had a unique idea to avoid (or mitigate) deepfakesthe disinformation and the toxic speechesespecially in relation to that electoral process, but also in other scenarios. What they want is nothing less than eradicate anonymity of the internet and that you have to reveal your identity on platforms to be able to use them. Remembering democracy. Dimirtis Papastergiou, minister of digital governance in Greece, remembered in Euractiv how democracy was born in his country with a clear objective. “In ancient Greece, everyone could express their opinion openly and by name. They raised their hands and shared their perspective. This should inspire us as we seek to shape a new digital democracy.” Goodbye to anonymity on networks. That reflection is the argument behind a controversial measure: Greece has a plan to try to prohibit anonymity on social networks. This will make it possible to minimize the growing toxicity in these networks, says the minister, who is promoting an idea that is already being debated in the presidential office of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek prime minister. Pseudonyms yes, but always associated with your real identity. The measure does not seek to prohibit the avatars and pseudonyms that users use in their profiles. Instead what you want is to guarantee that the system knows exactly which citizen is behind that label. As the ministry states, any opinion is valid as long as the person expressing it can be traced by the authorities in the event of a legal infraction. Against harassment and defamation. Papastergiou highlights how anonymity has become the perfect shield to attack reputations or harass in a coordinated way. These situations have attempted to be investigated by the Greek police without success due to the opacity of the platforms. If age verification is required link an account with a personthe government may apply measures so that the social cost of defamation is the same in real life as on the screen. The 2027 elections as a catalyst for the decision. Greece’s political calendar has caused this regulatory urgency, because the Greek country will hold general elections early next year. According to the prime minister’s cabinet, the national political debate has become a chaos of fake news and threats orchestrated by both anonymous users and coordinated bot attacks. The electoral campaign has already begun unofficially, and this ban on anonymity is presented as a “hygienic” measure to avoid or at least mitigate disinformation and hate speech that, according to the government, contaminate the coexistence of Greek society. Bad business for Facebook, X or TikTok. Prohibiting anonymity would have a clear impact on the platforms, which since their inception have built their user base assuming that a large portion of them used an anonymous profile. This has favored an extraordinary growth in the number of users, although it is clear that some of them are duplicates or are bots. Papastergiou accuses companies of maintaining this business model for pure economic benefit, prioritizing that over toxicity problems, for example. The confrontation is served: on the one hand, the state demands the ability to identify its citizens, and on the other, companies protect anonymity because that favors the advertising business model. Also in digital press. Pavlos Marinakis, vice president of the government, has gone further and points out that this measure may not be limited to social networks. Their idea is to demand that all articles and comments in digital press are signed by real people, thus eliminating pseudonyms and spaces for collective opinion. This has set off even more alarms, this time among those who defend digital rights, who see here a potential tool to silence criticism and complaints that are made with anonymity as the only shield against retaliation. A European precedent. Greece is the most vocal country in proposing this measure and activating it unilaterally if the European Union does not move. Greece already has been added to this trend of imposing age verification to prohibit the use of social networks by those under 15 years of age. A piecemeal approach poses problems and is even questionable under the DSA framework. In fact, it is to be expected that the EU will rule on the matter, and the approval of such a measure at a pan-European level faces extraordinary obstacles. In Spain has also been considered that possibility, but It’s much easier said than done.. Very dangerous. Dismantling anonymity on the internet undoubtedly has its advantages when it comes to mitigating all the toxic, hateful and misinformation speeches that abound on the internet, but the disadvantages are even greater. The Greek plan assumes that the State will always be a benevolent actor and that this user identification will only be used to prosecute real crimes. However, we are in an era of extreme polarization and such a measure would allow, among other things, to create a gigantic database in which each real DNI would be associated—among other things—with a political opinion. It is the seed of a massive surveillance system that could be more toxic than what it precisely wants to combat. Image | Chaozzy Lin | dole777 In Xataka | You’ve been ‘user84721’ for years. A study just showed that AI can know who you are in minutes

