fidzu : computers

Researchers say the world's largest known wild chimpanzee community in Uganda fractured into rival factions and has been locked in a vicious "civil war" for the last eight years. "It is not clear exactly why the once close-knit community of Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda's Kibale National Park are at loggerheads, but since 2018 the scientists have recorded 24 killings, including 17 infants," reports the BBC. From the report: [O]ver several decades, [lead author Aaron Sandel] said the nearly 200 Ngogo chimpanzees had lived in harmony. There were divided into two sets - known to researchers as Western and Central - but they had existed overall as a cohesive group. Sandel said he first noticed them polarizing in June 2015, when the Western chimpanzees ran away and were chased by the Central group. "Chimpanzees are sort of melodramatic," he said, explaining that following arguments there would ordinarily be "screaming and chasing" and then later, they would grooming and co-operating. But following the 2015 dispute, the researchers saw that there was a six-week avoidance period between the two sets, with interactions becoming more infrequent. When they did occur, Sandel said they were "a little more intense, a little more aggressive." Following the emergence of the two distinct groups in 2018, members of the Western group started attacking the Central chimpanzees. In 24 targeted attacks since the split, at least seven adult males and 17 infants from the Central chimps have been killed, the study found, although the researchers believe the actual number of deaths are higher. The researchers believe many factors such as the group size and subsequent competition of resources, and "male-male competition" for reproducing may be to blame. But they say there were three likely catalysts: - The first, were the deaths of five adult males and one adult female -- for reasons unknown -- in 2014, which could have disrupted social networks and weakened social ties across the subgroups - The following year, there was a change in the alpha male, which the study says coincided with the first period of separation between the Western and Central groups. "Changes in the dominance hierarchy can increase aggression and avoidance in chimpanzees," it explained - The third factor was the deaths of 25 chimpanzees, including four adult males and 10 adult females, as a result of a respiratory epidemic, in 2017, a year before the final separation. One of the adult males who died was "among the last individuals to connect the groups," the research paper said. The study has been published in the journal Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Apr 2026 11:00pm GMT

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on April 3, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers. The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog. Bruce66423 adds: "Child abuse as the excuse for avoiding privacy protections. Who would have thought it?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

Plaintiffs say transcription tool processed confidential chats offsite.

10 Apr 2026 9:43pm GMT

San Francisco police arrested a suspect after a Molotov cocktail was allegedly thrown at Sam Altman's home and threats were later made outside OpenAI's headquarters. "Thankfully, no one was hurt," said OpenAI in a statement to WIRED. "We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping keep our employees safe. The individual is in custody, and we're assisting law enforcement with their investigation." From the report: "At approximately 3:45am PT, an unidentified individual approached Sam's residence and threw an incendiary device toward the property. The device landed nearby and extinguished. There were no injuries and only minimal damage was reported," the message to staff reads. "Shortly afterward, an individual matching the suspect's description was contacted by security outside MB1," the message continues, referring to OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco's Mission Bay neighborhood. "This person made threatening statements about the building." OpenAI's corporate security team told staff it is cooperating with law enforcement on an investigation, and that employees may notice an increased police and security presence around the office on Friday. The security team said that the company's offices remain open, but employees were advised to "not let anyone tailgate into the building."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Apr 2026 9:00pm GMT

A now-vanished plate under North America may open the crust below Yellowstone.

10 Apr 2026 8:06pm GMT

Algorithms, not drivers, are deciding how hard to accelerate, and that's no good.

10 Apr 2026 7:07pm GMT

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you're asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be. Perhaps I can explain. ↫ Marcin Wichary It seems pretty obvious to me that's what it was for, but I guess many normal, regular people have never seen anything but one particular keyboard configuration (ANSI for Americans, ISO for some Europeans, etc.) keyboards. Perhaps they don't realise that not only are there ANSI keyboards with other layouts, but also entirely different keyboard configurations (mainly ISO and JIS). Interestingly, my home country of The Netherlands uses a US English layout on an ANSI configuration, but of course, it's the US International variant, either with deadkeys or using AltGr for the various accented/special characters we use. In my current country of residence, Sweden, they use this utterly wild and incomprehensible ISO layout where Shift unlocks characters on the bottom of keys, while AltGr unlocks characters at the top, the exact opposite of literally every other keyboard I've ever used (US Int'l, classic Dutch (no longer used), German, French, etc.). It's utterly bizarre, but entirely normal to my Swedish wife. We cannot use each other's keyboards.

09 Apr 2026 11:06pm GMT

This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn't have a certain background in Hardware. You don't need to be an Embedded Systems Engineer to use USB the same way you don't need to be a Network Specialist to use Sockets and the Internet. ↫ Nik "WerWolv" A bit of a generic title, but the article details how to write a USB driver.

09 Apr 2026 10:49pm GMT

The months keep coming, and thus, the monthly progress reports keep coming, too, for Redox, the new general purpose operating system written in Rust. This past month, there's been considerable graphics improvements, better deadlock detection in the kernel, improved Unicode support thanks to switching over to ncurses library variant with Unicode support, and much more. Alongside these, you'll find the usual long list of kernel, driver, and relibc changes, bugfixes, and improvements. This month also covered three topics we've already discussed individually: Redox' new no-"AI" code policy, capability-based security in Redox, and the brand-new CPU scheduler.

09 Apr 2026 10:44pm GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT