A teenager in Mexico created a Hombres G fan website in 1998, with the band already separated. 9 years later they filled Las Ventas

In 1998, Mexican Francisco Romero was 15 years old, had a new computer and a school assignment to complete. Looking for the best grade, he created a website about his favorite group: Hombres G, a Spanish band that by then was already dissolved. What began as an academic exercise ended up becoming the band’s first digital fan community, with thousands of members spread around the world. And it was also the trigger that convinced David Summers and his team to return to the stage. How it all started. In 1998, having internet at home in Mexico was not common: just a marginal fraction (2-3%) of the Mexican population had access to the network under these conditions. Even so, Francisco Romero, a teenager who had just gotten his first computer, embarked on completing a school project in which students were asked to create a web page. Romero chose the Hombres G as the subject of his project. He had arrived at the Madrid group, which had already been dissolved for five years, through friends from high school. And since finding documentation about the band was difficult (there were only two pages about Hombres G on the internet), he decided to create a community. Meeting point. The web, as Romero himself explainswas titled Club ‘We’re still crazy… so what?’, in reference to ‘We’re crazy… or what?’ title of one of the group’s first albums. The success was immediate: in its first five months, it received hundreds of requests from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Peru and Japan (in times before algorithms and search engines crashed). They wrote to him, above all, from fans who had not had a space to talk about the band for years, to which they had not stopped listening since the last album they had released in 1993, ‘Bikini history‘. The contact. At the end of 2000an anonymous user left him a complimentary message on the page, to which Romero responded politely. Three days later, another message arrived from the same sender, who turned out to be one of the band’s two guitarists: “Please don’t give out my email, I’m Dani Mezquita.” Later they established telephone contact, which ended up leading to more frequent conversations. The significant fact: Mezquita was then working as marketing director at DRO East West, the Warner Music label that released almost all of the band’s albums. From his position he had noticed something: at the end of 2000, a compilation of Hombres G was the third best-selling album in Mexico at that time. A group without activity, without tour, without active label, without a single public appearance in years. That is, they had an active and completely underserved fan base. With these data on the table, and as told in the documentary ‘The Best Years of Our Life’ (released in theaters scheduled for April 30), the members met and proposed a modest return, with three or four concerts in Mexico. It gets out of hand. From there the expectation skyrockets. The reunification tour ended adding 70 performances during 2002 and 2003including a concert in Las Ventas before 20,000 people and several cities in Latin America and the United States. The album that accompanied the comeback, ‘Dangerous Together’, was initially released only in America, which says a lot about where the weight of the comeback was leaning. When he arrived in Spain he ended up obtaining the Platinum Record. In gratitude for Romero’s importance in this return, he has continued working continuously with the band from Mexico. And so we come to the present: on April 25, 2025, Men G performed before more than 60,000 people at the GNP Seguros Stadium in Mexico City. All within the framework of a tour titled ‘Thank you, Mexico Tour’. A name that makes it clear to what extent the very survival of the group is owed to a modest student from the city. In Xataka | Three millennia of pop: the oldest song in the world is 3,400 years old and we can still hear it

A teenager discovered the ‘Málaga’ virus and ended up founding VirusTotal. The enigma that remains is the same since 1992: who programmed it

