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All the unanswered questions left by Netflix’s purchase of Warner: a huge mess

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After a few weeks of three-way negotiations, it is finally Netflix that has won, with $82.7 billion ahead, take over Warner Bros.. Which includes, of course, HBO Max, but also the entire production arm of the veteran company, one of the few majors classics that remain in Hollywood. However, the purchase is of such importance that a multitude of questions arise, many of them still unanswered. This is everything we know (and don’t know) about this absolute revolution in the world of streaming. What we do know. Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery have announced an agreement that radically transforms the entertainment industry. The operation, which is expected to close between the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027, unites the streaming giant and its more than 300 million subscribers with one of Hollywood’s most legendary film studios, founded more than a century ago. For now, Netflix must wait for CNN and Discovery to finish separating from what was their parent company. And now, the doubts. What will happen to Warner’s classic IPs and franchises? Netflix takes over a trove of intellectual property that includes the DC universe‘harry potter‘, ‘game of thrones‘, Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo and the distribution rights to franchises such as ‘Dune‘ or the Monsterverse. It also acquires film classics such as ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Citizen Kane’, as well as emblematic HBO series such as ‘The Sopranos’, ‘The Wire’ and others close to the platform such as ‘Friends’. Netflix will most likely keep these franchises active and continue them. The company has stated in its statement that these IPs will allow “creating greater value for talent, offering more opportunities to work with successful intellectual property.” The big advantage for consumers is certainty: One of the fiercest criticisms of Warner Bros. Discovery under David Zaslav was the removal of content from HBO Max for tax reasons. Netflix has opposite incentives. Who knows…and if we get to see ‘Batgirl’? What has Netflix not bought and what Warner divisions and businesses are not included in the purchase? The deal completely excludes Warner Bros. Discovery’s global networks division, which will be spun off into a new company called Discovery Global. This spin-off has been planned since June 2025 and will be completed in the third quarter of 2026, before Netflix can close the acquisition, and includes assets such as CNN, TNT Sports in the United States, all Discovery channels (Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, TBS, TruTV), the main free-to-air television channels in Europe, the Discovery+ streaming platform and Bleacher Report. This split makes strategic sense: Netflix has never shown interest in the traditional linear channel business, which is in structural decline. In fact, revenue from Warner Bros.’ cable television division. fell 23% in the last reported quarter. Netflix stays with what really interests it: production studios, content libraries and HBO Max. Are HBO Max prices going to rise? The most immediate answer is that most likely yes, although not immediately. Netflix has a documented history of regular increases: Since 2017, the platform has raised its rates by approx. every 18 months. The most recent one occurred in January 2025. However, the arrival of HBO Max changes the equation. When Disney acquired Fox in 2019 for 71 billion, Disney+ increased its price by 129% between 2019 and 2025. We must not be naive: with 302 million global subscribers after acquiring the 128 million of HBO Max, Netflix would exceed 420 million, a huge base where small increases will generate billions of dollars in additional income. Our bet: a single premium price between 20 and 25 dollars/euros per month by 2027, when the deal is underway. What does Netflix get apart from the catalog? Beyond content libraries, Netflix acquires monumental physical and operational infrastructure. You get the historic Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, a production facility that has been operational since the 1920s and includes multiple sets and top-of-the-line technical equipment. The company has emphasized that this will allow them to “significantly expand American production capacity.” Perhaps most transformative is the global theatrical distribution apparatus. Warner Bros. has deals with networks around the world, a network that Netflix has never fully developed. Netflix will inherit “a global distribution apparatus” which includes contracts, commercial relationships and an army of professionals: human teams made up of executives and creatives with decades of experience. Will you take advantage of it? Netflix has promised maintain “Warner Bros.’ current operations, including theatrical releases for films,” but frankly, and seeing Netflix’s relationship with theaters in recent years, there is reasonable room for skepticism. How is Netflix’s presence on HBO going to be creatively noticed? Speculative territory, but we can reason from the corporate cultures of each platform. HBO built its reputation through a creative process where pre-production is vital, with constant rewrites and only the best series receiving the green light. A meticulousness that has historically paid off, for example, at the Emmys. Netflix is ​​just the opposite: it renews and cancels without stopping, trying many things and sticking with what works. Possibly we will see a hybridization where HBO maintains its distinctive seal of quality, less fast food than Netflix, but accelerating production rates. As a curious note, in the presentation in London to which We attended just a couple of days ago The current CEO of HBO, Casey Bloys, highlighted the differences in creative approaches with Netflix as one of its strengths. Maybe everything will change from now on. What legal problems may arise for the purchase? The regulatory hurdles are substantial. The combined entity would exceed 420 million global subscribers, giving it more than 30% of the streaming market, a threshold traditionally considered problematic in US antitrust law. Republican Representative Darrell Issa warned this month that Netflix already possesses “unmatched market power” and that adding HBO Max “could result in harm to consumers.” Senator Mike Lee was more forceful, declaring in X that this transaction “raises serious competition issues, perhaps more so than any transaction I have seen in a decade.” Netflix … Read more

More than 40,000 people were left in MOVES III limbo when the Auto+ Plan was presented. It has just been resolved

