YunoBlog

Author: tio

  • Three dead in suspected hantavirus infection outbreak on cruise ship: WHO

    Three people have died and three others are ill following suspected cases of hantavirus infection on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday.
  • FlavaWorks Sues Operator and 325 Users of Private Torrent Tracker Gay-Torrents

    FlavaWorks Sues Operator and 325 Users of Private Torrent Tracker Gay-Torrents

    FlavaWorks is an Illinois-based adult entertainment company specializing in content featuring Black and Latino men.

    The company has pursued copyright infringers aggressively for years, including a $1.5 million damages award against a defendant who shared its films on BitTorrent and a high-profile clash with an unnamed television executive that was eventually settled.

    This week, the company continues its legal pressure with a complaint filed last week at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit targets the owner and administrators of private BitTorrent tracker Gay-Torrents.org, the company that allegedly receives the site’s revenue, and 325 individual members identified only by their site usernames.

    Site Owner, Admins, and a Bulgarian Company

    Gay-Torrents.org is a private, invite-only BitTorrent tracker that has operated since June 2009. According to the complaint, more than 146,000 members registered at the site since its launch, of which 20,671 members are currently active.

    The complaint largely targets unnamed defendants, including the site’s alleged operator, who goes by the handle “TheMan”. According to Flava, “TheMan” was one of the first registered members, using the site’s official email address as the main contact.

    TheMan

    theman

    In addition to the operator, seven administrators are also named as John Doe defendants, identified only by their site usernames: sgmusuk, jasepl, Marius, ams_guy, lucasneo, simlacroix, and matthewmancs. According to the complaint, matthewmancs alone has generated more than 470 terabytes of upload and download traffic, the largest sharing volume of any user.

    Flava does not only list unnamed defendants; it also identifies BYZONA LTD, a Bulgarian company, as being involved. This company and its operator are allegedly linked to 247host.eu and cloud2max.club. These are shell entities, which Flava believes are used to route VIP-membership payments through Skrill and PayPal, while concealing the site’s true beneficiaries.

    The complaint alleges that the two shells together have generated more than €7 million in revenue since 2009. This is not an exact calculation, but based on Flava’s analysis of the site’s VIP pricing, donation records, and the registered member data.

    “Straight-Up Extortion”

    This is not the first time that Flava has targeted users of the private torrent tracker. In fact, the complaint quotes the site’s owner characterizing FlavaWorks’ enforcement as a scam. Last December, TheMan posted on the Gay-Torrents.org forum in response to a member who had received a cease and desist letter from the studio.

    Posting under his “Owner” account, TheMan wrote: “This is straight-up extortion, and people shouldn’t fall for it.”

    TheMan also told users the studio had been “uploading their own shitty content themselves just so they can blackmail users afterwards,” and claimed: “We deleted all of their stuff a long time ago.”

    TheMan’s forum post (from the lawsuit’s evidence package)

    theman extort

    Flava’s complaint points out that the private tracker did not remove all contested content, as 47 of the 56 infringing links it reported in February 2024 remained active on the site twenty months later. Some of the infringing content remained accessible when the lawsuit was filed, the company adds.

    A French Uploader and 325 Registered Users

    The lawsuit doesn’t only focus on the alleged owner and administrators; it also lists a prolific uploader who is identified as the Frenchman Ludovic D. This defendant allegedly purchased two paid subscriptions to FlavaWorks-affiliated sites in 2004 and 2013, which were both traceable to the same email address and other personal details.

    Since Flava uses a forensic-watermarking system to link videos to registered users, it could track the man’s account to more than thirty videos that were uploaded to the torrent tracker.

    “Defendant [D.] cancelled his subscription approximately thirty days after purchase, on the same day as his final download session—a pattern consistent with bulk acquisition for redistribution rather than ordinary consumption,” the complaint reads.

    In addition to the named Frenchman, the complaint also lists 325 “John Doe” defendants who are only known by their usernames. These users all allegedly shared Flava’s copyrighted works, are based in the U.S., were active in the Gay-Torrents forums, and purchased VIP memberships.

    Courts have previously been wary of joining this many Doe defendants in a single lawsuit. Flava recognizes this and specifically notes that this isn’t part of a mass settlement scheme, while promising to dismiss all defendants who don’t fall under the court’s jurisdiction.

