talking

The US is already considering withdrawing bases from some European countries. You don’t have to be a genius to know who he’s talking about.

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More than 80,000 soldiers Americans are permanently deployed in Europe, spread across dozens of bases that function as key nodes for operations in the Middle East, Africa and the continent itself. In many cases, these facilities not only have military value, but also generate thousands of jobs and millions in investment local. Therefore, any change in its location usually says much more about global politics than about geography. Spain changes the theater. It we count weeks ago. Spain decided from the beginning of the conflict to mark a clear line: not participate in the war against Iran, nor facilitating the use of bases such as Rota and Morón nor allowing transit of American planes through its airspace. The position, defended by Pedro Sánchez under the argument of avoid escalation and respect international law, was not symbolic but operational, forcing the United States to redesign air routes and military logistics. At the same time, he placed Spain in a unique position within Europe, differentiating itself from other allies that did collaborate, even if in a limited way. That decision, apparently defensive, has ended up having much deeper strategic implications. Washington’s response. A few hours ago and through an exclusive from the Wall Street Journalit was known that Donald Trump’s administration has begun to outline a response that goes beyond rhetoric, with plans to punish allies who did not support the war, reorganizing military deployment American in Europe. The idea is clear: withdraw troops and possibly close bases in countries considered unreliable, while reinforcing the presence in those that did support the operation. In that list of “unfriendly” countries, Spain appears as one of the most obvious cases, not only because its operational refusal but for his open political position against intervention. The consequence is a change in logic in NATO, where support for specific conflicts begins to outweigh formal membership in the alliance. Spain in red. Within this new strategic map, Spain emerges as the clearest example of a break with Washington, having actively blocked military operations and publicly criticized the war. The tensions have not remained at the diplomatic level, with threats of a trade embargo and questions about its defense spending. But what is relevant is that the country goes from being a key logistics partner on the southern flank of Europe to becoming candidate to lose American military presence. In practice, this means that the foundations that for decades have been strategic nodes They could cease to be so or lose strength if the United States decides to prioritize loyalties more aligned with its foreign policy. A military redesign to the east. According to the Journal, the withdrawal in countries like Spain or Germany would be accompanied by a reinforcement in Eastern Europewith destinations such as Poland, Romania and Lithuania gaining weight due to their support for the operation in Iran and their greater commitment to defense. There is no doubt, this movement not only reconfigures the US military presence, but also brings Washington’s forces even closer to the Russian borderincreasing tension with Moscow. At the same time, it turns the war in Iran into a factor that redefines the European security balance, something that until now was dominated by the conflict in Ukraine. The implicit message is that political alignment has direct consequences on military architecture. The political clash. Not only that. After the ceasefire in the war, Sánchez’s statements criticizing the war They have intensified a clash that had already been brewing since the beginning of the conflict. “Ceasefires are always good news. Especially if they lead to a just and lasting peace. But momentary relief cannot make us forget the chaos, destruction and lives lost. The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire because they show up with a bucket. What’s up now: diplomacy, international legality and PEACE”, has communicated through networks. Thus, while other European leaders chose to nuances or partial supportsSpain has adopted a frontal stance that has made people uncomfortable especially Washington. This confrontation reflects a broader fracture within the West over how to address conflicts like Iran, and highlights the lack of prior coordination between allies. The war has not only opened a front in the Middle East, but also a political rift in the transatlantic relationship. From sovereign decision to strategic cost. In short, what began as a sovereign decision to avoid getting involved in a war is becoming a possible strategic cost long term for Spain. The truth is that with Trump’s words you never know the actual scopeand although it seems difficult for Washington to want to get rid of such a key node Due to its geographical position, the eventual loss of bases, military investment and weight within the NATO structure could alter Spain’s position in the European security balance. At the same time, it shows how national decisions in global conflicts can have unexpected collateral effects on historical alliances. In this new scenario, Spain has not only said “no” to a warbut could face the consequences of having done so at a key moment for the international order. Image | US Navy In Xataka | The same day that the US threatened Spain and said it did not need the Rota base, the US invested 13 million in expanding the Rota base In Xataka | Spain’s ‘no’ to the use of its bases in the offensive against Iran already has an answer: Trump threatens to “cut off all trade”

A polar air mass will descend over Spain just before Easter. AEMET is already talking about polar cold and significant snowfall