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The presentation of the Auto+ Planthe Government’s new direct aid program to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles, has come with more than just announcements of millionaire investments and promises for the sector. It has also raised doubts. Specifically, it has generated expectations about what will happen with the thousands of people who have been increasing the waiting list for the plan that is about to retire, the MOVES III. Logical. After all, it is calculated that there are tens of thousands of people who still They are waiting for your help. The Ministry of Industry already has confirmed that the Auto+ Plan will not cover the loose ends left by its predecessor. Their solution would be another: inject more funds into MOVES so that the autonomies attend to all the “pending requests”. In fact, it has already committed to mobilizing 400 million thinking about the users who were left in administrative limbo with the change of plan. What has happened? That the announcement of the new Auto+ Plan has generated expectation… and doubts, unknowns that can be explained for three reasons. The first is that the Auto+ Plan will arrive in 2026 to retire MOVES IIIapproved retroactively last spring to support electric purchases made between January 2 and December 31, 2025. The second reason is that, due to the design of MOVES III, its funds They didn’t take long to run out in several communities, generating a considerable waiting list. The third reason is that the Government itself has made clear since Auto+ will not cover the pool of pending payments that MOVES III applicants have made up. What is the difference between MOVES III and Auto+? Basically, they are two different plans, with notable differences in their approach and application. In spring the Government provided MOVES III with 400 million euros designed to support purchases made throughout 2025, an injection of funds that was managed with a peculiarity: although the plan comes from the central government and is carried out through the Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE), its funds are distributed among the autonomous communities to process the applications. This bet allowed the system to be decentralized, but it was also focus of criticism due to delays and blockages. The Government seems to have taken note and on Wednesday announced “a new line of help” endowed with another 400 million euros by 2026, the Auto+ Plan, which will be carried out directly by the ministry. “This aid will be managed by the central government, not the Autonomous Communities, to guarantee greater speed and homogeneity in management,” confirm from La Moncloa. The new plan also differs from its predecessor, MOVES III, in other details, such as that it will not cover personal charging points and the aid will be delivered at the time of purchase. Although the program generated some doubts, there was one in particular that clouded its presentation… What the hell happens with the pending issues that MOVES III has pending once it retires? Is that important? Yes. And it is because of a revealed piece of information a few days ago by Europa Press: MOVES has 40,000 clients on a waiting list pending receipt of aid. Not only that. The agency assures, citing sector estimates, that the amount pending payment would be around 300 million euros. Such a figure is partly explained by how the plan was designed, with a distribution of resources based on the population and not on where the demand for electric vehicles is actually registered. This caused Madrid and Catalonia to exhaust their funds after just a few months, in July and September, respectively. And what is the situation now? At the end of November Europa Press assured that there were 10 autonomous communities that had already exhausted their funds. However, as MOVES III did not expire until December 31, 2025, it continued to add applicants who piled up on a waiting list. The same one that was surrounded by doubts after the presentation of the new plan. If Auto+ centralizes management and creates a single fund for the entire country, this will prevent buyers who request aid from depending on whether or not their regions have exhausted the allocated amounts in the future. The problem is the past: the approximately 40,000 clients who, according to the news agency, are keeping an eye on the MOVES piggy bank and see how the plan is about to expire. Has the Government said anything? Yes. The waiting list has generated so much expectation that the Ministry of Industry and Tourism has had to come out to clarify some keys. Yesterday, during a visit to Valencia, Jordi Hereu confirmed that the new Pan Auto+ direct aid plan will focus “on present and future demand”, which will not cover the pool of users carried by MOVES III. Does that mean that the Government will leave lying to those thousands of buyers waiting for your help? On Thursday Hereu did not go into details, but he did say that the Executive will look for a way to shorten the waiting list of the previous plan. “(Everything that) has been done and managed in 2025 with MOVES III, which has been a success, is an element that we will surely address in due course,” guaranteed. And how will he do it? The answer has arrived today. Just 48 hours after announcing its new program, the Government has committed to mobilizing an extra 400 million euros in 2025 to meet pending MOVES III requests. The news is spread by economic media, such as The Economist and Expansionthat assures that the IDEA contacted the CCAA yesterday to confirm that the funds have been expanded so that they can cover the users who were left in limbo. The injection is added to that of Auto+. Images | Precious Madubuike (Unsplash) and Pool Moncloa/José Manuel Álvarez In Xataka | The European Union decided that our future involved the electric car no matter what. Until Germany realized something

An Italian man did not want to be left without his elderly deceased mother’s pension. So he started dressing up as her.