    “This is not a mass-joinder action seeking to extract settlements from non-resident Doe defendants in a distant forum,” the complaint reads.

    ‘$7 Million’ Asset Freeze and More

    Flava also requests an asset freezing order targeting the assets in the Skrill account associated with BYZONA and the PayPal account associated with cloud2max.club. Those can be as high as €7,000,000, the complaint notes. That is an estimation based on Flava’s calculations, assuming that no funds were spent or taken out in 17 years.

    Asset Freeze

    gay assets

    In addition, the complaint also asks the court to direct Cloudflare to preserve all records relating to the gay-torrents.org domain, including DNS configuration records and customer communications, without taking the site offline.

    In total, the complaint lists seven counts, including copyright claims for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement, and a separate inducement count against the alleged operator and administrators.

    To support these secondary liability claims, Flava cites the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony, arguing that the Bulgarian shell entities are “tailored to infringement” and without any “substantial noninfringing use.”

    The remaining three are state-law claims for unjust enrichment, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent concealment. The latter is built around the alleged payment-routing scheme through 247host.eu and cloud2max.club.

    As compensation, Flava requests statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. The exact number of works is not listed, but with hundreds of titles in Flava’s catalog, the potential damages run into the many millions of dollars.

    Finally, it is worth noting that this is not Flava’s only case against a private torrent tracker. Last March, the adult company filed a copyright lawsuit against an alleged Canadian leaker of its videos, as well as 47 users of the private torrent tracker GayTorrent.ru. This lawsuit remains pending at the Illinois federal court.

    —

    A copy of the complaint, filed this week by FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc. at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is available here (pdf).

    From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

  • What death doulas can teach us about dying

    Death doulas or soul midwives have increased in popularity in recent years. What do they do?

  • Pluralistic: The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (02 May 2026)

    Today’s links


    A post-war 'denazification' bonfire featuring several Nazi flags. It has been hand-tinted. There is a smouldering MAGA hat amidst the coals.

    The prehistory of the Democratic Nuremberg Caucus (permalink)

    Comrade Trump continues his unbroken streak of destroying the American empire’s grip on the world, hastening the renewables transition, de-dollarizing global trade, and killing the world’s suicidal habit of entrusting its digital life to America’s defective, enshittified tech exports:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/#acceleration

    But Comrade Trump’s ambitious praxis knows no bounds. Now, he’s helping to remake the Democratic Party as a muscular opposition with a serious commitment to workers’ interests over billionaires. It’s not merely that Trump has empowered the primary campaigns of leftist Democrats facing down corporate, AIPAC-backed sellouts:

    https://prospect.org/2026/04/30/palestine-super-pac-new-jersey-12-district-adam-hamawy/

    He’s also stiffening normie sellout Democrats’ spines, forcing them to confront the stark choice between socialism and barbarism! And Dem leaders don’t come more normie sellout than Cory “Big Pharma” Booker, a disgrace to Corys everywhere:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20170112224531/https://theintercept.com/2017/01/12/cory-booker-joins-senate-republicans-to-kill-measure-to-import-cheaper-medicine-from-canada/

    Nevertheless, that very same (lesser) Cory has introduced legislation to unwind every illegal, corrupt merger that the Trump administration has waved through:

    https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-introduces-legislation-to-review-and-unwind-anticompetitive-corporate-mergers-approved-under-second-trump-administration

    Under the Correcting Lapsed Enforcement in Antitrust Norms for Mergers (CLEAN Mergers) Act, any company that was acquired in a deal worth $10b or more will have to break up with its merger partner if it turns out that these mergers were “politically influenced.” “Politically influenced” sums up every major merger under the Trump II regime:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/13/khanservatives/#kid-rock-eats-shit

