sink

Its shares have fallen 99% and threaten to sink it

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As I write these lines, X (the artist formerly known as Twitter) is full of memes and jokes about Fernando Alonso and the vibrations of the AMR26. I don’t know what happened to him in qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix. I don’t even know if, given what I’ve seen, He will at least be able to run on Sunday. The only thing that is clear is that Aston Martin is a meme factory. They have kept Fernando Alonso, capable of selling us the impossible. They have signed Adrian Newey, one of the most successful people in the history of Formula 1. And the preseason is summarized in that, in a year that Honda powers the team, Fernando Alonso has been seen walking with a Toyota Yaris through Monaco. Did you think it couldn’t be worse? Well, tell that to those who bought Aston Martin shares in 2018. Today they have depreciated 99%. The company’s fate hangs by a thread, mired in debts that seem like a slab that is impossible to lift. No clear candidates for purchase. With Lawrence Stroll, owner of the Formula 1 team and endorsement for his son to drive one of the cars, buying the company’s image to be able to use its name, colors and logo in the future. You can do it no matter what. And that’s not good at all. A life on the brink of bankruptcy The story of Aston Martin is a story of survival. Actually, few luxury companies can say that they have not encountered serious viability problems throughout their history. Ferrari, who sees the world burning around him and who seems untouchable on his throne, It was saved by Fiat in 1969. Lamborghini did not find stability until it was bought by the Volkswagen Group. Bugatti, which is also inside, it’s a money losing machine. And if we look at the British, Jaguar is in a process of reinvention. Lotus was bought by the Chinese conglomerate Geely and today little remains of what it was. McLaren is not much better than Aston Martin. As Raymond Blancafort explains in The Vanguardbarely 10 years had passed when Aston Martin encountered its first bankruptcy. After a first adventure focused on the world of competition, it was in the 1930s when the management at that time began to focus the company on street sports cars. Things would not improve later and David Brown, a businessman, would be the one to buy the company after World War II, assume the accumulated debts and pay his own tribute. And since then, Aston Martin sports cars have the letters DB associated with them. As the decades passed, the brand maintained two things: fame and debt. While James Bond rode around in his sports cars, the company’s buying and selling games marked the future. To the point that the company came to form Premier Groupthe umbrella under which Ford held Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo… and Aston Martin. Things would not end well (Ford announced historic losses) and In 2007 it changed hands again to go to David Richards, who already controlled the future of the competing company, with the support of an American banker and two Kuwaiti groups. In 2013, Mercedes joined the company with a small participation and the objective of sharing knowledge and developments. In 2020 Lawrence Stroll arrived. A more than complicated crisis We have stopped along the way because the arrival of Lawrence Stroll marked a before and after. In 2018, this Canadian businessman creates the Racing Point group and buys the Force India Formula 1 team. The following year, he formed a team with the Mexican driver Sergio Pérez and a debutant: his son Lance Stroll. It would not be until 2021 when Racing Point became the Aston Martin Formula 1 teamwhich remains in a completely separate structure from the car manufacturer. But how do you get to this point? At the same time that Lawrence Stroll was taking his first steps in Formula 1, the Canadian acquired 16.7% of the vehicle manufacturer. The agreement included that the Formula 1 team would inherit its name. For this, Stroll paid almost 240 million dollars and a rights issue of 417.5 million dollars was carried out, which already anticipated that his weight in the company would continue to increase. The promise was to get Aston Martin out of a complicated situation. With less than 6,000 cars sold, the company announced losses of more than 120 million euros, 89% more than the previous year. Stroll arrived with the intention of turning the Aston Martin DBX, its future SUV, into a luxury product. Yes to Porsche had rescued him with the Cayenneif Lamborghini was producing the Urus, Aston Martin would regain momentum with the DBX. The truth is that the car is being a failure. The British SUV has never had enough traction and nor did it have the advantage of the Cayenne or the Urus, which share a platform and development with other Volkswagen Group cars, which helps reduce the risks. The projections of selling 5,000 cars annually have remained at 1,000 units placed on the market each year. With the Aston Martin DBX in free fall, the next ones to jump off the cliff were investors. Since going public in 2018, the shares have fallen 99% and The company now costs just over 400 million euros. last summer Liverpool invested more money in signings than what the entire company costs. Although the SUV has not found its place in the market, the DBX has not been the only thing that has failed. In 2017 the development of the Rapide Ewhich was supposed to be a rival to the Tesla Model S. The project ended up being canceled for a very simple reason that was pointed out by Tom Stacey, a senior lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University who worked for the company at BBC: In all parameters, the Aston Martin was a worse car than the Tesla. Not only that. Time has shown … Read more

