internet

We can no longer trust any image on the internet

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In 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated the Caribbean Sea and reached the coast of New York. There he left floods, power outages and spectacular photos. Of all of them there was one especially amazing which went viral, but there was a problem: it was false. She wasn’t the only one that slipped into networks. That image was just one more example of what we have seen before and after: great phenomena and events end up generating floods of content, some of which are not real. There are many reasons why people take advantage of these moments to spread false images, but at least before achieving credible images and videos was expensive. Only advanced users of applications like Photoshop or Final Cut/Premiere could achieve convincing results, but AI, as we know, has changed all that. We have been warning about this problem for some time: distinguishing between what is real and what is generated by AI it’s getting harder. and these days we have had the last great example of this trend. Anatomy of a deepfake The Kamchatka Peninsula, in the far east of Russia, has experienced a historic snow storm. The worst in decades, according to records, with snow levels exceeding two meters in various areas, according to Xinhua. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the administrative, industrial, and scientific center of Kamchatka Krai, has especially suffered these consequences, and residents of the region have spread images on networks of the one that already has been baptized like the “snow apocalypse.” Those images spread in news media and social networks and that they were real—often more “mundane” and much less spectacular— contrast with others that theoretically also showed the state of various points in the region but that are actually generated with AI. That video, for example, was shared a few days ago by Linus Ekenstam, an influencer who often shares news and reflections on AI. He republished that video and claimed that it was real, but soon several users indicated that the video was actually created by AI. Ekenstam argued that the theoretical AI error that it pointed out in the user was not such, and that where he lives there are poles near the streetlights. He therefore tried to defend that for him the video was real, but others suggested that it was not. The definitive test: a user linked to the theoretical original videowhich apparently originated in a TikTok account dedicated precisely to disseminating AI-generated content that seems real. The crucial thing about that fake video is that it is spectacular, but not overly spectacular. It is, to a certain extent, believable, and when the image and the camera movement itself is so convincing, it is difficult to think that “maybe it is generated by AI.” With this snow storm experienced in Kamchatka, unusual images have been shared on networks, much more typical of a dystopian Hollywood movie than a real natural phenomenon. A priori the images may even seem coherent, but a more detailed – and above all, more critical – examination makes it easier for us to realize that perhaps these images are not as real as they seem. In fact, the most striking images shared on social networks and that accumulate thousands of retweets and likes on X, for example, contrast with those published in traditional media, which tend to be as we said much less flashy and much more mundane. Spanish media such as OndaZero or OKDiario have published some images and videos generated by AI on their digital media or on their social media accounts without realizing that these videos actually had their origin in the aforementioned TikTok account which has managed to spread like wildfire. Debates about the possibility that certain images could be real have been frequent for example on Redditwhere users shared for example an amazing catch which when analyzed in detail seemed generated by AI. The avalanche of “citizen journalism”, which can be well-intentioned and very important at times, contrasts here with the role of the media, which has an enormous responsibility in acting as trusted sources of information. Even they (and we) can fall into the trap, and here once again The best thing is to start distrusting what we see on our screens, because it may be false content. The videos that appeared in some media such as SkyNews or in The Vanguard they combine with others that (at least, a priori) seem real, but that at this point also require rigorous examination. Our brain betrays us and technology knows it There are several well-studied psychological phenomena and cognitive biases that explain why we believed in fake news in the past and now the same thing happens to us again with deepfakes. It doesn’t matter if we know (or at least rationally suspect) that these images and videos are false: technology and especially AI precisely exploit these biases. Among them the following stand out: Confirmation bias: we believe what fits with what we already believe. Our brain does not seek truth as much as internal coherence, so if a piece of news reinforces our ideology, we lower the level of potential criticism, but if it contradicts it, we analyze it with a magnifying glass or directly discard it. The problem here is that AI can generate tailor-made content adjusted to each narrative. Illusory truth effect: here it happens that “if I have seen it many times, it will be true.” Repetition increases the feeling of truthfulness, not actual truthfulness, and it is something that, for example, social networks, machines for repeating hoaxes, make the most of. Again, AI facilitates the mass production of the same lie with minimal variations. We believe what we see: This is what some call perceptual realism. We trust too much in the visual, and hence the famous saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Images are processed much faster than text, and critical thinking comes after the emotional reaction, as you well argued Daniel Kanheman in his famous ‘Think fast, think slow’. Cognitive load: related … Read more

