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Spain has won the World Cup. Good luck finding the exact video of that moment you want to see again.

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Spain is world champion again. And one of the questions that struck me this morning was how complicated it is, paradoxically, to find specific moments from this 2026 World Cup as opposed to how easy it is to locate those from the 2010 World Cup. It is a question that has nothing to do with the scoreboard but with how the Internet has evolved. In 16 years… will it be as easy to find the moments of 2026 as it is now to find those of 2010? The panoramic. In 2010, YouTube was the home of online video. Any recording of the South Africa final, made with TV or mobile cameras, ended up uploaded there, indexed on a platform designed to locate specific videos, with title and date. In 2026 that exercise is more difficult, and that difficulty is going to get worse. The video no longer lives in one place, now it also lives on TikTok, on Instagram, in private accounts, in stories that disappear after 24 hours, in whatsapp groups that never reach the search engine. Why is it important. We assume that we record and share more than ever, so we assume that everything is archived somewhere. It’s not like that. A fan records the goal from the stands with his cell phone, uploads it to TikTokgoes viral, a TV cuts it out for its news citing the source… and there the trail ends. That video may never make it to YouTube. The account that uploaded it may be private. It may not be easy to locate later using the TikTok search engine. And there may never be a record of that shot anywhere else. Between the lines. All platforms have become video platforms, but each one has a different purpose and editorial line, and that makes finding something specific a more complex task. Or impossible. It is a phenomenon similar to what has happened with text search, although for different reasons: content and communities have been divided into fragments that do not communicate with each other. The rise of newsletterscommunities locked in Discord or Telegram, etc. A centralized search engine indexes text designed to be found. An ephemeral video app indexes immediate attention, but not long-term memory. They are opposite design goals. Yes, but. For the occasional user it is much more difficult to locate moments in this atomization. For the user hooked on specific platforms, it is not so much because they know how to navigate them and know where to look within each one. That means that the problem is not only technological, but also one of skill and time invested in learning the logic of each application. And now what. In 16 years, someone will want to see moments from this World Cup, like the anthem played by tubas, or Ferran’s goal recorded from a very specific seat. If that video never reaches a platform with an archiving vocation, that person will find an empty space. The collective memory of that World Cup will largely depend on editorial decisions that none of the platforms involved took with the archive in mind, but rather with the minute in which that video retained attention. In Xataka | Shy of the world, we are losing the Internet Featured image | FIFA

Spain has just won its second World Cup. It’s the perfect time to ask your boss for a raise.

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If you have been thinking for a while about going to your boss’s office to ask him a salary increasewe have good news: that time is today. At least if your boss is a soccer fan and a supporter of the Spanish National Team. We don’t say it, it says it a study prepared by US economists who have found a clear relationship between the happiness caused by the successes of a person’s team and their predisposition to be more generous or risky when it comes to spending. After all, sport may be passionate (Of course football is.), but passions often creep into business as well. Why do you decide what you decide? It sounds strange, I know; But that is the question that a group of US economists asked themselves a few years ago, including Judd Kesslerfrom the University of Pennsylvania, or Andrew McClellanfrom the University of Chicago. To be more precise, the team attempted to clarify the relationship between a person’s mood and their financial decisions. “While angry people are advised to ‘think it over’ before making angry decisions, they are rarely advised to consider how incidental happiness influences their behaviors or giving,” slide. What does it have to do with sport? A lot. If something knows Spain today is that a sporting success can bring hundreds of thousands of people to ecstasy and raise the general mood of a country. Having your team achieve a victory triggers your dopamine levels and that is something that Kessler and his colleagues knew well, so in 2013 they went to a bar on the Upper Esat Side, New York, with a group of American football fans and, once there, they started watching games. And that for what? To do science… although in an unconventional way. What the economists did was put their ‘Indoas pigs? two live NFL games. In the first, held in December 2013, the Dallas Cowboys they faced Philadelphia Eagles. In the second, in January 2014, the New Orleans Saints and Philadelphia Eagles. During the commercial breaks, the economists gave them questionnaires to assess how the game affected them on an emotional level (basically whether they felt more or less happy) and then a series of questions related to their greater or lesser willingness to make donations, purchase items or place bets. It was not a simple theoretical exercise. At stake were real dollars with which researchers compensated experimental subjects for their time. What did they discover? More or less what common sense dictates: when the person interviewed was ecstatic because things were going well for their team, they showed considerably fewer qualms about donating or spending money. It may seem obvious, but researchers claimit is one thing to have an intuition based on experience and another to have a study with academic parameters that demonstrates it. And taking into account that we are talking about something as serious as the factors that influence economic decisions, that is not a minor nuance. “We have observed that what happens in the game influences the subjects’ incidental happiness, and that changes give rise to predictable variations in their decisions,” they explain researchers, who claim to have developed a system that incorporates mood into economic models. As a reference, the matches altered the emotional state of 81% of the subjects. Did they go further? Yes. The study results were published first in June 2020 and a few months ago at Cambridge University Press. In their paper, Kessler and his colleagues confirm that “changes in incidental happiness significantly affect” most economic decision-making (two of the four included in the questionnaire) and that the happiest people are those who donate the most to NGOs, spend on consumer goods and take greater risks. “We observed variations in the economic decisions that the participants made throughout the game. 30 of the 64 participants (47%) change the amount they decide to donate; 36 of the 64 participants (56%) change the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a consumer good, and exactly the same number, 36 of the 64 participants (56%), change the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a lottery,” points out the article of 2020. Is the relationship so clear? The economists are clear. “We observed that when subjects’ mood improves, when they report feeling happier, they donate more to charities and may be more willing to pay more for a good, be less risk-averse and more confident,” Kessler points out and colleagues: “A person who is in a good mood can be modeled as equivalent to a person who feels richer.” Images | Wikipedia, Vitaly Gariev (Unsplash) and EmbedSocial (Unsplash) In Xataka | We believed that there is only one Erling Haaland. Until Peru got imaginative when baptizing its babies