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The key day will be Wednesday the 26th. It will be then when, at the gates of Holy Week, a mass of polar air will enter the national territory leaving cold and snow during the last week of march. And yes, that’s what matters to us right now; but the general context is much more complicated. But let’s talk about the cold. Starting on Wednesday, an undulation of the polar jet will push the anticyclonic ridge towards the north of the Atlantic and a very deep polar trough will descend over Europe. This will generate several storms. In Spain, the models they don’t agree. While the European model is committed to a colder and more intense scenario; The American believes that the irruption will be limited to the north, the east and the Balearic Islands. Be that as it may, we are talking about an isotherm of -4 degrees in the heart of the peninsula, more than significant snowfall in the Cantabrian Mountains, the Pyrenees and the Iberian system (at least in the north). This is just what we hope for. And skepticism is more than justified: the 2025-2026 storm season has broken all records totaling (to date) 19 named systems. Furthermore, this winter has been the third wettest of the 21st century and January was the wettest month since records began. The uncertainty is, understandably and unjustifiably, greater than normal. We must not forget that “Holy Week” is synonymous with millions of trips, thousands of outdoor activities throughout the country and hundreds of sectors that critically depend on it. But it’s not a surprise either. According to AEMET climate dataBetween the end of March and the beginning of April, it rains some day in 70-80% of recorded years. That is to say, the distinctive thing this year will not be the rain, but the cold. The good news. If we pay attention to the medium-term models, everything seems to indicate that the anticyclone It will recover ground around April 1 or 2. That is, we can expect the weather to be more stable in the second half of Holy Week. Of course, the uncertainties are great and, as the old saying goes, “you should not sell the bear’s skin before hunting it.” Interesting days are coming. Image | Tropical TidBits In Xataka | The snowiest ski resort in Europe right now is not in the Alps or the Pyrenees: it is in Granada

We have been talking about “time immemorial” all our lives as if it were a remote past. Well it’s a specific year

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You’ve heard it a thousand times. Someone is talking about a custom, a tradition, a deep-rooted habit and suddenly, to underline that idea, they pompously claim that it dates back to “immemorial times”. You, too, have probably uttered that phrase more than once. What you may not know is that “immemorial times” does not take us back to a very distant and diffuse past of which there is no written record, but to a date very specific and not so remote: the summer of 1189. That is, just under 840 years ago. To understand it you have to travel to medieval England. Of laws and customs. It’s easy to forget when you get a fine, but living in a world regulated by clear laws is a fortune. For example, if you believe that your neighbor has taken something that belongs to you, you know exactly what to do: find a lawyer, go to court and appeal to legislation that applies equally to everyone. In medieval England the thing was more complicated. Justice was dispensed, but in a way that would seem rudimentary to us today. “Until 1275 law in early medieval England was constantly evolving and was based largely on the idea of ​​long usage, custom and royal decrees,” explains Amy Irvine in Histoy Hit. “The legal framework was decentralized, with no unified or systematic legal code for the entire country. Individual regions and communities had their own local courts and were governed by customary laws developed over time. These rules were often unwritten and passed down from generation to generation.” putting order. Over time that framework evolved. An important change came with the ratification of the Magna Carta of 1215, which placed certain restrictions on royal authority. Another (key) was completed in 1275, with the Statute of Westminstera document that codified the laws in force throughout the kingdom. Throughout his 51 chapters The statute addresses issues such as criminal legislation, the rules that regulate commerce or an issue that may seem minor to us today but in its day played a fundamental role: consolidated rights. As Irvine recalls, during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), as the legal system consolidated, more and more people began to defend their rights, claiming legitimacy over plots or grazing areas. What arguments were they using? The custom. Often those who claimed a right relied on the fact that they had enjoyed it for a long time. The problem was how to prove it. The Statute of Westminster wanted to clarify that point with an ingenious solution, one that played with the idea of ​​’memory’. “Immemorial” times. Basically what the statute of 1275 did was divide history into two large blocks, at least for legal purposes. What divided them? The ‘legal memory’. On the one hand, there was the vast period that came to be considered ‘time immemorial’. On the other hand, the valid ‘memory time’. Today it may sound far-fetched to us, but it made sense in the eyes of medieval Englishmen. At that time one of the arguments usually used in property trials was oral tradition transmitted from one generation to another. That is, someone claimed a piece of land arguing that their father, grandfather, great-grandfather… claimed that they already farmed on that plot of land. The Statute of Westminster wanted to put some order in this mess, establishing a time of ‘legal memory’, a border between an oral company and another regulated in writing. What exactly did he do? “It became the date of legal memory,” explains Russell Sandbergprofessor at Cardiff University, in statements reported by IFL. That is, he established a framework that anyone who wanted to defend that something had happened “since” time immemorial “had to adhere to.” The change also had important advantages for English landowners, who until then had to go back several centuries, until the norman conquest of 1066, to demonstrate the validity of their property titles. One year: 1189. The next question is obvious: What barrier separated ‘immemorial’ time from the time of legal memory? What year made the difference? The answer is 1189, the year of the coronation of King Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart. Taking into account that the Statute of Westminster dates back to 1275, this means that legal memory was limited to 86 years, a reasonable time to use the testimonies of parents and grandparents. ‘Immemorial time’ thus became limited (at least in the eyes of medieval English law) to any time prior to the summer of 1189. When exactly? It is not easy to define it. There are those who set the exact border July 6 1189, the day of Richard I’s accession to the throne after the death of Henry II. Others delay it until his coronation, September 3 of that same year. Laws… and something more. That 1189 was chosen as the temporal border also has a symbolic reading: by choosing that date, Edward I paid tribute to his predecessors, the monarchs Henry II and Richard I, which in a way also served to reinforce his legitimacy on the throne. The truth is that the formula worked and still today is used frequently the concept of “time immemorial”, although those who use it do not always have Richard I and medieval legislation in mind. For the RAEFor example, “immemorial” is that time “so old that there is no memory of when it began.” Images | Andrik Langfield (Unsplash) and Wikipedia In Xataka | In the Middle Ages it was common to sleep inside wooden closets. The big question is why we stopped doing it.

