fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer's disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S. [...] Of the 9 million death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022 that researchers examined, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest risk of dying from Alzheimer's disease out of 443 occupations. After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's, compared with 1 in 60 people overall. This pattern did not extend to other driving jobs. The researchers concluded that the key to reducing the risk of Alzheimer's was not driving itself but continuous real-time navigation: the constant work of locating yourself in space, tracking a destination and updating a mental map as conditions change. Drivers whose jobs relied on fixed or predetermined routes, like bus drivers and aircraft pilots, didn't seem to experience a similar advantage. Researchers believe the association between navigation-heavy work and lower Alzheimer's risk centers on the hippocampus, a part of the brain that governs memory and spatial navigation. It's one of the first brain regions that Alzheimer's damages: Problems with spatial navigation and orientation are among the earliest signs of the disease, sometimes surfacing before obvious memory loss. In one landmark 2000 study, neuroscientists compared the brains of licensed London taxi drivers with those of people who did not drive cabs. Their findings provided the first evidence via structural imaging that regions of the adult brain can measurably change under sustained navigational demand. To earn a license, London cabbies must memorize more than 25,000 streets within a 6-mile radius of Charing Cross, a challenge known as "The Knowledge" that takes three to four years. The researchers found that London taxi drivers had measurably more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus, a brain area tied to storing large-scale spatial maps. That volume tracked with experience: The longer someone had driven, the larger that part of the brain. The change was built through practice, not inherited. While people who are good at navigation might gravitate to this kind of job, the job itself does have an impact on the brain. Together, these two studies make a coherent case: Work that intensively exercises the hippocampus may reshape it, and that reshaping may protect against one of the most feared diseases of aging.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Aug 2026 5:16am GMT

A routine security assessment found that cameras aboard Royal Navy Kraken unmanned surface vessels were sending "heartbeat" signals to an IP address in China. "A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally," said a Ministry of Defense spokesperson. "Our assurance and testing processes are designed to identify and address potential vulnerabilities early, and we continue to undertake routine security activity across our systems and equipment." The Register reports: According to reports, the talkative components were cameras sourced by Kraken from a third-party supplier. The incident raises questions about supply chains, audits, and cybersecurity in the British armed forces. The spokesperson said: "The first duty of government is national security, and we take the security of our equipment, networks, and data extremely seriously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

Our discussion takes place live on August 11 at 3 pm ET.

10 Aug 2026 10:23pm GMT

Meta has been trailing competitors. Zuckerberg thinks he's found a way forward.

10 Aug 2026 10:13pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ceva Logistics, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information was also stolen in the breach. The cyberattack on Ceva is affecting at least eight warehouses across Europe used for shipping goods across the continent, the company told TechCrunch. Industry news site FreightWaves reports that the hack began on July 29 and is causing shipping delays for many of the goods in affected warehouses. Ceva is a France-headquartered shipping and logistics giant that companies around the world rely on to deliver their goods from their assembly lines to customer homes. The company, which brought in $18.3 billion in revenue in 2025, has over a thousand warehouses across the world. [...] The hack at Ceva also resulted in a data breach, affecting a large amount of personal information belonging to retail customers that Ceva relies on for delivering goods to people's home addresses. Several companies reported that hackers took their customers' names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses used to place their orders from Ceva's systems. Dutch online retail giant Bol said on its website that hackers gained access to systems of its warehousing partner, Ceva, and warned that their customers' data may have been taken. Bol also said that it expects delays and some customer orders to be canceled as a result of the incident. De Bijenkorf, another Dutch luxury retailer, similarly confirmed order delays following the theft of its customers' data, per local media. Football club Ajax, banking giant ING, and eyeglass maker Ace & Tate also reported that customers' shipping information was affected. Video game giant Valve told customers that it learned on August 7 that data was taken from Ceva's systems, and alerted customers who recently bought its Steam hardware that they had personal information taken in the incident. Valve said in its note to customers, posted to Reddit, that Ceva stores their shipping and delivery information for 90 days following their order. So far, Ceva says the agency has received data breach reports from 10 organizations in relation to the incident.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT

Trump falsely claimed the MMR vaccine is "quite lethal" and linked shots to autism.

10 Aug 2026 9:42pm GMT

Cookies are ancient technology, and in no way necessary of even particularly desirable to track you. Modern fingerprinting doesn't need them at all. A live demonstration of everything a website learns about you before you click anything with no cookies. It reads you during the connection and in the first two seconds of JavaScript, then narrates what it found back to you in plain English, as if a stranger were describing you out loud. The argument isn't "look how creepy this site is." It's: the site you visit after this one can do all of it too, and won't tell you. ↫ Kuber Mehta Also note, as the demonstration does, that if some of the things it determines about you are wrong, that doesn't really matter. In fact, it may actually make fingerprinting and tracking you easier; as long as fingerprinting consistently gets the same things wrong in the same way, it becomes a valuable part of the fingerprint, like a small scar obscuring part of your real thumb's fingerprint. Online tracking of people should be illegal.

10 Aug 2026 9:11pm GMT

Back in 2014, Microsoft released the source code to the first Windows version of Word, version 1.1a. Now, Justin Marshall has ported this code to modern versions of Windows, so you can run it as if it were any other modern application. This project is a fully working native Windows x64 port of Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, whose historical codename was Opus. It builds the original Word source and resources together with modern replacements for the 16-bit assembly, segmented-memory, and Win16 platform boundaries. The result is the original Word application and user experience running as a 64-bit Windows executable. This is not an emulator or a reimplementation using a modern editor control. ↫ Justin Marshall Neat endeavour.

10 Aug 2026 1:18pm GMT

Top supplier of great articles Nicole Branagan is at it again. We're back into the strip mahjong games today, here going back to 1991. Video System is a company that's probably best known in retro-gaming circles for Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings, but mahjong games (usually branded Idol Mahjong) were one of their bigger moneymakers. And there's something interesting going on here- Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2-R-4 Special re-releases the final three games in the series, which all also got contemporary console releases, but the first game in the series has never been seen outside of its original arcade launch. Why? ↫ Nicole Branagan Look, you're not going to get something like this from anyone else.

10 Aug 2026 1:09pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT