Every day they show up to work, with sweet declarations of love for Trump pouring from their lips, they are further reaffirming their decision to bind themselves to everything he does.
The post MAHA Doctors Love Donald Trump first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
HBO has a history of being plagued by high-profile leaks.
Several Game of Thrones episodes leaked in the past, and the same applies to the sequel, House of the Dragon.
With the long-awaited third season of HBO’s hit series Euphoria coming up this weekend, the company was on high alert. So, when it saw several ‘spoilers’ being posted by an X account operating under the name “Lexi howard’s cat”, it wasted no time to take action.
The Lexi-inspired fan account has been around for a long time, sharing various Euphoria-related updates. However, a series of posts that were published in late March appeared to have hit too close to home.
On March 31, HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) sent a takedown notice to X, flagging several posts. According to Michael Bentkover, WBD’s Director of Worldwide Online Enforcement, these were “spoilers for unaired episodes of our Euphoria TV Series”.
TorrentFreak was unable to find out what was posted exactly, but the DMCA notice identifies it as video/audiovisual recording.
X confirmed receipt on the same day and presumably removed the posts. However, that was not the end of it. A week later, on April 7, the company requested a DMCA subpoena at a California federal court, with the goal to identify the person behind the @maudesfancat account.
DMCA subpoenas are relatively easy to obtain, as they only require a court clerk to sign off, which indeed happened a day later.
The issued subpoena requires X to share information sufficient to identify the person behind the account. This includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, IP addresses, and any other contact or billing records held by the platform.
Unlike the DMCA notice, where WBD used “video” to describe the content, the declaration to the court by Michael Bentkover classifies the infringing content as “summaries of unpublished, character, setting, and plots of a forthcoming series”.
This distinction may matter, as a summary of a plot may not enjoy the same protection as a leaked video. Copyright generally protects the expression of a work, not the underlying ideas or plot descriptions.
Then again, Bentkover also states that the user in question “posted access to HBO’s unpublished, copyright protected work from its forthcoming series,” which sounds substantial.
For now, X Corp. has until April 23 to respond. Legally, both X and the account holder can challenge the subpoena, but no objections have been submitted in court yet. Meanwhile, the ‘Lexi howard’s cat’ account is no longer online.
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A copy of the subpoena, filed April 8 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). The notice of filing and supporting declaration can be found here (pdf).
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Instead of creating a sustainable environment for recovery, mainstream psychiatric practices often create more distress and reluctance.
Editor’s note: First published on Mad in America on March 28th 2026
Recently, multiple blizzards have hit the Northeast, raising urgent questions about how to protect unhoused people exposed to dangerous winter conditions. In New York City, the usual response during extreme weather has often involved forcing people into shelters or hospitals, sometimes by use of police or other forms of coercion. The logic seems straightforward: if someone is vulnerable and refuses help, shouldn’t we step in and decide for them?
This winter, however, the city tried something different. Instead of defaulting to force, officials expanded the number of options available to unhoused people, offering different types of shelter, warming spaces, and services. The mayor, Zohran Mamdani, spoke in a press conference about the impact of this process, suggesting that when they were given choices rather than ultimatums, homeless New Yorkers were more willing to accept support.
For many psychiatric survivors, this shift represents something we have been advocating for years: agency and options. Not being labelled “non-compliant” for saying, “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” and not having distress interpreted as a justification for losing autonomy.
Yet the assumption that people in distress must sometimes be coerced “for their own good” remains deeply embedded in mental health care. We often hear the same argument: wouldn’t someone experiencing suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, or intense distress be better off in a highly surveilled environment? And if they refuse, shouldn’t they be pressured or forced to accept treatment?
But “better off” is a remarkably subjective standard. And despite how normalized it has become, coercion consistently undermines the very recovery it claims to protect.
The recovery myth behind coercion
Often, when I hear fellow psychiatric survivor stories, I hear a subtle questioning in their voices. They wonder whether what was experienced entailed coercion: “I was not forced or anything but I couldn’t get away.” “I wasn’t physically restrained, but I was given ECT without my consent.” We also hear it in instances of “well, I was not directly pressured or threatened, but it was the only option,” or “they told me it was the only thing that would help me.” These instances of what is called hidden coercion appear to eat away at people, washing away their confidence in themselves, little by little, instance by instance.