The RAM crisis is great for those who manufacture it. There are those who think that a tsunami will sink many others

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Looking at current technology is peering into a well of contrasts. On the one hand, the optimism of companies that push the narrative of a future supported by AI while spend tens of billions of dollars. On the other hand, the consequences for the consumer segment are a new component crisis. Nobody likes pessimism, but unfortunately the market does not bring good news, and the CEO of Phison has a clear message: Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And that means that the RAM crisis It is going to take away some technology companies… in all sectors. In short. RAM and SSDs are the components that best exemplify the cost of data centers. They are elements that They have increased the price a real outrage and are made up of NAND flash chips. It is where the information is stored, but even those components need a ‘brain’, and that is where Phison comes into play. This Taiwanese company is one of the most powerful when it comes to creating something very specific: memory controllers. They are responsible for managing access, reading, writing and deleting data from NAND memory, among other tasks. Without them, these components could not function, so it is evident that Phison is interested in continuing to inflate the market. But its CEO, Pua Khein-Seng, has made it clear in a recent interview that this boom in data centers and artificial intelligence will have a disastrous consequence for the consumer market: there will be companies that go bankrupt. And it will be soon: by the end of 2026. slap. According to the boss of the controller company, this situation will put many consumer brands on the ropes, pushing some to disaster before the end of the year. When we talk about “consumer devices”, we refer to mobile phonestablets, consoles and computersbut also cars and of other devices with RAM and flash memories, such as televisions and even routers. Because it’s not that we can’t buy a couple of RAM pills, it’s that gigantic companies like Apple or Lenovo are already facing the problems involved in not having RAM. Memory production is dominated by just three companies and, although there are others such as Intel, tesla and the Chinese wanting to get their nails in the matterSamsung, Micron and SK Hynix are still the only ones capable of supplying the demands of the one that cuts the cod: NVIDIAas well as from Meta, Google or Microsoft. All production is focusing on creating memory for AI, and that means that Corsair, Dell, HP… but also Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO, Sony or Nintendo They cannot buy RAM or they have to do so at higher prices. Consequence? That if they buy at a higher price, they must also sell the product at a higher price. And they may make devices that users are not willing to buy if they are more expensive either by price or by a less memory than that of previous generations. Unprecedented. There were already estimates that certain mobile companies were being more cautious with their shipment estimates for this year, but the CEO of Phison give a figure: between 200 and 250 million fewer mobile phones. It also targets the aforementioned PC industries (not those that we can assemble in parts, but to those pre-assembled by the companies) and to that of televisions. If all televisions are already ‘smart’, they need components that have a price through the roof. The executive is not the only interested party that has sent a pessimistic message about the situation. In statements to BloombergMicron’s executive vice president already pointed out that the current shortage is unprecedented, ridiculing even the previous components crisis that we live in 2020. In fact, something that is also unprecedented is that RAM manufacturers request payments up to three years in advance. Big Tech optimism. While users cannot buy components and consumer-focused companies are beginning to see sea level rise, Big Tech continues investing exorbitant amounts. There is not a day that we do not have news about billion-dollar investments in some data center or agreements between the main protagonist companies. And the most curious thing about that is that a lot is being invested in something that does not yet exist. Goal, for example, ends to buy graphics cards from NVIDIA for a data center not yet built. AND NVIDIA depends on Samsung I sent him a memory that he still doesn’t have. But the wheel keeps turning and, as one of the SMIC bosses commentedthe big feature of China, “no one has really thought about what exactly those data centers will do, but companies would love to build the entire capacity of the next 10 years in just one or two years.” We’ll see who gets ahead. Image | Andrey Matveev In Xataka | There was only one way to lower the price of RAM: Samsung and SK Hynix have flatly refused

