Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

In the most recent update to Apple’s devices, iOS 27.2, the company has introduced a new setting to “Exclude Apps” from Siri AI, fulfilling one of our asks from our Encrypt It Already campaign earlier this year.

One of our main concerns with new AI features on devices is how those features interact with end-to-end encrypted content, particularly with secure messaging apps. Many AI features require cloud processing, and despite privacy protections engineered into these systems, the content of secure messaging apps may leave a user’s device without their knowledge. That changes the privacy concerns around using those tools. In a perfect world, users would be able to put a barrier up to ensure data from certain apps doesn’t leave the device. Here was our initial ask:

You should be able to tell the operating system’s AI to not access an app, even if that comes at the “cost” of missing out on some features. The setting should be straightforward and easy to understand in ways the Gemini and Apple Intelligence controls currently are not.

At launch, we found the settings to control Siri AI’s app access behavior pretty confusing. You had to toggle several options to block Siri AI off from accessing an app, or disable Siri AI entirely. Turning off Siri AI and reverting to Siri Classic is, for now, still a good option if you’d prefer to use the older version.

The most recent update is far more clear and does more to protect your data. And, just as expected, it comes at the cost of some features. That’s a good thing, actually. The features not working shows that the new setting is effective. 

Here’s how to add apps to the exclusion list, once you’ve updated to 27.2:

• Open Settings > Siri > Excluded Apps
• Tap “Add Apps” and select any apps you’d like to add to the exclusion list

Now Siri AI cannot access the contents of the app. Excluding an app also means you may lose some features. For example, if you exclude the Apple Messages app, you will no longer be able to have Siri AI read or respond to messages for you. Even the “onscreen awareness” feature, where you invoke Siri and ask it for information about what you’re currently looking at, will not work anymore. For example, if you exclude Signal, you cannot invoke Siri and ask it to discern any information in the Signal app. You’ll just get these messages:

What’s the State of This on Android?

This update from Apple is also a good excuse to check in on the process on Android. It has improved a little, but is not as straightforward as Apple’s new settings, and lacks the ability to set the screen context feature per-app. But you do have some control over what Gemini can access: 

• Open up the Gemini app
• Tap your user photo, then Settings > Personal Intelligence > Connected Apps
• Revoke access to any apps you do not want Gemini to have access to

This process seems to work well enough for some data and we like that it’s opt in, but it’s not exactly intuitive. For example, Signal doesn’t appear there because Signal doesn’t support Gemini’s app access feature at all. That means Gemini can’t access the content of Signal directly, which is good. 

But Gemini can read notifications if you’ve enabled the “Device Assistance” Connected App (which you likely have, since that also enables basic features, like setting a timer—check under Settings > Personal Intelligence > Connected Apps), and it can use screen context unless you’ve disabled the Device controls > Screen context > “Use screen and app data” option in the Gemini Settings. These two features may access the contents of the Signal app or notifications, if you choose to use them. We’d prefer a more hard-lined approach that reduces the chances of user error here: Google should give users the ability to turn these features off per app.

Apple clearly understands that some users want stronger controls over what Siri AI can and cannot access. But we think they should go further and offer the option to only use “on device” AI features, similar to what Samsung offered with its Galaxy AI. We’re happy to see this change and think all operating systems need to consider similar controls moving forward.

A federal appeals court should curb the government’s abuse of grand jury subpoenas to unmask social media users who criticize lawless immigration enforcement.

That is the message from the ACLU, EFF, and other civil liberties and trade groups who filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a sealed case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The case involves the government’s investigation of an anonymous Reddit user who commented on a post about an immigration officer in Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first issued an administrative subpoena to Reddit to unmask the user. When the user challenged the subpoena in court on free speech and statutory grounds (as many others have), DHS withdrew it. But then the government obtained a separate grand jury subpoena—a subpoena issued by a prosecutor to gather evidence to present to a grand jury before any criminal charges are filed—for much of the same information. The user then challenged the grand jury subpoena too, and the case is currently being appealed.

The right to speak anonymously is essential. It preserves privacy and shields critics from government retaliation. In the past year, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued grand jury subpoenas to social media companies for their users’ personal data. This is frequently done for improper purposes and without really showing that social media users have committed any crime. These subpoenas have the effect of intimidating and chilling critics, as immigration authorities have engaged in invasive, unconstitutional, and sometimes violent conduct.