Psychiatric coercion takes many forms, but it seems that many see it as crucial when dealing with psychiatrized people. The sounds of “it’s for their own good” echo in my head as I type this. The memories of being dismissed and discredited after having a psychiatric label slapped on me, the experience of becoming an invisible human.
This “necessary” tool often has ripple effects, causing more harm directly or perpetuating cycles of harm and compounding distress. The deepening of harm often leads to more distress, which in turn leads to more coercive interventions, which in turn lead to more harm, and so on and on. This is not just something I experienced myself, but something I have witnessed as a psychology trainee. In many instances, it seemed like psychiatric treatment was the last thing a person needed, and it would have been best if they had psychosocial support instead.
Forms of coercion in mental health settings
Researchers have defined two modes of coercion employed in mental health settings: formal and informal coercion. Formal coercion is the most widely recognized: it’s the most visible, including the use of mechanical and chemical restraints, use of force, seclusion, and sometimes, involuntary hospitalization. By contrast, informal coercion takes on a subtle, less visible form, such as muddy consent that lacks transparency, weaponization of psychiatric diagnosis to suppress and contain, and “consent” under threat, including manipulative and paternalistic statements such as “it’s for your own good.” Psychiatric coercion is also used for the clinician to cover themselves from potential liability while knowing it is not a helpful tool for recovery.
These practices are incredibly normalized in our society; it has been more and more ingrained. People seem to think that by normalizing “seeking help” we are destigmatizing mental health problems, but what I observe as a researcher and lived experience expert is exactly the contrary: we are creating more stigma, normalizing oppression and control of highly distressed people, and normalizing potential harm. We are corroding people’s agency and subjectivity slowly.
In psychiatry, recovery is often defined by how productive an individual is in our society. Basically, if you’re not advancing the goals of capitalism, you are not meeting the optimal functioning expectations.
However, if you ask those with lived experiences of the mental health system, recovery is a subjective continuum that depends on an individual’s own experiences, circumstances, desires, and choices. It could range from being able to attain a level of emotional stability to having a good quality of life to being able to regain control over one’s own experience and make decisions for oneself. This is why I often ask in my interviews with psychiatric survivors, “What does recovery mean to you?” Their answers often differ greatly from what mine would be.
For many, recovery is contingent on relationships and safety. An important part of this is self-determination: the recognition that a person is able to make their own choices. The integration of shared decision-making approaches into mental health services attempts to honor this principle, but coercion and force are still prevalent despite these approaches. Coercion and force disempower people, show that their relationships are unsafe and disconnected, and thus prevent recovery. No one can heal in the environment that made them sick.
Many people who come to receive mental health services arrive with a history that includes cumulative experiences of trauma, stress, or general adversity. Placing individuals in an environment that is not trauma-informed, but designed to gaslight, label, subdue, control, and contain at the cost of the individual and for the benefit of the system, will naturally create more adversity in a person’s life. Their needs are not being recognized or centered. This, in turn, will create more resistance towards help-seeking, more disengagement, fear, and distress. It makes people afraid of speaking out due to fear of being isolated, punished, and caged. So instead of creating a sustainable environment for recovery, traditional practices often create more distress and reluctance.
How coercion has remained hidden
In my work, I have interviewed many psychiatric survivors about their experiences. They often describe coercion and force. For instance, one psychiatric survivor described subtle and ambiguous forms of coercion occurring when seeking out services: “It’s the way you’re treated—when you’re seeking help, yet at times you can feel like a prisoner, like a criminal, like someone who is a problem, a burden. At times, they infantilize you or treat you as if you were part of the herd, so to speak—like sheep that need to be kept in line or herded along.”
Listening to the experiences of people who sought out services at their most distressed, and instead found coercion, can be healing and reparative for many; it can help normalize their own experiences, and also help make meaning out of them. It can help people realize why the “care” they received did not feel good or necessarily helpful.
Most people, although marked by their experiences with coercion in the mental health system, only spend a short amount of time in these settings. Therefore, if they achieve recovery and healing, it occurs outside of these settings and not within them. For many, this happens after finding alternatives, building community, leaving abusive households, and gaining housing or employment.
Again, the root of healing is found in our relational and contextual world. That is why it is not rare that recovery occurs outside of these systems, and that these systems many times end up making the problems worse instead. To achieve this much-needed relational healing, however, trust is required, and building trust takes time and effort. People need to be treated with compassion and empathy, to have their needs valued and respected, and not the contrary of being coerced and condescended to.
This has been identified in previous research: the language of having a chronic, lifelong illness leads to disempowerment. “Why try if this ‘disease’ is a part of me?” Psychiatric coercion feeds off that language of chronicity and the catastrophic prognosis without assuming responsibility for their own promotion of the status quo. The relationship has already been defined as one where the provider is the expert—the one who dominates, makes decisions, and serves as a seer, who can determine what someone’s future looks like based on how they act at their most vulnerable.
Intersectional identities, power dynamics, and coercion
These power dynamics extend into the identities of people experiencing psychological distress. The implicit and explicit biases of our mental health system can be unmasked based on how people’s ethno-racial, gender, and sexual identities are pathologized and oppressed within it. I must emphasize that our current mental health system is built upon the legacy of colonialism and genocide, as is our modern society. Consciously or unconsciously, otherness is not seen as beneficial to our society, neither in how people look and identify, nor in how they think.
Minoritized people are often subjected to more restrictive, prescriptive, and violent forms of oppression. Ethno-racially minoritized people are restrained more often and for longer periods of time, and assigned highly stigmatized and personality-oriented psychiatric diagnoses. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ folks are pathologized at high rates while ignoring factors such as discrimination and anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Women are often pathologized with personality disorders or viewed as delusional, and not believed when recounting their traumatic experiences. Homeless people often cycle in and out of hospitals, accumulating more and more debt, without being connected to psychosocial services in the ways that, when asked, they mention needing support. Moreover, poverty is often viewed through a pathological lens, weaponizing psychiatric labels on people who are in survival mode, trying to make ends meet. These examples make it clearer how coercion is about social control and punishment and not about care.
What is there to lose when coercion in mental health settings is normalized?
Many view psychiatric coercion as a necessary evil to which there is no alternative; this comes from a combination of stigmatizing beliefs, actual care for the person’s well-being, genuinely thinking of coercion as therapeutic, and safety concerns. In many cases, communities are in desperate need of support, but by normalizing coercion, relational ties and trust may be broken, while reluctance to seek out support or admit to distress might take their place.
For many people, taking time to pause and be listened to can oftentimes be enough to reduce distress. In addition, community-based supports, including simple interventions such as “meal trains” where a different person volunteers to bring food to a household each day, may be essential to reducing distress and allowing time for recovery and processing. These sorts of approaches are rooted in dignity and care for the person, and centered around their own needs and choices.
Nurturing communities create environments of care and healing, facilitating recovery and promoting prevention from further psychological distress. Prevention of further harm is crucial and life-saving for many individuals. Creating these types of environments takes time, just as recovering and healing do, but one cannot heal in an environment of manipulation or force. We cannot force or coerce people into recovery, which makes coercion incompatible with recovery.
While mental health systems continue to perpetuate harm by engaging in coercion and utilizing coercive measures, these will not be recovery-oriented or centered around lived experience. There must be a shift in how help and care are defined within mental health. This needs to be accompanied by an ego deconstruction and a willingness to share equal power with people experiencing distress. This includes listening and believing their experiences, and actively working towards a paradigm shift. This shift includes partnering with community-based organizations, communities, and grassroots movements to provide sustainable support for people experiencing psychological distress.
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
The post Psychiatric Force and Conversion Undermine Recovery2 appeared first on Mad in the UK.
Few organizations understand the moral imperative of digital preservation better than the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) and the After Violence Project. That is why both have just endorsed Our Future Memory’s “Statement on Digital Rights,” joining a growing roster of organizations committed to preserving vulnerable archives and insisting on the four basic rights that they and other memory institutions need to do their critical work:
HMML is a nonprofit engaged in photographing, cataloging, and providing free access to manuscripts housed in libraries around the world. Now celebrating over 60 years of operation, it was founded at Saint John’s University (SJU) in Minnesota when the threat of the Cold War loomed large. Father Colman Barry of the Order of Saint Benedict envisioned that SJU could provide a safe repository for microfilms of the Benedictine manuscripts held in European libraries. After that, HMML expanded its mission to preserve copies of manuscripts from different religious traditions in other regions. It now serves as a digital life raft for irreplaceable documents from Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, and other war-torn areas, with an enormous collection of digitized manuscripts hosted in its online Reading Room.