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To the civil registry official the alerts they jumped him quickly. The person in front of me claimed to be an 85-year-old woman, but if you looked closely you detected certain details that didn’t fit. His voice, for example. It was too serious and from time to time it seemed to go down several tones. Lugo had the skin on her neck and hands, thick, smooth, very different from what one would expect to see on an almost nonagenarian woman. More than an old woman, he looked like a man in disguise. The civil registry official was quickly alerted. So much so that he ended up notifying the police. And in doing so he uncovered a delusional scam that has cost Italy tens of thousands of euros and now has the country fascinated. A lot of money, few scruples. That the imagination is sharpened when there are bills involved is nothing new. Just as it is not true that there are unscrupulous people willing to do all kinds of nonsense to pocket money that does not belong to them. Last year we told you the story of a Brazilian woman who appeared at a bank in Rio de Janeiro accompanied by the corpse of a man (supposedly “Uncle Paco”) to withdraw 3,000 euros in her name. That case went around the world, but it is not much more bizarre than another that just aired in Italy. As happened in Brazil, there is a corpse and an attempted scam involved, although in this case the staging has been somewhat different. The reason? The alleged criminal did not take the dead man with him, but instead disguised himself as him to impersonate him before the city council. The problem is that the alleged scammer was a 56-year-old man and the person his mother wanted to impersonate was a woman in her 90s. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Who are you? The case has told it in detail the diary Corriere della Sera. A few days ago, an employee of the civil registry in the town of Borgo Virgilia, in Mantua (Italy) found that a neighbor wanted to renew her expired ID. So far nothing out of the ordinary. The woman showed up by appointment and her papers were in order, but upon seeing her the official became suspicious. The woman walked at a slow pace, wearing a skirt, jewelry, painted nails, and an exquisite layer of makeup that apparently tried to hide her wrinkles. In theory he was 85 years old. Or at least that’s what his license said. Her neck, however, was robust, her wrinkles were strange, and her hands had little to do with those of a frail, almost nonagenarian old woman. Not only that. Although she spoke like an older woman, from time to time her tone seemed to drift into deeper registers, registers more typical of an adult man, between 50 and 60 years old. “Isolated from the rest of the world”. The mayor of Borgo Virgilia, Francesco Aporti, explains that this accumulation of details made the employee suspicious, who ended up alerting her bosses and the police. The first alert was raised when reviewing the security cameras and verifying that the supposed octogenarian had arrived at the wheel of a car, something strange considering that it did not appear that she had a driving license. A more exhaustive search also revealed that the elderly woman had not been to the doctor or visited specialists for some time. Neither her nor her son. “It was as if they were isolated from the rest of the world,” says Aporti. There were signed documents and deeds of sale, but either they had been handled directly by his son as attorney-in-fact or they showed a signature that did not seem completely authentic. And the cake was revealed. With all these indications, the authorities decided to set a trap for him. They called the old woman’s house to inform her that she had to return to the registry to complete her paperwork. They were not able to speak with her, but they did speak with her son, a 58-year-old man who assured them that he would notify his mother. Shortly after, the woman went to the town hall, wearing makeup, a skirt and jewelry. On that occasion, however, she did not meet the official who issues ID cards, but rather a police officer who accompanied her to the police station. There the cake was revealed: during the interrogation, the supposed old woman recognized that he was actually her son, an almost 60-year-old nurse who was impersonating her. A corpse in the closet. The next question is obvious: Why? To find out, the agents inspected the house where the old woman supposedly lived, where they found her mummified body in a closet. The woman in question was called Graziella Dall’Oglio and everything indicates that died in 2022 at 82 years old. Instead of notifying the death, the only child decided to keep it a secret, keep his mother’s body at home and continue collecting the pension religiously. According to precise CorriereThanks to that income and the properties his family had, he managed to pocket around 53,000 euros a year. “There were no known relatives. The woman’s husband, a doctor, had died, and the 58-year-old man was her only son. He worked as a nurse, but was unemployed. The last time the old woman was seen at City Hall was ten years ago, when she came to renew her old identity document,” explains the mayor of the town, who confirms that the police are investigating to clarify two points. First, confirm that the body they found in the closet is indeed Graziella’s. Second, that he died of natural causes. A strange case? Strange yes. Uncommon, not so much. Although in this case the protagonist’s lack of scruples and daring stands out. it’s not the first time that the Italian press talks about people who hide the death of a … Read more

Udio closed fronts with Universal. The creators were then left unable to download their own AI songs

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Generative music applications have achieved something that seemed unthinkable a few years ago: allowing anyone, with just two prompts, to can produce complete songs with vocals, arrangements and structures that can sound surprisingly real to most who hear them. This experience, which is presented as magical and accessible, has a much less visible side, linked to how these models have been trained and their legal implications. Many of these platforms have turned to large volumes of content available on the weboften copyrighted, to build their systems. The user enjoys the result, creates and shares, until a legal change, an agreement or a lawsuit transforms the tool and the experience is no longer the same. Until just a few weeks ago, udio It was one of the services that best represented that promise of instant creativity. It had managed to attract both curious people and experienced musicians thanks to its simple system, the tools to extend, mix or remake songs and, above all, the possibility of downloading songs for use outside the platform. There was nothing to suggest that this model was about to change. The first indication came when the company began to talk about a “transition phase” linked to new agreements with record companies. It did not yet detail what was going to happen, but it made it clear that the platform was entering a different stage. The day the download button disappeared. Confirmation came when Udio announced thatas part of its transition, audio, video and stem downloads would be disabled for several months. It was a feature that many considered essential, but now they could only play their creations in Udio and share them using links from udio.com. In exchange, the company reported an increase in credits and more generation capacity, although that did not compensate for the feeling of loss. The message was clear: the songs still existed, but they no longer left the walled garden. Warner and Universal chose a different path than the judicial confrontation: turning Udio and Suno into partners rather than adversaries. Universal signed agreements for the next version of Udio to be based on licensed music and offer artists new avenues of income, while Warner did the same with Suno and also sold the Songkick platform to incorporate it into that new ecosystem. Record companies went from denouncing to collaborating, with a clear condition: at least in the case of Warner and Udio, artists and composers would have the possibility of deciding whether their voice, their image or their style could be part of the creations generated by AI. From defendants to partners. Once the content is within the legal space, what is relevant is not only that agreements have been signed, but how the industry’s priorities have changed. A year ago the goal was to put AI platforms on the bench for using protected music to train their models. Today, a growing part of the sector has understood that it may be more profitable to integrate them than to stop them. The move does not eliminate legal conflicts, but it opens the door to a model in which record labels oversee, license and participate in revenue, rather than reacting only through lawsuits. It is a change of focus that signals where the music business is moving. What nobody sees: scraping as the foundation of musical AI. For years, the actual functioning of many generative music models was far from transparent. Some startups, like Suno, admitted to having trained their systems with “virtually every quality music file available on the web,” trusting that such use would be protected by the fair use. However, when record companies began to examine that process, the conflict ceased to be technical and became legal. Images | Universal Music | udio | Unsplash In Xataka | AI has become the best example that if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product