As the amicus brief makes clear, courts should not defer to the government’s claims regarding the legitimacy of using grand jury subpoenas to unmask internet users. Instead, the subpoenas must receive proper First Amendment scrutiny. Like many other types of legal processes, grand jury subpoenas are issued by federal officials without prior court approval. And they too can be abused to harass or retaliate against people critical of the government.

The amicus brief was filed in early September and recently unsealed. The brief was signed by the American Civil Liberties Union of DC, EFF, the Center for Individual Rights, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Cato Institute, and NetChoice.

It is notable that NetChoice signed the amicus brief. It is a trade group that represents many companies who have received similar subpoenas including Reddit, Google, Meta, PayPal, among others. EFF has called on these companies to do more to defend their users’ speech and privacy rights in the face of these subpoenas.

When we give our private information to the government to pay taxes, apply for a job, or vote, we should be able to trust that our data won't later be used against us. But in a betrayal of that trust, the federal government has been pooling the information it has about us on an unprecedented scale—and using it for purposes we never agreed to.

EFF and other groups are fighting back. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about a recent victory in our lawsuit against the government for sharing federal workers' confidential personnel files with DOGE.

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers our free tracker blocker coming to Safari, a call to action for net neutrality in California, and a big win in our lawsuit against the DOGE data grab.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time we're talking to EFF's F. Mario Trujillo about the dangers of government data grabs—and what defenders of privacy are doing to stop it. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Researchers set up a fake start-up company to study fraudulent North Korean IT workers.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02784-w

As the IPCC is in its seventh assessment cycle, bridging the gap between physical climate science and economics has become more urgent. Estimating climate damages requires a rigorous translation of physical hazards into economic losses, highlighting the need for better communication between the disciplines.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02758-y

This work investigates the effect of the 2016 regime shift in Antarctic sea ice on Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW). The authors show that decreased sea ice and reduced freshwater subduction lead to saltier and denser AAIW, with implications for wide-scale water-mass properties.

The crack of a bat accompanied by a roar from the crowd can capture a baseball fan’s attention, even if they miss seeing the home run. Humans may be visual creatures, but we also perceive the world around us by listening to it. 

To improve artificial perception, MIT Professor Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01 seeks to make machines that can hear and understand sound even better than humans.

A machine with super-human hearing could rapidly pinpoint the location of a traffic accident by listening for squealing tires and crunching metal, or identify when an industrial drill might break while it is boring through dense bedrock to dig a geothermal well.

“I like to say that I do the same thing the computer vision folks do, but instead I do it for hearing,” says Smaragdis, a professor with joint appointments in the Music and Theatre Arts program of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the School of Engineering and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. 

His research group explores areas like machine learning for sound source separation, smart devices that can augment the audio surroundings of humans, and better tools to help people understand, manipulate, analyze, and create music.

“Having had a musical background, I’ve been interested in examining these ideas. What does it take to make machines understand sound? There is a huge domain of applications for machines that can listen,” says Smaragdis, who joined MIT in 2025.

A musical prelude

Smaragdis, who grew up in Greece, began playing classical guitar at a young age. He enjoyed playing traditional pieces but reached a turning point in his musical journey when his father brought home a small synthesizer.

“That little synthesizer had a function that allowed you to make your own sounds, and I became completely captivated by the possibilities,” he says.

Synthesizers were taking a more prominent place in pop music during the 1980s, adding to his fascination with the technology.

As he advanced through school, Smaragdis wanted to study music made with synthesizers. But this was not an educational path offered by the more traditional European conservatories at the time.

Instead, he enrolled at Berklee College of Music in Boston, into a program where he could explore the use of computers and synthesizers to shape and manipulate sound.

“With computers and synthesizers, I could make new sounds that have never been heard before,” he says.

At the same time, Smaragdis became immersed in jazz fusion. He declared bass as his major at Berklee since it would allow him more opportunities to play with jazz ensembles.

“I found the bass to be sonically more interesting than the guitar. It was a more unexplored domain, and I’ve always gravitated toward unexplored domains,” he says.

That interest in the unexplored carried over into his coursework. He and mentor Richard Boulanger, a professor of electronic production and design, created new tools to help people use computers to write, produce, and enhance music. 

Through his studies at Berklee, Smaragdis embarked on a collaborative project with Professor Barry Vercoe (who passed away in 2025) at the MIT Media Lab to create software synthesizers for music creation. Building on that project, Smaragdis pursued graduate studies in Vercoe’s group, where he completed his master’s degree and PhD, followed by a postdoc.