“HMML is delighted to join Our Future Memory in advocating the 4 Rights,” said Dr. Columba Andrew Stewart, CEO and Executive Director. “As an organization dedicated to digital preservation and online access, HMML regards its care for the handwritten voices of our ancestors as a moral imperative. We have promised communities in dozens of countries that we will keep their manuscript heritage safe forever in digital form, and they in turn have trusted us to share that heritage with the world. We encourage all institutions, organizations, and concerned individuals to stand with us in defending the power of open information.”
The After Violence Project answered the same call in pursuit of its own archival mission. With roots in Austin, Texas, the organization is dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the endangered knowledge of communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence and erasure. Its first oral history project, now called the After Violence General Collection, comprises reflections from individuals, family members, and activists about the effects that carceral and capital punishment have had on their lives. And in 2021, the After Violence Archive was created to retain interviews, correspondence, records, and all sorts of keepsakes from vulnerable and traumatized people. These projects enable everyone to bear witness to the pervasive social and psychological impacts of state violence—in defiance of concerted efforts to erase that testimony.
“The state has always tried to destroy the records of its own violence,” explained Hannah Whelan, Associate Director of Programs and Strategy. “Today that threat is more organized and better resourced than ever, as we witness federally-funded knowledge initiatives being destroyed, libraries gutted, and public access to information under attack.”
“This epistemic violence also comes from the slow monopolization of knowledge itself: platforms that lock up information behind paywalls, predatory contracts that strip memory institutions of their ability to collect, preserve, and share materials freely, and commercially-motivated systems that decide what gets remembered and what disappears. The state doesn’t just commit violence; it works hand in hand with these infrastructures to erase all evidence of how and why that violence functions.
“We signed the Our Future Memory statement because the communities we work with, namely people impacted by police brutality, mass incarceration, and the death penalty, deserve archives that can collect thoughtfully, preserve carefully, and share their stories without interference. Protecting those rights is not a technical matter or a vague policy issue. It is a critical condition under which resistance becomes possible.”
Needless to say, the Our Future Memory coalition is thrilled to welcome these distinct but complementary digital preservation efforts into the fold. With these and other signatories, the push to protect memory institutions’ traditional work keeps gaining momentum—at a time when that work is more urgent than ever before.
It’s easy! Your organization can join the movement and sign the Statement by going to the Our Future Memory website, downloading and signing the statement, and sending it back to campaigns@internetarchive.eu.
ATTEND: If you’re in the Minneapolis area, register and attend HMML’s upcoming events, including workshops on Ethiopic manuscripts and a keynote by Dr. Stewart on its “Museum without Glass” ethos.
LISTEN: To hear more about the origins of the Our Future Memory campaign, be sure to listen to the Future Knowledge podcast on the Four Digital Rights.
WATCH: To see interviews with recent signatories from library world, watch the recording of February’s “Protect Our Future Memory” webinar.
PARTICIPATE: Going to the Rare Book and Manuscript Section conference in Milwaukee? Stop by our workshop, “Protect Our Future Memory: Developing Digital Rights for Special Collections.”
Google moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology. It’s ahead of schedule, but not altogether unexpected. Cryptographers and engineers have been working on this for years, and as the deadline gets closer, it’s not surprising to see more precise timeline estimates come up.
The preparation for the Y2K bug is not a perfect analogy. Like Y2K, if systems are not updated in time, anyone with a powerful enough quantum computer will be able to more easily insert malware into the core systems of a computer and fake authentication to allow impersonation merely by observing network traffic. These are the threats whose mitigation timelines have been moved up.
But unlike Y2K, there’s a second sort of attack that we already need to be prepared for: quantum computers will be able to decrypt years of captured messages sent over encrypted messaging platforms shared any time before those platforms updated to quantum-proof encryption. That type of attack has been the main focus of engineering efforts so far and mitigation is well on its way, since anything before the upgrade might eventually be compromised.
Fortunately, not all cryptography is broken by quantum computers. Notably, symmetric encryption is quantum resistant. That means that if you have disk encryption turned on, you shouldn’t have to worry about quantum computers breaking into your phone, as long as your system’s keys are long enough. The problem is how you get the keys to do that encryption, and how you authenticate software on your device and in the cloud.
For those whose work touches on any sort of cryptographic deployment, you’re hopefully already working on the post-quantum transition. If not, you really should be; there are quite a few relevant posts and updates with more information about what this news means for you. Your key agreement systems should be upgraded soon if they’re not already because of store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Now it’s time to prepare for authentication attacks on forged signatures as well.
