silent

Orange has a silent plan to reign in Spanish telecos: get with all Masorange

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Orange has begun to contact international investment banks, according to Expansionto prepare an offer for 50% of Masorange that does not control. It has reserved 4,400 million euros – processes of the megadividndo generated during the merger – specifically for that operation. The main vendors would be the providence funds (14.8%), KKR (13.4%) and Cinven (12.1%), together with Spanish minority shareholders. Why is it important. This movement can mark a turning point in the Spanish telecommunications market, where Orange wants to go from being one more competitor – the third operator, in fact – becoming a dominant giant. Give continuity to the process initiated with the fusion of MasMóvil and Orange Spain that culminated with Masorange. If materialized, this operation could influence competition, prices and services offered to millions of users Between the lines. He Timing The operation speaks for itself. Although the shareholders pact establishes that until September 2025 the works for a possible OPV cannot be formally initiated, Orange is already moving file. This anticipation shows the strategic importance that the French gives to the Spanish market … … but also its determination to avoid any possible complication or competitor interested in this participation. Orange CEO, Christel Heydemann, already dropped clues during the last presentation of results When mentioning that “the OPV was not the only option” and remember that they kept the 4.4 billion intact to “maintain all open options.” A clear sign of your will to explore other ways beyond the OPV. In perspective. This operation marks the final episode of European consolidation, where three large groups – Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Orange – are gradually creating an increasingly structured continental oligopoly. Spain, considered so far one of the most competitive markets in Europe and with relatively low prices, can begin to raise prices in the face of lower competition. Movistar, meanwhile, Has Vodafone Spain in the Diana and Digi. For Orange, converting Spain into its second most important market after France has enormous strategic value: It allows you to diversify risks to the regulatory pressure of your domestic market. And makes him gain financial muscle on the European stage. And now what. Although the formal operation cannot be closed until March 2026 (when the two -year period expires during which the sale of shares according to the fusion pact) is prohibited, everything indicates that Orange and the funds will prefer a direct sale instead of an OPV. An IPO to brush would complicate both parties: Orange would have a subsidiary quoted with greater obligations of rePorting And the funds would be forced to sell packages progressively. The greatest question is not whether Orange will complete the absorption, but how the Spanish market will be once you have total Masorange control. And, incidentally, if regulators will have something to say about this concentration of power in a sector as special as that of telecos. Chair change in Brussels, from Vestager to Riberayou can remove obstacles with European consolidation on the horizon. The key is no longer so much in itself, Orange will complete the operation, but how it could impact the Spanish market if consummated. And, incidentally, if regulators will have something to say about this concentration of power in a sector as special as that of telecos. In Xataka | The service that nobody wants to give but we all pay: this is how the universal internet works in Spain Outstanding image | Orange

It was an abandoned nuclear power plant. Now he has a second life as the most silent acoustic laboratory on the planet

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Two gigantic cooling towers of almost 150 meters high flank what clearly seems to be a nuclear power plant in a rural Washington area. It is actually the acoustic laboratory NWAA Labs, one of the most silent buildings on the planet. An abandoned nuclear power plant. The laboratory was built on the vestiges of a pharaonic project that never saw the light, the nuclear washington Projects of Elma. Plants 3 and 5, part of what was intended to be the largest nuclear energy complex in the United States, were abandoned in the 80s without fissting a single atom. Designed to resist all kinds of impacts and earthquakes, the structures would have been extremely expensive to demolish, so the NWAA Labs adapted to them. The reactor is the reverberation chamber, the turbine room is the anecoic chamber and the old reactor control room is the laboratory control room. The facilities, still marked, remain a “disturbing” maze. The ideal facilities. The NWAA Labs is a project by Ron Sauro, an electrical and mechanical engineer formed in Stanford that combined its beginnings in NASA with being the keyboardist of the group The Rivieras, authors of a gold record in 1963. After a life designing sound systems, Sauro saw the unique potential of this nuclear power plant abandoned to bombing proof. The outer structure, with walls of 1.5 meters thick and eight layers of reinforcement bars, is designed to support an earthquake of magnitude 10 and the direct impact of an explosion of 10 megatons on its roof. The interior structure is isolated from the surrounding terrain by a ditch that minimizes the transmission of vibrations and noise. In another ditch within this, a circular and steel circular container is erected, originally intended for the nuclear reactor. The entire installation rests on a sandstone layer of more than 3,000 meters thick. An almost absolute silence. Thanks to these structures, the NWAA Labs presumes to have the two largest reverberation cameras in the world. Salas where the sound bounces up to 28 seconds without absorbent material, which allows to measure the sound power of a source or the absorption capacity of a material. In addition to the reverberation cameras, the laboratory has anechoic cameras designed to absorb sound and simulate a space without reflections. In these rooms, silence is almost absolute. The background noise is -43 dB (below the human hearing threshold). In the old turbine room, 198 meters long by 106 wide by 24 high, the reflections take so long to arrive (more than 160 ms) that do not interfere with some measurements. Who uses this laboratory. The NWAA Labs performs tests for the audio industry. The speakers are 20% of their business: over here more than 3,000 speakers of some 300 professional brands and high fidelity have passed. But it is also offered to other industries, which prove construction materials, acoustic insulation here, and even noisy washing machines or aircraft cabins. The laboratory also attracts musicians, video game and filmmakers, fascinated by their acoustics and post-apocalyptic aesthetics. Image | Walter Siegmund (CC By 2.5)