If the question is how many websites has AI generated, the answer begins to explain the new internet

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Creating a website has never been just one thing. For years, for many users it meant choosing between fighting with tools like FrontPage, hiring someone who knew how to design, or settling for other types of solutions. Later, templates and visual editors began to gain ground, lowering the barrier to entry. Now we are witnessing a new change thanks to tools such as Lovable either Vercel v0which promise to turn a description into something publishable in just a few minutes. The AI ​​leap. The intuition that AI is gaining weight in the new web already has a concrete figure on the table. This is what the study points out “The impact of AI-generated text on the Internet“, signed by researchers from Stanford, Imperial College London and Internet Archive. The work places the percentage of new websites analyzed classified as generated or assisted by AI at around 35% by mid-2025. Before the launch of ChatGPTat the end of 2022, that percentage was zero in the study sample. The speed of change, rather than the isolated data, is what makes it relevant. How they measured it. To arrive at that figure, researchers worked with the Internet Archive and analyzed monthly samples of sites between August 2022 and May 2025. In each case they searched for the oldest archived copy available on the Wayback Machine, downloaded the HTML, and extracted the text for processing separately. They then tested several detection tools and chose Pangram v3which was the one that offered the highest detection rate in its tests. Some of the pages published by the Lovable community The result. The research found a website with “a decrease in semantic diversity and an increase in positive sentiment.” Do you mean that all this is positive? You can depend on the angle at which you look at it. The same text warns that “as AI text becomes more common on the Internet, the range of unique ideas and diverse points of view is reduced.” An expanding industry. What the study shows has not appeared out of nowhere. An industry of its own is being consolidated around this promise of creating a website with less friction, with tools designed for very different users: from those who need a simple page for a business to those who want to prototype an idea quickly. Wise Guy Reports Data They place the market for tools to create websites with AI at 3.1 billion dollars in 2024 and project it to reach 25 billion in 2035. The direction of travel seems clear: publishing is becoming increasingly accessible. What’s coming. In web creation, AI is already moving pieces, and professional design does not seem to be immune to that change. That doesn’t mean it’s going to put an end to web designers or that all projects can be solved with generative tools. There are products, brands, stores and services that will continue to need criteria, architecture, design, maintenance that is less semantically diverse and more positive overall, and a technical layer that is not so easily resolved. However, it makes sense to think that professionals will also end up relying on these AI tools to speed up parts of the process. Images | campaign In Xataka | Kimi Code is eight times cheaper than Claude Code and does 75% of your work. The question is whether it is enough

Someone connected an unprotected Windows XP PC to the Internet to see what would happen. The result is not surprising