We have been telling ourselves for decades that we have the Internet thanks to military research. The problem is that it is false

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It is difficult to imagine that something as impressive as the Internet could be summarized just over 40 years ago in a single page. The map of germ of the internet, ARPANETtook up no more than a DIN A4 sheet of paper and reflected the less than 50 computers that at the beginning of the Internet were connected to each other. But even more curious is the story of how ARPANET was born, which may not be as you have been told. It all happened almost midnight on October 29, 1969, in a small room at the University of California (UCLA), and with a message that only said “it“. The true origin Search the Internet about its history (from the Internet itself), and you will find that the most common thing is to talk about its military origin. Technically it is correct since ARPANET was developed by the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), an institution that depended on the US Department of Defense. But the reasons were not military even though One of the minds behind some of the ideas that helped create ARPANET, Paul Baran, worked precisely with the motivation that cold war between the US and the USSR would not end with a blockade and destruction of the communications and control structures of the US army in the event of a nuclear attack. You will indeed find many references to this idea, which results in a story that makes for an entertaining movie. hollywood but in reality it was not exactly with that motivation that ARPANET was born. In the 1960s, within ARPA there was the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), at that time focused on taking full advantage of computers within the administration. Robert Taylor, one of the fathers of the Internet, began his career as director of the IPTO in 1966, and proposed to the then director of ARPA the possibility of connecting computers together to optimize their use. With this structure of networked computers (an idea that he took from the previous works of JCR Lickliderpioneer in 1962 by proposing the possibility of interconnecting equipment with each other) the ARPA could better manage your budget for computers and not distribute efforts uselessly but concentrate them on a few but very powerful computers connected to each other which would allow resources and results to be shared between researchers and centers. “lo”, first message between computers on the network Taylor was not limited to the resource of sharing computers and results between centers as an advantage of his ARPANET. If the idea worked, the agency was ensuring that it could use more computer models of different types without the compatibility or use of terminals to access them being a nightmare, while at the same time allowing the creation of protection against failures, so that with the non-centralized network structure proposed, if one computer failed, the others could continue working. Taylor’s initial proposal consisted of a test network with four nodes that they could expand if the results proved them right. ARPANET was born. The Internet was on the way. If you are passing through California, a recommended visit is in room 3420 Boelter Hall at the University (UCLA). Do not look for it as such because after being forgotten and until its use as a common room, it was recently restored and became part of the Kleinrock Center for Internet Studies (KCIS). Much of the history and documents are concentrated there (there is no waste of original presentation of ARPANET) and equipment that allowed the first node to be established between computers. But it’s actually a fantastic tribute to Leonard Kleinrocka professor who in 1969, right from that small room at the university, sent the first message on ARPANET. It was 10:30 at night on October 29, 1969 when, from the SDS Sigma 7 computer in said room, Professor Kleinrock sent the LOGIN message to the SDS 940 computer at the Stanford Research Institute, the computer with which he was connected in a basic way. The message remained a curious “lo” since there was a transmission failureand it was not until an hour later that the initial transmission could be completed. The first connection had occurred between the first two computers within the ARPANET. Two weeks later there were 4 interconnected teams, and in two years, almost seventy. And no one could stop this revolution. In Xataka | In 1995 ‘Toy Story’ forever changed the way animated films are made. He did it with rudimentary computers In Xataka | In 1969, humans set foot on the Moon for the first time. He did it thanks to a computer less powerful than your cell phone

Thanks to Starlink, Papua New Guinea was able to access the Internet in its most remote areas. That dream is over

