2026-04-11 00:07:51
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss gun violence and chatbots and acceptance of depravity.
EMANUEL: It takes a lot for a post to shock me these days, especially if it’s from a known shitposter like the president of the United States, but I’ll confess that I was shocked by Trump posting a video of a woman getting beaten to death with a hammer last night.
I’m not a big believer in the “Trump is doing X because he doesn’t want you to think about Y” theory, but it’s hard not to read as at least an intuitive desire to change the subject away from the conclusion (?) to his disastrous adventure in Iran. It’s not going to work either way, and that’s not going to be the legacy of his posting style either. What’s sticking with me at the moment is not the graphic nature of the post itself or the attempt to demonize certain minorities—unfortunately none of that is surprising at this point—but that I don’t know if it’s possible to roll back this level of acceptance of even embrace of depravity in our culture.
2026-04-10 02:00:46
Scientists have observed an extremely rare chimpanzee “civil war,” a conflict that has killed at least seven adults and 17 infants, and which sheds new light on the nature of warfare in humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.
Male chimpanzees are often aggressive to outsiders, but it is unusual for chimps to kill former members of their own social groups. Though Jane Goodall and her colleagues observed one famous example—the Gombe Chimpanzee War of the 1970s, which resulted in seven adult deaths—it’s estimated that these violent episodes occur only once every 500 years, based on genetic analyses of chimpanzee lineages.
Now, a team led by Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin, has reported a far more deadly “group fissure” among the Ngogo chimpanzees of Uganda. This population exceeded 200 individuals at one point, making it the largest group of chimpanzees ever observed in the wild. But over the past decade, the chimps have fractured into two factions, one of which has staged multiple lethal raids on the other.
“Certainly, these are not strangers,” said Sandel in a call with 404 Media. “These are chimps that once knew each other, and we know that for certain.”
The Ngogo group has been studied since the 1970s by primatologists like Thomas Struhsaker, and have been intensively observed since 1995 as part of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project set up by David Watts and John Mitani. For more than three decades, researchers from around the world have convened to watch the group during summer field expeditions, while Ugandan research assistants have maintained a continuous presence at the site.
Because of this longstanding observation, Sandel said, researchers were able to be on the ground “witnessing every moment” as the deadly chimp war unfolded.
Chimpanzees from different clusters socialized together before the group fissure in 2015. Image: Aaron Sandel
This group has always had distinct subpopulations that spent more time together, including the Western and Central clusters. Even so, before the fissure, the clusters regularly overlapped for shared activities like grooming, patrolling, and interbreeding.
Sandel vividly remembers the exact day that this dynamic had noticeably shifted: June 24, 2015. He was following the Western cluster, which was at the center of its “neighborhood” territory, he said.
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
“They hear chimps from the Central neighborhood nearby, and they go quiet,” he recalled. “They seem nervous. They're touching each other with this reassurance that they typically do when they hear the outsider chimps, but I was just alone with them. I remember, just in that moment, being really puzzled and focused, like ‘what’s going on?’”
“They could have reunited and done what's typical—screaming and charging around, maybe some slapping, and then come together, sit together, groom, maybe go their separate ways after, because they'd already started to be a bit more disconnected,” Sandel continued. “But instead of reuniting in typical chimpanzee fusion fashion, the Western chimpanzees ran and the Central chimps chased them.”
Video credit: Aaron Sandel
What started as a weird vibe transformed into a weeks-long chill between the groups, followed by a temporary thaw. Ultimately, the tension spiraled into bloody conflicts.
“You act like a stranger, you become a stranger,” Sandel said. “It seemed like that planted the seed of polarization.”
Over the course of the next few years, the males in each cluster began to treat each other like outsiders. The last offspring that had parents from different clusters was conceived in March 2015. The Western and Central chimps were fully separated by 2018.
The Western chimps, despite being smaller in number, have since amped up hostilities by staging 24 violent attacks against their former kin, killing at least seven mature males and 17 infants from the Central cluster. The death toll may well be higher, but some deaths and disappearances cannot be conclusively attributed to the conflict.
Sandel and his colleagues proposed a few possible causes of this “civil war,” a term that specifically refers to human conflicts, but that may have parallels in other species. First, the unusually large size of the group may have amplified feeding competition among individuals, even in their lush forest habitat. Social networks within the group may have also been disrupted by a wave of six deaths in 2014—five adult males and one adult female—some of whom likely died from disease.
The beginning of the fissure also coincides with the rise of a new alpha male, Jackson, who replaced the previous alpha, Miles. Sandel recalled Miles grunting in submission to Jackson on the same day that the Western cluster ran away from the Central cluster. Such transitions between alphas can introduce social instabilities as the dominance hierarchy is upended, a process that can take several months.
