It has surely been the worst week for Mark Zuckerberg since the founding of Facebook. The tycoon has had to announce the dismantling of his virtual reality metaverse, after having burned 80 billion dollars in a bet that the public has received with indifference. While Meta makes a desperate turn towards AI to save face, the judicial front has opened a leak that threatens the entire business model of social networks. Two US juries have issued rulings holding Meta and YouTube directly responsible for designing deliberately addictive products.

When firefighters combat a forest fire in Les Gavarres or the Mossos carry out an operation in a motorway tunnel, they don't use their mobile phones, but radios connected to RESCAT, the Emergency and Security Radio Network of Catalonia: owned by the Generalitat, operated and maintained by Cellnex Telecom, and designed not to fail even when the power goes out.

Companies and organizations that suffer data breaches have developed a comforting narrative: "We detected it, patched the security hole, and it won't happen again." The problem is that this mantra ignores an uncomfortable reality: once data has been extracted, it is almost impossible to stop its spread on the dark web, where it can circulate for years. We review three incidents—two very recent ones, Endesa and Spotify, and one older one, the Consorcio Sanitario Integral (the entity that includes the Broggi Hospital in Sant Joan Despí)—as distinct examples of this ongoing crisis and the corporate efforts to reduce the reputational impact.

This year, 2025, has repeatedly reminded us that we live in an internet-dependent society. Digital networks and services have experienced some of the most massive outages in recent history, affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Worryingly, many of these outages were caused by human error, poorly deployed updates, or faulty configurations. Where has the distributed internet, which was supposed to be resilient, gone?

The smartwatch market has long since ceased to be a race to see who has the biggest screen or the most sensors. Now the battle is on more subtle grounds: who understands you best, who monitors your health most effectively, and, especially, who lets you sleep with your watch on. This time I've tested the Apple Watch Series 11, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8, the Oppo Watch X2, and the Withings ScanWatch 2, four offerings that represent two very different philosophies about what a watch should do in the 21st century.

The smartphones Today's smartphones offer semi-professional photography capabilities that we often don't fully utilize. With advanced techniques and specific settings, it's possible to achieve studio-quality results while on vacation using only your phone. Models like the iPhone 16 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and the Google Pixel 9 Pro include computational capabilities that completely transform the mobile photography experience.

The recent addition of Meta AI to WhatsApp, with which Meta Platforms aims to have the 3 billion users of the world's most popular mobile chat platform participate for free in the training of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, has revealed a curious paradox: the aforementioned AI knows Catalan. When users start a conversation in our language, the chatbot initially responds in Catalan for a few tenths of a second, but then deletes the response—usually correct enough—and goes on to claim that it doesn't yet understand the language and indicates that, when it speaks it, it will let us know.

The ES-Alert emergency alert system suffered a serious failure last Saturday when numerous Catalan users failed to receive the torrential rain warning issued by the Generalitat's Civil Protection Department early in the afternoon. The alert was intended for all active mobile phones in 37 of Catalonia's 43 counties, but a technical issue that has not yet been resolved left thousands of citizens without the crucial warning.

The 2019 Galaxy Z Fold, Samsung's first foldable phone, measured 17.1 millimeters thick and weighed 276 grams. The Z Fold 7 that the brand unveiled this week measures just 8.9 mm (less than half the original) and weighs 215 grams (22% less), despite having a more powerful chip, larger screens, and AI features. A technological milestone that, of course, comes at a price: starting at €2,109.

We urgently need to edit a PDF and we open our phone's app store. We want to plan a vacation route and we search our browser for "best map apps." We need to organize a get-together with old school friends and we download the first app we find, without even looking to see if it's in Catalan. Everyday situations that illustrate a paradox of our time: while we demand to be able to live fully in Catalan, when it comes to digital tools we often accept any language and settle for closed platforms that limit our autonomy.

At the recent Health Revolution Congress in Barcelona, ​​several companies with a local presence showcased solutions for remote patient monitoring: Lifevit offers connected medical devices for tracking vital signs; ClaraCare offers home hospitalization by integrating health devices and personalized reports; Garmin Health offers healthcare app creators a telemedicine platform based on its watches, which are not just for athletes; Sense4Care has created a wearable device, similar to cardiology Holter recorders, but in this case to detect movement patterns, with Parkinson's patients in mind. All of them boast pilot tests with this or that Catalan hospital, but they all share a common sense of frustration over the difficulty of deploying their technologies across the broader healthcare system.

The Internet and the digital services that depend on it are a global network, but in practice it is biased towards the Latin alphabet and the basic ASCII characters. If you write from right to left, in Cyrillic, or if your name contains an open accent or your brand a geminated accent, you will encounter all kinds of inconveniences when using them: you will not be able to register a domain that corresponds exactly to your name or brand, emails will not go out or will not arrive, and web forms. Incidents like these seem technical, but they are symptoms of a deeper problem: the lack ofuniversal acceptance, still in 2025.

The market of the smartphones It's constantly under competition between manufacturers, who are looking for new ways to stand out. One trend that's emerging strongly is the creation of ever-thinner phones. This strategy doesn't respond to any explicit consumer demand, but rather is a deliberate tactic to establish a unique identity in a saturated landscape.

Whether it be on February 14, May 30 or whenever the TSJC deems appropriate, the elections to the 13th legislature of the Parliament of Catalonia will be very different from all previous ones because election day will take place under the effect of the covid-19 pandemic. Between voters affected by the virus and those who fear contagion, participation could suffer considerably. The most willing citizens are looking for alternatives and at this point the requests for postal voting are already 2.5 times those of the previous elections. But after so many months in which many people have discovered that it was possible to work from home and that many procedures can be carried out telematically, it is pertinent to ask ourselves why an electronic voting system has not yet been implemented. The answer has more to do with political will than with technology.