Now they can sink anything, even islands

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we have been counting: China has transformed its naval power away from the most visible spotlights for years, constantly advancing technologies that prioritize stealth, persistence and the ability to deny access to the adversary. While international attention was focused on aircraft carriers and large surface ships, a silent evolution has been brewing under the sea that now points to a profound change in the way force is projected and conflict resolved. The unexpected weapon. Yes, far from the classic idea of ​​aircraft carriers or strategic bombers, China’s last great leap in naval warfare has not come since the most visible platformsbut from its conventional submarines, discreet and until now considered secondary to nuclear power. The incorporation of the missile YJ-19 anti-ship hypersonic to diesel-electric submarines with air-independent propulsion has turned these “ordinary” units into a threat capable of change the rules of the gamecombining extreme stealth with a strike capability designed to overcome the most advanced naval defenses and project lethal power without warning. From conventional submarine to hypersonic hunter. He YJ-19 missilepresented publicly in 2025 and now accepted for operational service, represents a qualitative leap compared to the previous YJ-18 by raising the speed of the attack to the hypersonic threshold or, in other words, it has multiplied the difficulty of detection and interception. Integrated in The Type-039B of the Yuan class, the backbone of the Chinese conventional submarine fleet, this missile transforms these vessels into the only non-nuclear submarines in the world armed with a system of this type, a move that radically reinforces the maritime denial capacity of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and places at its AIP fleet in a league of its own within the global naval balance. The silent advantage of torpedo tubes. The technical key that explains the disruptive nature of the YJ-19 missiles is not only in their speed, obviously, but in their compatibility with torpedo tubesstandard horizontal s of 533 millimeters, a ability which allows existing submarines to be modernized without practically having to resort to complex vertical launch systems. This decision saves costs, as it makes deployment cheaper, faster and more widespread, allowing, for example, a large fleet of silent submarines to launch hypersonic attacks. from hidden positionssomething that other powers cannot easily replicate with their conventional submarines. A conventional fleet as a strategic weapon. It is another of the legs that emerges after the movement. Thanks to the AIP propulsionthe Yuan can remain submerged for long periods at low speed, which allows their acoustic signal to be reduced and can operate in coastal waters or areas with restricted access. Therefore, now armed with missiles specifically designed to pierce modern naval defenses, these submarines have ceased to be simple tactical platforms and have become authentic strategic multiplierscapable of threatening entire combat groups and imposing unaffordable costs on any naval force operating near the Chinese coast. Taiwan in the background. The last reading of the advance is possibly the most obvious in terms of the future. If Beijing decided to move towards an open conflict over to the island of Taiwanthe incorporation of the YJ-19 to AIP submarines would deep implications: would allow establishing a lethal maritime encirclement without the need to expose large surface units, making it difficult for allied fleets to intervene and increasing the risk for any attempt to break a blockade. In this way, the silent, dispersed submarines armed with hypersonic missiles could attack ships, port infrastructure or even supply lines with little room for reaction, turning the sea surrounding the island into an extremely hostile environment and reinforcing the Chinese strategy of area denial from the shadow Image | CCTV, SteKrueBe In Xataka | Satellite images leave no room for doubt: China’s nuclear renaissance is already visible from space In Xataka | Chinese fighters are getting dangerously close to Taiwan’s F-16s. And they are “shooting” flares at them