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When Microsoft ends its support for security updates in its operating systems, it is not usually advisable to use a PC with said system unless it is for a specific and specific case. Eric Parker, content creator specialized in technology, wanted try with an experiment: use Windows XP today connected to the Internet and eliminating all types of protections. As you may have imagined, the PC has become a magnet for malware. In fact, in just 10 minutes, the operating system was completely compromised. Parker also helped make this happen for educational purposes and to demonstrate how dangerous it can be to use an operating system like Windows XP today. Windows XP without firewall and without NAT 10 minutes later: a magnet for malware The expert configured a virtual machine with Windows XP Service Pack 3 on a Proxmox server, also disabling its firewall and NAT (Network Address Translation) settings and replicating the connection conditions common in the early 2000s. To recreate this scenario, the researcher Completely disabled Windows XP firewall and assigned a direct public IP address to the system, exposing the machine without any intermediate protection. As seen in the video, in just ten minutes, the system showed the first signs of infection with the appearance of the “conhoz.exe” process in the Task Manager, which turned out to be a Trojan disguised as a legitimate component of the operating system. After downloading a compatible browser and continued use of the system, in a short time we see how the PC starts to accumulate malware from multiple unknown sources. The system had been a victim of several Trojans and malicious programs running from temporary folders. He was also the victim of a rogue FTP server that allowed full remote access to files, DNS modification to redirect traffic to attacker-controlled servers, and the creation of additional user accounts for attackers to maintain access to the system. A whole string of malicious processes that ended up hijacking the PC. Image: Eric Parker The key factor that allowed the rapid entry of all these malicious components was the vulnerability EternalBluepresent in unpatched Windows XP SP3. This security breach, which was later used by the famous ransomware WannaCryallows attackers to execute remote code without any user interaction. Parker explains that tools like Nmap allow cybercriminals to scan the network for vulnerable systemsquickly identifying exposed and unprotected Windows XP computers. A system that was crying out to be violated and a Windows 7 stronger than it seems The content creator himself admits that the conditions were as optimal as possible to get malware: disabled firewall, direct connection without NAT and unpatched system. Under normal circumstances, with a basic home router and the firewall activated, Windows XP would be significantly more protected. However, the risk does not disappear completely. The use of outdated browsers and the ease of privilege escalation on this operating system remain serious problems. And as shown in the experiment, once infected, The malware was able to automatically close security tools like Malwarebytes. To contrast the results, Parker performed the same test with Windows 7 under identical conditions. Surprisingly, after ten hours of exposure, the most modern system showed no signs of infectionevidencing the significant security improvements implemented in later versions of Windows. Now that official security update support for Windows 10 is ending soon, it’s good to take a look back and see how an outdated system can easily become compromised. Fortunately, today we have many more alternatives if we do not want to update to Windows 11. Cover image | Eric Parker In Xataka | FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8 This article was originally published in Genbeta in June 2025 and is part of Genbeta’s “greatest hits” that we will discover here in the coming weeks.

95% of intercontinental internet traffic goes through submarine cables. China has just proven that it can cut them at 3,500 meters

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The world is connected through the “invisible”, almost omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent internet. But it turns out that 95% of data traffic runs through cables that, although not visible, are very tangible: the submarine fiber optic cables that run around the world. This strategic infrastructure is inherently vulnerable due to its vast extent in unmonitored environments. Until recently, threats were limited to random accidents in shallow waters, but sabotage are the order of the day. In this scenario, China has just marked a technical milestone that is a warning to sailors: has tried successfully a submarine cable cutter who plays in another league. Thus, it is capable of cutting with high precision and operating at depths of up to 3,500 meters. The tool. The system that China through its Haiyang Dizhi 2 scientific vessel is an electro-hydrostatic actuator (EHA), a compact device that integrates the hydraulic system, the electric motor and the control unit in a single piece, a combo that as explained The South China Morning Post allows you to get rid of the external oil pipe common in this type of system. The Ministry of Natural Resources of China explains for the Chinese media that last Saturday, April 15, its first mission in deep waters was carried out. This is not the first deep underwater cable cutter we have seen from China, in fact it has them to cut even deeper seabeds: the China Naval Scientific Research Center (CSSRC) and the State Key Laboratory of Deep Sea Manned Vehicles also developed a little over a year ago a vessel that uses a diamond coated grinding wheelcapable of operating at depths of 4,000 meters. Why is it important. We have already glimpsed in the intro that currently, practically the entire of intercontinental data traffic travels over submarine cables. He Center for Strategic and International Studies gives an example of its importance: in the financial environment, approximately 22 trillion dollars move per business day through these systems. Any disruption can unleash chaos on entire countries, leading to digital isolation, collapsing financial systems, degrading military capabilities… much more than a simple cyberattack. Underwater cables are inherently vulnerable due to their exposure and with these types of systems not even depth is a guarantee. Furthermore, repair at a depth of 3,500 meters is slow and expensive, requiring specific vessels that are not plentiful. context. Since 2024, China and its vessels have become common suspects in cases of alleged sabotage. Two examples: is in the Baltic and is in waters near Taiwan. These events have generated growing concern in NATO on the security of these essential undersea cables from hybrid warfare tactics. China, for its part, justifies this development as part of its scientific research and deep-sea mining program through the Chinese Academy of Sciences: the ability to cut cables is necessary for the recovery of stuck equipment, cleaning marine debris, and preparing the seabed for deep-sea mining. However, it is inevitable to think about the duality of its functions. chow they do it. In 2020, a team of engineers from Lishui University, in the coastal province of Zhejiang, opposite Taiwan, developed a device for cutting underwater cables by drag (one of several patents in recent years made in China) and in the patent application The team said that “The traditional cutting method requires first detecting the position of the cables, then excavating and recovering them to cut them. The process is complex, a lot of expensive equipment is needed, and the cost is too high. A fast and low-cost cutting device for submarine cables is needed to perform this task.” These new tools seek to solve this as they operate directly on the cable on the seabed without the need for extraction. In the 30-day mission of the Haiyang Dizhi 2 vessel, in addition to testing the cutting tool, they also tested an autonomous underwater vehicle called Hai Ma, recovered 16 self-developed measurement probes and deployed China’s first deep-sea winch with 11,000 meters of coaxial cable. Yes, but. The fact that there are patents and tests on tools to cut marine cables at great depth and efficiency does not mean that they have been used in these incidents, although it does indicate an interest in cutting them. China has a known official position, as we saw last year when a similar tool came to the fore. At that time Liu Pengyu, declared that the device is used in marine scientific research and that both the United States and several European countries have similar technology. Likewise, it highlighted the importance that China gives to protecting underwater infrastructure and its commitment to the international community to protect them. In Xataka | The submarine cables belonged to the teleoperators, and now the big technology companies are controlling them In Xataka | The first great Atlantic submarine cable that connected us to the internet says goodbye for a simple reason: it was too expensive to repair it Cover | seatools and CCTV