The silent sunset of the Solo-Voz interface

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Amazon has presented Alexa+its new version of the wizard driven by generative AI models. Between advanced customization promises and agricultural capacities, the presentation allowed to read between the lines somewhat deeper: the silent failure of one of the most important strategic bets of the company. And not just Amazon. Ten years ago, Alexa was born as a flag bearer without screens. Echo was conceived as a black cylinder without visual interfaces, a device that predicted the democratization of environmental computing. “The voice is the most natural interface,” Amazon executives repeated while strategically positioning themselves to master this new paradigm. It was an early, almost prophetic vision: we would interact with technology simply speaking, freeing ourselves from screens and keyboards. A future that seemed as inevitable as Smartphone himself a decade before. We shared it: in this same company We launched some Skills For Alexa Because we understood that they were the future. And then the screens arrived. First timidly with Echo Show, as a concession to those who had not understood the vision. Then, multiplying in formats and sizes. Wednesday’s presentation was revealing: All Alexa+ demonstrations were made on devices with touch screen. The most impressive interactions, those that justified the “plus”, depended primarily on visual elements. The great commitment to the voice interface failed to stay pure even in the house of its greatest defender. Apple arrived somewhat late to the car of the smart speakers. He did it with a homepod that happened with more sorrow than glory, a Homepod Mini which has been without updating and – continuously to the usual in Apple – has always attracted more for its price than for its quality. He recovered Homepod with A minimum update And since then he has not talked about him again. Amazon is not alone here. The fascinating thing is not the change of strategy – the companies constantly pivot – but Silence around this conceptual failure. No one at Amazon explained that the initial commitment to voice interfaces has been swept under the carpet. Alexa+ It will work on speakers without screen, but Amazon said it with a small mouth, without showing a single demo in them. They are secondary. Instead, we witnessed undercover rehabilitation, a silent turn where the screens went from being a complement to becoming the center of the experience. It is the tacit admission that its great initial bet – a revolution comparable to that of the iPhone for Apple – did not materialize as expected. The interface was not quick enough, precise or satisfactory for everyday needs. Neither the airpods, nor GPT Voicenor have they ever managed to turn the voice into the predominant interface. This strategic reposition is Alexa +’s unlocked story. While Amazon speaks of agricultural and customization, he is really building a bridge to a different paradigm than they initially imagined. The renewal of its application and its web interface are not mere accessories, but emergency floats in the face of the partial sinking of its original vision. There is some irony in which Amazon, a pioneer to leave the screens, now competes for recovering ground on the same visual battlefield that I used to consider obsolete before. The screens are still unbeatable. In Xataka | Alexa+, first impressions: the explosion of AI feels great to the Amazon assistant. But there are also many unknowns Outstanding image | Brandon Romonchuk in Unspash