turning the “sea of ​​death” into a carbon sink

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For decades, the Taklamakan desertin the Chinese region of Xinjiang, has had a nickname quite eloquent: “the sea of ​​death.” And it is no wonder, since it is the second largest mobile dune desert in the world and a place where, historically, whoever enters does not usually leave. But faced with this major problem with sand for the surrounding areas, China decided to find a solution. The solution. China since 1978 has been waging an ecological engineering war against sand with a very specific weapon: the Three North Shelter Belt Programbetter known as the Great Green Wall. A name that seems to come out of Game of Thrones, but its objective is to stop erosion and sandstorms. But a new massive study published in PNAS has just revealed an unexpected and monumental side effect: human intervention has turned the edges of one of the driest places on Earth into an active carbon sink. The data. The study has focused on 25 years of data obtained through field work and also with satellites. What the team has found on the margins of the Taklamakan is what they call a “cold spot” of carbon dioxide. This means that in reforested areas the concentration of CO₂ is between 1 and 2 parts per million smaller than in the surrounding environment. And although it may not seem like much, in climatology it is an outrage. The trend in this case is quite clear, since The vegetation cover is increasing every yearand there is also a tendency for soil and plants to be “eating” more carbon than they are emitting. How is it possible? The million-dollar question here is pretty clear: how do you keep 66 billion trees alive in a place where it barely rains? The answer lies in water management technology and species selection. In this case, the project does not focus on planting oaks or pines, but is based on Extremophilous species like him Tamarixhe Haloxylon and the Euphrates poplar, which are plants evolutionarily designed to survive on very little. But the technological key has been the use of drip risk with saline water. Origin of water. China discovered that under the Taklamakan there are immense aquifers, but they are too saline for traditional agriculture. However, these “halophytic” plants can tolerate it, so it seemed like it was done on purpose. That is why groundwater is used to irrigate the protective strips that exist, especially around the famous tarim desert highway. The result with this is that soil moisture drops drastically between waterings, but the plants survive. And, although the salinity of the superficial soil increases, studies indicate that it is manageable in the long term and does not salinize the deep layers. This has made it possible to complete in 2024 a “green belt” of 3,046 kilometers that encloses the desert, stabilizing dunes that previously moved meters each year. Its stability. Unlike the Great Green Wall attempts in the Sahara, which have suffered from political instability and a lack of continued funding, the Chinese project has maintained its course since 1978. This continuity has allowed a “40-year experiment” that is now bearing fruit with important conclusions. The Chinese authorities themselves cite that national forest coverage has gone from 10% in 1949 to 25% today, thanks in large part to this project. As a result, in places like Maigaiti in Xinjiang, sandstorm days have dropped from 150 a year to fewer than 50. It is not the panacea. The source article warns of the limitations of this project: photosynthesis and carbon sequestration are strongly correlated with seasonal precipitation. This means that at least 16 liters of rainfall per month is needed in high season to maximize its effect. But behind it is climate change that is drastically altering rainfall patterns in Central Asia, which could weaken the carbon sink. Although what is happening in Taklamakan is causing a paradigm shift, since now where we see reforestation of deserts, we also see a way to cool our planet by reducing the concentration of CO₂. Images | Wikipedia Jasmine Milton In Xataka | Someone has counted each and every tree in China. Because? Well because now it is possible

the high possibilities that the US plan for Venezuela will sink the price of oil

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The global geopolitical board has been blown up at the start of 2026. If the oil market was already limping after 2025 characterized by excess supplythe capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces This weekend has acted as the definitive catalyst. What in another time would have caused a “shock” of rising prices due to fear of shortages, today is having the opposite effect: investors are beginning to discount a flood of crude oil in the medium term that could push the barrel of WTI directly towards the basement of $50. The Trump factor. The military operation to arrest Maduro and transfer him to New York has not come wrapped in the usual diplomatic alibis. On the contrary, President Donald Trump has been unusually explicit: the goal is oil. Under what some analysts already call the “Donroe Doctrine“, the White House has demanded the return of assets that it considers “stolen” from the United States since the era of Hugo Chávez. Trump does not seem interested in a change in the traditional democratic regime; has minimized María Machado’s opposition and has conditioned stability on US oil companies (Chevron, Exxon, ConocoPhillips) taking the reins of PDVSA to “fix” a ruined infrastructure, as Bloomberg has had access. A market in free fall. Despite the tension, prices are trading lower today. WTI stands at $57.12 and Brent barely defends $60.55 —at the time of writing this report. The market was already coming from 2025 where the barrels took a 20% annual cut. According to the Financial Timessentiment is the most bearish in a decade. The newspaper highlights that the operators (traders) maintain record levels of short positions (bets on the fall), ignoring any geopolitical risk premium. Amrita Sen, founder of Energy Aspectsexplains to the same medium that psychology has changed because it is assumed that there will be “much more oil in the medium term”, which cancels out any rebound due to military tension. The $50 plan. The real fear of traditional exporters is not only Venezuela, but the consolidation of a bloc under US influence. According to a JP Morgan reportIf Washington manages to reactivate Venezuelan production and add it to that of Guyana (controlled by Exxon) and its own domestic production (world leader with 13.3 million barrels per day), the United States would de facto control 30% of all world reserves. This “superblock” would neutralize OPEC’s ability to set prices. Oil would cease to be a purely market good and become a strategic tool administered from Washington to keep prices in low ranges (50-60 dollars) and thus promote its internal economic expansion. The OPEC+ axis: a fight for fiscal survival. This scenario of low prices creates a lethal clamp that squeezes Moscow and Riyadh equally. For Russia, a barrel at 50 dollars It is a weapon of economic war more effective than sanctions; The country already suffers from a chronic lack of investment and the siege of its income to sustain the conflict in Ukraine. This weakness spreads to the rest of OPEC+. According to the recent press releasethe eight countries have decided to pause production increases until April 2026 due to “seasonality.” However, its capacity for influence is exhausted: each cut by the cartel is compensated by the increase in supply from foreign countries such as Brazil or Canada. In addition, doubts are already bleeding into the Gulf financial markets. According to ReutersSaudi Arabia’s stock markets have closed in the red on the prospect of a chronic surplus. Riyadh has approved a borrowing plan of 217 billion riyals by 2026 to support its “Vision 2030”. Without oil above 70-80 dollars, their megaprojects become financially unsustainable. Is a flood of Venezuelan crude oil realistic? In the short term, technical skepticism persists. According to Bloombergreviving the Venezuelan industry so that it returns to its 3 million barrels per day of yesteryear would require an investment of 10 billion dollars annually for a decade. The infrastructure is so deteriorated that loading a supertanker today takes five days, compared to the single day it took seven years ago. Additionally, there is the factor of internal resistance. Delcy Rodríguez, current interim president, has already warned that Venezuela “will not be anyone’s colony.” However, the market looks further: the simple possibility that Venezuelan heavy crude (vital for US Gulf Coast refineries) return to the legal circuit is enough to keep prices under structural pressure. It is worth remembering that the market moves by expectations. The International Energy Agency (IEA) already foresees a surplus record of 4 million barrels per day for this year due to the China slowdown and technological efficiency. The new era of transactional oil. Trump’s success when eliminating an opponent and “lay your hand” on the largest reserves in the world In a matter of hours he sent a message maximum global pressure. If this trend is consolidated, 2026 will be remembered as the year in which oil stopped being an instrument of balance to become the hammer with which the United States redraws the map of power. Barring an unexpected disruption, the path to $50 seems less like a hypothesis and more like a sentence for traditional petrostates. Image | freepik and Gage Skidmore Xataka | This graph shows that Venezuela has more oil than anyone else. Its production is another story