China has started a battle against the US and Japan that no one is talking about. And it is crucial to winning the chip war

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In the semiconductor war that the US and China are fighting Companies that specialize in the manufacture of photolithography equipment tend to attract attention, such as ASML; those that design the chips, such as NVIDIA or AMD; and the companies that produce them, such as TSMC or Samsung. However, in this complex network there are other much less known companies that also play an essential role in the integrated circuit industry. One of them is the Japanese company JSR Corporation. This entity is one of the industrial strongholds of Japan. And it is because it supplies its photoresist liquids to most of the semiconductor manufacturers that produce cutting-edge chips, helping to sustain Japan’s leadership in a very important area that usually goes unnoticed: that of the manufacture of advanced materials to produce integrated circuits. For China to have its own advanced photoresist liquids in your path to total independence of its chip industry is crucial, so its plan involves break Japan’s monopoly in no more than five years. China prepares to intimidate Japan The photolithography equipment designed and produced by ASML is responsible, very roughly, for transferring the geometric pattern described by the mask with great precision to the surface of the silicon wafer. In this area we can observe the pattern as the “drawing” that delimits the distribution of the transistors, the connections and the other elements that make up an integrated circuit. Before transferring the geometric pattern to the wafer, it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing light and preserving the pattern on it. However, before reaching this very important step, it is necessary to subject the wafers to a process known as deposition. It usually involves equipment manufactured by Tokyo Electron or Applied Materials. Its purpose is prepare silicon wafers for the transfer of the geometric pattern by depositing a very thin layer of material on them. Depending on the type of chip being manufactured, it will be necessary to use one material or another. One of the most used deposition techniques is known as oxidation, and consists of taking advantage of the ability of silicon to form a very thin layer of oxide when reacting with water. Its purpose is to protect the transistors and other chip components from external contamination. However, before transferring the geometric pattern to the wafer using lithography equipment, it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing light and preserving the pattern on it. This is the function of the photoresist fluid. During the last two decades, all companies specialized in the production of photoresist materials have been Japanese. In fact, Japan has since then the monopoly of this marketwhich is currently led by JSR Corporation. For the US, one of its main allies should lead this market not a problembut the possibility of China developing the capacity to produce its own advanced photoresist materials on its path to cutting-edge chip manufacturing is an issue. The Chinese government knows that photoresist production is a critical bottleneck, which is why its latest five-year plan has set out to resolve it. Xuzhou B&C Chemical, which is one of the leading photoresist materials manufacturers in China, anticipates that in at most five years will have the capacity to produce large-scale advanced KrF photoresists (Krypton Fluoride) and ArF (Argon Fluoride). Precisely this last material is commonly used in nodes equipped with deep ultraviolet (UVP) lithography equipment. However, the great challenge facing China is the development of photoresists suitable for the production of integrated circuits in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nodes. We will see what achievements it achieves over the next five years. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | SCMP In Xataka | Japan takes the lead with nuclear fusion and sets an extremely ambitious date: the 2030s

