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Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coined "neurorights," that protect "mental privacy," "identity," and personal "agency." Here's an excerpt from the article: Over the past two decades, researchers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the iron in the hemoglobin supplying oxygen to neurons, have been building up increasingly detailed maps and inventories of the mammalian cortex. Thanks to huge advances in machine-learning artificial intelligence -- computer algorithms that are able to sort through enormous amounts of information and use statistical methods to make classifications and predictions -- fMRI scans can now be used to identify everything from depressive thoughts to the nuanced feelings of envy and schadenfreude. Other algorithms have been able to accurately piece together reconstructions of movie clips watched by subjects, just by analyzing their brain scans; or have detected, in probing the brain activity of swing voters in the US presidential election, responding to photographs and videos of presidential candidates, which candidates provoked anxiety or even disgust, and which elicited positive responses or feelings of empathy. In just the last few years, neuroscience researchers have progressed from decoding images and emotions as they play across the cortex to sounds, words, phrases, and even language. In 2023, in a remarkable demonstration of this emerging technology, a woman called Ann Johnson, who had been paralyzed for 18 years by a brain-stem stroke, was able to speak again through the insertion of a grid of 253 electrodes onto the surface of her brain, which translated her neuronal signals into sentences, in real time, at a rate of 78 words per minute (just about half the speed of standard conversation). The research team at the University of California, led by neurosurgeon Edward Chang, had combined this brain-computer interface with an animated avatar of Johnson's head, which spoke in her own voice, as reconstructed from a recording of a 15-minute toast she had given at her wedding. Just as the avatar's mouth spoke Johnson's words as she thought them, so its expressions were similarly influenced by the nuances of her brain activity, which turned her thoughts about facial gestures into displays of emotion -- from smiles to pursed lips and frowns. [...] The more invasive the recording equipment, the richer and more detailed the data. Surgical interventions are at the vanguard of neuroscience and remain very rare -- fewer than 100 people on the planet have brain-computer interfaces like Johnson's embedded beneath their skulls. Yet almost inevitably, a concerted trickle-down effect is occurring. In the summer of 2023, a team at the University of Texas demonstrated that they could use fMRI to translate brain scans into words and sentences, after subjects listened to 16 hours of the storytelling podcasts The Moth Radio Hour and The New York Times' Modern Love to train an AI model. When the subjects then listened to new podcasts, the algorithm was able to convert the gist of what they heard, as it manifested in their brains, into words, phrases, and sentences that roughly captured the stories. As the team's lead computational neuroscientist, Alexander Huth, put it in an interview with Science, "Our thought when we actually had this working was, 'Oh my God, this is kind of terrifying.'" Now noninvasive, wearable brain scanners are beginning to proliferate beyond the lab, making their way into our workplaces and, through the vast global consumer market, into our homes too.

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Fei-Fei Li, aka The Godmother of AI, says the biggest AI risk in education may be students losing the motivation and agency to learn, rather than simply using the technology to cheat. She argues against banning AI outright, saying it can be valuable when used to support engaged students instead of replacing the thinking and struggle that learning requires. Techspot reports: Speaking on an episode of the science podcast Huberman Lab this week, Li talked about the fears around how students are using AI. "The absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human-level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools," the ImageNet inventor warned. "It should not be taken away by humans nor should it be taken away by machines." If we see a generation of graduates who have completely relied on AI without actively trying to learn anything for themselves, they risk leaving education without having "properly developed the brain," Li said. [...] Li certainly isn't advocating for a complete ban on students using AI. She believes it can genuinely help struggling students who are already engaged in their learning. Li herself noted how she struggled with organic chemistry as a premed student, when teaching assistants and professors didn't have enough time to answer every question. While there's no obvious solution, Li says we need to find a way to keep children and students' motivation and agency. "Let's find a way to give them the access and the right way of using these tools," she said. Li added that if AI is used properly in education, it could make the students of the future "way smarter than us because they are superpowered."