In some cases, you may need to wait on others to finish their work first. If you’re using NGINX to host websites on Ubuntu, for example, the security settings you need to upgrade key agreement were just released in version 26.04. Updates are rolling out, so keep checking in and upgrade your systems as soon as you’re able to.
But if you’re not in any position to be updating software or hardware, there may be some additional steps you can take to make sure you’re as protected as possible. You’ll want to get the latest post-quantum protections as soon as they’re available, so if you don’t already have a habit of applying software updates in a timely manner, now’s a good time to start.
If you want to know if the website you’re using or the encrypted messaging app you’re chatting over will leak its data in a few years to anyone storing traffic now, you can search for its name with the word “quantum.” The engineers are usually pretty proud of their work and have announced their post-quantum support (like what we’ve seen from Signal and iMessage). If you can’t find that information, you may want to have extra consideration for what you say over the internet, or switch the tools you’re using. Those are the big areas to worry about now, before quantum computers are actually here, because they could result in the mass leakage of old messages.
The new deadline means that some technologies are simply not going to make it in time and will have to be left by the wayside, like trusted execution environments (TEEs), due to the slower speed of hardware deployments. TEEs are how companies do private processing on user data in the cloud, and they’re particularly relevant to AI offerings.
Even now, though they offer more protection than processing data in the clear, TEEs are not as secure as homomorphic encryption or doing the processing on device. Post-quantum, the security level gets much closer to computation on cleartext, and even with strong user controls, that makes it way too easy to accidentally backdoor your own encrypted chats. If you’re worried about the contents of messages in an encrypted chat being exposed, you’ll probably want to completely avoid using AI features that might leak that content, such as summarization of recent chat history and notifications, and reply composition assistance.
The work to update the world to post-quantum is well on its way. NIST finalized the standards for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms back in 2024. The larger platforms, websites, and hosting providers have already updated their algorithms, so even now, you’re probably already using post-quantum algorithms to access some of the internet. Measurements vary pretty widely, but up to about 4 in 10 websites currently support a post-quantum key exchange.
There’s still some work to be done in figuring out how to make the needed changes—for example, the way you find out a website’s private key to make HTTPS possible is being reworked to make room for larger signatures. Some technologies are just coming to market, like the post-quantum root of trust available now in some Chromebooks. In practice, this means that as you think about replacing your current devices in the next few years, you may want to check if you’re picking up hardware that has post-quantum support, if those specific protections are required for your threat model.
For the areas that still need updating, how much can we expect to actually get ready by the new deadline? It’s likely that not every cryptographically-capable device and deployment will be ready in time, and hardware with hard-coded certificates will probably be the last to update. We saw that happen when SHA-1 was deprecated; Point of Sale systems in particular were late adopters. While governments and large companies with quantum computers may not be interested in stealing money from cash registers, they will be interested in accessing secrets about people’s private lives. That’s why it’s so important that everyone does their part to upgrade, to protect the details of private communications and browsing.
And there’s a good chance that older devices that won’t receive quantum-resistant updates were probably vulnerable to some other attack already. Quantum computation is just one type of attack on cryptography that’s notable for the scale of migration required, and how every public-key cryptosystem and authentication scheme has to do the work to prepare. That’s not a difference in kind, it’s a difference in scale, and some systems will inevitably be left behind.
Quantum preparedness hits different industries and services in different ways, but services that handle communications and financial information are particularly susceptible to risk, and need to act quickly to protect the privacy and security of billions of people.
As long as people have had more than one purchasing option, they’ve been comparing those options and looking for bargains. Online shoppers are no exception; in fact, one of the potential benefits of the internet is that it expands our options for everything from car rentals to airline tickets to dish soap. New AI tools can make the process even easier. These tools could provide some welcome relief for consumers facing sky-high prices that many cannot afford.
Unfortunately, Amazon is trying to block these helpful new tools, which can steer shoppers towards competitors. Taking a page from Facebook and RyanAir, they are trying to use computer crime laws to do it.
Amazon’s target is Perplexity, which makes an AI-enabled web browser, called Comet, that allows users to browse the web as they normally would, but can also perform certain actions on the user’s behalf. For example, a user could ask Comet to find the best price on a 24-pack of toilet paper, and if satisfied with the results, have the browser order it. Amazon claims that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by building a tool that helps users access information on Amazon and engage with the site.
Unfortunately, a federal district court agreed. The court’s fundamental mistake: relying on the Ninth Circuit’s misguided decision in Facebook v Power Ventures, rather than the court’s much better and more applicable reasoning in hiQ Labs.