We have been talking about “day 996” in Chinese companies for years. The reality is more complex: “day 323”

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In China there are more than 1.4 billion people and nearly a quarter of its active population works in the public sector, a work universe so enormous that any generalization usually falls short. Thus, between global topics and everyday realities, the distance may be greater than it seems. The myth exported from 996. It we have counted on more than one occasion, but just because something is repeated many times does not mean that it is the norm. We have been hearing for so long that China applies infamous day 996 (working from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, six days a week), that the concept itself has ended up becoming a symbol of a supposed superhuman work ethic, although in its origin it was a criticism to an abusive model within the technology sector and never a general rule. On paper, Chinese law sets weeks five days and 40 hoursalthough its application is irregular and the official unions lack real power, and although there are sectors such as migrant work or the platform economy where the hours are hard and the scarce rights. In any case, they said in a Foreign Policy report that 996 has prospered in the West because fits the fear It calls for China to “work harder” and surpass its rivals, but that narrative simplifies to the point of dehumanizing those 1.4 billion people. Furthermore, it hides a much more diverse reality. The inheritance of work as ideology. The truth is that Chinese work culture was not born with the technologies of Shenzhen, but with a tradition marked by Maoism and heritage. of Soviet Stakhanovismone where productive sacrifice was glorified and consolidated the social weight of the danwei or work unit. In that sense, he remembered the analyst James Palmer that was not until 1995 when the two-day weekend was formalized, and for decades employment was not only a source of income, but also the core of identity, housing and social network. that past explains the coexistence of intense practices with other deeply bureaucratic ones, where political obedience and compliance with quotas weigh as much as real efficiency. The silent reality of 323. As we said at the beginning, beyond from the myth of 996a significant part of Chinese employment (around 23% of the active population) is concentrated in the public sector, where an informal pattern predominates summarize as 323: three hours of work in the morning, a break of two or even three hours to eat and napand another three hours in the afternoon. That long interruption is, in fact, almost sacred and has withstood reform attemptswith offices that dim lights or enable spaces to rest, in a routine that surprises those who expect constant hyperproductivity. The pace can be lax in quiet times and frenetic at the end of the year to meet administrative objectives, often accompanied by creative accounting adjustments. Bureaucracy, patronage and ghost jobs. They recalled in FP that 323 coexists with less visible practices such as fictitious jobs granted by patronage, from positions where hardly any work is done to positions “without presence” that serve to reward loyalty or avoid formal requirements. In that environment, flexibility and frustration coexist: an office may close during a long break, but also show leniency in the face of formal delays. And when the political leadership hardens the toneas happened with the anti-corruption campaign started in 2013 or with extraordinary demands such as imposed on teachers to register vaccinations in 2022, the intensity increases and many of the amenities temporarily disappear. Mandatory socialization and discipline. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that official work life includes banquets, toast and collective meetings that reinforce hierarchies and informal networks, rituals that can become a burden rather than a privilege and that were briefly contents by disciplinary campaigns before eventually returning. That sway between everyday laxity and political pressure explains why 323 makes sense within the system: it does not respond to an ethic of leisure, but to an administration that alternates phases of low demand with bursts of mobilization. Put clearly: in front of the story simplistic 996reality is more contradictory and less hyperbolic, a fragmented work culture where the working day depends as much on the sector and the political climate as on individual will. Image | International Labor Organization ILO In Xataka | China promised them very happy with day 996. Until they realized that it was a shot in the foot In Xataka | China became famous for its eternal work hours. The solution has been to throw the employees out on time.