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In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching filme with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. First of all you make the entire room properly dark or you can't see anything. This is regardless of the fact that the projector bulb is consuming 100 watts of power to show the image. Even if you manage not to burn the film merely running it through the projector causes wear, scratches and tearing. While film typically ages very well, eventually it will turn into magenta goop or gets eaten by vinegar syndrome. Thus you'd really want to convert all these films into high quality digital files.

There are several companies that offer this service. If you only have a few rolls, using those is the smart thing to do. I, on the other hand, have so much material that using a commercial service would cost thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of euros. Fortunately, this is a fairly common problem and there are dozens of existing projects on the Internet to be inspired by. 

The main technical problem with super 8 film is that it is very small. A sequence of 10 super 8 images is approximately as long as a matchstick. The fact that projectors can display 18 frames per second with sub millimeter registration is an astounding achievement of mechanical engineering. How do they do that? Very difficultly.

Many of the DIY solutions start by taking an existing projector and modifying it to run slower. Then you remove the projection lens and aim a digital camera with a macro lens at the gate. This yields incredible results quality-wise but requires a fairly expensive macro lens and typically the modification on the projector is destructive. So that's out. Some more searching eventually lead me to this Github project.

The basic idea is simple. Instead of using a projector or trying to replicate a film transport (which proper tension and all that) instead rely on the basic stiffness on film and drive it directly with stepper motor. Film is not aligned mechanically but instead by detecting the sprocket hole with some straightforward machine vision code. Time to fire up the ol' 3D printer and order components. This is what the end result looks like after assembly

The thing at the top left that looks like a space cannon prop from a scifi movie is actually a microscope lens. Not only can it do > 1x optical magnification, it can do so at a cost of about 25 euros. The downside is noticeable chromatic aberration. The small flat thing on the other end is the Raspberry Pi HQ camera module that can do 4k at 12 bits per channel. The whole thing is run via a single Raspberry Pi 3 with a stepper motor hat. The board at the bottom is used to distribute 12V DC power to the lamp and motors.

Before going further, let's just spend some time appreciating just how awesome colors look in this film. Props to the chemical engineers at Kodak. And remember, the original image is about one third of the size of your smallest fingernail.

The Github repo says that you probably need to adapt the code to your setup. I basically ended up rewriting all of it from scratch. In the process I learned that OpenCV has its own GUI toolkit which is both simple (one could even say simplistic) and perfect for this use case. The first attempt took nine hours to process one 3.5 minute reel of film. Then I realized that trying to do 4k on material that physically maxes out at approximately 2k with the processing power of a potato is not a recipe for success. Halving the capture resolution and a few other optimizations brought the runtime down to about one hour per reel.

With this, some more custom software for image processing and stabilization coupled with FFmpeg scripts one can start to go through the archive of films. Doing so raises a fair bit of questions. For example:

Is that a 3 year old child driving a jury-rigged go-kart on a frozen lake on his own without even wearing a helmet?

Yes it is. A bit later a grown up drives the car but he is too heavy so the ice cracks under him. No one seems particularly concerned. This may seem strange to us but you have to understand that this was the very early 70s. The concept of safety had not been invented yet.

The CFTC has ordered Kalshi to keep operating in New York, claiming the state's lawsuit against the prediction market created a "market emergency." They said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act's Core Principles." Ars Technica reports: The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Kalshi on July 31. James' lawsuit seeks a court order to permanently enjoin Kalshi "from operating an unlawful gambling business" in the state. The lawsuit also demands that Kalshi "make full restitution to customers who have engaged in betting" and pay financial penalties. "New York intends to make event contract derivatives waste away under its iron curtain of state gaming laws before the courts get the chance to issue final rulings," CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said yesterday. "Congress did not intend for derivatives exchanges to be regulated under a patchwork of state gaming laws... New York has no business regulating these interstate financial markets. The commission is required by law to ensure order in these markets, and that is what we have done today." [...] The CFTC says it alone has the power to regulate platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket under the Commodity Exchange Act, a US law that gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over designated contract markets (DCMs). "These are financial exchanges that offer financial instruments and operate across state lines," Selig said yesterday. "They match the bid from a resident of one state with the offer of a resident from another state and submit the trade to a clearinghouse that backstops the transactions of customers throughout the country."