    You could be forgiven for assuming that this is just about reining in Wall Street greed, but that it isn’t an especially political maneuver. That’s not true: antitrust is the most consequentially political regulation (with the possible exception of regulations on elections). Every fascist power defeated in WWII relied on the backing of their national monopolists to take, hold and wield power. That’s why the Marshall Plan technocrats who rewrote the laws of Europe, South Korea and Japan made sure to copy over US antitrust law onto those statute-books (that’s also why the tech antitrust cases brought in Europe could be re-run in South Korea and Japan – their laws are all substantively similar, because they were harmonized with US antitrust in the 1950s):

    https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

    Fascism and monopolies go hand in hand, and smashing monopolies is key to the program of fighting fascism. After defeating fascism in the mid-20th century, the Allies oversaw a program of “denazification,” starting with the Nuremberg trials:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials

    Inspired by those trials, I’ve proposed that Congressional Dems could form a “Nuremberg Caucus” that would publicly promise sweeping plans to denazify America after Trump and his allies have been swept from power:

    https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/10/miller-in-the-dock/#denazification

    The centerpiece of the Nuremberg Caucus playbook is a set of ready-to-file, public indictments against Trump officials who have violated the law, the Constitution, and the rights of the people of the USA. Dems should create and maintain a docket with exhibits and witness lists that gets updated every time one of these crooks runs their big, stupid mouths on Fox News or OANN or Twitter. The Nuremberg Caucus could even set dates for the trials of officials, with judicial calendars for each federal courtroom, starting on January 21, 2029.

    The idea here is to both demoralize Trump’s collaborators and to stiffen the spines of the Democratic base who will have to be convinced that turning out for the coming elections, and defending them, will mean something, delivering the change and hope they’ve been promised since the Obama campaign, but which has never materialized.

    While trials and punishment for Trump’s fascist goons are at the center of the Nuremberg Caucus plan, that’s not all of it. The plan also calls for publicly announcing the intention to unwind every corrupt merger that was consummated under Trump. This serves two purposes: first, it promises the electorate that the monopolists who steal from them will face consequences for their crimes; but second, it also puts investors on notice that any gains from corrupt mergers will turn into massive losses once the next administration orders these companies to unscramble the inedible omelets they’re cooking up, no matter what the cost.

    That’s exactly what Booker’s CLEAN Mergers Act – cosponsored by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) – does. I don’t think that Booker is listening to me, but I do think that Dems who are willing to introduce this kind of legislation can be cajoled, coerced and sweet-talked into more ambitious Nuremberg Caucus actions.

    For example, there could not be a better time to announce plans to unrig the Supreme Court, which has just gutted the Voting Rights Act:

    https://prospect.org/2026/05/01/turning-civil-rights-inside-out-supreme-court-voting-rights/

    The Supreme Court’s legitimacy has been burned to the ground, and Trump’s chud justices are pissing on the ashes. Packing the court is a very good idea:

    https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

    It’s also a very popular idea:

    https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/18/the-people-no/#tell-ya-what-i-want-what-i-really-really-want

    Which is why I included it in the Nuremberg Caucus plan. But packing the court is just table stakes. In his latest video, Jamelle Bouie lays out a detailed plan for denazifying the Supreme Court:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRzS61buXkQ

    As Bouie points out, “as long as John Roberts has his majority, nothing the left of center in this country wants to do is safe or stable…We can have democracy and self-government in this country or we can have the Supreme Court as it exists, but we cannot have both.”

    But packing the court – while a good place to start – isn’t enough. Per Bouie, the problem isn’t just the court’s corruption – it’s how powerful the court is. Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution permits Congress to “jurisdiction strip” the Supremes: Congress can pass a law taking voting rights and racial discrimination away from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. Congress can impose ethics reforms on the court, banning justices from taking bribes (I can’t believe I have to type these words).

    Congress can turn the Supreme Court’s current building into a museum and move the Supreme Court back into its original home in Congress’s basement. Congress can take away the Supremes’ ability to select their clerks or which cases they hear. All the Constitution says is that there must be a Supreme Court, and it must adjudicate “disputes between states, disputes involving ambassadors, impeachments, that kind of thing.” Everything else is up to Congress to grant or withhold from SCOTUS.

    This is very good Nuremberg Caucus stuff. It would be an amazing campaign promise for anyone primarying a shitty normie Dem in the midterms: “Vote for me, and I will be part of the legislative movement to make the Supreme Court weaker and thus more accountable.”