A new turn to end the war in Ukraine has left the final outcome in the hands of a decisive point: 900 km

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The latest diplomatic movement between the United States and Ukraine has crystallized into a peace draft reduced to 19 points which, according to both delegations, constitutes real progress with respect to the controversial document initial 28 points. That first draft, written largely with Russian participationcrossed multiple Ukrainian red lines and set off alarms throughout Europe. As things stand, the final decision is a little more 900 km. The new twist. In Geneva, after hours of tense negotiations that were on the verge of collapse, the team led by Andriy Yermak managed soften or reformulate most of the most problematic aspects. The new text, described as a “solid” body of convergence, integrates security guarantees, economic commitments and infrastructure protection in a framework that is no longer perceived like an ultimatumalthough it is far from resolving the most explosive core: the territorial question. That point (the possibility of giving up portions of the east) was explicitly “placed in brackets” for Presidents Trump and Zelensky to decide, a gesture that recognizes both the political gravity of the issue and the legal impossibility of resolving it without a national referendum in Ukraine. The revision of the draft also eliminates elements such as the limitation of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to 600,000 troops or a total amnesty for war crimes, but deliberately preserves the biggest obstacle. Thus, although the White House describes the process as “optimistic,” the heart of the agreement is suspended in an uncomfortable balance: moving forward without defining the most decisive point. The air battle. In parallel to the negotiations, a strategic reflection runs through the debate: no agreement will survive if Ukraine lacks of air guarantees real. Moscow has shown that your fastest and most effective way to break a ceasefire is violate airspace with missiles, drones, bombers or fighters. Ukrainian cities have been subjected to long-range attacks and coercion from the sky for three years, and the country has only avoided total collapse thanks to a makeshift patchwork of Western anti-aircraft defenses. They remembered the analysts at Forbes that any sustainable peace requires three pillars: an integrated defense network that connects radars, Patriot batteries, NASAMS, IRIS-T and aviation in a common operational framework, a modernized, numerous Ukrainian air force capable of maintaining continuous patrols with F-16, Rafale or Gripen equipped with AESA radars, long-range missiles and advanced electronic warfare, and a visible presence of allies operating from or within Ukraine, similar to the Baltic Air Policingto deter violations and react unambiguously to any incursion. Clarity. Furthermore, it was pointed out that the rules of engagement should be explicit: immediate interception of unauthorized aircraft, shooting down any vector that poses a threat and automatic retaliation against launch points if Moscow fires missiles after an agreement. Without this aerial architecture, a peace signed on paper would become a fragile parenthesis, exposed to a Russia that historically explores every void and tests every border. The stability of the future agreement depends both on the diplomatic text and the firepower that supports its lines. The point that no one wants to write. What happened in Geneva shows that diplomacy is advancing, but also that it is doing so with a limp. counted the financial times that the meeting began almost broken: the Americans, upset by previous leaks, arrived tense, and the Ukrainians, distrustful of the pro-Russian bias of the original draft. It took a long conversation. almost therapeuticbetween Yermak and the American delegation to reduce tension. Afterwards, both sides revised the draft point by point, eliminated the troop cap, rewrote the amnesty and adjusted key definitions. The Europeans (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and the EU) joined later to coordinate priorities and synchronize postures. Subsequent statements reflect a “constructive atmosphere,” with Washington under self-inflicted pressure to present the document to Russia as soon as possible. Be that as it may, no technical correction can resolve the essential absence: the impossibility of deciding in that room about the territory. According to the Ukrainian negotiators, they did not have a mandate to give up a single kilometer, and the Constitution requires consultation to the population. Kyslytsya himself admitted that what is pending requires “leadership decisions,” a diplomatic euphemism to admit that what is unacceptable for Ukraine has been postponed, not eliminated. The 900 km as a judge. The peace draft can have changedbut the reality on the front changes even faster. As diplomats wrote, erased and rewrote sentences in Geneva, Russia intensified its offensive in multiple sectors: advances north of Huliaipole, increasing pressure towards Siversk and a siege that could be sealed in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad. The front line, about 900 kilometershas become the silent arbiter of the negotiation: the more Ukraine retreats, the more strength Russia believes it has to demand concessions, and the more it resists, the more room Kyiv has to reject any territorial concession. The American and Russian proposal filtered It started from that premise: asking Ukraine to hand over areas that it still controls before it loses them. Zelensky, however, has reiterated that Ukraine will “defend its home” and that accepting territorial amputations would undermine not only its political legitimacy, but the very possibility of lasting peace. Time trial. The problem is that time on the front is against Kyiv. Russian advances, although extremely costly in men and material, are creating pockets of vulnerability and forcing to retreat reserves to cover cracks. And what is at stake in those 900 kilometers It’s not just terrain: is Ukraine’s ability to come to the table with a negotiating position that does not amount to staged surrender. Every kilometer lost on the map alters the draft in Geneva more than any paragraph. Between paper and the battlefield. What emerges from these three fronts (diplomacy, the sky and the line of contact) is a more or less clear picture: the peace agreement is closer in form, but not in depth. He 19 point text It represents an indisputable technical advance, but it depends on enormously costly presidential decisions. Air guarantees are the indispensable condition … Read more