Sony won the most important generation by humiliating Xbox with physical games. 13 years later he killed them

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Sony has just taken a stab at video games in physical format. Those discs that allowed PlayStation to build its empire with CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray on consoles like PS1, PS2 and PS3now they have a death date. Starting January 2028, there will be no more physical games for PlayStation consoles. The reactions have not been long in coming, with all industry players pointing out the impact of this decision. We will not own games because they are licenses, worry from small publishers, death to second hand and abandoning games and all because of a decision that makes industrial sense: absolute control by Sony in the distribution of games, their price and the margin they leave in their store. But since the newspaper archive is very bloody, it didn’t take long for those who, like myself yesterday, to remember a certain moment from E3 2013 to appear: the same moment in which PlayStation 4 won the competition Xbox One with three very simple decisions, but they disrupted Microsoft’s plans. Because it was at that same moment that PlayStation won the generation. And as the Xbox boss confessed some time later, they lost the worst generation that could be lost in the field of consoles. The battlefield? Physical games, the same ones that today have an expiration date. When you lose the worst generation you can lose June 2013, E3 plenary session. The great video game fair was preparing for a generational event. Both Sono and Microsoft had teased some features of the PS4 and Xbox One respectively in advance, but on June 10, the Xbox One would show off games and pricing, and on the same day but a few hours later, Sony would do the same for the PS4. What no one expected was what was about to happen. Xbox One already had controversies behind it due to the fact that the machine had been presented more as an entertainment system (with an emphasis on watching television on it) than as a console. Besides, in a gross communication failureit was also noted that the discs needed online verification every few hours for Microsoft to verify that the game was yours. This meant that if you didn’t have Internet, you might not be able to play your games, and the division’s boss himself sent out the message. “If you don’t have Internet access, we have a product for you. It’s called Xbox 360”. When you present your new machine, it is not elegant to say that if someone doesn’t want it, they have the old one because the easiest thing that can happen is that they end up looking at the competition. And the competition… tightened. After the mess with the verification of physical copies on Xbox One, Sony attacked. During his conference, starting at the hour and 57 minute mark, Jack Tretton, who was COO of Sony Computer Entertainment, spent a few minutes stating that they believed in the physical format, in sharing and reselling your games on disc and in doing whatever you wanted with them. Of course, there would be no ‘online check’ to verify the discs either. He won a lot of applause with the speech that you can see here: That moment, added to the fact that PS4 was going to cost 100 euros less than the confusing Xbox One, marked the generation, but there was more blood. On the same day of the presentation, PlayStation recorded a video in which two of its heavyweights did a complete tutorial of what the process of leaving games between PS4 users was going to be like. It is one of the most iconic moments of these fairs and one of the last moments I remember in which one company went so hard against another in this console thing: The previous generation, the PS3 and Xbox 360, ended with the two machines selling a very similar number of units, but the PS4 and Xbox One began with the Sony machine sweeping sales. Xbox retracted its policiesbut it was late and when Phil Spencer took the reins of the division and started making moves (lower the price, remove mandatory Kinect, etc.), it was… well, that’s it: late. Xbox One sold so little that Microsoft made the decision to stop providing data on consoles sold. When that happens, things go wrong because everyone likes to stick out their chests when the wind is in their favor, and a few years later, Spencer himself commented that they lost the generation they shouldn’t lose. “We lost the worst generation you could lose, the one where everyone built their digital games library” – Phil Spencer Among their arguments, one made all the sense in the world: the PS4 and Xbox One was the generation of change, of the change from physical to digital, of the change from a model of consoles that were a blank canvas to one in which people wanted to continue playing their games from past generations. And, above all, the generation in which it was more important than ever to provide continuity to that digital ecosystem. Spencer summarized with the phrase “we lost the worst generation that could be lost, the one in which everyone built their library of digital games.” As I say, it makes perfect sense because if you went from an Xbox 360 to a new console, it didn’t matter to you because there was no backward compatibility (it was added later in the case of Xbox). You had to start from scratch, and the same if you went from PS3 to PS4. Therefore, Xbox 360 users who were not happy with the new policies were able to switch to PS4 without fear of losing anything because there was nothing to lose. However, as On PS4 and Xbox One the digital ecosystem began to developusers began to buy more and more games in that format. If you had a PS4 with an account in which you had invested money in dozens of games, it was … Read more