Snapchat invented the format that dominates the Internet. 15 years later it is still unable to make it profitable

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Evan Spiegel this week sent a memo to your employees announcing that Snap is going to lay off about 1,000 people16% of the entire workforce, in addition to canceling 300 vacant positions that had yet to be filled. Snap thus hopes to save more than $500 million in annualized costs starting in the second half of this year, although the cut is expensive in the short term, since it will have to pay between $95 and $130 million in compensation. Nevertheless, the stock rose 7% in response to the layoffs. The markets have been asking for them for a long time. Why is it important. Snap’s is not a “normal” failure story. It’s much more interesting than that. It’s the story of a company that forever changed how we communicate online and yet has failed to build a profitable business on it. In 2025 it lost 460 million dollars, although it is true that in 2024 it lost more and in 2023 even more. He has spent his 15 years of life in that dynamic. It still hasn’t closed a single complete year on a positive note. The context. His paradox begins in 2013, when he launched Stories: photos and videos that lasted 24 hours, published before disappearing. A format that is common today but at that time groundbreaking. A format that freed people from the pressure of permanence, of the trail. In August 2016, Instagram launched exactly the same thing, with the same name, and with much bigger muscle behind it. Within two months, Instagram had 100 million Stories users. It had taken Snapchat four years to reach that number. A year later it had already surpassed Snapchat. Yes, but. The problem was not that they were copied. The problem was that Meta, TikTok and YouTube adopted the format with an advantage that Snap never had: data. Meta and Google know who we are, what we buy, what interests us. Snap knows much less. That’s why their advertising converts worse, and advertisers pay less for it. A vicious circle. The coup de grace was Transparency Tracking AppApple’s privacy policy released in 2021, which sank tracking-based advertising models. Meta also sufferedbut Meta had the scale and ecosystem to absorb the impact. Not Snap, so its stock went from touching $83 to trading today around $6. A drop of more than 90% from its highs, in less than five years. However, Snap has 946 million active monthly users, grows 12% in year-over-year revenue and has one of the youngest audiences on all platforms. The most coveted demographic for fashion and entertainment brands. It has cutting-edge augmented reality technology and also has Snapchat+, your paid subscription, which is growing well. That is the contradiction that a thousand layoffs do not resolve: Cutting costs improves margins, but alone does not truly monetize a platform with almost a billion users when its audience is young and difficult to convert, and its competitors have ten times more resources. There is also an activist fund in the capital, Irenic Capital Management with 2.5%, which has been pushing for months exactly in this direction: cuts. And now what. Spiegel speaks at memo to concentrate investments where monetization already works. That is, give up on markets that are difficult to grow and profitable (Spain has every chance to be one of them) and focus on more powerful ones, presumably in the style of the United States or the United Kingdom. Give up growth in search of sustainability. Snap has been trying to solve an equation that others have solved at their expense for 15 years. These layoffs are bought time to keep trying. Featured image | Shutter Speed In Xataka | Snapchat introduced its own version of ChatGPT in its app. Nothing has gone, nothing good