    Now, as much as I like this, I’m really holding out for a Dem to go with my big ICE-melting idea: promising million-dollar bounties for ICE officers who rat out their buddies for violating the law:

    ICE agents are signing up with the promise of $50k hiring bonuses and $60k in student debt cancellation. That’s peanuts. The Nuremberg Caucus could announce a Crimestoppers-style program with $1m bounties for any ICE officer who a) is themselves innocent of any human rights violations, and; b) provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. That would certainly improve morale for (some) ICE officers.

    As I wrote in February:

    Critics of this plan will say that this will force Trump officials to try to steal the next election in order to avoid consequences for their actions. This is certainly true: confidence in a “peaceful transfer of power” is the bedrock of any kind of fair election.

    But this bunch have already repeatedly signaled that they intend to steal the midterms and the next general election:

    https://www.nj.com/politics/2026/02/top-senate-republican-rejects-trumps-shocking-election-plan-i-think-thats-a-constitutional-issue.html

    ICE agents are straight up telling people that ICE is on the streets to arrest people in Democratic-leaning states (“The more people that you lose in Minnesota, you then lose a voting right to stay blue”):

    https://unicornriot.ninja/2026/federal-agent-in-coon-rapids-the-more-people-that-you-lose-in-minnesota-you-then-lose-a-voting-right-to-stay-blue/

    The only path to fair elections – and saving America – lies through mobilizing and energizing hundreds of millions of Americans. They are ready. They are begging for leadership. They want an electoral choice, something better than a return to the pre-Trump status quo. If you want giant crowds at every polling place, rising up against ICE and DHS voter-suppression, then you have to promise people that their vote will mean something.

    Hey look at this (permalink)


    A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

    Object permanence (permalink)

    #25yrsago Implementing TCP over pigeon https://blug.linux.no/rfc1149/

    #20yrsago Barenaked Ladies frontman on copyright reform https://web.archive.org/web/20060505032617/http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesideas/story.html?id=3367a219-f395-4161-a9b9-95256c613824

    #20yrsago Stephen Colbert kills at White House press corps dinner https://web.archive.org/web/20060501114431/http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002425363

    #20yrsago Cinema owners try to lure us back to the movies https://web.archive.org/web/20060620140301/https://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/14457900.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_peninsula

    #20yrsago Smithsonian’s sellout to Showtime slammed by Congress https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802213_2.html

    #20yrago Wallaby milk: proof against antibiotic resistant bacteria https://web.archive.org/web/20060429102138/http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=593632006

    #20yrsago Documentary on radical free school https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgpuSo-GSfw

    #15yrsago Facebook celebrates royal wedding by nuking 50 protest groups https://anticutsspace.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/political-facebook-groups-deleted-on-royal-wedding-day/

    #15yrsago Jay Rosen: What I Think I Know About Journalism https://pressthink.org/2011/04/what-i-think-i-know-about-journalism/

    #15yrsago Companies should release the source code for discontinued products https://makezine.com/article/maker-news/if-youre-going-to-kill-it-open-source-it/

    #15yrsago Scratch-built “freedom press” https://makezine.com/article/craft/freedom_press/

    #15yrsago HOWTO quilt a 3D Mad Tea Party set https://www.instructables.com/Quilted-Mad-Tea-Party-Set/

    #15yrsago Online activism works: Canada delayed US-style copyright bill in fear of activist campaign https://web.archive.org/web/20110501103056/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5763/125/

    #15yrsago Ad agency to radicals: “We own radical media(TM)” https://web.archive.org/web/20110503045909/http://radicalmediaconference.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/we-make-radical-media-you-make-adverts/

    #15yrsago Troubletwisters: Garth Nix and Sean Williams’ action-packed new kids’ fantasy https://memex.craphound.com/2011/04/30/troubletwisters-garth-nix-and-sean-williams-action-packed-new-kids-fantasy/

    #15yrsago RIP, Joanna Russ https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012974.html#547586

    #5yrsago Experian doxes the world (again) https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian

    #5yrsago Disney’s writer wage-theft is far worse than reported https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer

    #5yrsago Korea set to break the Samsung dynasty https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#dynasties

    #5yrsago What the hell is “carried interest” https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

