stealing

There is a luxury development in Madrid that has been “hidden” for years and is stealing the spotlight from La Finca and La Moraleja

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If we think about luxury developments in Madrid, names like La Finca or La Moraleja probably come to mind. However, there is a new player on the Madrid luxury real estate board, one that has gone unnoticed for decades and has recently become fashionable among the richest. Low profile. Álamos de Bularas is an urbanization that has been standing since the 1980s, but has gone unnoticed in the shadow of more high-profile names such as its neighbor La Finca. Its strong point is precisely that: combining luxury and exclusivity with a lower profile and less media noise than other areas. But just because it is not the most famous urbanization does not mean that it does not offer high-level luxury; a search on housing portals most popular returns us a few properties that border and even exceed 4 million euros. Tranquility is what is most sought after. Like other luxury developments such as La Finca, Somosaguas or Monte Alina, our protagonist is located in Pozuelo de Alarcón (which by the way is the richest municipality in all of Spain) specifically in the northwest area. Álamos de Bulara is a fairly small urbanization, located next to Monte del Pilar, a forested area of ​​about 800 hectares. Access is closed and has private security. The location factor. In statements to the AD Magazinethe head of the Ketier real estate agency highlights that location is a key factor for more and more buyers to look at Álamos de Bularas. The urbanization is very well connected, with access to both the M40 and the A6, allowing its residents to be in the center of Madrid in less than half an hour and in the center of Pozuelo in just 10 minutes. In addition, it is very close to some prestigious private schools and sports clubs. The new refuge for VIPs. The housing crisis is also impacting how and where the wealthiest shop. We were recently talking about luxury apartments in Madrid were so expensivewhich urbanizations like La Moraleja or La Finca were becoming more “affordable” options“for the great fortunes. According to a Colliers report A year ago, the square meter in neighborhoods such as Salamanca or Chamberí reached peaks that exceeded 27,000 euros per square meter. This has caused many buyers to seek residence in peripheral areas, where demand has increased. In Xataka | The rich neighborhoods of Madrid and Barcelona have changed their accent: millionaires from the US and Mexico invest their fortunes in Spain Image | Max Vakhtbovych, Pexels

There are people stealing spoons, napkins or glasses in restaurants. And for many it has become an economic drain