Michel Foucault was convinced that “visibility is a trap.” And without knowing it I was talking about our lives with AI

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I never thought I’d write this, but I’ve been thinking about it for days. Michel Foucault more than I would like. And a back pain is to blame. It was a couple of weeks ago, it was one in the morning and the house had been quiet for a while. That’s where the puncture came. I could have woken up my wife who was 30 centimeters away and, well, she is a doctor; I could have searched on Google; I could have even asked on an Internet forum. And yet, I opened ChatGPT, asked what was bothering me, and shortly after turned off my phone to go to sleep. And I fell asleep right away. But a few days ago, this analysis by Javier Lacort about ChatGPT Health It left me thinking. Not because AI was fully entering the world of health and “medical advice” (something that, on the other hand, I knew firsthand); but because of something that was commented on in it: that “we prefer to ask a chatbot have to wait three weeks for an appointment or have to bother a friend at eleven at night. It hurt a little. There was something interesting there. Eleven at night; one in the morning “The ChatGPT Competition”, Lacort continued“it’s not so much with the doctors as with the emotional support network that we used to have. We asked our mother, our partner, the friend who studied nursing.” But for some time now, “upsetting someone has become emotionally costly.” That last phrase is devastating because it contains the key to something that goes far beyond chatbots with medical uses. Something that goes through Millennials’ problems with calls, with the fishmongers, with sex or with any interaction that is not mediated by a screen: the deep cultural aversion that the modern world has generated to ‘social friction’. And it is curious because, although only in recent years do we see the most striking consequencessociology and cultural analysis have been pointing out what was happening for decades. We have Norbert Elias, for example, who I was convinced that (as part of the prolongation of the civilizing process) the thresholds of shame and discomfort are shifting. What fifty years ago was perfectly normal—calling without warning, asking a favor from an acquaintance, interrupting someone with a question—today borders on the intrusive. What’s more, today we have internalized it. Sennet spoke of the decline of the public sphere (we know how to handle ourselves in privacy and in public transactions, but not in the middle ground); the sociology of emotionstalks about the success of therapeutic lexicon and how that has changed the way we relate; Hartmut Rosa cblame social accelerationprecariousness and lack of time, the loss of effectiveness of reciprocity networks. That is to say, we have many theorists thinking about the same thing: that we are a new type of subject. A subject who has internalized the rules, who manages himself, who evaluates his relationships in terms of emotional cost-benefit and who, above all, experiences direct reciprocity as something frictional, uncomfortable and potentially invasive. And, just then, chatbots appear. I’m not talking about the technology behind it, nor its ultimate nature: I’m talking about the same historical process that has created subjects like this, has created something that “listens to them”, that “is empathetic”, that does not judge them and that helps them as and when it can. Honestly, it would be strange not to throw ourselves into his arms. Can Foucault help us understand all this? Google DeepMind That’s where, I’m afraid, Foucault becomes interesting. In his courses at the Collège de France from the late 70sthe French philosopher explored a whole series of different dimensions of power that, although not obvious, were inseparable from the Modern State. In the past, the State was mainly about controlling borders and collecting some money. But not anymore: now the State manages populations (what it called ‘biopolitics‘ and includes things such as vaccination programs or birth policies) and, at the same time, deals with each subject in its particularity (the so-called ‘pastoral power‘ who through family doctors, social workers, school counselors or psychologists listen to us, advise us and “lead us”). He called the combination ‘governmentality‘: a power that (excuse the ‘expletives’) is at the same time totalizing and individualizing. And those, totalizing and individualizing, are features that seem half-made of technological solutions such as ChatGPT Health. A chatbot that, on the one hand, advises users about their problems, listens without judging, guides us in micro-decisions and knows us (or ‘pretends to know us’) in our particularity; and, on the other, it performs triage, implements protocols, normalizes thresholds, generates aggregate data and, in a short time, will integrate with insurers and health systems. Pastoral and biopolitical, at the same time. And with an incredible infiltration capacity. The difference, and this Foucault could not foresee, is that now this power does not depend on the State, but on a corporation. What was previously a community or ecclesiastical function, then partially state, is now outsourced to private, for-profit infrastructures. It is a privatization of power. The tentacles of the State In the previous section I said that “Foucault could not foresee it”, but I think that is not accurate. It is true that when this thinker theorized about “pastoral power” or “biopolitics,” he was thinking about public officials operating in state institutions. But the wickers were there. After all, Foucault himself, in his last courses (especially in ‘Birth of biopolitics‘, dedicated to analyze ‘neoliberalism’ as arts of government), described a decisive mutation of our time: the State no longer thinks of itself as a provider of services but as a guarantor of the conditions for the market to function. The functions that were previously assumed directly (educate, heal, advise, care) can be outsourced to private agents. In this sense, chatbots are neither an accident nor a distortion; are the logical culmination of the historical process of the development of modern power. From a very specific formulation of … Read more