    #1yrago Mike Lee and Jim Jordan want to kill the law that bans companies from cheating you https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/29/cheaters-and-liars/#caveat-emptor-brainworms

    #1yrago Republicans want to force students to pay off scam college loans https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/30/trump-u/#i-think-you-know-what-the-trustees-can-do-with-their-suggestions

    Upcoming appearances (permalink)

    A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


    A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

    Recent appearances (permalink)


    A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

    Latest books (permalink)


    A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

    Upcoming books (permalink)

    • “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

    • “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

    • “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

    • “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


    Colophon (permalink)

    Today’s top sources:

    Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

    • “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

    • “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

    • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

    This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

    Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

    How to get Pluralistic:

    Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    Pluralistic.net

    Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

    https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

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    https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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    https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

    Medium (no ads, paywalled):

    https://doctorow.medium.com/

    Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

    https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

    “When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla

    READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

    ISSN: 3066-764X

  • June 22nd: Internal Family Systems Therapy; A non-pathologising way of working

    June 22nd: Internal Family Systems Therapy; A non-pathologising way of working

    Part of the Challenging the culture of diagnosis & disorder! collection

    Online event

    Monday 22 June  •  11 – 12:30 GMT+1
    Overview

    A wonderful introduction to IFS; a trauma-informed, humanising approach empowering therapists to work respectfully with all parts.

    AD4E is delighted to be repeating this very popular workshop with Dr Zandra Bamford

    Internal Family Systems Therapy is a model that has been described as ‘a paradigm shift for psychological therapies’ and is quickly gaining increasing popularity amongst counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists particularly as a way of working with clients who have experienced trauma.

    Zandra founded and runs a clinical psychology service in the North West of England that specialises in Internal Family Systems therapy.

    She is passionate about bringing IFS therapy with all that it has to offer to counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists believing that it is a deeply respectful and humanising model that welcomes all parts of a person into the therapy space.

    Although this is an introductory workshop it will empower counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists to integrate the theory and practice of Internal Family Systems Therapy into their work. It will cover/include the following…

    – An overview of Internal Family Systems Therapy

    – The nature of Self (The idea that everything that an individual requires for healing from trauma is already within them.)

    – The importance of honouring and befriending protectors (parts that adapt / protect our wounded little inner parts from further trauma.) Zandra will present case examples and examples from her own experience of therapy to exemplify the transformative potential of the Internal Family Systems model.

    – How traditional mental health systems and services continue to exile parts, shame protectors and consequently prevent healing.

    – How some processes of psychological therapy (eg assessment, formulation, the approach to supervision) can be subtly (or not so subtly!) pathologising, shaming and disrespecting. Zandra will present alternatives.

    – Fostering trust of the inner system and body within traditional mental health systems to support healing.

    – Guided meditation to connect the audience with parts in their own system (learning the model from the inside)

    Zandra will share examples from her own experience of therapy to illustrate the transformative potential of the Internal Family Systems model.

    This workshop will be invaluable to counsellors, psychotherapists and psychologists who are wanting to expand on what they can offer their clients and who are committed to not colluding with the pathogising culture of psychiatric labels and medicalised responses. It will also be useful for those who are considering further training in IFS.

    Bio

    Zandra Bamford works as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and is the founder of Therapy NorthWest and has led NHS Psychology Services within crisis, inpatient and community mental health teams in the UK for over 19 years.

    Zandra is passionate about reducing harm within traditional mental health systems and bringing in IFS as an effective tool for humanising systems, nourishing and nurturing both staff and those within services.

    Zandra has worked with complex trauma throughout her career and having repeatedly witnessed the healing power of IFS personally and professionally with complex and enduring childhood trauma she now holds a practice delivering training, supervision, trauma retreats, individual and group IFS therapy.

    Get tickets here

    A CPD certificate will be available after the workshop.

    The post June 22nd: Internal Family Systems Therapy; A non-pathologising way of working appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Rethinking Mental Health – Mad in Norway International Film Festival on September 24-26

    Rethinking Mental Health – Mad in Norway International Film Festival on September 24-26

    Welcome to
    Rethinking Mental Health 

    Mad in Norway’s International Film Festival
    September 24 to 26, 2026 – Lillehammer, Norway

    This September, we invite you to come to Lillehammer, Norway, to be inspired by films from around the world – films that rarely reach mainstream cinema.