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Those of us who have lived in student flats know that there are objects that appear without anyone remembering very well how they got there. A jug of 100 Montaditos, for example. Be careful, I’m not accusing anyone, I found her in the kitchen when I lived sharing a flat in Barcelona. The fact is that stealing—not stealing—utensils from bars, restaurants or hotels is not something new. What is new is the standardization with which it is done and the real cost it is beginning to have for the sector. Because taking a “cute” spoon, a nice glass or a towel with a logo is not an isolated anecdote or a cute prank. It is a widespread, systematic phenomenon and, according to national media and internationalincreasingly expensive. When it affects the budget. The problem is no longer anecdotal. According to data provided to The Spanish by the gastronomic agency Foodie Love, the constant disappearance of objects forces many bars and restaurants to reserve a specific replacement item. In the province of Alicante, one of them – distinguished with a Michelin star – allocates around 2,000 euros annually solely to replacing what customers take away. The phenomenon has been described in this environment as “posh thefts”: thefts committed not out of necessity, but for fun, collecting or simple impulse. However, the label is as striking as it is questionable. Because, more than sophisticated, these thefts are repetitive, predictable and, in many cases, quite shabby. There is no epic or transgression: there is economic wear and tear and a progressive loss of quality in the premises. The impulse to take something “just because.” The objects that disappear are repeated with an almost industrial regularity: tableware, consumer products and bathroom items. On tables, what flies the most are coffee spoons, especially if they have a special design, color or texture. While a basic one can cost one euro, a designer one costs four. Saucers, cups, oil bowls, sugar bowls or sweetener jars they follow the same path. Some restaurants they recognize having to buy dozens every month. The bathroom is another key focus. As waiters report in testimonies collected by Diario Vasco Following a query launched by the profile @soycamarero, soap dishes, toilet paper, air fresheners, plugs, toilet seats, push buttons or even tiles disappear. Irony abounds among workers, but the problem is serious. Furthermore, as detailed in the specialized media Food & Wineit is not necessity, it is sentimentalization of the object, attractive design, alcohol, disinhibition and, above all, a feeling of impunity. The client does not perceive himself as a thief; He tells himself that it is a souvenir. The theft assumed in hotels. If the phenomenon is worrying in bars and restaurants, in hotels it is directly massive. According to a Hosteltur survey87% of guests admit to having taken something from a room at least once in their lives. Towels, soap dishes, mini pillows and tissue boxes top the ranking. The president of AC Hoteles, Antonio Catalán, acknowledged on the Nude Project podcast that his chain loses more than 80,000 towels a year, both in Spain and Italy. All with a logo, which do not go unnoticed at all. Some establishments have chosen to take it on as part of the business: tolerating certain losses such as involuntary advertising, selling the objects or charging them directly on the invoice. Others have explored more creative avenues. This is the case of the Swedish chain BWH Hotels, which launched the campaign The Hotel Theft Rewardinviting people to return stolen objects—from lamps to mannequins—in exchange for hotel nights or breakfasts. What if they catch me? The legal reminder. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that, no matter how normalized it may be, taking an object without permission is theft. As criminal law experts explain cited by RRYP Globalthe Spanish Penal Code clearly distinguishes between theft and robbery, but both are crimes. If the value of what was stolen does not exceed 400 euros, it is considered a minor crime, punishable by a fine. If it exceeds that amount, it can lead to prison sentences. And not only the isolated object is valued, but the total amount and the circumstances. “I accidentally took it” doesn’t always work as an excuse. The souvenir that we all pay for. Maybe that jug of 100 Montaditos is still on that floor, turned into a recurring joke. But multiplied by thousands, that same logic empties bars, restaurants and hotels of personality and quality. And it has a direct consequence: more expensive menus or cheaper products, as hoteliers recognize. cited in El Español. It is not an elegant or rebellious robbery. It is a small, repeated and assumed gesture that ends up having a big effect. And in the end, as almost always, we all end up paying for the souvenir. Image | freepik Xataka | The hoteliers promised them happy times in a summer of record tourism. Until the ghost reserves arrived

We thought talking to ChatGPT and other AIs was private. We didn’t have these extensions stealing our conversations