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Thousands of people in Papua New Guinea They have been left without an internet connection following the government’s order to suspend operations of starlink in the country. The decision has come amid a legal blockade that has lasted more than a year, and is affecting businesses, health centers and rural communities that depended on Elon Musk’s satellite service to stay connected. What exactly happened. In mid-December, the National Information and Communications Technology Authority (Nicta) ordered Starlink to cease all operations in Papua New Guinea because the company does not have a license to operate in the country. “Starlink is currently not licensed to operate in Papua New Guinea, and until the legal process is completed, services cannot be permitted,” account Lume Polume, CEO of Nicta, told The Guardian. The company has already completely withdrawn its services from the territory. Why was there so much hooking? Although there are no official figures on how many users Starlink had in the country, telecommunications analysts estimate that its terminals served thousands of people before the closure, including entire towns and districts in remote areas, according to the media. For many rural communities it was the only viable option since mobile networks are unreliable or non-existent, and other satellite services are much more expensive. Starlink offered fast, relatively inexpensive internet in places where connectivity had historically been a chronic problem. The real impact of going offline. The blackout has generated a series of important problems in daily life. Teachers like Simon Jack, who works at a remote secondary school in the Southern Highlands province, have explained to the British media that students need the internet to check their academic results and see where they have been admitted to study this year. “For many of them, Starlink was the only option that worked,” he says. In the health field, health worker Theresa Juni, from East Sepik province, counted that his clinic used Starlink to communicate with doctors in the city and send reports quickly. “Now we have to wait days or travel just to send information. For patients who need urgent care, these delays can be dangerous,” he warns. On the other hand, the medium assures that some farmers and merchants must now travel long distances to cities to access banking services and other transactions that they previously did online. The legal mess behind the blackout. The problem comes from afar. Starlink has been trying to get a license in Papua New Guinea since December 2023, but in March 2024 the Ombudsman Commission blocked its approval citing concerns about service reliability and regulatory compliance, according to inform RNZ. Nicta took the case to court months later seeking to overturn this directive, but the court decision is still pending. Meanwhile, the regulatory authority is “legally prevented” from issuing a license until the court rules. The Pacific is from Starlink. The irony is that Starlink has become a lauded service in other Pacific nations, especially after its deployment in Tonga after the 2022 volcanic eruption destroyed underwater internet cables. There the service was described as “transformational.” However, Papua New Guinea has been left out of this story for now. Just like account According to RNZ, last November, SpaceX’s director of global market access, Rebecca Slick Hunter, said at a conference in Port Moresby that the company was ready to activate services as soon as it received authorization, and that Starlink had already established a local entity in the country. Citizen reaction. About 200 people have signed an online petition asking that Starlink be allowed to operate legally, as confirmed by Nicta. Businessman and former MP John Simon has criticized harshly the situation: “This is really bad for this country. Internet and online services have been very expensive and slow for years, yet we cannot listen to ordinary people on the street and solve this,” he told The Guardian. “The Papua New Guinea government must do something for struggling small businesses. Ordinary people and small businesses depend on the cheapest and fastest option, and right now that is Starlink. This problem must be fixed.” Cover image | starlink In Xataka | Without making a noise, someone has eclipsed Elon Musk among the most influential millionaires in the US: Larry Ellison

Why has the internet gone crazy shouting rhythmic words at the television?