A fan secretly recorded 10,000 concerts over 40 years with a dictaphone. Internet Archive is digitizing everything

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For four decades, Chicago club owners would see a guy with deep pockets walk in and turn a blind eye. Aadam Jacobs didn’t sell anything or bother: he simply recorded. Every week, several concerts. Every year, hundreds of tapes. Forty years later, that absurd and methodical habit is one of the most valuable and unique sound files of rock history. Who is it. Jacobs, who is now 59 years old, began recording concerts in 1984 with a dictaphone-style device that his grandmother lent him. He was 17 years old and was already recording songs from the radio when he realized he could do the same live, simply hiding a recorder in a pocket when entering the room. Jacobs does not consider himself an obsessive archivist, but simply a music fan. His reasoning was simple: if he went to several concerts a week anyway, why not document them? More and better. Over time the equipment improved: from the Sony cassette it went to DAT (digital audio tape) and from there to solid state digital recorders, although in the first years he admits that he used quite mediocre material because I didn’t have money for anything else. At first, the venue owners tried to stop him from recording, but over time he became a regular figure on the Chicago music scene and many began to let him in for free. A profile of him in the ‘Chicago Reader’ in 2004 he described it as one of the city’s cultural institutions. What’s in the boxes. What has happened with the Aadam Jacobs Collection, which is the name that has ended up being given to all of their recordings, is especially valuable to fans of indie and punk rock from the 1980s and early 2000s, when the scene hit the big time. mainstream thanks to nirvanazo. The catalog includes early performances by REM, The Cure, Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth and Björk. There are also rarities, like a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions, or a 1990 performance by cult group Phish. The star: Nirvana. Nirvana’s recording from 1989, when the group was completely unknown, may be the most interesting of all, taken two and a half years before the release of ‘Nevermind’. But there are also hundreds of performances by smaller groups that have no other sound documentation of their career. Engineers reviewing the recordings acknowledge some surprise at the good quality of many of the recordings, especially given that Jacobs was not using professional equipment. How it started. After appearing in a 2023 documentary, the Internet Archive contacted Jacobs to propose preserving the collection in its live music collection (Live Music Archive), since analog tapes have a limited lifespan. Gradual demagnetization, fungus and mechanical deterioration of coil mechanisms mean that the risks of loss increase with each passing year. Internet Archive volunteer Brian Emerick travels to Jacobs’ house once a month and picks up 10 to 20 boxes, each containing 50 to 100 tapes. He transfers the analog recordings to digital files, which he then sends to other volunteers for mixing and mastering. Emerick estimates that it has digitized approximately 5,500 performances since the end of 2024, and that the project will still take several years to complete. An exception. Jacobs’ tapes have survived through a mix of personal obsession and luck, which has ended up leading them to a repository where they will remain for posterity. He smartphone has democratized concert recording, to the point where it is practically impossible for a live show not to have its corresponding digitalization. But democratizing is not preserving: most of that material ends up buried in forgotten backups or online platforms that change their terms of service frequently. Jacobs was methodical despite his amateur status, and that is what has saved this true musical treasure. In Xataka | The first chorus decides everything: streaming is making today’s songs much simpler

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