Perplexity has appealed to the Ninth Circuit. As we explain in an amicus brief filed in support, the district court’s mistake, if affirmed, could lead to myriad unintended consequences. Overbroad readings of the CFAA have undermined research, security, competition, and innovation. For years, we’ve worked to limit its scope to Congress’s original intention: actual hacking that bypasses computer security. It should have nothing to do with Amazon’s claims here, not least because most of Amazon’s website is publicly available.
The court’s approach would be especially dangerous for journalists and academic researchers. Researchers often create a variety of testing accounts. For example, if they’re researching how a service displays housing offers, they may create separate accounts associated with different race, gender, or language settings. These sorts of techniques may be adversarial to the company, but they shouldn’t be illegal. But according to the court’s opinion, if a company disagrees with this sort of research, it can’t just ban the researchers from using the site; it can render that research criminal by just sending a letter notifying the researcher that they’re not authorized to use the service in this way.
A broad reading of CFAA in this case would also undermine competition by enabling companies to limit data scraping, effectively cutting off one of the ways websites offer tools to compare prices and features.
The Ninth Circuit should follow Van Buren’s lead and interpret the CFAA narrowly, as Congress intended. Website owners do not need new shields against independent accountability.
Following an order from the Supreme Court of Nepal, authorities released on Thursday the country’s former prime minister and his home minister, ending a two-week detention on criminal negligence charges stemming from a deadly police crackdown on youth-led protests last year.
The release of the former premier, K.P. Sharma Oli, and the former home minister, Ramesh Lekhak, marks the latest twist in a political upheaval that has reshaped the Himalayan nation. The two men were arrested on March 28, barely 18 hours after Balendra Shah, a 35-year-old rapper-turned-politician and former mayor of Kathmandu, was sworn in as prime minister with a mandate to deliver accountability.
Their detention was directly tied to the violent suppression of the massive “Gen Z” demonstrations in 2025 that left 76 people dead. A high-level investigative commission recently concluded that the fatalities resulted from extreme negligence and a failure of command responsibility. The commission formally recommended the criminal prosecution of Oli, Lekhak, and Chandra Kuber Khapung, the former national police chief.
The Supreme Court, which had initially declined to intervene when the men were arrested under emergency government warrants, ruled on Monday that the authorities must either formally conclude their investigation or free the suspects. Pravin Dhital, a spokesperson for the Kathmandu Valley Police, said both former officials were released on the condition that they remain available to investigators.
Oli, 74, who resigned in September 2025 as the street demonstrations reached a boiling point, is currently hospitalized. He was admitted for heart complications shortly after his arrest and said he would remain under medical supervision for further testing.
In a statement posted to social media following his release, Oli dismissed the investigation as a politically motivated witch hunt. He asserted that the new government had acted “with prejudice and vindictiveness,” holding him for 13 days without sufficient evidence. Despite the collapse of his government last fall, the four-time prime minister remains a formidable political force, having been elected to a third term as chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) in December.
In a separate but equally high-profile move toward political accountability, Nepal’s anti-corruption agency filed criminal charges against a former speaker of Parliament, Krishna Bahadur Mahara, and his son in connection with an international smuggling ring.
The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority alleged that Mahara, his son Rahul, and senior customs officials smuggled more than 8.4 kilograms of gold into the country in 2022 by concealing it inside electronic cigarettes at Tribhuvan International Airport.
According to the charge sheet, the scheme generated more than 77 million Nepali rupees (about $527,000) in illicit proceeds, which were subsequently “laundered through land purchases and bank accounts belonging to various associates and Dexter Travels and Tours Pvt. Ltd.”
Mahara was initially arrested in October 2025 in the wake of the mass protests that toppled the political establishment, though he was released on bail the following month.
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.
We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fixing.
We called for:
Twitter was never a utopia. We’ve criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we’re joining them.
Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the apps isn’t always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We’ve spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we’re posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members’ support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we’re here to help you take back control.
As our group of DWeb Camp organizers arrived at Wiesenburg station, frazzled by countless train delays in Berlin, a light rain and a blossoming gray winter sky welcomed us.
Moments after our arrival, a car and a van swooped up in front of us. Two of Alte Hölle’s stewards, Marv and Störte, had come to pick us up. During our days at this former forest hotel, we heard a common refrain: Imagine this place greener and warmer.