In 1919 the Germans decided to sink their entire fleet in the North Sea. The steel from those ships ended up in space

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At 11:20 in the morning of June 21, 1919, Admiral von Reuter’s ship began to signal to the rest of the German ships in Scapa Flow Bay, England. The taps and water intakes were opened, the pipes were destroyed, the portholes were dismantled: no one noticed anything. Until around midday, the Friederich Der Grosse began to list to starboard. It was already late, the German flag was flying from the 74 masts. Scapa Flow. The image tells the story of Scapa Flowthe sinking of the German fleet immediately after World War I. While the Allies negotiated the terms of the Armistice with Germany, the fleet was held captive and stationed off the British coast. Von Reuter feared that the Allies would divide up the ships, so he decided to sink it completely, at any cost. The British naval ships that were on maneuvers arrived at 2:30 p.m. and were only able to save one ship. The last to sink was the battlecruiser Hindenburg. Nine Germans were killed, 16 were wounded, 1,774 were detained. 52 ships were sunk on June 21 at Scapa Flow. But they are no longer there: they are on the Moon, Jupiter and beyond the orbit of Pluto. steel is steel. A tough guy, with bad temper and few words. But in 1945 (or a little before), everything changed. We didn’t realize it at first, but we quickly discovered that although all steels are equal, there are some steels that are more equal than others. I’m not going around the bush: what happened in ’45 was the atomic bomb, the device of the Devil that made us change geological era. The problem. Since the first atomic bombs exploded on the Earth’s surface, the air contains traces of radioactive elements. They are there, dissolved in it, but the amount is so small that they are harmless. Unless for some strange reason you have to blow in enormous amounts of air in the manufacturing process of some material. It’s almost useless to us. That is, all steel manufactured after the explosion of the first atomic bomb is radioactive. Very little, almost nothing. But enough so that some medical, physical or astronomical instruments do not work correctly. For example, radioactivity monitoring systems used by spacecraft. He tells it David Bodanis in “E = mc². Biography of the most famous equation in the world“, a book that, although it has become somewhat outdated, is still a delight. You may have heard the story, but it is a good story. Steel = expensive. In the book, Bodanis explains that, faced with this problem, uncontaminated steel became very expensive. Above all, because before ’45 we did not make steel in quantities so industrial as now. I imagine dozens of NASA engineers rummaging through their family’s cutlery so they can send reliable machines into space. Until someone remembered Kaiser Wilhelm’s ships. The peculiarity of Scapa Flow. There are sunken ships in many places, but there are not many shallow inlets with 52 sunken ships in their waters. Not all of them were there, but a few were enough for us to manufacture the equipment that the Apollo mission left on the lunar surface, that which the Galileo probe took to Jupiter, and that which the Pioneer probe is taking even further. The evil, the sea. In Xataka | Quantum find in Cambridge points to solar ‘Holy Grail’: single-material solar panels In Xataka | The Atacama salt flat is the key on which the electric car industry pivots. And it’s starting to dry