24 years ago Oliver Kahn sued EA and won. Then a new goalkeeper appeared in football games: Jens Mustermann

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There are two things that I have to eternally thank my love for football simulators: locating places on the map and being familiar with a good part of the new talents that emerge in the quarries. I got off this annual roulette a long time ago, when the textures of the grass or the expressions of the players were not so important, but their faces were already well understood and you could recognize them thanks to the transfer of image rights, a tricky and lucrative topic even at that time. And for example, a button: Oliver Kahn’s. The name of the legendary goalkeeper of Bayern Munich and the German national team in the 90s and early 2000s disappeared from soccer games to return almost a quarter of a century later, it became an icon to close one of the longest and most curious legal disputes. Oliver Kahn’s lawsuit. Coincidentally, while searching for images of the special FIFA game for the 2002 World Cup, I found in the Xataka newspaper archive it is which illustrates the cover of this article and which is great for us. Because it was just then that the German goalkeeper filed a lawsuit against EA for image appropriation, as stated in the Ace article of the time: He believed that they were commercializing his identity without having given his permission or receiving compensation for it. The video game company faced a fine of up to 250,000 euros or up to six months in prison. Why is it important. This trial changed the rules of the game because it showed that video game companies cannot use the image of a famous athlete without their direct permission. In fact, it marked a before and after: from then on companies had to be much more careful with contracts, thus preventing big brands from taking advantage of the fame of footballers for their faces. After all, Kahn was a pioneerbut it could have been the tip of the iceberg of a barrage of similar lawsuits, such as explains the law firm Pinsent Masons. Context. It was the 2000s when football games began to look very real and in that image quality significantly improved compared to that FIFA 94 original Having the real names and faces of the stars was a powerful and attractive selling point. EA had signed agreements with FIFPro to be able to use player identities en masse, so in the hit FIFA series were represented virtually 800 players from 40 countries. The problem? That the union did not have the rights of everyone. It was one of the first train wrecks between the ambitions of a huge American technology company versus European privacy laws. Kahn 1 – EA 0, So titled Der Spiegel the goalkeeper’s victory in the German courts in 2003, ruling that the agreement that EA had with the FIFPro union did not cover the use of Kahn’s image, since the goalkeeper was not part of that organization. But it was more a moral victory than a practical one: Kahn managed to stop the distribution of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, but by the time he won, EA had already launched FIFA 2003. In fact, the goalkeeper tried to make ads featuring a blonde goalkeeper disappear, but the judge dismissed the petition: “Not all blonde goalkeepers are Oliver Kahn.” EA removed Kahn from the national team but kept him as Bayern’s goalkeeper under a separate agreement with the German league. The most striking thing is what happened next: to avoid any problems, the character based on Kahn was simply called “Jens Mustermann”, the equivalent of a completely generic and anonymous name like John Doe. Paradoxically, that name bears quite a similarity to that of Jens Lehmannthe goalkeeper who sent Kahn to the Mannschaft bench in the 2006 World Cup. Yes, but. Kahn won, but did not convince: The director of EA Germany stated that FIFA 2003 would still be on the market and that the new contracts were “even more solid” than before. EA did not change its business model: it continued to use block licenses and continued to operate normally. Kahn was absent from EA video games for years and It was not for legal reasons, but because he did not want to negotiate with them again. It has been now, with nostalgia and the evolution of modern game modes based on micropayments, when it has returned in the form of ICON card in EA Sports FC 26 actively participating in promotions and profiting from it. In Xataka | The most important thing about the ‘FIFA’ games was that they were called ‘FIFA’: EA is proving the hard way the weight of a franchise In Xataka | It’s World Cup time and millions of fans will pay for it with sleep: the graph that shows which countries suffer the most from FIFA’s schedules

A new true crime by Carles Porta arrives along with a film that won six Oscars to Movistar Plus

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There are just a couple of days until summer begins, beach and pool time. But, what do we do all those hours that we can’t leave the house? There, having movies, series or documentaries to watch can save us from a boring afternoon. If you like the true crime, You have an appointment on Movistar Plus with the new Carles Porta: you can see it by 4.99 euros per month. And it arrives almost at the same time as a movie that swept in the last Oscars. Monthly subscription to Movistar Plus The price could vary. We earn commission from these links It can be shared, has no permanence and you can see what you want offline This new Movistar Plus Free Plan It arrived a few weeks ago and is a very interesting option for all those users who don’t like sports at all. That is the only difference with respect to the other plan available on this platform, which has a price of 9.99 euros per month. For the rest, it is identical: it has no permanence and can be contracted regardless of the operator we are. Besides, You can also share the account with a friend or family member. Let’s now talk about the premieres. He true crime in question of Carles Porta it is called ‘The twins’ plan‘and, as indicated its synopsisit seems that it is going to be just as good (or more) than the last one that arrived on the platform, called ‘Peregrina’. This one has been available since yesterday and joins a good assortment of other documentaries by this same author that are available on Movistar Plus. As for the film that won several Oscars, we are referring to ‘One battle after another‘, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. This joins others that have recently arrived in the catalog of this platform, such as ‘F1: The Movie‘ either ‘Gladiator 2‘, among others. Other interesting ones will also arrive in the coming days, such as ‘Sisu: Road to revenge‘ either ‘Blue Moon‘. It is a good time to try this Movistar Free Plan. If you are one of those who plan to travel by plane or train in the coming months, this platform can help you make the journey more enjoyable, since it allows you to download anything and view it offline. Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Espinof, Movistar Plus In Xataka | Less than five euros per month and without permanence: this is the new Movistar Plus plan that you can even share with a friend In Xataka | Movistar Plus activates its Free Plan with complete programs and a lot of content, regardless of which operator you are