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There are matters that we would not publish on social networks or comment out loud. However, there they go, flowing in a waterfall of messages towards an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, as if it were our best friend. There are no glances, no judgment, no awkward silences. There are answers that, many times, are limited to proving us right or convincing us. But beyond that, an uncomfortable question appears: what if everything we have told could end up in the hands of a third party? What if there is someone else reading those conversations? Opt out in training models or maximizing the security of our account may not be enough. There is another threat that is reaching millions of users these days, and they may not even be aware of it: browser extensions that spy on and steal what is said to chatbots. At the top of the list is Urban VPN Proxy. A Chrome extension with more than 6 million users, rated 4.7 stars and that, until the publication of the cybersecurity report that we will talk about today, showed a “Featured” badge on Google, something that we can still verify in a version archived at the Internet Archive. The discovery. What has set off the alarms is a report published by Koia company specialized in cybersecurity. It is not a generic warning or a hypothesis, but the result of analyzing what these tools do in the background while we browse. When looking at popular extensions, the kind that are installed to gain privacy or security, their researchers detected a worrying pattern: some were capable of reading and sending conversations held with artificial intelligence chatbots outside the browser. A much larger attack surface. The investigation indicates that Urban VPN Proxy did not target a single AI provider, but rather a broad set of popular platforms. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini either Microsoft Copilot appear among monitored services, greatly expanding the volume and diversity of data potentially captured. These conversations are not trivial: they often include intimate questions, financial information, or details of ongoing projects. Therefore, access to this type of exchange involves a very delicate level of exposure. How conversations are captured. According to the research firm, the mechanism does not depend on vulnerabilities in the chatbots themselves, but on the privileged place that the extensions occupy within the browser. Urban VPN Proxy monitors active tabs and, when the user accesses an AI platform, injects code directly into the page. This code intercepts the requests and responses exchanged with the server before the browser displays them on the screen, allowing access to the full content of the conversation in real time. What Urban VPN Proxy extracted were not jumbled fragments, but entire conversations with their associated context. Koi documents the systematic capture of user messages, AI responses, identifiers for each chat, and temporal data that allows them to be sorted and related to each other. This type of information, crossed over weeks or months, allows us to draw very precise usage patterns. From work habits to personal concerns, the value of the whole lies precisely in its continuity and not in a specific message. The content script that forwards the data It does not depend on activating the VPN. One of the most important nuances of the report is that conversation capture is not tied to the use of the VPN service itself. The mechanism, they explain, works independently, even when the VPN is disabled. It is enough to have the extension installed so that the code responsible for intercepting conversations continues operating in the background. There is no user-accessible switch that allows you to disable this collection without completely removing the browser extension. Conversation collection was not present from the beginning. According to the analysis, Urban VPN Proxy did not include this behavior in previous versions of the extension. The turning point comes on July 9, 2025, when an update is released that activates the capture of conversations with AI platforms by default. From there, any user with the extension installed and automatic updates activated began to execute that new code without an explicit notice comparable to the change in behavior or having to expressly accept that modification. What does “AI protection” promise? In the extension’s tab and in its messages to the user, Urban VPN Proxy presents this feature as an additional layer of security. According to its description, it serves to alert when personal data is entered into a chatbot or when a response includes potentially dangerous links. The problem is that this layer of notifications is not directly related to the collection of conversations. Activating or deactivating warnings does not prevent messages from continuing to be intercepted and sent to the company’s servers. The investigation did not stop at Urban VPN Proxy. By tracing the origin of the code and its behavior, Koi found that the same conversation capture logic appeared in other extensions published by the same publisher. Some present themselves as VPNs, others as ad blockers or browser security tools. Together, there are more than 8 million users between Chrome and Edge, which expands the scope of the problem and explains why researchers talk about an ecosystem and not a specific anomaly. Identified extensions for Chrome: Urban VPN Proxy 1ClickVPN Prox Urban Browser Guard Urban Ad Blocker Identified extensions for Microsoft Chrome: Urban VPN Proxy 1ClickVPN Proxy Urban Browser Guard Urban Ad Blocker Who is behind. Urban VPN Proxy is operated by Urban Cyber ​​Security Inc., a company linked to BiSciencea data intermediation firm, a data broker, as described by Koi. Koi recalls that BiScience had already been the subject of previous investigations by other cybersecurity experts for the collection and commercialization of browsing data. The report frames this case as an evolution of these practices, going from collecting browsing habits to capturing complete conversations held with artificial intelligence systems. The finding also puts the focus on how the user is informed. The extension generically mentions the processing of data related to AI services … Read more

We thought only marijuana growers were stealing electricity. Now it turns out that supermarkets too