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Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream say suspected China-linked hackers used an open-source AI-agent system to conduct what may be the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the attack compromised at least 85 accounts and resulted in the theft of more than 2,500 personnel records from Taiwanese systems. Tom's Hardware reports: The campaign reportedly ran for four days at the beginning of July and at times deployed as many as eight autonomous agents in parallel. Dream said the system mapped 21 government systems before compromising user accounts and extracting personnel information. The attackers subsequently expanded their activity to Taiwan's nuclear safety agency, at least seven energy companies, government suppliers, and other government systems. Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors. The archive reportedly held 1,395 files showing that the tool was built on two open-source AI agent systems -- Hermes and OpenClaw -- both of which can be downloaded freely and are designed to let large language models carry out multi-step tasks on their own. Researchers could not determine which underlying model powered the agents, but the data reportedly showed the model's safeguards had been sidestepped by presenting the intrusion as an authorized penetration test rather than a real attack. Of particular concern is that the toolkit for the hack comprised such easily available systems, neither of which was purpose-built for offense. The operators appear to have assembled a capable autonomous tool out of components any developer can pull down and run. What the researchers describe as the tool's most striking feature was its ability to continuously devise attacks on its own, rather than follow a preprogrammed route. The platform continuously assessed available evidence, ranked possible attack paths, and reprioritized them as circumstances changed. When one technique failed, the tool tasked another agent with searching the internet for information and developing an alternative approach.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas, and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-ground messages, known as ACARS. According to the "ACARS Drama" account, a message was sent by pilots from the plane stated: "NO INFO AS OF NOW WE HAVE A BUNCH OF PAX THAT WERE AT A CYBER CONFERENCE IN LAS THEY WERE ABLE TO JAM OUR WIFI AND BROADCAST THEIR SIGNAL." A description of the incident posted to Reddit further stated that these passengers created a fake hotspot ("Delta WiFi Fast"), with a phishing landing page "designed to harvest passengers' personal credentials." This technique, sometimes known as an "evil twin" attack, has been long-known to the IT security community. It involves setting up a fake Wi-Fi network and then capturing login credentials and other data. "One initial finding is an unauthorized WiFi network, which was not provided, operated, or supplied by Delta, was present onboard the aircraft for a short time during the flight," said a Delta spokesperson. Delta further noted that the flight's safety was "never in question and no aircraft operating systems were affected," and that no emergency was declared. Ars notes that the "actual onboard Wi-Fi was disabled for 30 minutes."

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Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color -- Fog -- that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to objects you want to track. There's a single button that will trigger a sound on your phone, for the rare occasion when you've got the Tag but have lost your main device. It also has an IP67 rating, so it should be safe from dust and rain. As for the battery, the Pixel Tag takes CR2032 coin batteries, and says one battery should last for over a year. Naturally, it'll be compatible with Google's Find Hub network, which leverages the Bluetooth capabilities of Android devices worldwide to help locate lost objects. [...] Once you're close enough to the Pixel Tag, UWB lets the Find Hub app display the distance and direction to the tracker, so long as you're using a phone with a UWB chip. Channel Sounding is a newer development that can display the exact distance, but not direction, and it will work with any phone or tablet that includes Bluetooth 6.0. The Moto Tag 2 is the only other tracker to currently support it.

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A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta's AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany's network regulator says smart glasses are legal "as long as the recording function is clearly visible." Reuters reports: "There's no place to escape from smart glasses. You have to expect at any moment to be filmed and then exposed on the internet," said HateAid managing director Josephine Ballon. The organization reported the management of Meta, units of spectacles maker EssilorLuxottica including Ray-Ban, as well as retailers Fielmann, Apollo-Optik, Mister Spex and MediaMarkt to the Frankfurt-based digital crime prosecution unit ZIT. HateAid said its complaint was based on a federal digital data protection law that prohibits the sale of communication devices designed to film people without them noticing. ZIT confirmed it received a complaint from HateAid invoking that law, saying it would routinely investigate on a preliminary basis whether there are grounds for a deeper probe. MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group said it was taking the complaint very seriously, adding that its suppliers had contractual obligations for all goods to be compliant with the law. Mister Spex said it had not been officially notified of a complaint and that it was taking protection of privacy very seriously.