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Table, strawberry, weight, weight, weight, table, strawberry, table. If your brain has just played a little music and you have read it to the beat, you have also fallen into the latest viral challenge of social networks. You will surely have felt this December that the algorithm has been “hacked” by an infinite loop of rhythmic words and a sound in a language that we cannot identify. But it is not a computer error: it is the definitive viral phenomenon that has transformed our Christmas dinners in a makeshift arcade. The phenomenon that conquered the holidays. What started as a niche game has become the absolute protagonist of the family gatherings of 2025. The challenge, known globally as Say the Word on Beat (or its version adapted to Spanish Say the word with the rhythm), has flooded digital platforms. According to analyzed datathe challenge has gone from being a simple filter to a skill competition that has already accumulated more than 1.2 billion views under its main label. The figures that can be seen at a glance under the hashtags #wordonbeat either #wordonbeatchallenge They exceed thousands of videos that, in turn, garner millions of views. This new phenomenon suggests that its rise is due to the extreme ease of participating, thanks to the CapCut automatic templates either on your own websiteand the ease of the game that brings together everyone from children to grandparents. The science of the mental “short circuit.” But what makes such a simple game so addictive? The answer is in our brain. The challenge is a digital and playful version of the famous Stroop effect. This psychological phenomenon measures reaction time when faced with tasks where there is a cognitive conflict. When trying to say the name of an object while the rhythm pushes us to say a rhyme (like cup, soup, clothes, cup), the prefrontal cortex of our brain suffers a small collapse as it tries to inhibit the automatic response. As professor and virality expert Jonah Berger explains in his theories about the “social currency”this type of content succeeds because it allows us to demonstrate a skill to our circle. Achieving the “Impossible” level is not just about winning a game; It is gaining public validation that the brain rewards with dopamine rushes. Furthermore, these “micro challenges” adapt perfectly to the new consumer habits: They are short, intense and highly competitive. An unexpected origin. One of the most curious aspects of the challenge is its soundtrack. That rhythmic, foreign voice that guides the game is not a creation of artificial intelligence. This is a traditional Thai school song known as “Moo Ma Ga Gai“, which translated would be something like “Pig, dog, crow, chicken.” This audio, originally designed for Thai children to practice the diction and tones of their language, was rescued and remixed by content creator @robgongfriendwho added the metronome and the whistle that we all recognize today. It’s a fascinating example of how digital globalization can turn an elementary school lesson in Southeast Asia into the hit of the new viral challenge. A new family “arcade”. Unlike other TikTok dances that are usually individual, the Word on Beat has made a qualitative leap towards the “phygital” (physical and digital) world. YouTube channels like Rhytup or its Spanish version I Know The Game! have detected a massive peak of traffic from Smart TVs. Instead of consuming content on the small mobile screen, users are projecting these videos on their televisions to play as a group. The living room thus becomes an improvised arcade, replacing classic board games with visual reflex challenges. It is, in essence, the “karaoke” of the new generation: a collective activity that encourages laughter through other people’s mistakes. A party at the stroke of beat. Today, as we prepare for the chimes of New Year’s Eve, it is very likely that the ambient sound is not just that of toasts or party music. Before the grapes, you will hear rhythmic shouts: table, dumbbell, strawberry… It’s not that the networks have hacked our brains, it’s that we have found in the simplicity of a Thai rhythm the most human and fun way to connect. So, if tonight you see your entire family yelling at a screen, don’t be surprised. They are simply trying to keep their brain from jamming before the clock strikes twelve. Image | instagram Xataka | The house as a showcase: how interior design has taken over from fashion

disconnect from the Internet with a digital iron curtain

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Imagine a world without Internet It’s not that strange. In October, an AWS outage left the Internet shivering. In December, with Cloudflare sneezehalf the Internet collapsed. These are just two examples that show that, At any tremor, the network wobbles. And they are specific cuts, but imagine that there are 655 cases in a month. Or until 2,099. If they are very specific figures, it is because that is what is happening in Russia. And not because of an error or a server crash. But because Russia is experimenting to completely disconnect from the global Internet. RuNet. We told it a few years ago. The Russian Ministry of Statistics noted that the Government had instructed all state sites and services to change their domain names. From a global one to a Russian one. It coincided with Ukraine asking that Russia was disconnected from the network, and that was it: mere coincidence. According to the rulers, disconnect of the Internet responds to a strategy of defense against cyber attacks (Russia is a power in this sense). According to others, it has more to do with implementing a filtering system similar to the one China operates with its ‘Great Firewall‘. The truth is that we knew this as ‘RuNet’and the strategy that began step by step in 2019 is now colossal. The new normal. Throughout these years, Russia has been testing disconnection tests. 2025 has been a critical year in this sense, one in which administrations have repeatedly pulled the cable to test the system. They have even been given massive blackouts in regions such as Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia to test the stability of RuNet. In 2024 They tested in several regionsbut this year has been a ‘massacre’. In May of this year, on the eve of Victory Day40 regions were left without mobile communications. There were 69 “blackouts” of the network, but in June there were 655 and in July the figure increase to 2,099. It is estimated that it exceeds the number of outages in the entire world for a full year. Data packet loss reported on Cloudflare when Russia has pulled the cord Roskomnadzor. That’s a key name in this story. To ensure control over Internet access and consolidate it within the legal framework, the Russian government expanded the powers to Roskomnadzorthe state regulator. The entity has the ability to isolate and redirect traffic within Russia in the face of “specific threats” such as cyber attacks, critical infrastructure failures or loss of access to both domestic and foreign networks. They have the authority to issue binding orders to teleoperators, allowing them to disconnect Russia from the global Internet in an emergency, and in fact, in recent years the authorities consolidated more than half of Russian IP addresses in the hands of seven service providers who are clearly linked to the state. In the evidence This year, which has left regions without mobile Internet for up to two months, the narrative is defense. If the ukrainian war is that the rules have changed, but in 2025 in particular, lDrones and cyber attacks They have created a totally new battlefield. That is what they hide behind for some of these patterns of cuts, but the problem is that they are occurring in remote regions, such as Omsk, 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Lock. During these outages, users are not completely disconnected, but rather have limited access to websites that are on a government-approved whitelist. Anyone who is not there is blocked or penalized. YouTube is an exampleexperiencing a significant reduction in speed since summer of last year. Any service that uses Google caching is also being throttled. AND cloudflare It is also being penalized by Internet providers. From Cloudflare itself they affirmed this summer that only Russian users are allowed to upload the first 16 KB of any website. It is a limitation that affects 20% of the entire Internet and 16 KB is not even enough to upload a sad image. WhatsApp, Google Meet, FaceTime or Telegram also have been penalizedto the point that in October there were users who they complained because they did not receive confirmation SMS from those apps to create a new account. 2026 doesn’t look better. The Government has a solution: Max, a super app similar to China’s WeChat with messaging, calls, video, file sharing and banking operations option. With everything that this implies. And, if throughout 2025 new laws and articles have come into force to give more power to Roskomnadzor, on March 1, 2026, Decree No. 1667 will come into force, which will establish new rules for centralized network management, giving more power to the regulator and which will be in force until 2033. The decree will potentially give Roskomnadzor the ability to pull the cable permanently. For now, what has been experienced in recent years responds to different tests, but it is evident that Russia is preparing for this total disconnection and the creation of an Intranet. Much more controlled and to where VPNs to see what happens abroad are criminalized. In Xataka | The color of your Ethernet cable is not for decoration: it is a key visual language