A year ago, Warner wanted to sink Suno’s AI to generate songs. Today he has decided to ally with her

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From chaos to order: when AI burst onto the music scene it seemed like everything was going to fall apart. And some of the latest news in that field seems to go in that direction: uncontrolled multiplication of false groups created with AI on streaming platforms, accelerated sophistication of AIs that allow the creation of music indistinguishable from that created by humans… however, the majors of the industry have taken action on the matter to turn the situation in their favor. And no, it is not that they have won the multiple lawsuits they filed against the AI ​​companies. It is, perhaps, something much more disturbing: they have reached agreements. What has happened? In just eighteen months, Warner Music Group has completed a radical strategic pivot regarding its relationship with AI. In June 2024the record company sued Suno along with Sony and Universal for massive copyright infringement, accusing the platform of training its models with millions of songs it owned and without authorization. But now he announces an alliance with that same company to license its complete catalog. What is Suno? A music generator through artificial intelligence that has attracted almost 100 million users in two years, and allows complete songs to be created from simple textual descriptions. Users can specify genre, mood, instrumentation and tempo, and the system generates two versions of the requested song in about 15 seconds. To achieve this, Suno combines its own musical model with ChatGPT, and from there come both the music and the lyrics, creating pieces that can include voices and instrumentation or be purely instrumental. What the agreement consists of. The pact establishes that Suno will launch in 2026 new advanced and licensed models that will completely replace your current systems. Artists in Warner’s catalog (Lady Gaga, Coldplay or Ed Sheeran, among many others) will have control over whether or not they allow their names, images, voices and compositions to be used in that AI-generated music. Neither Warner nor Suno disclosed the financial terms of the deal, although Warner CEO Robert Kyncl stated that the goal is to “compensate and protect artists, songwriters and the creative community.” As part of the deal, Suno acquired SongkickWarner’s concert discovery platform. Besides, from now on Song downloads generated by Suno will require a paid account, with download limits and options to purchase additional downloads, a bit like the usage limits established by the level free of other AI models. The original demand. The complaint of 2024 accused Suno and Udio of massive infringement of protected recordings. The record companies they requested damages up to $150,000 per infringed song. Suno admitted that he had trained his model with tens of millions of protected recordings but defended that it was “fair use” (the famous fair use Anglo-Saxon) And what is the reason for the change in Warner and company’s strategy? Suno closed a $250 million financing round at a valuation of $2.45 billion just a week ago, according to The Hollywood Reporter. They are not the first. This is not a desperate deal major allying himself with someone who just a year ago he considered an enemy. It is an industry trend: in June 2024, for example Universal Music reached an agreement with SoundLabs to offer its artists vocal cloning tools through the plugin MicroDrop. In November of this same year, Universal, Sony and Warner themselves closed separate agreements with the brand new startup KLAY to train your “Large Music Model” with licensed music Without a doubt, they are significant agreements, especially because, unlike the cinema wave pressto mention other leisure and communication sectors strongly impacted by AI, majors of music are the first to bury the hatchet. With what it may mean for hostilities to soften in other fields. A doubtful future. For a startSony and Warner maintain active lawsuits against Udio and Suno. And there are multiple doubts about the scope of the contract: supposedly the artists have the right to veto, but As Irving Azoff saysfounder of the Music Artists Coalition, “artists end up on the margins with crumbs.” Other analysts like Frankie Pizá They are even more pessimistic: “What some of us see as a collapse in what we understood as artistry/authorship is quietly becoming a new order regulated by the major record labels themselves” Pizá adds: “The music industry has been perfecting its ability to absorb any technological disruption for decades. It did so with Napster, with YouTube, with the streaming and now with generative AI. The pattern repeats itself: first moral resistance, then demands, then agreement and finally implementation.” Header | Amin Asbaghipour in Unsplash