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 have been talking theoretically about data centers in space for months. A company already has a plan to set it up in 2027

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The Californian startup Aetherflux has announced which will launch its first data center satellite in the first quarter of 2027. It is the initial node of a constellation that the company has named “Galactic Brain”, designed to offer in-orbit computing capacity powered by continuous solar energy. The underlying promise. Aetherflux presents an alternative to the years of construction that terrestrial data centers require. According to Baiju Bhatt, company founder and co-founder of the financial firm Robinhood, “the race toward artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for computing power and, by extension, energy.” The company is committed to placing sunlight next to silicon and completely bypassing the electrical grid. How the project works. The Galactic Brain satellites will operate in low Earth orbit, taking advantage of solar radiation 24 hours a day, something impossible on land. Advanced thermal systems would eliminate the limitations faced by terrestrial data centers, which require large amounts of water and electricity for cooling. In addition, the constellation fits within Aetherflux’s initial plans: transmitting energy from space to Earth using infrared lasers. The competition is already underway. Aetherflux is not alone in this bet. Google presented in November your Suncatcher projecta plan to launch AI chips into space on solar-powered satellites. Jeff Bezos too expressed his optimism on large data centers operating in space in the next decade or two, a goal that Blue Origin has been working on for more than a year. SpaceX also works in use Starlink satellites for computing loads of AI. Musk himself wrote in The real obstacles. Although launch costs have decreased considerably, they remain prohibitive. According to recent estimateslaunching a kilogram with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy costs around $1,400. Google calculate that if these costs drop to about $200 per kilogram by 2030, as projected, the expense of establishing and operating space data centers would be comparable to that of terrestrial facilities. In addition, the chips will have to withstand more intense radiation and avoid collisions in an increasingly congested orbit. The urgency. Big tech is colliding with physical limits on Earth. From 2023, dozens of data center projects have been blocked or delayed in the United States due to local opposition over electricity consumption, water use and associated pollution. According to the consulting firm CBRElimitations in electricity generation have become the main inhibitor of data center growth around the world. The Aetherflux Calendar. The company, founded in 2024 and which has raised $60 million in financing, plans to first demonstrate the feasibility of transmitting space energy through a satellite that will launch in 2026. If all goes according to plan, the first Galactic Brain node will arrive in 2027. The company anticipates launching about 30 satellites at a time on a SpaceX Falcon 9 or equivalent, although if Starship becomes an option, they could orbit more than 100 data center satellites in a single launch. The long term strategy. Aetherflux hasn’t revealed pricing yet, but promise Multi-gigabit bandwidth with near-constant uptime. Their approach is to continually release new hardware and quickly integrate the latest architectures. Older systems would run lower priority tasks until the life of the high-end GPUs were exhausted, which under high utilization and radiation might not last more than a few years. Cover image | İsmail Enes Ayhan and NASA In Xataka | OpenAI launches GPT-5.2 weeks after GPT-5.1: a maneuver that aims to cut ground on Google’s Gemini 3

We have been talking about railguns for years without seeing their real damage. Japan just showed an image that says it all