Bernardo Quintero (@bquintero) was 14 years old and his first PC, an Amstrad PC-1512, had just arrived home. It was 1987, and the co-founder of VirusTotal He was excited by this machine that allowed him to exploit his computer curiosity. His hobby ended up being trying to circumvent the copy protection systems of some games, and he was there one day when something suddenly happened. A little white ball moved on your screen. By itself. Without him having done anything. He soon discovered that it was a computer virus. One that he ended up studying to know how to detect and eliminate it. He succeeded, and over the next three years he ended up improving his first antivirus, a tool that allowed him to recognize and eradicate seven different viruses he had encountered. It didn’t seem like that project was going to go much further, and Quintero began his studies in Computer Science at the Polytechnic University School of Malaga. In one of the first classes, a professor asked if anyone wanted to raise a grade with a Pascal programming project. He signed up, and when talking to the professor, he asked him if he had done any previous projects. “Well, yes,” he replied. “An accounting program, disk utilities, an antivirus…”. The teacher cut him off. “Did you say antivirus?”. When he answered affirmatively, the professor asked him to accompany him to his office. There he showed him how the entire IT department had been infected by a virus that the antivirus did not recognize. Fragment of the code in Turbo Pascal 5.5 of the antivirus that Bernardo Quintero developed to eliminate the “Málaga-2610” virus (1992). Source: Bernardo Quintero. Quintero soon detected where the problem could be and went home with an infected disk to work on an antivirus. It took him more than he thought, but after a few hours he managed to figure out how to detect it and delete it. That helped him pass the subject, but it also ended up being the definitive seed of the professional project that would end with the founding of Virus Total. He tells it all in more detail in his novel, ‘Infected‘, which he published at the beginning of the year and in which he narrates those beginnings and how that ended up leading him to create VirusTotal, the Malaga company that would later end up being bought by Google. That virus in his faculty was called “Málaga”, and Quintero spent years without paying much attention to it again. So, three years ago, this expert posted a message on Twitter (X) to try to solve the mystery of who would have created it. Already then he discovered that according to several sources the virus had been created at the Polytechnic School of Informatics. The objective, I counted thenit was not about bringing the name to light, but about chatting with that person and remembering those times. He failed to reveal the mystery, and that mystery remained unsolved again. But Bernardo Quintero never forgot that and returned to the fray with a new attempt a few days ago. After first publishing a message on X, the next day he published a summary of that story on LinkedInand asked for help in that post to try to solve the mystery once and for all. We contacted him, and he told us how while in the past he had focused on discovering how it infected and creating the disinfection tool, he never tried to find out who had created the “Malaga” virus. But he told us that “now, looking at it with new eyes, I have seen a couple of interesting details and I have discovered the motivation.” In fact, he adds that thanks to those messages on X and LinkedIn “I have received stories from several people who studied those years at the Polytechnic of Malaga and who believe they know the author.” Of those candidates, he explains, “I have ruled out 3 or 4, but there is one that fits very well with the new data I have.” The mystery seems to be close to being solved. “I just need to clear up one unknown to confirm the author.. And if it is confirmed, there is a beautiful and sad story that will be worth telling.” Everything therefore indicates that it will finally be known who was the author of that virus, and Quintero has promised to tell more details these days. We will be attentive. Image | Mika Baumeister In Xataka | The computer with the most malware in the world: this is MICE, the challenge of Bernardo Quintero and VirusTotal

That a teenager begins to ‘hate’ his parents is something that is in his brain, and science has already found the pattern