The bloodiest scene in the history of cinema left its protagonist in shock. 50 years later we know it was real

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Stephen King told that, for him, his Carrie It was like a pig taken to the slaughterhouse, and the blood of the animal reinforced the metaphor anticipating the massacre that would follow. Hence when the novel became a film, the most recognizable scene was the most visceral, organic and unpleasant of all. A gore moment that became celluloid history. The blood that changed terror. The Legend of Carrie (the movie) is born at the moment when a thick mixture of corn syrup and red food coloring falls on actress Sissy Spacek, a moment that has transcended horror cinema itself to become a cultural icon. The construction of the scene (the coronation interrupted by the explosion of humiliation and fury) concentrates the essence of a film that turned the artificial into something emotionally real. He Karo syrupheir to decades of cinematic experimentation with fake blood, here acquired an unexpected meaning by becoming the visual and psychological trigger for Carrie White’s transformation. Anniversary. Now that 50 years have passed since the original film, Spacek has remembered that that substance “warm as a blanket” in the first seconds soon became an exhausting, sticky and repetitive experience, forcing her even to sleep with the bloody suit so as not to have to reproduce the makeup application. But precisely that physical surrender, with its almost immobile and tragic presence under the weight of the thick liquid, is what granted to the plane that kind of mythical quality: the border between artifice and emotion is erased, leaving only the fixed gaze of a broken teenager who feels, for the first time, that the whole world is laughing at her. The infernal filming of a scene. The Independent said It’s been a few years since the prom sequence required almost surgical precision. Although the rest of the scene required more than thirty takes, the exact moment of the blood spill could only be filmed once or twice due to the impossibility of cleaning and recomposing the set. Spacek even accepted that it was her own husband who operated the cube mechanism to ensure that the fall was perfect, knowing that her interpretation would depend on how she received that hit of red viscosity. The fake blood was a physical enemy but also a dramatic element on which the story completely depended: its texture, shine, the way it adhered to the actress’s body and soaked her dress, everything contributed to giving the impression that something irreversible had happened. In fact, many of the scenes we saw ended up being very real: a stage that ended up accidentally burning, a team evacuated while the director I asked to keep rolling and injuries such as the perforation of an actress’ eardrum during the attack of the launched hose telekinetically by Carrie. What should have been millimeter choreography became an almost ritual experience, in which fire, destruction and general chaos seemed to respond to the internal logic of the film itself. The unexpected myth. Despite initial doubts, the rejection of critics who considered it a sensationalist spectacle and the fact that even the name of Stephen King appeared poorly written In the first previews, Carrie ended up transforming into a phenomenon. Its mix of operatic stylization, black humor, adolescent cruelty and symbolic violence connected with a much wider audience than expected, inaugurating a type of youth horror cinema that is still alive several generations later. For King, a small-town teacher who had thrown away the first pages to the garbage can before being rescued by his wife, the film marked the beginning of a hyperbolic race. For director Brian De Palma, it was the definitive consolidation of his baroque style, obsessed with the gaze, visual manipulation and expressive excess. A unique role. Of course, for Sissy Spacek, work meant an Oscar nomination and lasting recognition for a performance that combined absolute vulnerability and unleashed rage. On a personal note, I would say that none of the later remakesreinterpretations and adaptations managed to capture that mixture of innocence, evil and contained tragedy that the original became its hallmark. The validity of a story. The truth is that with the passing of the decades, Carrie has not lost strength. Quite the contrary, its contemporary reading resonates in a world where school violence, public humiliation and the feeling of youth isolation are part of the collective imagination. the movie speaks of the ritualized cruelty of adolescence, of vulnerability to changes in the body and of a universal feeling of maladjustment that Spacek described a few days ago on CNN like that “wounded teenager that we all have inside.” The combination of emotional realism and the tone of a dark story, almost biblical in some passages, turns the story into more than just an exercise in terror. The presence of a fanatic mother, the brutality of her classmates, and Carrie’s own inability to understand what is happening to her allow the story to oscillate between melodrama, religious parable, and Greek tragedy. The visual references, the use of color and the stylization of the final climax consolidate an imaginary that continues to define how psychological horror is filmed. in adolescence. The weight of artifice. Five decades later, Spacek’s memory of filming it’s contradictory: the physical hardness of the process, the exhaustion of wearing hardened layers of corn syrup, the extreme discomfort of the long days and, at the same time, the privilege of having worked on a project where each member of the team was dedicated to something that they did not know would transcend. That mix of technical suffering and unfiltered creativity explains why the blood scene has become an immutable symbol of horror cinema. What began as a practical necessity (creating cheap, realistic, and manageable gore) ended up leaving an indelible mark on how emotional violence is portrayed on screen. Perhaps for this reason, Carrie remains a most accurate study in fragility, repressed rage and the devastating power of humiliation, but also as a demonstration that even a sticky, artificial substance can, in … Read more