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Japan is going through one of the most crucial transformations in recent decades: that of its rearmament. It is its most aggressive defense policy since Second World Warand the Ministry of Defense justifies because we are in the “most severe and complex phase of the last 80 years.” And there is nothing that better exemplifies Japanese rearmament than a cannon that, until not long agoit was science fiction material. The electromagnetic cannon. Reconfiguration. Starting in the 1990s, Japan stopped investing significantly in its Self-Defense Forces. He economic bubble burstthe “lost decade” and demographic difficulties implied that the military spending of 1% of GDP that they adopted after the Constitution of 1947 would be maintained. In 2023, things changed. As a result of geopolitical complexity, they decided that they would invest 2% of their GDP in rearmament. In figures, we are talking about about 271,000 million euros until 2027, but recently The target has been brought forward to March 2026. This reconfiguration will manifest itself in four dimensions: the aforementioned increase in military spending, the restructuring of the Self-Defense Forces, a relaxation of restrictions on the export of weapons and the expansion of long-range offensive capabilities. That’s where the railgun comes into play. Electromagnetic cannon. Like gunpowder, it fires a projectile that gains speed as it passes through a barrel. However, it uses electricity instead of gunpowder. Two metal rails form a circuit that, when closed by the projectile, generates an intense magnetic field. This produces a beastly force that propels the projectile at high speed, allowing hypersonic, precise and long-range shots. This speed would allow that would travel without detour even in the most unfavorable weather conditions. Japan has been investing in this field since mid of the 2010s, and a few weeks ago, the Japan Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) performed the first proof documented firing of a naval electromagnetic cannon at a real ship. Mounted in it JS Asuka test shipthe prototype is a cannon of 40 millimeters in caliber and six meters in length. It requires four huge energy containers to power the weapon and the projectiles used were small missiles of about 320 grams, stabilized by fins and without an explosive head. There is no need for an explosion: upon reaching those 2,300 meters per second, the kinetic energy is comparable to that of a 1,000 kilo car crashing into something at 140 km/h. Success. During them, the system achieved a record by firing projectiles at a speed of 2,300 meters per second. It is a speed of Mach 6-7, but in addition, they also pushed the useful life of the barrel to the limit. The estimate was about 120 shots, since it was established in previous phases of the investigation, but they got perform more than 200 shots without the system failing. ATLA had conducted open sea tests before, but never against a real target. And although they had already commented that the tests were a success, now they have shared photographs in which you can see the holes left by these projectiles. The target ship was in motion, but due to the enormous speed and stability of the projectiles thanks to the enormous power of the system, the entry holes allow an almost perfect view of the “cross” left by the projectile passing through the hull. Challenges. Now, understanding how a railgun works is easy, but executing it is extremely complex. It is a brutal technical challenge due to several factors: The stability of the barrel: the system generates tremendous heat, so dissipation systems must be effective enough not to compromise the integrity of the barrel. Wear and tear not only affects the speed and accuracy of the projectile, but can cause accidents on the boat itself. The energy: since it requires so much electricity to operate, it must have storage systems large enough to allow it to operate with the necessary power and during intense fire sessions. Miniaturization of the system: these cannons are extremely large and, although ATLA has managed to contain it quite a bit, mounting them on ships is not easy due to both the length of the cannon itself and the set of batteries required. Integrating a railgun into a ship is not easy. Perspectives. Currently, ATLA is working on evolving a system which might not be as far from the action as was thought a few months ago, and this miniaturization would allow it to be mounted on other types of vehicles, in addition to ground defense lines. But apart from as a weapon, the agency has mentioned that the concept of electromagnetic acceleration could be applied to other areas. For example, to the “mass throwers” ​​that would allow launching materials electromagnetically in space transportation. The problem is that other challenges are added, such as the imperative need to calculate the trajectory millimetrically or develop recovery methods for these goods. USA and China. And, although it may seem like another test of weapons, what Japan has achieved is a milestone. After fifteen years of research and some 500 million dollars invested in the technology, The United States left in 2021 the development of electromagnetic railguns (although they are now with larger versions). Japan has persevered and its testing demonstrates that the system can be viable in a real-world context. And another that has continued to develop this technology is China. They are keeping it more secret, but we have already seen images of Chinese ships with an electromagnetic cannon and power containers on the front. And that, precisely, it was these two countries that They are taking steps forward when developing this technology It’s not a coincidence. They are both engrossed in technological warbut also in a escalation of military tension that has been going on for months and that is leading both countries to accuse each other of invading their respective territory. Images | ATLA, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force In Xataka | Taiwan has had an idea if Beijing invades it: surprise China underground

What is the Richter scale, how it works and why you should stop using it when talking about earthquakes