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While the city slows down and most businesses close, some supermarkets continue to operate normally. They open at dawn, keep the lights on and the cold rooms running. For years, this constant consumption barely attracted attention. Until last December 2, a joint action by the Civil Guard, the National Police and the Urban Police revealed that several supermarkets in Barcelona were obtaining electricity through illegal connections to the grid. Under the magnifying glass. It was not a specific case or a single neighborhood. The inspections were distributed across Nou Barris, Sant Andreu, Sant Martí, Gràcia, Eixample and Ciutat Vella. In total, 26 supermarkets, and in 24 of them the electricity did not go through the meter. The Civil Guard opened proceedings against 26 people, of Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationality, for an alleged crime of electricity fraud. They were not small isolated businesses. Most operated as franchise supermarkets, some open 24 hours a day and belonging to well-known chains, according to The Newspaper. The performance, named Nihariwas carried out with the collaboration of Endesa technicians and Labor and Social Security inspectors, and ended with the immediate cutting off of supply in the establishments, as reported by the Urban Guard. Electricity tapped into the network. The investigation began after a complaint filed by Endesa before the Civil Guard, as pointed out The Vanguard. The electricity company had detected a suspicious pattern: businesses that, due to their activity and schedules, recorded anomalous or non-existent consumption in their contracts. Once inside the premises, the technicians verified that the electricity was obtained through illegal connections directly to the general network or public lighting. Manipulations without any type of protection or technical review, designed to avoid paying the energy bill. The fraud amounts to 2.85 million kilowatts, a figure equivalent to the annual consumption of 814 homes. A crime with risk of fire. The Civil Guard remembers, as collected The Newspaperthat illegal connections lack safety systems, adequate insulation and protection against overloads, which significantly increases the possibility of short circuits and fires. The danger is aggravated by the location of many of these supermarkets: commercial basements of residential buildings, with a large influx of people and proximity to garages, storage rooms and common areas. In this sense, the Urban Guard emphasizes that electrical fraud It is not only a crime against the energy system, but also a citizen security problem. Much more than light. The operation uncovered a wide catalog of irregularities. During the inspections, the National Police identified 59 people. Of them, five have been considered victims of labor exploitation and another five are in an irregular administrative situation. In addition, the Barcelona Urban Guard drew up 87 minutes for administrative infractions related to safety, hygiene and regulatory compliance. Among them, blocked emergency exits, absence of fire extinguishers, impractical bathrooms, lack of mandatory signs, sale of expired or spoiled food, and carrying out the activity without a license. For its part, the Civil Guard opened 16 cases due to smuggling, incorrect labeling of products, unmarked surveillance cameras, sales receipts without the businessman’s data and manipulation of scales, with a weighing favorable to the merchant. The absence of a food handling card was also detected in some workers. The same fraud, another showcase. What was previously detected in boarded-up floors and linked industrial warehouses to illegal marijuana cultivation It now appears in all-night supermarkets. The investigation confirm that electrical fraud has ceased to be a strictly clandestine phenomenon and has become established, in some cases, in apparently normal activities facing the public. The scenario changes, but not the crime. And neither are the risks. Image | Release and freepik Xataka | Spain lights up for Christmas, but an uncomfortable doubt arises on some rooftops

The AI does not stop stealing internet content to improve. And the Internet has swollen the noses

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That Reddit blocks the action to the Archive Internet is a tragedy. And also a way of stopping a voracious and implacable The price to be paid for having ia It is the looting of all the internet content. In Reddit they know it well, and they have just taken an extreme measure against those indiscriminate robberies: it is not that Block access to their contents to the ‘scrapers’ of the companies of AI directly. Now they also block them if these companies try to access with rodeos. The injured party? Internet Archive. What happened. Reddit, who has always been very proactive when protecting “their” contents (which, by the way, have been generated by users voluntarily and free), has realized something: they were stealing them. But not directly, but through previous versions stored in that gigantic digital hemeroteca library called Internet Archive. Wayback Machine without access. Wayback Machine is the “Machine in Time” of the Internet Archive, and allows access to old versions of any website. But to avoid more content theft, Reddit has banned this platform to index the vast majority of Reddit content. Only the Reddit.com home page can be indexed. Reddit’s argument. Tim Rathschmidt, spokesman for Reddit, explained In The Verge That although Internet Archive is a service aimed at the open web, they had discovered “cases in which artificial intelligence companies violate the platform policies, including ours, and extract data from Wayback Machine.” In addition, he pointed out the following: “Until they are able to defend their site and comply with the policies of the platform (for example, respect the privacy of users, in relation to the elimination of deleted content), we are limiting part of their access to Reddit data to protect Reddit users.” If you want our contents, pay. That message from the spokesman is reasonable, but as little is incomplete. Especially since Reddit has persecuted that kind of looting of AI companies. He has tried to block those who did it with technical means, and the goal both before and now was the same: that companies pay for their contents. It is something that has achieved with the agreements that have reached since this type of processes began. The first thing he did was close his APIa disaster for all the Internet. Then he ended up reaching a Google agreement, which pays 60 million dollars a year In order to have access to those contents. And the same ended up with OpenAiwith which he sealed a pact whose economic details have not been unveiled but that gives access to Reddit’s contents to the models that enhance chatgpt. My content is mine (more or less). Social platforms have been nourishing the content of users for years. Until now the business model focused on advertising, but the arrival of AI has allowed us to have an interesting alternative model: that the companies of AI pay for being able to access those contents. Users barely win, Reddit and social networks do. Contents affirming that they are his – as Reddit, which in June He sued Anthropic– But that actually created the users of these platforms, who without realizing have become slaves of these social networks: they do not stop producing content that others consume, and do so without charging a euro. These platforms are intermediaries that provide the necessary infrastructure for this content to be available for free, but there are hardly any consideration for creators. Only a few can make a living on YouTube, Tiktok or Instagram for example. In Reddit exist Some metallic remuneration for the “taxpayers” who create the most for the platform. Cloudflare and content locks. Content companies are beginning to act in a similar way, and in the last two years we have seen how some editorial groups –Including haste– They reach agreements with AI companies so that they can use their contents. You Shall Not Pass! However, there are companies that go further. We have as clear example to Cloudflare, which has created a system so that companies that use their services can block the “Crawlers of AI” that try to steal their contents. If you are a cloudflare customer, you can activate that block, thus avoiding the problem or at least putting it Much more difficult to the AI companies that try to train their models with your data. Media and platforms such as The Associated Press, Fortune, Time or Stack Overflow are some of the companies that are already using said system. Quid Pro quo. This cat and mouse game is especially striking for the entire content creation segment, because IA companies use All shortcuts that can to capture (and steal) That data, Have or not copyright. What Reddit raises is a model in which creators compensate for the AI to take that data. Or more than creators, platforms that serve as their meeting and showcase. Media groups and audiovisual content producers have an interesting opportunity here Before the potential traffic collapse caused by solutions like Google AI Overviews. In Xataka | The “digital decomposition”: how 38% of the websites that existed in 2013 have disappeared from the Internet