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At its Made by Google 2026 event today, Google unveiled a slew of new devices, headlined by the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Here's a breakdown of the company's latest smartphones, provided by TechCrunch: Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and now uses an all-glass surface that stretches across the width of the phone. Google is also increasing the base storage to 256GB, doubling the previous starting capacity. The starting price for the new model is set at $899, reflecting a $100 increase compared to the Pixel 10. This price hike comes with the decision to drop the 128GB storage option. Plus, the ongoing RAM supply shortage plays a part in this increase. Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL: Google is making durability a bigger part of the Pro lineup. The company says the Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL have improved drop resistance and a new anti-scratch display coating that provides more than twice the scratch resistance of the Pixel 10 Pro models. The Pixel 11 Pro starts at $1,099, compared to $999 for the Pixel 10 Pro. Pixel 11 Pro Fold: Google says the new foldable is nearly 10% lighter and almost 1mm thinner than the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It also has slimmer bezels, a 48-megapixel main camera, and 30x Super Zoom. The company is also building on the IP68 water and dust resistance introduced with the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold uses a glass-fiber composite back cover designed to better withstand cracking, while a redesigned hinge offers additional protection for the inner display. Google says the changes make the model three times more durable than its predecessor. There were also several new Gemini-powered features unveiled at the event. Google is expanding "Live Transcribe" to support American Sign Language, using the Pixel Camera to translate signing into text in real time. A new voice-input feature called "Rambler" is designed to understand natural, unstructured speech, including filler words and run-on sentences. Google is also integrating "Circle to Search" more directly into the Pixel Camera for identifying objects, translating text, and asking questions about what users see.

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The FAA says its push to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers has helped it hire more than 2,000 trainees, reaching 94% of its hiring goal. Another 2,000-plus candidates are in the pipeline. CBS News reports: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency's recruitment campaign to recruit gamers as air traffic controllers has been a "game changer" for the Federal Aviation Administration. [...] When Duffy announced the initiative in April, he acknowledged that the Transportation Department needed to extend its reach to recruit prospective air traffic controllers. "A lot of what they do playing games ... is what they do ... controlling traffic in the air," Duffy told CBS News senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an interview on Tuesday at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport. Duffy added that many current trainees started out as gamers. Only about 25% of controllers hold a traditional college degree, while former controllers note that gaming requires many of the same skills that air traffic controllers use on the job, such as thinking quickly, staying focused and managing multiple sources of information as they guide more than 80,000 flights to their destinations daily.

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alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials. To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots. Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil. "In soil environments, the microrobots can navigate through water-permeated soil microenvironments, actively disrupt microplastic entrapment within soil matrices, and extract them," the study authors commented in their paper. As they moved, their sticky surfaces collided with microplastics, binding to them and dragging them along. The researchers then used a magnet to pull the microrobots, along with their trapped plastic cargo, out of the samples. They performed well. In water, they removed about 94% of test polystyrene particles and 89% of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in around an hour. In the model soil, they removed about 81% of the polystyrene and 72% of PET. This outperformed the same MXene material used without magnetic motion, which relied on passive adsorption rather than actively moving through soil and water.

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sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a "glueball." In a preprint posted last month on arXiv and in a presentation last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the researchers argue that a particle called X(2370), which they produced by smashing electrons into positrons at high energies, has the properties expected of a glueball. "It's an experimental triumph," says Colin Morningstar, a particle physicist at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in the finding. "It's the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. [...] Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information. [...] The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA's calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows. "If you're talking heat waves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress," [said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections]. "So if it doesn't cool off at night, your body doesn't have time to readjust to all the heat." As nighttime temperatures increase, more people die and lose sleep, studies show. The years 2021 and 1936 tie for America's hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June. Because of climate change, Masters said, "this may be one of the coolest years we're gonna experience for the rest of our lives." What's needed, Masters said, is "to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we've put in place."