    Who are we,
    and who is invited?

    Mad in Norway is a webzine and part of the Mad in the World network. Our mission is to promote a paradigm shift in mental health care – away from a narrow disease-based model and toward a more humanistic approach that truly supports recovery.

    Our international community welcomes the general public, people with lived experience, relatives, professionals, researchers, students, cultural workers, and policy-makers.

    The festival

    In addition to film screenings, the festival will offer conversations with filmmakers, panel discussions, personal stories, and artistic performances. Above all, the festival is a space for human connection and new friendships, across national borders and differing perspectives.

    We will present powerful films in a wide range of genres and formats. Together, they offer insights that may change how you understand life and mental health.

    Mental health struggles are often defined through diagnoses. 

    But what if these struggles are signals – expressions of a deeper longing for connection with ourselves and with one another?

    Through stories of emotion, longing, and the search for identity in a fragmented world, the festival explores the human condition
    at the intersection of inner and outer realities.

    Lillehammer

    The small town of Lillehammer offers a perfect setting for the festival.  Film screenings and presentations will be held at the local cinema, and many of us will stay at a nearby conference hotel with a cozy lobby with bar and large dining room. Lillehammer’s town center, with its cafés and pedestrian street, provides a warm and welcoming setting for shared experiences and meaningful conversations
    among participants from many countries.

    We will meet in Lillehammer to think together – to broaden our horizons and rethink how we understand mental health struggles and human needs.

    Our hope is to offer inspiration, encouragement, and renewed energy for ongoing public education and change in the field of mental health.

    SAVE THE DATES September 24th to 26th and join us for all or part of the festival! Stay tuned for further announcements on this page
    —we look forward to welcoming you!

    Get tickets at this website https://madinnorwayfilmfest.org/

     

    The post Rethinking Mental Health – Mad in Norway International Film Festival on September 24-26 appeared first on Mad in the UK.

  • Mouin Rabbani Breaks Down the Crisis in the Middle East

    Mouin Rabbani Breaks Down the Crisis in the Middle East

    Mouin Rabbani is one of the foremost analysts of the Middle East working today. He’s a senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, an editor at the journal Jadaliyya, and the author of the forthcoming book Gaza Apocalypse: A Genocide Diary. You might also remember him as Norman Finkelstein’s debate partner in their epic four-hour exchange with Israeli historian Benny Morris and Steven “Destiny” Bonnell, or as the prolific social-media critic of what he calls the “Hasbara Symphony Orchestra.” He joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to unravel the chaos coming out of the Trump White House, the joint U.S.-Israeli wars on Iran and Lebanon, 

  • In Defense of ‘The Drama’

    In Defense of ‘The Drama’

    SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains spoilers for the film The Drama.

    If you purchased a ticket to The Drama expecting a light-hearted romantic comedy, you, too, might have found yourself choking on your popcorn about ten minutes in. The promotion surrounding A24’s latest filmwas intentionally tight-lipped, trailers hinting only at some unspecified rift between a couple leading up to their wedding, but no one could have guessed the real premise: an exploration of America’s chronic mass shooting problem, and what forgiveness looks like for people who consider—yet never actually commit—terrible acts of violence.

  • It’s May, and we’ve been keeping busy

    All four teams at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have been working tirelessly the past four months, and we have a lot to show for it!

  • Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills

    The bitter courtroom brawl between Elon Musk and Sam Altman captivating the tech industry this week revolves in no small part around fears that artificial intelligence technologies both men are building could spiral out of control and exterminate humanity. Such far-looking scenarios obscure the fact that tech companies are enlisting to kill today.

    Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.”

    The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals.

    Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence of “artificial general intelligence,” an ill-defined form of superior machine reasoning that may never come to pass. But their fear that AI could kill us all is less hypothetical for those living in places targeted by the Trump administration’s global wars. In Iran, for instance, Anthropic’s Claude AI model “suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance,” according to the Washington Post.