China has won the data war without stealing any. We have given them to them

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Despite the bodies that are usually tried to attribute in that sense, at least much more disproportionately than on the other side of the Pacific, China has not needed to steal secrets or technological secrets of the West. We have given them to them in a silver tray. Why is it important. There are several cases that do not mean much but united form a puzzle. For example, Apple and Its accumulated investment of 55,000 million dollars in China to “form” in advanced manufacturing. Or bytedance accumulating billions of hours of video labeling – and western– To train the most sophisticated recommendation algorithm we know. And now Apple can repeat the pattern with AI. The context. The dominant narrative points to Chinese industrial espionage as a cause of its technological boom. It is not so simple: Western companies have been the greatest facilitators of technological transfer in modern history, and did it voluntarily. The promise in return: margins. In the short term. The panoramic. Apple was one of the great responsible for China’s change, which went from manufacturer Low Cost A superpower of manufacturing in just two decades. Bytedance has converted western behavior data – hours and hours deciding what we like and what is not based on Scroll– In algorithmic supremacy for a five years. Tesla accelerated the Chinese ecosystem of electric vehicles and now he has turned against him. DJI dominated civil drones by processing Western Maps. The pattern is repeated: West delivers knowledge, China absorbs it and begins to overcome it. Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn, understood that it was better to sacrifice immediate margins in exchange for tie up a company like Apple to get free training by US engineers. Between the lines. China applied what we could call “reverse Trojan horse.” Instead of infiltrating, it attracted Western companies to come voluntarily. Apple’s is a paradigmatic case: for years he thought it was she who was conquering China, but the reality seen with perspective is that It has been China who has conquered Apple. Examples: The progressive assignments of sovereignty. Apple has accepted content restrictions or Mandatory storage on local serverssomething that led many hands to many heads at the time just for the EU to end up demanding something very similar. Logistics dependence without turning. There is no plan B, leaving China would be a slow, expensive movement that would require many years and many dollars. The massive transfer of knowledge. The aforementioned formations to millions of Chinese workers, the investments of more than 7,000 million in own equipment for foreign factories. China has absorbed that know-how. Yes, but. Apple generated thanks to this a company of 3 billion dollars. In 2000 it was around 4,000 million. Thousands of times less. That growth could not have happened investing elsewhere. Tesla would have taken much longer to master the electric car without Chinese industrial capacity. The problem is the aforementioned: there is no medium -term plan can not have it. Without China, Apple cannot manage its complex logistics, its millions of daily components. Nor access engineers to dominate them. And now… Apple is working with Alibaba to take Apple Intelligence to China for legal imperative. Is being more complicated than it seemed. And bytedance I would prefer to close Tiktok in the United States rather than sell its valuable algorithm. The employer is also repeated here: Western companies seek to access the Chinese market delivering their most valuable technology. The threat. China is increasingly dominating the massive adoption of AI with models mainly open source. Tencent has already integrated Depseek in Wechat For its more than one billion users. In China, AI is not a separate application, but is integrated into what is already widely used. Possibly the next generation of intelligent agents will repeat the pattern of Apple and Foxconn. But in the field of software. China is not winning the data career spying on the West. He is winning for having opened the door for the West to teach him everything he needed to know in exchange for greater quarterly benefits. Today the student has become a teacher and is the one who puts the standards. In Xataka | For Apple, the price of its iPhone was sacred. Until he started falling into a vacuum in China Outstanding image | Collabstr in Unspash