“In the Media Lab, I got exposed more to the computer part of computer music. That’s where my attention shifted a bit. Now I really wanted to make computers that could understand sound,” he says.

Tuning in to unexplored domains

At that time, many students in the Media Lab were using signal processing techniques to help machines handle sound. Smaragdis chose a less explored approach — machine learning — to separate himself from the pack.

He found that training machine-learning models to understand sound offered advantages that couldn’t be attained with traditional signal processing techniques.

“Over time, it became really clear to me that we need to teach computers how to listen. We can’t just tell them how to listen. If anything, we don’t even know how we humans listen,” he says. “We don’t have a vocabulary to explain what it means to listen, or how to tell the difference between a cat’s meow and the sound of a violin.”

After finishing his postdoc, Smaragdis began a career at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, where he worked on artificial intelligence systems that could scan video soundtracks and understand what is happening on screen. 

“What if you record an entire soccer game, but you only want to watch the highlights? In computer vision, it is very difficult to identify what a highlight is. But on the other hand, if you only listen to the sounds, then when the crowd goes crazy you would know that something interesting is happening,” he says.

That system was eventually incorporated into electronic devices, including a personal video recording system Mitsubishi was developing at the time, and into traffic monitoring systems and cell phones.

Smaragdis later joined Adobe, where he created the audio research team that built user-friendly tools to help artists, musicians, and producers manipulate sound without needing a lot of expertise.

“As we did that work, I kept coming up with deeper technical problems that needed to be resolved. I jumped into academia to address that itch,” he says.

Smaragdis joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he and his group incorporated the latest machine-learning techniques into audio-processing systems.

One of the technologies they developed utilized neural networks for separating individual sounds from audio mixtures. That project caught the attention of the team working on the 2021 documentary mini-series “The Beatles: Get Back.”

The production team enlisted Smaragdis to help clean up some archival Beatles recordings.

“That was a very different way of audio processing than what I was doing in academia. Now, I had to do something that sounded good but didn’t necessarily have to look good on paper. We didn’t have a formula we could optimize,” he says.

Every recording involved different challenges. For instance, in one clip John Lennon was playing music while Paul McCartney was horsing around, reading headlines from newspapers and making fun of George Harrison.

“We were trying to come up with a technological solution that could help us do everything, as opposed to addressing each problem on its own,” he says.

His contributions helped the team win an Emmy Award for sound editing for a nonfiction or reality program, in 2022.

A concerted effort

After 15 years at the University of Illinois, Smaragdis decided to join the faculty at MIT to tackle the thorny, interdisciplinary problems that were emerging in the field. 

His group now focuses on two main areas. For one, they develop systems that make computers more useful tools for musicians. 

One project in this area is enabling machines to understand how to listen to music, so they can provide constructive feedback to musicians.

“We want to enhance the toolbox a musician has. We don’t want to use computers to replace musicians,” he says.

On the other side, his group focuses on the fundamental tools scientists and artists alike can use to process, analyze, and manipulate audio.

For instance, his team has recently been exploring algorithms that allow sophisticated signal processing where traditional frames of reference, such as sampling rates, frame sizes, or context-windows, are not fixed — or even defined. 

That implies different computational structures that are yet unexplored, despite their potential for more efficient processing, Smaragdis says.

“That requires rethinking a lot of the basics, but once you have that ability, you can start getting much more flexible and more powerful systems,” he adds.

They also explore ways to incorporate the latest techniques, like large language models, into speech recognition and audio enhancement.

“AI is an immensely powerful tool, but I don’t think we have found the ideal way to use it for sound and music yet,” he says.

He also enjoys mentoring students and helping them materialize their visions for research projects.

Since few of his students have experience using computation in sound, he emphasizes hands-on lessons so they see and hear how to transform equations into something tangible.

Smaragdis still feels a thrill from making music, whether with a computer or a more traditional instrument. Off campus, he tries to play jazz bass whenever he can find the time, and enjoys exploring the rich musical community of Boston with his wife and 15-year-old son.

Outside the musical realm, he plays and coaches underwater hockey — a sport where players wear diving masks and use sticks to push a heavy puck across the bottom of a pool toward their opponent’s goal. He coached the underwater hockey team at the University of Illinois, and is hoping to revive the MIT underwater hockey club soon and start hosting tournaments on campus.