    “ There’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”

    “The risks of integrating frontier AI into the nation’s most lethal capabilities are already existential, both for civilians swept up in the violence and destruction of AI-enabled wars, and rank-and-file troops that have to live with the consequences of potentially unsafe weapons they can’t control,” Amoh Toh, senior counsel at Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, told The Intercept. “Existing AI models are already pushing policymakers and militaries toward nuclear escalation — there’s a real danger of Skynet-like outcomes even without a Skynet-style takeover.”


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    Silicon Valley has widely embraced AI military contracts despite its worries over lethal AI. Amazon, OpenAI, Musk’s xAI, and Microsoft all earn money from selling large language model services to the Pentagon. Even Anthropic, accused of “betrayal” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth and declared a national supply chain risk for mounting the smallest of opposition to the Pentagon’s terms, is still keen to participate in the national kill chain. “Anthropic has much more in common with the Department of War than we have differences,” CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post a week after the United States bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing more than 100 children.

    Google offers a telling illustration of the industry’s increasing coziness with selling AI to the military. Following a 2018 employee revolt over Project Maven, a contract to help target Pentagon airstrikes, CEO Sundar Pichai pledged his company would swear off the business of killing. He wrote in a company blog post that Google would not pursue deals that could cause harm, including applications whose “principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” He added: “These are not theoretical concepts, they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.”

    After watching AI help wage a war that has already killed over 1,700 Iranian civilians, Google this week sent a clear message: We want in. In a deal that makes explicit the extent to which company leadership has abandoned its AI principles, Google agreed to provide AI services to the Pentagon that allow for “classified workloads,” sensitive military work that encompasses tasks like intelligence analysis and targeting airstrikes, The Information reported.

    Executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

    According to the tech news outlet, the deal allows the U.S. military to use Google’s AI models for “any lawful government purpose” — a carveout that could allow any uses the administration deems legal. Take, for example, the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear, the ongoing aerial assassination program against civilian boats accused of drug trafficking that has killed more than 180 people to date. The campaign has been widely condemned as illegal under both international and U.S. law, but the administration has deemed its own actions legal through a Department of Justice memo that remains secret. On Friday, the Pentagon announced additional “lawful operational use” deals with Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon as well.

    The Google contract reportedly includes a toothless and unenforceable provision gesturing at concerns over autonomous and spying. “We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight,” the clause reportedly states.

    “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ … The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

    “When I worked at Google, they would spend a lot of time punting into the future, promising a future that would never come,” said William Fitzgerald, a former Google employee who helped organize the 2018 worker-led campaign against the Maven contract. “‘Don’t regulate us or it’ll kill innovation.’ The talking point is the same today. The reality of Google’s work with the military is it’s part of a tech-military ecosystem that’s killing people today.”

    Google spokesperson Kate Dreyer did not respond to questions about the contract’s language, instead touting how the company’s military work applies “to areas like logistics, cybersecurity, diplomatic translation, fleet maintenance, and the defense of critical infrastructure.”

    There is little evidence the people in charge find this technology enticing because of its diplomatic translation prowess. In a January address to Musk’s employees at SpaceX, another Pentagon contractor, Hegseth explained how “an embrace of AI” would make the military “more lethal.”


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    AI’s Imperial Agenda

    Musk and Altman, though foes at the moment, can at least find common ground in their support of Hegseth. Musk, a longtime defense contractor, similarly wraps himself in the flag, tweeting in 2023, “I will fight for and die in America.” Altman, who once expressed skepticism toward military work, now frames OpenAI’s mission in terms of patriotic nationalism. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

    Between Musk’s courtroom visions of the apocalypse and Google’s plunge into classified workloads, the week’s news illustrates the disjointed state of AI industry ethics, where executives say they’re terrified of the technology killing by accident, while wholly supportive of using it to kill on purpose.

    Though AI executives clearly find this a virtuous revenue stream, some of the people who actually built the technology do not. Andreas Kirsch, a research scientist at Google’s pioneering DeepMind laboratory that produced much of the work on which xAI and Anthropic rely, responded to this week’s news with dismay: “I’m speechless at Google signing a deal to use our AI models for classified tasks. Frankly, it is shameful,” he wrote on X. Alex Turner, a DeepMind colleague of Kirsch’s, described the contract in a single word: “Shameful.”

    The post Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills appeared first on The Intercept.