Something is stealing our dream and they are not just the screens. A neurologist helps us understand what is really happening

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We sleep, we dream, we forget. But do we really know what happens while we sleep? Sleep paralysis, déjà vusawakening in the early morning or that exhaustion that appears even after Sleep eight hours. In this new section of Xataka we enter all those questions that we have ever asked ourselves and that until now were still without clear response. Or worse: full of myths. We release ‘Science and Apart’, a new section in Our YouTube channelalso Available as Podcast on Spotify and Ivoox. A space where we propose to talk about science with experts in the field. In this first episode, our partner Ángela Blanco talks with the doctor Daniel Blanes Jacquartspecialist in neurology and member of the Spanish Sleep Society. “Dream is a vital function,” explains Blanes. “It helps us to prepare our internal environment and respond to demands From the external environment. ”Sleeping is not simply to rest: it is a biological need that occupies much of our life. Although we perceive it as a kind of blackout, during the dream there are fundamental processes for our body, such as internal reparation. And it is not necessary to be a scientist to intuit it. Just look at the data of a smart watch like the Apple Watch Series 10 or the Huawei Watch 5. Those graphs that divide the night into phases such as REM, deep, essential or vigil are not only decorative: they respond to real processes that fulfill very different functions with each other. In our dialogue with Blanes, concepts such as declarative memory, emotional memory appear, what they are and in which part of the dream are fixed. The talk also addresses ideas such as the relationship between what we remember and the quality of rest. “We all dream a lot, but most dreams are not fixed in memory.” Our guest explains why this happens and what does it mean if We dream very often And we can tell what we have experienced (or we think we have experienced). Angela asks how it is possible to wake up paralyzed, unable to move. “Sleep paralysis is an incomplete awakening,” says Blanes, and adds: “I am awake, I wake up, but I continue with the activation of the visual, auditory cortex, that is, you can see things or you can hear things that are not because in the background is still that part of the REM active and, in addition, the paralysis is complete.” Issues that are very present in everyday life are also addressed. Do we sleep worse than before? Are the guilty screens? Does blue light affect us more than we believe? Throughout the episode we talk about the impact of sleep hormones, why we hate Mondays, narcolepsia and even the collagen we produce at night. “We have a tool to make collagen that is the dream.” We invite you to discover all this and much more in ‘Science and apart’, which starts with a very interesting episode and that makes some key concepts about sleep clear. It will help us better understand this fundamental part of our life. Now we just have to choose the platform you prefer to enjoy this first episode. Images | Xataka In Xataka | The close (and far) that we are not sleeping at all: for the first time in history, we have a small way to try In Xataka | More and more people are going on vacation simply to sleep

Nvidia desperately seeks engineers for its Taiwan R&D center. They even accuse you of “stealing them” to TSMC