If you’re a parent of a teenager, you know: their world revolves around their friends. If you were one of them, you surely remember: parents’ opinion took a backseat. And although it seems that it is a sign of the rebellion that we see normal at this age, the reality is that the guilt is literally found in the brain. The culprit. But when asked what causes this indolence among adolescents? The answer comes from the magnetic resonance imaging that has been applied to the brains of some adolescents. And research shows that, during adolescence, the brain not only changes its interest, but also reconfigures your reward circuits so that the voices of strangers are more gratifying than the voice of one’s own mother. And this is something that explains the fact that adolescents give much more importance to a friend than to their own closest family, and even go so far as to prioritize them above anything else. Although in the end he has a good excuse in his brain systems. The study. To find this out, the researchers didn’t have the teens listen to scolding. They used a more cunning methodology by gathering 46 children and adolescents between 7 and 16 years old who were exposed to listening to recordings of nonsense words such as teebudie-shawlt. The important thing about this investigation was that these meaningless words were spoken by two voices: that of their own mother and that of two women unknown to them. In this way, when the recording was played, the activity of their brains began to be analyzed through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see the parts of the brain that were lighting up with each of the voices that were playing. The results. In the youngest children between seven and twelve years old, their mother’s voice caused a party at the reward centers of the brain, specifically in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The interesting thing here is that this activity was much greater than what was felt when hearing the voices of the strangers and it is logical because the mother is the center of her social universe that causes her greater happiness. But things change completely in adolescents between 13 and 16 years old, where these same reward and social evaluation regions showed significantly greater activity for unfamiliar voices than for their own mother’s. In this way, the age that we can consider as a border between them paying attention to their mother and when they are going to completely ignore what they are told will be around 13.5 years. Because. In this case we are not talking about adolescents rejecting their parents, since in a behavioral test they were able to identify mothers’ voices in an almost perfect way. The change is precisely in the valuation of that voice. This neurobiological turn is considered an adaptive process essential for maturity. The teenage brain is being “refreshed” for a new mission: leaving the nest. To prepare for independence, the brain must begin to find new social connections more rewarding. You have to tune in with your companions, future allies and partners. The bibliography. This finding fits with previous models that were made to identify the differentiated stages in social and brain development, where the affective focus passes from the mother to friends and finally to romantic relationships. Recent reviews reaffirm that the reward system in adolescence is especially sensitive to novel social stimuli, and that the maturation of frontostriatal connections modulates these changes. A previous work by the same group had already shown that in childhood the maternal voice has a privileged response in the mesolimbic circuit and the current study extends and completes that model by showing how this pattern is reversed in adolescence. In this way, every time we see a teenager who literally tells his mother that he doesn’t even want to hear her, but spends all day talking to his friends, we already know why: his brain has changed so that he likes it more. Images | Sebastien Mouilleau Amir Hosseini In Xataka | If the question is where to find the time to play sports or learn languages, you have the answer on your mobile

The suicide of a teenager unleashed a crisis in Openai. We already have the first measures that will arrive in Chatgpt

The chatbots of AIs are in the spotlight for their possible risks on mental health, especially chatgpt. We recently deepened this problem following the accusations that Chatgpt was the culprit of causing delusions and even the suicide of a teenager In the United States. Although we already saw that reality is much more complex that a simple “the fault is AI”, OpenAi has responded to the wave of criticism and already has A package of measures that will integrate into chatgpt To avoid more similar cases. OpenAI’s plan. In response to the controversy after the case of Adam Raine, Openai has detailed the measures that will reach Chatgpt, which will focus on facilitating access to emergency services, contacting trustworthy people and reinforcing protection measures focused on adolescents. The company puts a period of 120 days to integrate these novelties, although it warns that some will take a little more than others. Reasoning models. GPT-5 Choose the best model automatically depending on the needs. One of the solutions proposed by Openai for conversations that take a worrying address is to automatically direct them to their reasoning model, regardless of the user selected. Parental control. It will arrive next month and the minimum age to use will be 13 years. Parents can link their children’s account to their own and can deactivate functions such as chat memory and history. In addition, they will receive a notification if it detects that their son “is in a moment of acute anguish.” Collaboration with experts. OpenAI ensures that all these improvements will be implemented under the supervision of mental health experts. For some time they have an artificial welfare and intelligence experts that has been expanded with experts in addictions, eating disorders and adolescent health. The demand. It is not the first case in which Chatgpt is placed as responsible for a mental health crisis, but one of the most popular. Adam Raine’s parents They sued Openai after their son’s suicideclaiming that Chatgpt validated his “most harmful and self -descetive thoughts.” In some of his conversations he came to discuss details of how to make the knot in the rope with which he planned to commit suicide. Weak safeguards. In his Fake Friend reportthe ‘Center for the Fight against Digital Hate’ has already verified that the safeguards of chatbots are very fragile and the case of Adam Raine corroborates it. Chatgpt detected several times that there was a risk of self -injuries and insisted to call the suicide prevention line, Adam managed to dodge these messages simply telling him that he was looking for information for a fiction story. The new parental control sounds like the first stronger measure against this problem. Image | Kaboomps, via Pexels In Xataka | In 2011 someone published in Reddit “A858”. Fourteen years and thousands of messages later, the mystery is still disound

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