Indeed, Miles reacted violently toward other members of the group in the wake of his displacement. Jackson, who led the Central cluster, ended up as one the casualties of the conflict; he died from injuries inflicted by the Western cluster in 2022.
Whatever the cause of the rupture, this group of former kin have now become hostile enemies. It’s always dicey to draw broad comparisons between the behavior of humans and other animals, but the team speculates in the study that one possible takeaway is that "it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”
“If we study chimpanzees in detail and start to understand the mechanisms driving their cooperation, their conflict, and something as complex as one group becoming polarized, splitting, and engaging in ongoing lethal conflict, then we might gain insights into similar dynamics that are happening in humans,” Sandel said.
“If chimps are able to do this complex process in the absence of ethnicity, language, and religion—the things we often attribute to human warfare—chimps don't have those narratives and those excuses,” he concluded. “They're stripped away of those cultural dimensions. It must be their interpersonal social bonds and daily conflicts, reconciliations, and avoidances—all those dynamics. If that's the case with chimps, to what extent is it the case in humans? It’s a hypothesis to be tested.”
2026-04-09 23:21:05
In February, Oklahoma native Darren Blanchard attended a city council meeting in Claremore with the plan to speak out against a proposed datacenter in the community. When he went a few seconds over his allotted 3 minute time limit, the city ordered Blanchard arrested and transported to the county jail. The city charged Blanchard with trespassing, according to police records 404 Media has obtained about the incident. Blanchard has vowed to fight the charges.
The arrest occurred on February 17 during a Claremore City Council meeting where city officials were set to hear from the public about Project Mustang, a proposed data center. City residents are concerned about the datacenters' use of water, what might happen to their electricity bills, and how noisy the building will be. Answers aren’t forthcoming and Beale Infrastructure, the company behind the datacenter, won’t talk to local media and has gotten city officials to sign non-disclosure agreements.
2026-04-09 21:27:50
The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas in July, and one shooting a police officer in the neck.
The news shows how forensic extraction—when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it—can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.
2026-04-08 22:31:59
This week we start with Jason’s story about how wildlife cops are doing Flock lookups for ICE. It shows that ICE is gaining access to this sort of information through pretty unexpected ways. After the break, Emanuel tells us all about the AI ban at Wikipedia. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph breaks down a set of vulnerabilities in the ‘secure’ chat app TeleGuard.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
0:00 - Intro
1:03 - Wildlife Conservation Police Are Searching Thousands of Flock Cameras for ICE
27:55 - Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content
34:33 - An AI Agent Was Banned From Creating Wikipedia Articles, Then Wrote Angry Blogs About Being Banned
Subscriber's Story - A Secure Chat App’s Encryption Is So Bad It Is ‘Meaningless’
2026-04-08 22:18:44
It’s Trans Day of Visibility, and I’m at an event space in the heart of New York City’s Commie Corridor to learn how to become less visible online.
The crowd gathered at the aptly-named Trans Pecos in Ridgewood, Queens is here for “404: Deadname Not Found,” a digital self-defense workshop which promises to teach trans people how to find and remove their sensitive personal information from the internet (and which also has no relation to this website). The vibe is giving OpSec rave happy hour—attendees sip colorful drinks, groove to DJ sets, and huddle around laptops using online tools to track down their own digital footprints.
The goal of the exercise is to find holes in your digital defenses, a practice cybersecurity folks call “red-teaming.” A slide deck guides participants through this “self-doxing” ritual, instructing them to use websites like IntelBase, PimEyes, and haveibeenpwned to find addresses, selfies, passwords, old names and aliases, and other personal info that might have been left sitting around on the open internet.
It makes for great cocktail party banter. One participant raises their arms in triumph upon receiving a clean bill of health while checking if their information was leaked in a data breach. Others swivel laptop screens and compare notes on the various places their digital detritus had cropped up. In my case, I was lucky: I mostly found data brokers with incorrect information, a long-forgotten MySpace page, and a woman whose spam calls I’ve been receiving for the past 10 years. Finally, participants are directed to various pages where they can request data to be removed, or sign up for discounted services like Kanary and DeleteMe that do the removals on your behalf.
Behind the fun and light atmosphere, everyone here knows the unspoken reality that drives tonight’s activities: an unrelenting wave of discriminatory bills and executive orders that are rapidly demolishing trans rights across the US. “Trans Visibility” is a nice idea, but it turns out it really sucks to be visible in a fascist surveillance state where the highest levels of government are obsessively trying to destroy your ability to live.
“In this world of hyper-surveillance, I want to make sure all my stuff is safe and that no one is trying to harvest my data for anything,” Anna, a workshop participant, told 404 Media. Anna asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, which is not surprising given that the goal of the workshop is to make it harder to be doxed. “Especially now that there’s lots of incentives for the federal government to get into that business, I just wanna make sure all of that is under wraps.”