A technical adjustment was enough to sink eDreams by 40% in one day

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Last week, eDreams shares plummeted more than 40% on the stock market in a single day. The cause was not a tourism crisis or another pandemic, but a technical change: Ryanair has raised a digital wall that prevents eDreams robots from accessing its tickets, sinking the airline’s reservations by 80% since September. Why is it important. It is the most violent chapter in the battle for control of the client, a war that comes from far away. Ryanair wants to eliminate intermediaries that charge extra commissions (“pirate OTAs”, according to them). Thus forcing users to buy on its official website. eDreams is the last great fortress that refuses to give up. The “cat and mouse game”. Dana Dunne, CEO of eDreams, has used this metaphor to describe your historical relationship with the airline: The mouse (eDreams): use a technique called screen scraping (robots that read the Ryanair website) to read the prices and sell them on their platform. The cat (Ryanair)– Implement technological blocks to prevent this. The current result: the cat has set a new trap and the mouse cannot escape. The lockdowns have intensified so much that eDreams has had to cut its profit forecasts by 2026. The map. Ryanair has managed to divide its enemies. While eDreams resists, other giants have already capitulated and signed “peace”: The allies (verified): Booking, Kiwi, Expedia and El Corte Inglés have signed agreements. They agree not to inflate ticket prices and share actual customer data with Ryanair. In exchange, they have direct access to the system, without blockages. The rebel: eDreams refuses to sign. They argue that they stand for “shareholder value” and customer experience. Although They won a court battle for unfair competition in Barcelona This summer, they are now losing the trade war. The offline front. Neighborhood agencies. Because the pressure is not just digital. Ryanair has eliminated paper boarding passesforcing everyone to use your app. The problem is that traditional agencies (represented by AVIBA) feared they would be left out of the game if they could not give the printed ticket to their clients (many of them older). There is a truce: Ryanair allows agents to continue managing boarding, but forces them to do it digitally (capturing QRs and sending them to the customer’s mobile phone). It’s more manual work, but it allows them to survive. What the sides say: Ryanair: “eDreams should recognize that it is now the only major OTA that does not follow price transparency standards (…) and continues to overcharge customers.” eDreams: “They try to prevent us from accessing the content and we overcome the obstacles they put in front of us. (…) There is a possibility that we will be able to overcome those obstacles, as we have done before.” In summary. Ryanair is winning by suffocation. By improving your technology anti-scraping and signing individual agreements with the competition (Booking, Expedia and company), has left eDreams isolated and vulnerable, demonstrating that in the low-costwhoever has the planes has the power. In Xataka | Now we know why Ryanair charges its passengers for everything: it is the key to having a profit of 2,540 million euros Featured image | Nejc SokličMockuuups Studio, eDreams

We’ve been obsessed with strong passwords and public Wi-Fi for years. It turns out that the data sink was in the satellites

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While we worry about choose strong passwords and Don’t let the neighbor steal our WiFiit turns out that anyone can capture private data simply by pointing a dish at a satellite. It is not a government conspiracy, it is what some Californian researchers have discovered using a piece of equipment that only costs $800. What has happened? They count in Wired that several researchers from the universities of California and Maryland have been capturing communications from various satellites for three years. During this time they have collected a huge amount of private data. Among the information collected there is data on calls and messages from users of various operators, the pages visited by airplane passengers who used WiFi on board, communications between different critical infrastructures such as oil platforms or electrical companies and even police and military communications that revealed the position of their equipment. Why it is important. According to the study’s conclusions, it is estimated that around half of the signal from geostationary satellites carries sensitive information of consumers, companies and also governments. We strive to protect our WiFi networks, our online accounts or mobile devices, but the results of the research make it clear that satellites are a critical element through which data can also be leaked. A basic equipment. What is striking is that the researchers did not use super complex technology to obtain these findings. They simply placed a satellite dish on the roof of a university building and started pointing it at the satellites. They only invested $800 in the entire equipment. The data they obtained is only from the satellites that they could capture from their position in southern California, which according to their calculations is 15% of the total, so logic leads one to think that the amount of sensitive data will be much larger. In addition, it also shows that anyone could do it from another part of the world. Operators. The most significant data came from telephone providers, mainly T-Mobile, but also Telmex and AT&T México. In just nine hours of communications logging, researchers were able to collect the phone numbers of more than 2,700 T-Mobile users, as well as text messages and phone calls. After contacting T-Mobile to alert them, the company took steps to encrypt the data. AT&T also fixed this and claimed it was due to a satellite provider failing to configure some towers in a region of Mexico. Telmex has not said anything about it. Military and police data. That anyone’s data is exposed is already problematic, but that it is data from the army and security forces adds another layer of seriousness. Investigators were able to intercept communications between US military ships and the names of those ships. Since they were in Southern California, they also obtained data from Mexican authorities, including transmissions of confidential information about ongoing operations. “When we started looking at military helicopters, it wasn’t the sheer volume of data that worried us, but rather the extreme sensitivity of that data,” says Aaron Schulman, co-director of the research. Cybersecurity in space. In August of this same year, researchers found several vulnerabilities which, under certain conditions, could allow remote control of satellites. At the beginning of the Ukrainian war, Russia carried out a cyber attack against ViaSat which affected thousands of users. Cases like these highlight the need to bring the cybersecurity debate to space systems as well and not just terrestrial systems. Image | SpaceX on Pexels In Xataka | There are so many satellites orbiting the Earth that Starlink has a new concern: avoiding colliding with them