Deepseek’s silent revolution

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The launch of the model Deepseek-R1 It has marked an inflection point in the AI ​​industry, demonstrating that it is possible to develop high -performance language models at a fraction of the cost of current leaders … and in an open source. Why is it important. This development questions the business model of large technological ones, which have invested tens of billions of dollars in proprietary infrastructure. They have done it under the premise that LLMS They are in themselves a sustainable competitive advantage. Deepseek (and not only her, although yesterday all the holders will take Calls) has burst that premise. The alarm signal. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, He said it clear: “The models and interface have become commodities. True value lies in data and metadata.” This vision suggests that the future of AI is not in the models itself, but in its practical application and in the data that feed them. This process reminds a lot of what happened with the search engines at the beginning of the century. Which was once considered high -value -owned technology – the search algorithm – became Commodity with the arrival of open source solutions such as Lucene / elasticsearch. The true value was not in the search engine per sebut in what Google built on him: contextual advertising, user data, integrated services, user experience. Today any company can implement the search, but only those that have managed to build a valuable ecosystem around them have prospered. Deepen. Deepseek’s efficiency is no accident. Forced by the restrictions of access to advanced chips, the researchers had to innovate in the model’s own architecture, with techniques such as latent care Multihead (MLA), which allow to obtain better results with less resources. Deepseek marks the beginning of a new phase of the AI ​​in which language models are a basic utility on which to build added value applications. The big question. Where will the value in a world where the LLMS are Commodities? Everything indicates that differentiation will be in the ability to apply these models to specific problems. And in the quality of the owner data, in addition to the user experience. The earthquake that Depseek has unleashed is the beginning of an era in which the competitive advantage will not reside in having the most powerful model, but in knowing how to apply it in the most effective way to solve real problems. In Xataka | Deepseek is the fashion model. The problem is that nobody knows very well what you are doing with our data Outstanding image | Xataka with Mockuuuups Studio

This is how this silent (and advanced) system called XProtect works

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Malware is not an exclusive threat to PCs. Macs can also become infected. For this reason, there are different third-party security solutions, such as Bitdefender, Intego, Malwarebytes or Avast, among others. What not many people know is that Apple computers have, for more than a decade, had a integrated antivirus called XProtect. XProtect It has been running silently in the background since it landed on Mac OS Unlike Windows Defender, there are no icons in the menu bar, nor do we have an application to manually perform system scans. How does XProtect work on macOS? The Apple ecosystem has a variety of protection measures, and XProtect is one of them. If we focus on macOS, the Mac operating system, Apple tries to avoid the malware from the App Store. The company reviews the applications so that no malicious software lives in its store, but let’s be honest, we don’t always use the App Store. Computers have always given us the freedom to install any compatible external software. To address the issue of external threats, Apple has a certification mechanism, where developers who do not use the App Store to distribute their applications can obtain a trusted certificate for macOS. Apple does not take this task lightly. Scans the applications and grants the certificate only when it cannot find known malware. Once this instance is passed, developers receive a certificate that they can attach to their application so that the target system can verify it, even when it does not have an Internet connection. At this point we find another of the protection measures. This is Gatekeeper, which looks for that certificate in the application that the user is trying to open or install. If the program does not have the corresponding certificate, the system warns users that they are trying to use software that cannot be verified. Since not all developers go through the certification processwe can ignore that message to use the application in question. Sometimes we will have to allow the installation of applications from the App Store and well-known developers from System settings > Privacy and security > Security > Allow applications from… XProtect is responsible for preventing the execution of malicious software. If for any reason the protection measures mentioned above have been violated, XProtect is responsible for preventing the execution of malicious software for the first time or detecting malware that has been executed on the computer. This integrated antivirus uses YARA signatures that are automatically updated periodically. XProtect comes into action at three key moments: when opening an application for the first time, when modifying an application in the file system, and when updating security signatures. If you detect known malware, blocks it immediatelynotifies the user and offers the option to send the software in question to the recycle bin. XProtect’s scope does not end there. Apple has improved the system to address problems that certain infections can cause. Once malicious software is removed, the built-in antivirus continues to scan for threats using a behavioral analysis engine. Of course, it does not have the ability to restart the computer. How do you update macOS built-in antivirus? XProtect updates automatically. However, you can buy if the system is installing the updates automatically. To do this, click the apple icon in the toolbar and then go to System settings > Software Update. Then tap the information icon under Security Answers. In the Automatic Updates category make sure the Install security responses and system files switch is turned on. So am I completely sure now? Although macOS has a solid security system, it is important to clarify that no system is 100% secure. In the world of cybersecurity it is often said that what is sought is to increase the level of difficulty for cybercriminals. And we achieve this in many ways. Integrated system tools are only part of this. The security features of the applications themselves, our security practices and, if necessary, third-party security tools also come into play. The level of difficulty varies according to the needs of each user. For example, for a long time iPhones and Macs can activate Isolation Mode. This is an extreme solution, but it is a good example of what it means to put higher barriers. This mode limits the functionality of applications, web pages, and certain system features. As a result, we obtain a more protected system, but much less useful than in its standard configuration. Images | Apple | Jakub Zerdzicki | Screenshot In Xataka | The Bank of Spain warns of malware capable of “capturing banking credentials.” His name: TrickMo

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