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We still often hear about “an earthquake measuring so many degrees on the Richter scale” in the news or when reading about an earthquake. This is incorrect for one or more reasons.. To understand why, we must delve into what the Richter scale is, when it is used and, above all, when it is not. What is the Richter scale The Richter scale is a scale used to measure the magnitude of an earthquake. According to defines the National Geological Institute (IGN), the magnitude of the earthquake is “a measure of the energy released by an earthquake and is determined from the signal recorded in a seismogram.” There are several magnitude scales for earthquakes, since earthquake waves can vary in their characteristics. Among them, the best known to the public is that of local Richter magnitudeor simply ML for “local magnitude.” Local, in this answer, refers to the fact that this scale is used to measure earthquakes that have been captured from close range. Specifically, it is used for those captured at less than 600 kilometers, according to the IGN. Who was Charles Francis Richter The name “Richter scale” refers to the American seismologist Charles Francis Richter. Born in 1900 in the state of Ohio, this American physicist and seismologist would leave as a legacy the first scale of its kind, a systematic way of measuring the strength of an earthquake. The seismographs They had been used for decades as a way to measure earthquakes, but it was in 1935 when Richter brought up the idea to establish a magnitude with which to measure these events. Starting from this idea, Richter would have the help of the German-American seismologist Beno Gutenberg to put it into practice. Charles F. Richter died in 1985 in the US state of California. The scale And how are the magnitudes calculated? The scale It is based on the logarithm of the amplitude of seismic waves. That is, the magnitude of an earthquake is proportional (logarithmically) to the height reached by the waves drawn by seismographs. The calculation must be “corrected” to, among other things, adjust it to a “type seismograph”. What we measure with the Richter scale, and what we don’t We pointed out before that the Richter scale, or ML, is used locally. And for seismologists, “local” refers to earthquakes originating no more than 600 kilometers of the seismograph that must measure it. But not all earthquakes that occur in “local” contexts are the same, so they are not all measured using this scale. The use of the ML scale is also limited with respect to the magnitude earthquake: it is only used to measure earthquakes of small or moderate magnitude (magnitudes between 2 and 6.5). The objective of measure the magnitude of an earthquake It is to get an idea of ​​its strength. To do this, scales such as the Richter scale use the waves generated by the earthquake, as captured by seismographs. The problem, as the experts realized, is that waves in large earthquakes do not always allow extrapolation of the magnitude using the Richter scale: sometimes the magnitude thus calculated overestimates the strength of the earthquake and sometimes the opposite occurs. Come on, although there are two earthquakes less than 600 kilometers from where they have been recorded with a seismograph, this scale is not always accurate for both. Sometimes this scale is fine, but other times the actual strength of the earthquake is higher or lower than what it measures. To compensate for the shortcomings of ML, geologists created different scalessuch as body wave magnitude (Mb) or surface wave magnitude (Ms). Each of these scales works in its own context, but the problem arises because none are universally applicable. To solve this, we then had to create the Mw scale, which we will talk about below. Magnitude and intensity To avoid confusion, we have to have clear concepts such as earthquake intensity. The intensity of an earthquake has its own scalebut it does not measure the strength of the earthquake but its impacts. The European Macroseismic Scale graduates in a scale from I to XII earthquakes based on the damage caused. The ML scale and the Mw scale As explained by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the limitations of the existing scales implied the need to create a new scale that would serve to cover these limitations. This is how the seismographic moment magnitude scale, or Mw, would have been born. This scale, although it is adjusted to “coincid” with the local magnitude scale where the latter is applicable, is based on a very different principle. Where the Richter scale converts recorded seismic waves into a magnitude, the Mw scale uses geological properties of tectonic movement. To do this, we start from the measurement of seismic momentthe product of the area traveled by the fault that has moved, the distance traveled in this displacement, and a measure of the stiffness of the rock that makes up the fault. This measurement is transformed through a logarithmic formula to obtain the magnitude of the moment (Mw) of the earthquake. Here, we can say that this scale is the closest thing to a universalsince it was created to be used in all earthquakes, even those with a magnitude greater than that supported by the Richter. Thus, it is currently the most used today to measure earthquakes, although in the news we will continue to hear about Richter’s. By saying degrees when they are magnitudes Other common mistake When talking about earthquakes and their scale, we talk about degrees, for example if we said “an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale.” The origin of this common error is not clear, but some attribute it to the fact that there are scales (such as the one used to study the intensity of earthquakes) in which degrees are used. In Xataka | 0.2 magnitude points and 70 years of disaster preparedness: what differentiates the deadly tsunami of 1952 from the one that occurred … Read more

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