We have left Moss out for nine months in space at the mercy of vacuum and radiation. He’s back alive and breaking records

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Life is much more tenacious than we usually think, even when we take it out of its cradle and expose it to the most hostile environment we know: the emptiness of the outer space. And to carry out this test, a team of scientists has decided to take a moss and expose it to conditions outside of Earth, giving a result that opens a path for us on how to create new ecosystems on other planets. The protagonist of this story is Physcomitrium patensor better known as primitive moss. And there were a series of Japanese researchers those who wanted to check What would happen if this little primitive moss was left outside the International Space Station. The logical a priori thing would have been that he would have died instantly, since he did not have oxygen, the environment was really aggressive, with a lot of direct radiation as he did not have the protection of our ozone layer and logically he was not in his natural habitat. But the reality is that he has managed to endure the absolute emptiness and the cosmic radiation for 283 days. But not only has it survived these conditions, but upon returning to Earth it has been planted and germinated. Without a doubt a great surprise in the face of the resistance that these organisms have. A round trip. The research, led by biologist Tomomichi Fujita of Hokkaidō University and published in iScience, started from a premise that seemed like science fiction: can a primitive land plant withstand prolonged exposure to cosmic elements without protection? To find out, in March 2022 they launched hundreds of samples aboard the ship Cygnus NG-17. Once on the ISS, the astronauts attached these samples to the outside of the station, orbiting at about 400 km altitude from the Earth’s surface. There they stayed for nine months, exposed to constant cycles of light and shadow, extreme cold, and relentless ultraviolet radiation. In January 2023, the samples returned in a SpaceX capsule (mission CRS-16) and when analyzed in the laboratory, the results perplexed the researchers. More than 80% of the spores had survived and were able to germinate. Not everything is the same. Just as two humans may not be equally resistant, something similar happens with mosses. In this research, we tried to verify the resistance of three types of fabric, but the winner was undoubtedly the sporophytewas the hardest fabric. Something that was already suspected, but the litmus test that this was was missing. In terrestrial laboratories, stress is usually tested separately. That is, in a season an organism is exposed to heat, or cold, or high radiation. But in this case everything happens at the same time, and that is why it was expected that his survival would be null with this combination of factors. But the reality is that the spores protected within the sporangium endured. And although the scientists noted a degradation of one type of chlorophyll due to visible light, the structural and genetic integrity of the plant remained intact enough to be “resurrected” upon returning home. Its importance. Growing a moss on the surface of the ISS seems insignificant and a silly waste of money. But the reality is that this finding has two very important readings. The first looks towards the stars and the terraforming process. It must be taken into account that mosses were the first plants to colonize land on our planet 500 million years ago. It can be said that they are natural pioneers thanks to the fact that they can settle on bare stones and then when they die, they generate soil where more complex plants later emerge. In this way, if they can survive space travel and withstand extreme conditions, they could theoretically be the biological vanguard. in lunar or martian bases to help modify its atmosphere and ecosystem. Something more urgent. Right now, our goal has to be to create crops that are more resistant to the extreme weather conditions we face on our planet. And the solution may lie in these spores and their genetics. Understanding the mechanism that gives them this great resistance is vital so that we can modify seeds of other crops with the aim of conferring the same resistance. A vital step to face everything that may be yet to come to our planet. Images | Mike Frandson POT In Xataka | Fungal spores and other microorganisms are candidates for surviving on the surface of Mars, according to NASA