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Nvidia smiles at the future. The pulse held by the US and China governments is degrading their business in the latter country because the US administration prevents them from selling its chips to its Chinese clients to artificial intelligence (Ia) more powerful. Even so, the company led by Jensen Huang currently monopolizes about 90% of the market of the GPUs for Ia. It is likely that in the medium term its quota will be reduced against the presumable growth of competitors such as Huawei or AMD, but right now Nvidia has no reason to worry. And it does not have them because the semiconductor market to grow a lot over the next few years. According to the AMR consultant (Allied Market Research) In 2031 it will have a turnover volume of More than 263,000 million dollars. It is a real barbarity, especially if we are in mind that in 2021 its business amounted to just over 11,000 million dollars. Although the NVIDIA quota is reduced during the next few years, it is reasonable to assume that its business volume will be increased by market growth. The problem facing this company is now another. This is what the engineers who hire in Taiwan pay Nvidia’s directive dome seems to be very clear about what to continue growing next to the AI ​​chips market for data centers: expand. It is about it. However, we must not overlook that this company is dedicated to the design of integrated circuits, so it does not need to invest in the construction of semiconductor manufacturing plants; What needs to expand its network of research and development centers (R&D). And Taiwan is a very attractive destination. Nvidia already has an R&D center in Taiwan, and is launching another The semiconductor industry is The main support of the island’s economywhich has caused Taiwanese universities to develop specialized training programs that seek to place the highly qualified technical staff on the labor market that They require companies such as TSMC, UMC or Foxconnamong others. Nvidia already has an R&D center in Taiwan, and is launching another. However, you are facing a very serious problem: it is having many difficulties in recruiting the highly qualified engineers you need. It is surprising, but although in Taiwan thousands of engineers are formed every year, the companies of the island have a hard time recruiting as many as they need. Even to TSMC. To solve this problem NVIDIA has chosen to offer very high wages. An engineer who has just finished his studies and, therefore, has no experience, pays him a maximum salary of $ 83,000 annually. And an experienced engineer up to 185,000 dollars a year and a very juicy bonus. According to the Taiwanese medium EBC News Nvidia’s aggressive salaries’ policy responds to the need for attract TSMC engineers highly qualified. It does not seem crazy. After all, the law of supply and demand works. Image | Nvidia More information | Tom’s hardware In Xataka | Nvidia has to deal with the absolute distrust of several US legislators. His plan in China is in danger

This hacker began to collaborate with the secret service after being arrested. What nobody knew is that he kept stealing big

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In the summer of 2003, a routine investigation for a series of robberies in Manhattan led to unexpected finding. An undercover agent of the New York Police Department followed a young man who behaved suspiciously and observed him for several minutes in the lobby of an ATM. I was extracting money with one card after another, All of them falsifiedtaking advantage of the day change to overcome the daily limits of withdrawal. That scene was just the tip of the iceberg of a much more complex criminal network, as detailed years later The New York Times. That young man was called Albert Gonzalez, although on the Internet he preferred to hide After alias as “Soupnazi”. What he did was known in the criminal forums as “CASHING OUT“: Use cloned cards to get cash before banks could react. His detention opened the door to an unprecedented operation. The agents discovered that he stored millions of card numbers on their computer and that, in addition to executing fraud, it had detailed knowledge about cybercrime techniques. Gonzalez was not any criminal The role of this individual in the community of cyber criminals was highlighted: he exercised as a moderator in Shadowcrew, a forum that centralized the exchange of stolen banking data, tools for falsifying cards and advice to exploit vulnerabilities in the financial system. When it was arrested, As NPR points out, He chose to collaborate with the authoritieswhich allowed him to dodge an immediate conviction and become an informant of the Electronic Crimes Unit of the Secret Service. For months, he collaborated in an undercover operation within Shadowcrew and facilitated an international maneuver that culminated in October 2004 with 28 arrested in several countries. The operation, Baptized as Firewallbecame a reference for cybercrime investigations. But the story did not end there. While working for the Government, Gonzalez parallelly built a much more ambitious criminal network. Using various techniques, it accessed internal systems of large American clothing and distribution chains such as TJX (owner of TJ Maxx and Marshalls), Offemax (stationery and office material) or DSW (footwear). Justice data indicate that he and his collaborators stole more than 40 million numbers of credit and debit cards. These intrusions included the installation of “sniffer” programs capable of capturing in real time the data of the cards used in point of sale. The numbers were subsequently encoded on virgin cards and used to remove cash in ATMs. Arrested in the middle of the Firewall operation The final jump came with the use of the SQL injection technique, which allowed to remotely access databases from web forms. With her, Gonzalez and her team They managed to infiltrate Companies servers such as Heartland Payment Systems, one of the main payments processors in the United States. The attack committed the data of millions of transactionsaffecting more than 250 financial entities, and went down in history as the greatest robbery of cards recorded until then. This was detailed by the United States Department of Justice in an official statement issued in 2009. Chains such as 7-Eleven (convenience stores) and Hannaford Brothers (supermarkets) were also affected. Albert González While collaborating with the day authorities, at night he continued to send stolen databases through contacts in Eastern Europe. He used ghost companies, opaque transfer systems and mules to bleach millions. He even sold committed information to hackers who were being investigated, thus feeding new lines of accusation. Finally, after a series of key arrests and the tracking of an email account linked to their old alias, the agents closed the fence. He was arrested in 2008 at a Hotel in Miami. Shortly after, he led researchers to a bidon buried at their parents’ house With more than one million dollars in cash. American justice condemned in 2010 to 20 years and one day in prison for crimes of conspiracy, computer fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. It also imposed two fines of $ 25,000 each, which total a total of $ 50,000, and three years of freedom guarded. The ruling grouped the causes presented in Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. Albert Gonzalez, who, According to Podcast Malicious Life and The New York Timeshad come to hack NASA being a teenager and had caught the attention of the FBI, ended up becoming one of the greatest traitors of the hacker ecosystem and a key figure to understand the evolution of cybercrime in the era of electronic commerce. On September 19, 2023, he ceased to be in custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, As stated in the records of the American prison system with the number 25702-050. Since then, his trail has become discreet, as if he tried to definitely move away from his past. Images | Screen capture | Secret service (1, 2) In Xataka | Some users are using OPENAI O3 and O4-Mini to find out the location of photos: it is a nightmare for privacy