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Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%. These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users. Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

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Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

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Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though. These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

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Public exploit code is now available for SCTPhantom, a Linux kernel flaw that researchers used to escape an unprivileged container and take control of the underlying host. 

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.

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I honestly wasn’t sure I was going to make it to GUADEC.

For months, the travel committee and I had been going back and forth trying to get all the documents needed for my visa application. The visa took longer than expected. I even lost hope at some point, and eventually got it just four days before my travel date.

This was my first GUADEC, and I was really looking forward to finally meeting the GNOME community in person.

I was also going to give a talk about my Outreachy project, which was probably something I should have been more nervous about than I was.

So between getting everything ready at the last minute, travelling from Kenya to Spain, and preparing for my talk, there was quite a lot going on.

But I made it to A Coruña.

Appreciation

I want to appreciate the people who made it possible for me to be there.

A big thank you to the GUADEC organizers and volunteers for all the work they put into making the event happen. I know there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, and I really appreciate the time and effort that went into making everyone feel welcome.

I also want to especially thank the travel committee. I know the visa process wasn’t straightforward, and they spent months helping me get the right documents together and working through everything with me. Getting the visa just four days before my trip made the whole process even more stressful, so I really appreciate that they didn’t give up on it.

And of course, I want to thank my mentor, Lucas Baudin, for the support and guidance throughout my Outreachy internship. Having someone to learn from and ask questions along the way made the experience much easier.

Meeting the GNOME Community

This was probably the part I was most excited about.

For months, I had interacted with people through GitLab, Matrix, emails, and meetings, and it felt so nice to finally meet them in person.

I got to meet contributors from different parts of the GNOME community, and I loved hearing about what everyone was working on. Some conversations were technical, some were about the community, and some had absolutely nothing to do with GNOME.

I came to GUADEC wanting to meet the community.

I definitely did.

Sharing My Outreachy Experience

I also got the opportunity to speak about my Outreachy project during GUADEC.

During my internship, I had been working on Papers, improving its document signing features. Most of the work happened from my laptop in Kenya, so being able to stand in front of the GNOME community and share what I had been working on felt a little strange, in a good way.

Outreachy gave me the opportunity to contribute to a project I hadn’t worked on before, but it also taught me a lot about working in an open source community.

Giving the talk was definitely one of the highlights of GUADEC for me. I was a little nervous before getting on stage, but once I started, it felt much easier than I had expected.

What I liked most was the conversations afterwards. Different contributors came up to ask questions and share their thoughts, and it was really nice to continue those conversations outside the presentation.

Learning and Sharing

Throughout the conference, I attended talks covering a wide range of topics, including GNOME development, design, accessibility, and the future of the project.

I got to learn about projects I had never come across before, which was one of the things I really enjoyed. There was always something new to discover.

I also appreciated seeing how diverse the GNOME community is, and how much the community cares about making GNOME a welcoming and inclusive space for people from different backgrounds. Coming from Kenya, it was especially nice to see people from different parts of the world coming together around the same project.

Bringing the Experience Back to Kenya

Returning home, I wanted to ensure that the knowledge and inspiration I gained at GUADEC would benefit others as well.

I recently started the GNOME Kenya community, where we hope to introduce more people to GNOME and open source contribution. We are beginning with translation efforts while also encouraging contributors to explore development, documentation, design, and other areas that match their interests.

We are also having our first meetup soon, where we will officially introduce GNOME Kenya and GNOME to the community in Kenya.

My goal is to make GNOME more accessible to new contributors in Kenya and help build a sustainable local community that contributes back to the global project.

Looking Ahead

I came back from GUADEC with a lot to think about, and even more excitement to keep contributing to GNOME.

 I look forward to contributing more, supporting new contributors, and hopefully attending future GUADECs, InshaAllah!

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."

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