sacrifices privacy to not be left behind in AI

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Europe, which until now seemed one of the few champions of privacy, threatens to stop being so. The European Commission is preparing a “digital omnibus”, a package of measures that will theoretically be announced at the end of the month and that propose notable changes to current privacy regulations. Why is it important. Draft documents obtained by Politico They are worrying. European Commission officials say these measures are intended to simplify many of the laws that regulate the technological field. The executive, they claim in this medium, insists that it is only cutting certain excessive rules through “targeted” amendments, but those drafts show disturbing changes. A weak GDPR for a strong AI. The changes that, for example, will affect the General Data Protection Regulation (RGPD, or GDPR for its acronym in English) will be carried out with a singular objective: to benefit the developers of AI models. The pillars crumble. Jan Philipp Albrecht, former member of the European Parliament and one of the architects of the GDPR, this spells the end of data protection and privacy that were pillars of the EU strategy. “The Commission should be fully aware that this is drastically undermining European standards.” Is Europe left behind, so out of privacy? What is certain is that European economic power is losing relevance and that seems to have motivated these changes. Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi mentioned the General Data Protection Regulation as an obstacle to European innovation in artificial intelligence in its historic report on competitiveness from last year. But. The question, of course, is whether Europe really needs to sacrifice the privacy of its citizens in order not to be left behind in the technological field. When the EU released the first regulation on AI, the AI ​​Acthe stuck out his chest precisely for applying an (overly) cautious approach. This provoked criticism that for months has caused some steps to be taken back in those so rigid goals. Europe, technological pariah. The AI ​​Act, the DMA and the GDPR have certainly caused the deployment of AI models and functions in the old continent to be blocked or delayed. Passed with Apple Intelligence and with Copilotfor example, but while Europe restricted the arrival of AI to users, in the US and China the deployment has been dazzling, total and without restrictions… for better and for worse. In fact, in the United States the philosophy of laissez faire is extraordinary, and companies even advocate for forget copyright laws. Dangerous exceptions. These documents aim to create exceptions for AI companies that would allow them to process disturbing special categories of data such as religious or political beliefs, race or health data that could be used to train and operate their AI models. The definition of such types of data, which enjoy additional protections under privacy regulations, is expected to be redefined. Anonymized data. Another objective seems to be defining what constitutes personal data. Thus, pseudo-anonymized data—with personal details opaque to prevent identification of a person—may not be subject to GDPR protections. This type of change would occur after the precedent of a recent ruling in that sense by the EU Court. Cookie banners. Finally, the draft wants to reform annoying European rules about cookie banners by including a provision in the GDPR that would give website and app owners more legal grounds to justify tracking users beyond simply obtaining their consent. Once again, bad news for the privacy of European users. Total uncertainty. The European Commission is expected to reveal its plans on November 19. Changes to the current drafts may be proposed during these days, however. Once this package of measures is presented, both EU member countries and legislators will have to approve it, something that is not certain either due to the great divisions that exist in terms of privacy between them. We are living it for example with the controversial Chat Controland these measures also go in that direction. In Xataka | Europe dominates open source AI but loses the race: the paradox that 150 billion euros will try to solve

Stephen Hawking left a hidden treasure that has just been discovered. The problem is that it is in the form of floppy disks

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The Cambridge University Library houses several historical treasures including letters from Isaac Newton and notebooks from Charles Darwin. Now they will take care also of manage 113 boxes with documents and memories of the physical Stephen Hawkingbut in those boxes they also found a surprise turned into a challenge: floppy disks. Lots of them. Computer pioneer. The famous physicist was an early user of those first computers in which data was stored on floppy disks. When he suffered from ALS this was a very important resource to be able to communicate and work, and now those disks that have just been discovered could contain all kinds of revealing data about Hawking’s life and work. Future Nostalgia. That’s what it’s called the project of the University of Cambridge and its library that precisely tries to safeguard all that information that in the past ended up being stored on floppy disks. Recovering such data is not easy when so much time has passed, and this project tries to educate about the best ways to preserve said information and transfer or recover it from those floppy disks. A format with an expiration date. Although one would think that floppy disks are a more secure way to store data than paper and ink, this physical medium also has clear disadvantages. The iron oxide covering the thin layer of plastic can degrade and lose its magnetic capabilities, meaning data could be lost forever. Each floppy disk is a world. With old books there are not too many problems when it comes to retrieving the information: you open them and read them (if you understand the language, of course). With floppy disks you need the hardware to be able to read them—a compatible disk drive—and also figure out how they are formatted. Leontien Talboom, responsible for this project, explained How to also clean those floppy disks was complex and there were various methods that they were exploring. These included the use of hand soap or isopropyl alcohol. Hawking used both a PC and a Mac. The disks arrived at the project in two batches. The first, with five and a quarter (5.25 inch) disks formatted on an MS-DOS based PC. The second, with three and a half disks, somewhat more recent and that were still used on an old Mac. According to Talboom, they are mainly talks that Hawking gave: “from a technical point of view they are really interesting because his talks were so big that he had to divide them into several floppy disks.” I wrote to speak. Hawking’s illness left him unable to speak for himself, so for years he used various voice synthesizers to express his ideas. Precisely for this reason he wrote so much on the computer and saved those documents on disk: this allowed him to use them later so that his synthesized voice could read said documents. Different discs, different readers. Although 5.25″ and especially 3.5″ discs were the most widespread, other formats were also seen such as eight inch discs which for example were used in the Churchill Archives Centre. Chris Knowles, one of the Future Nostalgia participants, explained how he bought a player for these discs on eBay. “It was a miracle that it worked,” but that allowed him to recover the information from those disks. Forgotten formats. They have also received some three-inch floppy disks, a much less widespread and peculiar format that had some success in the United Kingdom before the 3.5″ format was clearly imposed. To recover them, they ended up using an old reader manufactured by Amstrad that they had to modify to bring it back to life. And then there’s the software problem.. The information recovered from these disks can also pose another challenge: that it was created with software that was abandoned and even ended up disappearing. Some disks, for example, had documents written with a missing word processor called Diamond Word. That’s where a kind of “translation” comes into play to convert those files into something readable in the current era. Safeguarding our past. This work demonstrates how critical it is to try to protect and recover information from these old formats. Many of those floppy disks are 40 or 50 years old, and as Knowles says, “old emails and work calendars may not look like historical documents. They might seem banal. But they’re what Newton’s or Darwin’s letters would have looked like 200 years ago. Now they are fascinating documents that open a window to the past.” In Xataka | The 20 most important personal computers in the history of technology