30 years later it is the glue that keeps the internet alive

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Three decades ago, a joint release from Netscape and Sun Microsystems introduced the world to JavaScript, a scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. Behind that press release A story of technological survival was hidden: said language had been born months before, the result of a frenetic ten-day sprint led by engineer Brendan Eich. What began as a hurried prototype to give life to the netscape browserhas today become the infrastructure that supports a huge percentage of the visible web. The myth of ten days. The legend tells that Eich wrote the core JavaScript in just over a week. And it is true, but the result was a hybrid of influences. Pressured by Netscape management to make the language more like Java, Eich adopted a syntax of curly braces and semicolons. However, under the hood, it injected the functional elegance of Scheme and Self’s prototype-based object model. This mix, born out of haste, left a legacy of technical inconsistencies that developers still suffer from (and love) today. From Mocha to confusion. You may not know that the language was not always called that. It was born as Mocha, became LiveScript and was finally named JavaScript in a marketing maneuver to take advantage of the popularity of Java. What’s more, the confusion over names continues to this day among less knowledgeable users: but Java and JavaScript have the same thing to do with each other. car (car) and carpet (rug), as is usually answered when someone asks about their differences. The strategy worked, but angered rivals like Microsoft. His response was to create his own version called JScript, something that caused notable fragmentation that made Bill Gates himself complain about Netscape’s constant changes. To bring order to the chaos, the language ended up being established in 1997 under the name ECMAScript. Image by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash Ajax and the conquest of the server. For years, JavaScript was seen as a toy for doing simple validations, but that all changed in 2005 with the arrival of AJAX. This technology It allowed websites like Gmail or Maps to update data without reloading the page: the step was taken from static websites to dynamic apps. The second leap occurred in 2009 with Node.js, which took JavaScript out of the browser and onto the server. Key for developers to use a single language for the entire stack and which now involves between two and three million packages in the npm registry. Absolute domain. Despite the emergence of modern rivals, the hegemony of JavaScript is indisputable. According to the 2025 Stack Overflow surveycontinues to be the language most used by 62% of developers, something that puts them ahead of others such as Python or SQL. Its ubiquity is such that it has transcended the web: it powers desktop apps using Electron, mobile development with React Native and even AI tools. It is the default language for learning to program and chosen by 60% of students. This mass success has brought with it a complexity in the JavaScript ecosystem: Frameworks like React, Angular and Vue dominate the market (used by 40% of web developers). The weight of libraries is beginning to take its toll on the performance of the web. Therefore, predictions for 2026 point to a resurgence of pure JavaScript either Vanilla JavaScript. Forced maturity. Despite its birth defects, JavaScript was able to evolve. In 2015, the ES6 update radically transformed the syntax, but the real paradigm shift came from Microsoft: with the TypeScript creationa layer of security and types was added that solved much of the original chaos, something that allowed it to become the almost mandatory standard for professional development. JavaScript is still the engine, but TypeScript is the precision flywheel. A legal problem called Oracle. The paradox of JavaScript is that, despite being an open standard, its name is proprietary. Oracle inherited the “JavaScript” trademark after purchasing Sun Microsystems, although it has never released a product with that name. Recently, key figures such as Brendan Eich himself and the creator of Node.js have signed a request so that the US patent office can cancel the trademark due to abandonment. The legacy of a hack. It is ironic that the companies that sponsored his birth have disappeared or been absorbed, while his creation remains more alive than ever. Authoritative voices like Douglas Crockford (creator of JSON) have come to suggest they should “retire” it for its basic design flaws, but the reality is that the modern web would not exist without it. JavaScript is not just code; is the lingua franca of the internet, the invisible glue that turns static documents into digital experiences. Without its existence, the network would only be a collection of texts and images without movement, something similar to a PDF newspaper that we see on our screen. In Xataka | There is a shadow giant pulling all the technological strings that connect TikTok with AI: Oracle