the battle to explain gravity that Einstein won thanks to an eclipse in 1919

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This summer, many people have organized their holidays around the eclipse that will be seen in Spain on August 12. Without a doubt, many see it as a spectacle that perhaps they can only see once. or very few times in life. However, we must not forget that it is still a phenomenon with very interesting scientific implications. For example, something very curious is that in 1919 It was used to prove Einstein right. Einstein vs Newton. In 1915, Einstein enunciated his Theory of General Relativity. In it, broadly speaking, he pointed out that the attraction of gravity is due to a space-time curvature caused by the effect of objects with mass and energy. Before him, the most accepted theory about gravity was the one launched by Newton. In it, it was pointed out that the gravitational attraction was due only to the mass of the objects. Energy had nothing to do with it, and of course I had no idea that time and space could be intertwined. Einstein’s hypothesis was received as interesting, but many physicists of the time were not willing to abandon Newton’s theory. If Einstein wanted to be believed, he would have to prove that he was right. An eclipse ultimately turned out to be the ideal experiment for his demonstration, although it was carried out not by him, but by a British astronomer named Arthur Eddington. Light issue. Newton considered that light was composed of corpuscles with mass. Therefore, these could also be attracted to massive objects. If the Sun drew light from the stars around it, for example, it would do so with an arc of 0.84 seconds. Einstein, on the other hand, made different calculations. For him, light is not attracted like a magnet attracts metal or anything like that. What happens, according to his theory, is that massive objects curve space-time, like a ball falling on top of an elastic fabric. The light, to pass through there, must take the easiest path, which is passing through the edges of that groove that the massive object has generated in space-time. In short, it also deviates, but much more so. According to Einstein’s calculations, we would be looking at an arc of 1.74 seconds. Massive objects warp spacetime The trick. To know who was right, it would be enough to observe the effects of the Sun on a nearby star cluster. But of course, during the day those stars are not seen. Therefore, the ideal would be to take advantage of an eclipse that blocks the light of the Sun and allows you to see the stars when they are very close to it. A very useful excursion. To try to prove Einstein right, Arthur Eddington traveled to Africa in May 1919. On the 29th of that month a very interesting eclipse would occur, since at that time the Sun would be very close to the Hyades, a large star cluster. He went to Príncipe Island and made the calculations of the position in which the stars should be when they appeared when the Sun set. I only had 7 minutes to try to take photographs and the weather did not make it easy for him, but he managed to take advantage of a cloudless moment and take the snapshots that would prove the German physicist right. As he already sensed, the stars in the cluster were deviated from where they should be if the Sun did not exert any gravity on them. Specifically, with an arc of 1.7 seconds. Nowadays. Eclipses have not been used for a long time to confirm theories that the scientific scene takes with suspicion, but they are still very useful for science. They expose the solar corona, that superficial layer of the sun in which solar storms brew that can affect terrestrial communications so much. Nowadays there are coronagraphs that create a kind of false eclipse so that the corona can be studied. However, eclipses offer a very interesting natural opportunity to see it in all its splendor. That’s also very exciting. Image | Wikimedia Commons/Luc Viatour |ESA In Xataka | A third of Spain will be completely dark for a minute or two. The astronomical event of the century is approaching

A woman won the lottery and had to choose between a million dollars or 1,000 a week forever

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Brenda Aubin-Vega was 20 years old when scratched a lottery ticket in Quebec and saw the jackpot appear. What came next was not a celebration without complications: before it was a decision that unleashed months of debate on the networks. The game is called Gagnant à vie —”winner for life”—and offers the lucky person the choice between collecting one million Canadian dollars at once or receiving $1,000 a week for the rest of their life. She chose weekly payments. In networks they put it in broth. The criticisms. When his case became publicthe opinions on networks did not wait. Many users on Reddit and in X They debated their decision. Some argued that weekly payments were the safe option for someone young. Others argued that rejecting a full million (in Canada lottery prizes are not taxed) was a textbook financial error. Taxes, inflation, index funds, historical returns were mentioned. Who is right? The age factor Brenda was 20 years old when she won the prize, so to equal the million with weekly payments she needs to collect for 19 and a half years, that is, reach 40. From then on everything is net profit. If he lives to be 60, he will have earned more than 2 million Canadian dollars. Until 80, more than 3 million. Statistical life expectancy works completely in their favor. Of course, once you die, the payments stop and there is no inheritance left to leave, unless you have been very very saver. The advantages of a million. With the single payment, the numbers are also seductive. A million invested in a low-cost index fund with a conservative 6% annual return becomes more than 10 million by the time Brenda turns 60, assuming she doesn’t touch the money. There is also a nuance that the debates on networks overlooked: inflation erodes those $1,000 per week over time. That is to say, what allows us to live comfortably today may be a modest income in 30 years. The best of both worlds. There is a third way and that is to collect the million and manage it as a personal fund, withdrawing a salary equivalent to the weekly payment and investing the rest. The problem is profitability. With a return of 6% per year, the capital would probably be depleted before retirement age. For the million to last until 80 or more, a higher sustained profitability is needed, an ideal scenario, but one that requires a more aggressive investment strategy and, above all, not making a single serious mistake for six decades. Other factors. On paper it sounds impeccable, in practice it requires a lot of financial discipline sustained over decades and the ability to deviate from the plan, avoiding unforeseen situations or impulsive purchases. The history of lottery prize winners It’s full of bad decisions and million-dollar prizes that disappear in the blink of an eye. In this sense, the winner may not have chosen the most lucrative option, but she chose the safest and, above all, the most comfortable if what you want is to have a safety net without having to complicate your life. Image | Quebec Loto In Xataka | There is something even more difficult than winning the Lottery Jackpot: not making mistakes with the Treasury when collecting it

Spain has not won any Oscar but it has won a beef between Oliver Laxe and Sorogoyen