China knows that its population is going to sink but already has a long -term plan to solve it. How not, thanks to the AI

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In 2024 China exceeded 1,400 million inhabitants, but according to United Nations Data That figure will begin to fall remarkably in the coming decades. Predctions talk about 2050 The population There will already be between 100 and 200 million people, and for 2100 in the best Chinese cases it will have only 900 million inhabitants. Among many other things, there will be a huge impact In a key sector: that of the number of workers available. Source: United Nations In Economist They go further and stand out as today 22% of Chinese citizens are over 60 years old, but in 2035 that fee will rise to 32.5%. The Birth rates They are also very low: to maintain the population that rate should be 2.1 children per woman, but in 2024 the rate It was 1.0 children. And as they point out in Chinese triviumthe situation threatens to make China fall into “the average income trap”, slowing the growth of its economy because, simply, it cannot already have so much cheap labor and the level of exports that it had so far. More productivity. The Xi Jinping solution lies in a concept that the Chinese government calls “new quality productive forces” (NQPF). It is a strategy to boost productivity, and for this you can take advantage of technological innovations, improve education or disseminate ideas and improvements throughout all industries. In April XI He already indicated that its 15th “five -year plan” (from 2026 to 2030) will precisely drive this type of measures. And above all, one. Ai plus. That is where the so -called AI Plus directive, a long -term plan that in the next 10 years hopes to get AI becomes fully infiltrated the entire business and consumption fabric in China. The phases They are clear: 2027: reach a penetration rate of more than 70 % of terminals and intelligent agents in six key sectors (science and technology, industry, consumption, social welfare, global governance and cooperation). 2030: That penetration rate must be 90%. 2025: According to the report, “the AI ​​will be adopted as universally as electricity and the Internet, becoming the ‘basic infrastructure’ of society.” In all areas. The plan pretends that AI is the great technological innovation that allows to boost productivity in all types of areas. For example in innovation and scientific discovery, but also in industrial transformation. In the latter case both agriculture and services are short -term objectives for the deployment of AI. And also for consumption. In the consumer sector, AI must stimulate demand with the application of this technology in products such as connected cars or intelligent domestic devices. And of course, the objective is also that AI accompany and help all citizens in education, work or to improve health. Governance and cooperation. The last two major sectors of the initiative are those that affect government efficiency – for example, for urban planning, national segurity or online censorship – and international competitiveness. In the latter case, the plan defends that AI must be considered an international public good and must follow an open source philosophy. Challenges. Some experts believe that the success of the AI ​​Plus program is not assured, and there are also no clear metrics that serve to really measure the contribution of AI to economic growth. Jeffrey Ding, from the George Washington University, explains that “China faces a diffusion deficit because its ability to innovate and be a pioneer in new technologies far exceeds its ability to spread those advances throughout the economy.” Low adoption. Although the country can train its best talents of AI in its best universities, it has certain problems to achieve that same training between “standard” ingenerios, which can create a barrier for the adoption of these technologies. A survey conducted in 2022 confirmed That perception: only 4.5% of the companies owned by the Chinese government confirmed that the efforts to transform them digitally were “fulfilling expectations.” And the AGI, what? Interestingly, in that document there is no mention of the General Artificial Intelligencewhat seems to suggest once again that China prefers to make generative AI infiltrate throughout society instead of going in search of supremacy in AGI. That does not mean that China does not end up looking for this type of achievement, but at the moment its focus is another. A much more pragmatic and that is precisely aimed at mitigating the effects of its future demographic contraction. Image | Global panorama | Brian Matangelo In Xataka | China has found the formula to upload salaries while still being the world’s factory: a silent robots invasion

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