One night in 2000, Jennifer Lopez debuted a historic dress. And then Google changed the internet forever

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If you have a moment, go to Google and type something like “Jennifer Lopez 2000 Grammy dress.” Leave that new AI Mode section aside and tap on the ‘Images’ tab to find a green Versace dress with a jungle print that caused a real sensation in both the fashion media and the world of technology. In fact, that dress marked a before and after on the internet. Because before February 23, 2000, when we wanted to see what clothes the current star had worn to an event (to give an example), we had to wait for the news to appear on TV, browse through magazines or go to the Internet to Google it. And there you didn’t find the photo, but instead you had to wade through a sea of ​​blue text links to search through. There was no Google Images. We’re not even talking about videos. Before JLo’s Grammys dress, this was all field text Why it is important. Google’s decision to organize information based on images and not only on text not only changed the world of fashion as the work of a European brand went from being seen on the catwalks and little else, to reaching the entire world. It also modified our way of accessing information, laying the foundations for an Internet (and later, social networks) focused more on audiovisuals than on pure and simple text. These were the dawn of the internet of content. What started in July 2021 with an index of 250 million images, went to one billion images in 2005 and by 2010, exceeded 10 billion. Later, Google stopped offering that figure to focus on quality over quality. Paradoxically, in 2025 it is following the opposite path, massively deindexing images by considering them low quality or generated by AI. The context. In the year 2000, the Google search engine was not what it is now: the undisputed leader with almost 90% share. And the “almost” thing is something about the post-internet – ChatGPT had been overcoming that barrier for more than a decade. In fact, with just a couple of years of life, he was beginning his rise at a time when there was no hegemony as he managed to impose later, with others like Yahoo! and Altavista with greater weight. And then she arrived on the red carpet at the 42nd Grammy Awards, nominated that year for Best Dance Recording for “Waiting for Tonight.” Jennifer Lopez wore a semi-transparent green dress with a dizzying V-neckline that fell to her navel. If you already existed at that time and were old enough to watch TV, you surely saw it because because her dress was viraleven before that concept was used for matters other than biology. Seeing it once wasn’t enough, so people went online to look for it en masse. “People wanted more than text (…). At the time, it was the most popular search we had ever seen” counted Eric Schmidt for Project Syndicate. The former Google CEO explained that at the time “we didn’t have a sure way to get users exactly what they wanted: J.Lo wearing that dress.” Between the lines. That’s when started to cook Google Search Image. According to Cathy Edwards, director of engineering and product at Google Images, it wasn’t something that happened overnight, but JLo lit the fuse. There were few employees, but like Edwards explained In 2020, it was clear to everyone that they needed to build a photocentric search engine. The question was knowing what priority to give it. That same summer, Google hired a newly graduated engineer, Huican Zhu, and put him to work with Huican Zhu, who was the executive director of YouTube and who at that time was responsible for product. The two stood hand in hand and, According to Edwardsthey practically developed it alone to launch Google Search Images in July 2021. In Xataka | People are so fed up with the current Internet that they are returning to MySpace. Not out of nostalgia, but out of rebellion In Xataka | All the times that throughout the 20th century we imagined ourselves on the Internet