Like the event’s name suggests, many attendees are looking for traces of their “deadnames,” which is how some trans folks refer to the names they were given pre-transition. Trans people face a disproportionately high risk of being doxed online, and deadnames and other sensitive info are frequently dug up on right-wing hate forums like KiwiFarms and social media sites like Elon Musk’s X, where harassment campaigns and hate speech are allowed and even encouraged.
“We have to protect ourselves,” said Ryan, who also used a pseudonym. “It’s great to know how to find stuff like this, because you never know what’s still out there.”
Imani Thompson, a digital security trainer who organized the event as part of her series Cache Me Outside, says she started hosting the free workshops at queer bars in Brooklyn a year ago, after noticing trans and intersex friends who were noticeably shaken by the opening salvos of the second Trump administration.
“I hadn't seen cybersecurity events that looked like they would attract or resonate with the crowds I felt needed this information the most,” she told 404 Media. “I wanted to make this fun and un-intimidating and doing digital security training at the bar is kind of silly and fun and gives us a built-in VPN and protection from sensitive convos being recorded.”
There are specific reasons many trans people are anxious about their personal data and online presence these days. For one, trans identities often don’t fit neatly into government boxes, and the name and gender they are assigned at birth may or may not match their government-issued IDs. Recently, a new law in Kansas resulted in hundreds of trans people being told that their drivers licenses and IDs had been invalidated overnight, forcing them to obtain new documents that revert to the sex marker assigned at birth. Journalist Marissa Kabas later reported that the 300 trans IDs in question had been flagged and not immediately invalidated, but the goal of the law and its ensuing chaos was clear: requiring trans people to have IDs that don’t match their appearance or lived reality, forcing them to out themselves and introducing friction and discrimination into their everyday lives.
The same Kansas law also implemented the first state-level “bathroom bounty,” making it a crime for trans people to use appropriate bathrooms and changing rooms and promising rewards to random passersby who feel “aggrieved” by someone they think might be trans. Lawmakers in Idaho have passed an even harsher bill, which would charge repeat trans bathroom-users with a felony and up to 5 years of jail time. These bills threaten not only trans people, but anyone whose appearance might fall outside of someone’s normative expectations of “male” and “female.” And they are especially dangerous at a time when facial recognition can near-instantly identify someone with a quick search.
Thompson also worries about the information that queer folks can reveal while asking for help online. Trans people experience unemployment, housing insecurity, and violence at exponentially higher rates than cis people, and it’s not uncommon to see Gofundme pages and Venmo accounts flooding social media feeds. These posts will sometimes include personal details like a person’s name, face, transition status, location, immigration status, and even how much they have in their bank account—great for getting donations, but not so great for the doxable breadcrumbs they leave behind.
Janus Rose
“I think the risk is tenfold for the dolls and Black trans siblings because of disproportionate scrutiny in light of these bathroom bills and also how we do mutual aid,” said Thompson. “Whenever I see a mutual aid request being reposted or processed it makes me nervous, because we're basically doxing our most vulnerable friends.” To reduce risk, she recommends people take down mutual aid posts as soon as needs are met and set their Venmo activity to private. “I feel like the intention in listing off how all these systems of oppression impact our friends are meant to create a sense of urgency and care, but then months later it's still floating around and is a goldmine for someone who wants to claim they were made to feel unsafe in a bathroom so they can claim $3k or further an agenda.”
The privacy attitudes on display at the event contrast with the dominant media narratives about trans communities a decade ago. Fresh off the Supreme Court victory in Obergefell vs. Hodges that legalized same-sex marriage, many at that time were convinced that trans visibility would pave the way to equality, as glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox declared a “Trans Tipping Point.” But while conditions for some trans people marginally improved, we all know what happened next: a wave of reactionary anti-trans state laws, culminating in the re-election of Donald Trump and a series of executive orders aimed at destroying trans peoples’ access to healthcare, sports, bathrooms—essentially the ability to live a normal life.
At the same time, protection can’t be a retreat back into the closet. “It’s still important for trans voices to be heard in online spaces,” said Anna. “It’s not like I wanna go into the shadows or anything. I just don’t want people to know my personal data, my personal records, any of that.”
“Being Black, I also understand the distinction between visibility and hypervisibility and the precarity and lack of agency that hypervisibility creates,” said Thompson. “It's tricky to find language around digital security that doesn't imply queerness is something to hide or a shameful thing, because of course it's not. I think having agency and purpose in how we can show up online and interact with tech as well as literacy around how technology and surveillance operates makes us better equipped.”
Janus Rose is New York City-based journalist, educator and artist whose work explores the impacts of A.I. and technology on activists and marginalized communities. Previously a senior editor at VICE, she has been published in digital and print outlets including e-Flux Journal, DAZED Magazine, The New Yorker, and Al Jazeera.