Still, we did not have to stretch our imaginations very far. From the very first moment we laid eyes on Alte Hölle e.V., the only thing we could see was DWeb Camp 2026.
“We are just starting to wake up,” Marv told us while we looked across the property in late February. Just a couple of weeks earlier, snow levels reached an almost record 71 cm, and temperatures sank to double digits below zero. We arrived at this Brandenburg event space as bare trees, families of wild boars, and humans alike were emerging from their winter hibernation.
Alte Hölle has a very special history. Originally built in the 1800s as a Prussian forestry administration center, it later became a recreational facility for the Secret Service of communist Eastern Germany. Then a woman purchased it in the 1990s and managed it for three decades as a forest getaway spot. By 2021, the hotel wasn’t making a profit and she was searching for successors to take over. The full potential of this historic venue was yet to be recognized and realized.
At the same time, a diverse ensemble of friends who met at Chaos Communication Congress got together, looking for a place to establish a physical base to gather, build and host events and festivals. The old forest hotel was finally seen by the right sets of eyes, imagining it in a new light!
These ardent builders and dreamers booked the whole hotel for a week, coming up with ideas and ways to infuse the space with new life. After witnessing their process, the original owner slowly decided that selling her life’s work to a loose group of DIY enthusiasts was really the best option.
In 2021, this group purchased Alte Hölle, transferring the property to an association to ensure its long-term stability as individual involvement shifts and changes. Ownership by an association establishes Alte Hölle as a collectively-run physical commons. The members of the collective chipped in smaller amounts to secure a long term loan, thus collectivizing and decentralizing ownership and financial risk.
Rural Brandenburg isn’t exactly a cultural hotspot attracting scores of young people. Yet, for the Alte Hölle collective this place offers an opportunity to usher in change and a new cultural presence in the Brandenburg area. We don’t want to be a group of happy dropouts isolated from society,
Störte explained to us. Our intention is to look outward, participating in local initiatives, bringing people to this place, and being a backbone for community organising and democratic practice.
The Alte Hölle collective welcomes open involvement in decision-making and shaping the future of the project. Alte Hölle’s governance model is non-hierarchical and based on consensus. It’s hard to distinguish between who lives there and who doesn’t: people come and go, but they still actively contribute to decision-making and developing Alte Hölle’s infrastructure. We want to blur the lines as much as possible between who is here and who is not, because not everyone can afford to work remotely and stay long term, but this should not influence their sense of belonging to the project
, says Franzi, one of the stewards of the venue.
Alte Hölle runs as a seminar hotel for a broad variety of groups. Other collectives come there to organize retreats, literary groups hold reading events on the grounds, bike enthusiasts come for week-long workshops. And from July 8-12 2026, Alte Hölle is welcoming DWeb Camp.
How did we select this unique place an hour southwest of Berlin? It becomes clear if you look back at the history of Camp and the principles that guide our decisions.
Since our first outdoor convening, we’ve aspired to work closely with our venue’s stewards to help improve the land. We did so at the Mushroom Farm in 2019, when we brought stable internet to the remote California coastal location by building a tower and installing antennas across the property to establish a local mesh network. We want DWeb Camp to be firmly grounded in a place. A place with history, community, strong values, and aspirations. A place that shares our principles of giving agency to people, distributing value and power broadly. DWeb seeks to achieve this in the digital realm; Alte Hölle does so in a collectively-run 100,000 square meters of forest and field.
In November, we sent an email to share our ideas and explore the possibility of hosting Camp at Alte Hölle. Marv was the first to see our inquiry. As I read that email, a few things immediately just clicked. The right values, talks and workshops with interesting content and initiatives. I sent a very enthusiastic reply, and a couple of weeks later we were walking the place together with a first exploratory delegation from DWeb.
Then in February, a dozen members of our team convened to survey the site and start planning the details.
So now, the organizing machine is in full motion. We are meeting the vibrant culture of Alte Hölle with the joyful spirit of DWeb Camp. Not only will we have a lot of infrastructure to build, but also many things to make! Using wood sourced from local forests, we plan to craft benches, tables, and some other key structures we’ll need at camp.
The DWeb and Department of Decentralization organizers and the Alte Hölle community are looking forward to welcoming you to this land of rich history and abundant promise.
As Franzi shared, I love the idea and the principles behind DWeb Camp, and I am really looking forward to having an international event with many people coming from all around the world!
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