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Spain arrived at the 2026 Oscars with two nominations for ‘Sirāt’, Óliver Laxe’s film about a father looking for his daughter at a rave in the Moroccan desert: Best International Film and Best Sound (which it did not win, by the way, in either case). It was, on paper, a milestone with all that milestones entail in terms of headlines and coverage. But the story that ended up circulating on social networks and in newsrooms around the world was none of those. It was that of an early morning fight at a karaoke bar. The anger. The New York Times published days before the ceremony an extensive report that used that incident as a common thread to explain the state of Spanish cinema. One night in September, Laxe confronted Rodrigo Sorogoyen (previously nominated for an Oscar) in a karaoke bar in northern Spain because he had learned that the latter had criticized ‘Sirāt’ at a private dinner. Sorogoyen admitted it bluntly: the film did not convince him, Laxe did not pay enough attention to his characters and he had made a wrong technical decision in a crucial scene. Laxe responded by calling these criticisms “the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life” and jokingly said that his interlocutor was not a good director, or as has been said in other apocryphal versions of the anecdote, that he was “a great director.” Sorogoyen’s reply, brimming with venom: “Thank God I am sure of myself. Because if not, I would kill myself.” Gossip with subtitles. What’s notable is not the exchange itself, which both directors later downplayed as an informal disagreement. Sorogoyen laughed off rumors that they had come to blows, and Laxe said the two had joked about staging a fight. The artistic difference was “healthy,” said Laxe, because “the ecosystem of Spanish cinema is diverse,” he said in the ‘New York Times’, which curiously considered it the best possible hook to talk about the film industry. The two Spains. The report used the karaoke anecdote as a symptom of a theoretical division in Spanish cinema: Laxe defends a transcendental and sensorial cinema, and Sorogoyen, a more realistic drama. Their artistic differences, according to the directors and experts consulted for the article, are the sign of a sophisticated and mature Spanish cinema. How we got here. The article makes an interesting review of the trajectory of Spanish cinema in recent decades. For many years we have lived the legacy of the dictatorship, first as a visceral rupture, then as a processing of historical memory. When a new generation of filmmakers emerged twenty years ago with less debt to that part of our history, there was no industry to support them. In recent years, several currents have converged that have made things change: subsidies that have incorporated female or minority perspectives into the sector, European co-productions and streaming platforms that have financed more and more risky projects (like Movistar+ has done with Sorogoyen’s)… Names like those of Laxe or Sorogoyen themselves, Carla Simón (Golden Bear in Berlin in 2022) or Alauda Ruiz de Azúa (Golden Shell in San Sebastián in 2025) are some of its many representatives. In any case, the funny thing about the anecdote is not only that ‘The New York Times’ interprets it as a thermometer of the good industrial health of Spanish cinema, but that from Spain we have stayed with that part of the article. Because yes, Spanish cinema is very Spanish and a lot of Spanish, but not as much as a fight at dawn in a karaoke bar on the outskirts. In Xataka | The two faces of cinema: the director of ‘Sirat’ criticizes Netflix, but 40% of European directors do not make it to their second film