It’s not that there are hungry bears, it’s who is left to face them

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In 1976, the Government of Japan registered 500,000 licenses first level hunting. By 2012, the licenses did not arrive at 100.00. These data did not have much importance in the nation’s newspapers until someone noticed. The bears have taken over “rural Japan”, they are hungry and have no resources to contain them. In the background, a national demographic crisis, and another at an international level that have turned the animal into the number one danger. First they were emergency huntsnow it is directly the army. A sinlife. Japan is experiencing the biggest rebound of bear attacks recorded since data exists, with more than a hundred injured and at least twelve people dead since the spring, along with more than 20,000 sightings reported in the first half of the fiscal year alone. The meetings already are not restricted to mountainous areas: the animals appear in gardens, stations, schools, supermarkets and thermal complexes, which has generated a feeling of constant danger in regions that traditionally associated autumn with hiking, local festivals and enjoying the autumn landscape. Bears everywhere. The density of sightings is concentrated in the north, especially in Akita and Iwatebut cases have also been confirmed nearby from Tokyo and Osakaa clear indicator of the loss of ecological boundaries that separated the forest from the urban. The result is that a season that used to symbolize serenity, hiking and foliage viewing has become a period continuous alertwith cancellations of marathons, school walks and tourist events, and with hikers changing destinations, traveling in groups and equipping themselves with bells, radios and repellent sprays. Depopulation, aging and warming. He increase in attacks It is not a casual or strictly natural phenomenon: it is the accumulated consequence of decades of rural depopulation, aging community and environmental alterations. In large areas of the north, entire towns and neighborhoods have disappeared emptying and agingdrastically reducing the human presence that previously deterred bears from approaching. The figure of the local hunter, key to managing fauna, is has become scarcewith hunting associations composed mainly by elderly men that they can no longer intervene quickly enough. At the same time, the reduction of acorn and beechnut cropslinked to climate change, has decreased the food available in the woods, driving bears into abandoned fields and home orchards, where they find unguarded persimmons, chestnuts, and apple trees. Extra ball. In many villages, the ancient satoyama landscapes (the buffer strips between forest and crops) have been abandoned, erasing gradients that previously marked clear boundaries between the wild and the human. This spatial and ecological convergence has made the encounter with bears stop being a contingency and become an something statistically probable in certain areas. The army warms up. The seriousness of the situation has forced the central government to intervene, deploying troops in Akita to support local authorities who admit they are overwhelmed. However, the military They do not have authorization to kill animals: their role is restricted to installing traps, transporting authorized hunters and helping to remove carcasses, while the lethal component falls on a network of hunters whose capacity is already insufficient. This model highlights a growing contradiction: Self-defense forces, already limited in personnel, must address a prolonged civil emergency in parallel to their defense mission. As we countthe government has started preparing emergency measures that include relax the rules hunting in urban areas, hire new shooters, reinforce monitoring and use drones with deterrent sounds, but these actions require time, interprefectural coordination and specialized training. The feeling of citizen vulnerability persists because the problem does not depend only on individual captures, but on the restoration of a territorial balance that has been eroded for decades. Social and psychological impact. Plus: the increase in attacks has modified the daily routines in affected regions. Parents accompany their children to school, residents avoid going out after dark, farmers work in fear, and hikers reconsider activities that were previously seen as an essential part of seasonal well-being. Surveys show that more than 75% of hikers now feel anxious about the possibility of encounters with bears, and more than half have changed or canceled plans. The feeling of insecurity has even crossed cultural identity Japanese autumnassociated with contemplation, gastronomy and a slow pace. This emotional transition from enjoyment to caution reflects that the problem is not only one of fauna, but of social structure: when the territories they lose populationservices, surveillance and organized community, also lose their capacity to absorb and manage natural risks. Crisis and bears. The crisis of bear attacks in Japan it is not an exceptional episode but the visible manifestation of a deep dynamic where depopulation, aging, ecological transformation and weakening of rural management converge on a new vulnerability. While bears search for food and territory, humans they withdraw from spaces who previously maintained a controlled cohabitation relationship. The answer cannot limit yourself to hunting more or install more traps: It will require rethinking the revitalization of rural environments, restoring satoyama barriers, training new cohorts of managers and strengthening community capacity. The immediate future will bring a temporary truce with hibernation, but the trend indicates that spring and next fall they will stress again this border. Seen this way, the question that arises is not only how to protect the population, but how to reconstruct a territorial balance that allows the human and the wild to continue coexisting without fear replacing daily life. Image | Animals, US Department of Defense Current Photos, jasohill In Xataka | Faced with the largest flood of wild bears in memory, Japan has taken a measure: emergency hunts In Xataka | Wolf hunting throughout Spain depended on a red button that changes its status. And Europe has decided to press it

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