We already know which country had the highest internet speed in the world in 2025: Spain

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How has the internet changed in 2025? It’s too broad a question, but if there’s anyone trying to answer it, it’s Cloudflare. The company has published an extensive summary of the most important thing this year and among the numerous conclusions there is one that has surprised us: Spain is the country with the fastest internet connection in the world. Spain at full speed. in the studio stands out that Europe was the clear leader in terms of the best internet connection speeds. Here Spain was also the protagonist, because it was the country with the highest download speed in 2025, with 318 Mbps on average (25 Mbps more than in 2024). It was also the best in terms of upload speed, with 206 Mbps (13 more than in 2024). A possible person responsible. Cloudflare indicates that the reason why Spain leads this unique ranking is probably in the program UNICO-Broadband (Universalization of Digital Infrastructures for Cohesion). This initiative has been going for years and the current goal was to achieve an infrastructure capable of providing services at symmetrical speeds of at least 300 Gbps, scalable to 1 Gbps, and achieving 100% coverage in 2025. Achieving everything is almost impossible —Hello, rural Spain— but that effort certainly seems to be paying off. Spain also more than meets the metric of latency under load: even on intense connections, response times are very good. We also enjoy excellent latency. Data download and upload speeds are important, but so is the latency of the connections: the lower it is, the more fluid the communication is, especially in video conferencing, gaming and streaming applications. Here Iceland takes the cake with only 13 ms, but Spain is still among the best with 19 ms. Things are even better in the so-called latency under load, which measures how long it takes a signal to go and return (the ping) when the internet connection is under intense load (playing online, watching 4K videos). In that metric, much more realistic than “resting” latency, Spain is in third place with 89 ms, a truly remarkable figure. Years as leaders. These results may surprise, but in reality Spain already led these rankings in past editions of Cloudflare’s annual summary. It happened in 2024and also in 2023which is undoubtedly great data that shows that despite the problems that may arise, most users have access to an enviable infrastructure. More traffic than ever. Global internet traffic grew by 19% in 2025, and the person most responsible for that traffic was the Googlebot that searches the internet to index it and make it easier for us to find all types of data in the Google search engine. Although crawlers from AI companies are gaining ground, they are still a long way from Google’s activity, and with good reason: all types of websites want to be “crawlable” in order to be “findable.” The same does not happen with AI. The higher the ratio, the less traffic these chatbots send to content websites. Anthropic is the worst here, and Google, of course, the best by far. What happens to AI in 2025. There are many metrics related to AI this year. For example, Anthropic is the platform that sends the least traffic to content websites (ahead are OpenAI and especially Perplexity). This also causes platform crawling bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) to be “blocked” in the robots.txt files of many websites to prevent them from collecting data without permission to train their models. Google continues to reign. The list of most popular internet services Not much has changed around the world: Google leads that ranking, and is followed by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Instagram. It’s probably more interesting to see what data Cloudflare is reporting on the most popular generative AI services. There the winner is not a surprise (ChatGPT), but the order of the rest of the contenders is striking, because they are then followed by Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Character.ai. Grok is in ninth place and DeepSeek in tenth, for example. That list will surely be very different in 2026. Image | Sasha Pleshco | Stephen Phillips In Xataka |

We already have fake GTA VI videos circulating on the internet and made with AI. The implications are more serious than it seems