Battles are won long before the first missile is launched

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In World War II, armies began to discover that intercepting a radio signal could be as decisive as sinking a ship. Decades later, that logic has multiplied: today a modern conflict can involve satellites, algorithms that process millions of data per second and attacks that occur on invisible networks long before the first plane or the first missile appears in the sky. The war that happens before. In the past, wars began with the first visible shot: a cavalry charge, an artillery barrage, or a missile launch. But the conflicts of the 21st century have changed radically that logic. Before the first projectile crosses the sky, it has already been released a decisive battle in another much less visible place: computer networks infiltrated for years, satellites observing movements, electronically blinded radars and algorithms that analyze mountains of data to anticipate each enemy movement. The war in Iran has proven it again crudely. Same as it happened in ukrainethe real showdown begins long before the audience sees the explosions. A years-long murder. I was counting last week the financial times in an extensive report how the attack that ended the life of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was planned, one of the most extreme examples of this new way of fighting. When Israeli fighters dropped their bombs on the Pasteur Street complex in Tehran, the operation was actually years developing in silence. Israel had hacked a large part of the traffic cameras in the Iranian capital and transmitted their encrypted images to servers in its territory. Those data are combined with algorithms able to reconstruct patterns of life: what time the bodyguards arrived, where they parked their cars, what routes they followed and which officials they worked with. This information was integrated with human intelligence, communications interceptions and social network analysis that identified centers of power within the Iranian system. The result was a production chain targeting: an intelligence machine designed to convert data into military targets. Blind first, attack later. When it came time to execute the operation, the missiles and bombs were actually the last phase of the plan. Before the fighters went into action, the United States launched cyber attacks aimed at degrading Iranian communication and air defense systems. The goal was simple: blind the enemy. Disabled radars, confused command networks, and cell towers unable to transmit warnings created a temporary vacuum in which attacking forces could move with advantage. That logic (take away first the eyes to the opponent) had already appeared in previous conflictsbut has now become a centerpiece of modern military strategy. The invisible battlefield. This previous combat is fought in what the military calls the electromagnetic spectrum: the domain where radars, communications, satellites and navigation systems operate. Controlling that space means being able to detect threats before the enemyguide precision weapons or block signals that allow a defense to be coordinated. Losing it can have immediate consequences. Without secure communications, units cannot coordinate, without satellite navigation, guided weapons lose precision, and without radar, anti-aircraft systems stop seeing the targets they must intercept. That is why military strategists repeat a warning increasingly clear: if the electromagnetic spectrum battle is lost, the war is probably already lost. The lesson that came from Ukraine. How have we been countingthe war in Ukraine was the laboratory that demonstrated to what extent this invisible combat It is decisive. There, both Russia and Ukraine have employee war systems electronics to jam drones, jam GPS-guided missiles or disable enemy communications. At times, Western precision weapons such as lHIMARS rockets or the JDAM pumps They lost some of their effectiveness due to Russian electronic interference. The result was a battlefield where spectrum control (and not just the number of missiles or tanks) determined who had the advantage. The new phase of modern warfare. The operation against Iran confirms that this trend is not a Ukrainian anomaly, but rather the norm in contemporary wars. Today the first movements in a conflict are not usually visible, because they are hackers infiltrating networks, satellites detecting signals, algorithms processing data or electronic systems blocking communications. If you like, it is also a silent phase, but absolutely critical. Only when that battle is won do missiles take off, planes cross the border or bombs fall on their targets. By then, however, much of the outcome has already been decided. Because in the wars of the 21st century, the most important combat is not fought in the air or on the ground, but in an invisible domain where seeing before the enemy is as decisive as shooting first. Image | US Navy, nara In Xataka | Iran’s drones have aimed at the same target as the US. And now that they have pulverized it, they are going to unleash their most dangerous weapon In Xataka | Iranian oil made the Shah of Persia immensely rich. He also financed palaces, 140 luxury cars and a private Boeing 727.

Epic Games has won. Fortnite will return to the Play Store and developer commissions will be lower than ever

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It’s been almost six years since it started the war between Epic Games and Google. A battle in which the American court ended up determining that the Google Play Store it was a monopolyand in which the company was forced to change its commission system and policy with third-party stores. Today, we know exactly what those changes will look like. A new era. We don’t say it, Google says it in its publication titled “A new era for choice and openness.” The lawsuits with Epic Games have forced the company to take a new directionmaking its commission system more flexible and allowing third-party developers to implement their own stores. The change in commissions. Google will eliminate its 30% commissions and move to a new 20% one. This rate refers to the commission charged by the application store when a user purchases something within an app (in app purchase). New developers who join the new Google programs will be able to reduce this commission up to 15%. These figures say goodbye to the 30% rate that giants like Epic Games described it as abusiveand which were modified by judicial order of the US Supreme Court. Third party stores. Epic Games had to launch your Epic Games Store outside of Google Play to avoid commissions, something that will no longer be necessary. Just like Apple had to do, Google will have to facilitate the installation process of third-party stores. As they have shown in their own publication, there will be an interface on Android dedicated to third-party application stores, so that users who download them have a more simplified and unified installation flow. This interface will be available to all developers who want to join the program. Otherwise, we will continue to be able to install them like any other APK. The before and after. The Google/Epic case marks a before and after: it is a warning to the rest of the giants. The PC platform Steam charges a 30% commission on game sales and microtransactions. Same figure that Sony charges developers on the PlayStation Store. For years, 30% became the name of large stores, but European regulatory pressures and the antitrust trials held in the US are the first blow to this wall of 30. In Xataka | Obtainium: what it is and how this alternative application store to the Google Play Store on Android works

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