OpenAi has taken everything he wanted from the Internet to train his AI. Now accuses Depseek of stealing his data

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The models of AI of Deepseek They are really good. They show it comparative evidence we publish yesterday and that put it at the level of chatgpt, Claude or Gemini. That has unleashed praises, but also suspicion. There are people who do not believe that training deepseek It has cost just 5.6 million dollarsbut also now in Openai they accuse Depseek of something else. Deepseek, you are using our data without permission. Openai spokesmen have indicated Financial Times They have discovered evidence that “distillate” techniques have been used from OpenAi models used by Depseek. What is that of “distilled” in AI? Yesterday we talk about how Depseek developers have used a large number of techniques to achieve such an efficient model. Among them stands out for reinforcement learningbut it is also known that they use models distillate. In this technique a smaller “student model” is taught to behave as a larger and more advanced “teacher model”. Data of the “teacher model” are used so that the small model is faster and more efficient, but equally intelligent in specific tasks. Use not allowed. The distillate or distillation of models is a common practice in the industry, but the terms of OpenAi service prohibit that their models be used for this purpose. Thus, it is specified that users cannot “copy” none of their services or “use the output (of Openai models) to develop models that compete with Openai.” OpenAI and Microsoft have already investigated this. According to Bloombergboth companies analyzed last accounts that were being used to take advantage of their chatbots and that apparently belonged to Deepseek developers. They used Openai’s API, but there were suspicions that they had violated the terms of service by taking advantage of that access to make distillate of their models. Many do. David Sacks, responsible for AI in Donald Trump’s team, alerted him to what was happening and said there was evidence that Depseek had used OpenAi data. Spokesmen of the company led by Sam Altman indicated that “we know that companies of the People’s Republic of China – and others – are constantly trying to distill the models of leading companies in AI in the US.” The thief is believed that everyone is of his condition. The ironic thing here is that Openai has not had scruples when collecting internet data to train their models, also violating the terms of service of those platforms. Last year it was discovered for example how transcribed a million youtube hours To train GPT-4. Timnit Gebru, famous for his controversial dismissal From Google, I commented on LinkedIn that Openai “must be the most insufferable company in the world.” And he continued: “They can steal the entire world and swallow all possible resources. But no one can give them their own medicine not even a bit.” If you are on the Internet, it can be used, right? Other companies They do exactly the sameand are shielded in the argumetno of “fair use.” They collect Any public content On the Internet without asking users or permission or platforms. Not only that: it is suspected that in many cases these models are trained with works Protected by copyrightsomething that has resulted in numerous demands. Image | Xataka with Grok In Xataka | The next phase of AI is not to see who invests more but who invests less

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