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The strange thing is not that it happened. The strange thing is that it hasn’t happened before: the news that we would have to wait a full year (and not the few months that were planned) to enjoy ‘GTA VI‘ fell like a bucket of cold water on the fans. And after all the pertinent guesses, came the inevitable string of fake trailers made with AI. Despair. The desire for the most anticipated game in recent years has resulted in fake trailers, a subgenre that has always existed, but since the appearance of AI is reaching spectacular levels of verisimilitude. The channel specialized in this type of content Teaser Universe published a fake “final trailer” for the game that It already exceeds 600,000 viewsand which was followed by an additional one that had less impact. With the complicity of Google. As Kotaku tells itthe merit of the scope is not only the verisimilitude of the video (a trained eye can detect that That trailer for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is fakebut with digital video game content and animated images things get complicated), but from Google. The search engine spread the video as if it were official Rockstar Games content, although everything was done with AI, as its own creator recognized. In this way (remember that we are not just talking about the Google search engine, but about YouTube’s own algorithm, which also recommends it), what should be an anecdote becomes a viral phenomenon… and disinformative. Made to confuse. As much as the video includes in its description that it is made with AI, there are other elements of it that are somewhat more confusing. For example, the title “Grand Theft Auto VI – Final Trailer (2026) Rockstar Games”, a name calculated to be confused with official material. He timing It was also intentionally confusing: the video circulated just after the announcement of the postponement of ‘GTA VI’ until November 2026, a time when players were willing to consume any content linked to ‘GTA’, although in places such as the comments of the video itself The anger at the deception was evident. The false button of the twerk. It is just one more example of how easy it is to manipulate algorithms and search engines using AI, and not the first related to ‘GTA VI’. This summer, YouTuber Jeffrey Phillips launched a deliberate disinformation campaign publishing on Reddit and TikTok that the Rockstar game would incorporate a button to do twerking. Phillips even created a fraudulent subreddit, r/TrueFactsOnlyz, whose description would theoretically help the AI ​​with its search summaries. The result exceeded his expectations: Google AI Overview ended up literally quoting the Reddit comments that the Youtuber himself had writtenand referred to these comments as if they were speculations from real players. When someone asked him for proof on Reddit, he responded that Rockstar had called him personally. It was enough for Google’s AI, and it became clear that Google prioritizes content from Reddit without bothering to give it human oversight, allowing malicious lies like this (even if it was an experiment) to contaminate searches. A systemic problem. All these cases linked to ‘GTA VI’ are not isolated anomalies, but symptoms of a structural failure on YouTube. Mozilla published in 2021 an investigation which revealed data that 71% of the problematic videos reported by volunteers had been directly suggested to them by the recommendation algorithm, not actively searched for. And because of these suggestions, these questionable content recorded 70% more daily views than other videos. The proliferation of the so-called massive content generated by artificial intelligence aggravates the problem. have been identified channels that have accumulated almost 500 million views using AI tools exclusively. NBCNews uncovered a network of channels spreading hoaxes about famous African Americans with deepfakessome of them commercial ads that generated income for both the creators and YouTube. That is to say, as Jonathan Albright commented on Mediumthe technological paradox is in sight: YouTube is capable of instantly detecting songs protected by copyrightbut it does not identify texts from journalistic articles read with synthetic voices or images extracted from other websites. A real chaos. In Xataka | I have tried Gemini Dynamic View: here begins the era of visual and interactive AI that you will not want to stop using

If Cloudflare goes down, half the internet goes down

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If ChatGPT or Twitter (X) isn’t working for you, you’re not alone. In the last few hours, there have been problems at Cloudflare that have ended up affecting a multitude of platforms that use its services. This company, as happens with Amazon Web Serviceshas become one of the pillars of the internet, and when Cloudflare has problems, half the internet is infected. Another fall. It’s not the first and it probably won’t be the last time we experience a Cloudflare outage. This company has a gigantic content distribution network (CDN, for Content Delivery Network) that is used by a multitude of internet services and platforms. This infrastructure allows websites of all types to be easily and quickly available to users, but a failure in its operation causes crashes like today’s. When accessing services like X.com (Twitter) we now encounter an error message. The cause is clear: Cloudflare. What they say on Cloudflare. Those responsible for the company have a status website for your infrastructure. In it we can see how the company currently indicates that they are aware and are “investigating a problem that affects multiple clients.” Just before that problem notice they were showing several maintenance operations messages on some of their nodes (Atlanta, Los Angeles, Tahiti) today. At 12:17 (Madrid time) they already warned of a problem that, however, may not have to do with this last one at 12:48. Twitter (X) and ChatGPT, among those affected. The fall of Cloudflare has left platforms such as Twitter (X) or ChatGPT without service, which either do not work or do so irregularly. It was even difficult to check which other services were down because platforms like DownDetector, which precisely allows you to detect affected websites, was also affected by the Cloudflare downfall. It’s time to be patient. As often happens in these cases, users can do little beyond being patient. Cloudflare is still investigating the problem at this time, but both Twitter and Downdetector and other affected services seem to be returning to normal. Update (13.38): Cloudflare indicates that services are beginning to recover but “higher than normal” error rates continue to be observed. They continue to investigate the problem. In Xataka | How a mistake in the network configuration of a small US business brought down Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon and others globally

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