While underwater hockey may be a lesser-known sport, it fits with Smaragdis’ lifelong interest in pursuing the underexplored.

“I’ve always like doing things that were different from what everyone else was doing. If you can create a new sound that no one has heard before, what does that mean about your ability to create new things? I still find these questions completely fascinating,” he says.

Everyone knows, or should, that perfect (balanced, targeted, transparent, swift and swiftly appealable) content moderation at scale is impossible. That doesn’t mean powerful social platforms don’t have to try to get at least reasonably close, especially when access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

That’s why so many people, including the Meta Oversight Board, criticized Meta for suspending a major political Instagram account for hours during a huge early voting push on October 17; and for allegedly boosting one candidate in Brazil’s recent presidential election. Meta denies deliberate interference in either instance, blaming “mistakes” in its automated content moderation systems (including AI tools that can’t tell the difference between enthusiastic follower engagement and a bot attack).

Mistakes or not, with early voting in the U.S. midterms already underway, these events serve as a stark reminder that all major social media platforms need to have stronger systems in place to ensure that they serve, rather than impede, democratic communication.

Access to good information can have a profound effect on political participation and speech.

This is not inherently an “AI” problem: automated systems can process content at a scale that humans never could, potentially enabling better moderation at scale and alleviating the psychological load on ill-paid moderators whose jobs require them to view incredibly disturbing content. But automated systems also reproduce existing biases, struggle to understand context, and often make mistakes that disproportionately affect journalists, activists, artists, and other vulnerable and marginalized communities. And moderation errors are even more likely when the language is spoken principally by the global majority. In 2020, leaked document showed that Meta’s algorithms incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech under the company’s own policies in many instances. Where these systems are faltering in Arabic, they’re positively failing in less-resourced languages. As a 2025 report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found, labeled datasets in certain languages and dialects such as Maghrebi Arabic and Kiswahili contain inconsistencies, bias, and inaccuracies due to the limited hiring of annotators who actually speak the languages as well as shifts in the languages themselves. An investigation into ChatGPT’s outputs in several low-resource languages demonstrates the depth of problem.

But language disparities are just one of several concerns as automated moderation becomes more widespread. From the systemic suppression of content from Palestine to the repeated misclassification of LGBTQ+ content as adult or explicit material, these varied examples demonstrate the risks of overreliance on automated moderation—and the need for stronger safeguards.

Fortunately, there is a great deal companies, policymakers, and civil society can do to help ensure that highly automated systems operate in ways that respect human rights, minimize predictable harms, and provide meaningful accountability when they fail. If companies are going to continue relying on automation to moderate users’ speech—and there is little reason to believe they won’t—then accountability must evolve alongside these technologies.

That work should start with publicly committing to the Santa Clara Principles 2.0. Specifically:

1. Automated technologies should help, not replace, human moderators. For example, automated systems can help flag and prioritize content for review, while humans can interpret context, handle sensitive cases, and refine system performance. This investment is particularly important during the weeks immediately before and after an election.
2. Companies must be transparent about when and how automation is used in content decisions.
3. Companies must regularly audit their automated systems for bias, with particular attention to low-resource languages, vulnerable and marginalized communities, and conflict zones.
4. Companies should strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies. Automated content moderation often relies on personal data and profiling, so companies should think carefully about what data these systems use, what's necessary and proportionate and how their systems shape moderation outcomes.
5. Users must have the ability to appeal, and to provide context when they believe human or automated moderation decisions have wrongfully removed their content. Appeals should be promptly evaluated and decided by human moderators.
6. Companies should regularly assess the human rights impact of their moderation decisions, and issue public statements of the results
7. If they rely on third-party vendors, companies should carefully (and regularly) audit those vendors for compliance with these same principles
8. Lawmakers should avoid promoting and passing legislation that effectively or explicitly mandates automated moderation systems
9. Policymakers should also refrain from attempting to dictate platforms technical and design choices to favor or disfavor particular expression.
10. Policymakers should work to educate the public about how their personal data may be collected and used in electoral contexts.

These recommendations understand that automated content moderation isn’t just a technical problem for clever engineers and product teams to solve. Because content moderation shapes public discourse and fundamental rights, its design and oversight must respond to the concerns of policymakers, civil society, independent researchers, and the communities most affected by these systems.

One other distinct and enduring problem makes transparency, checks, and accountability all the more urgent: too few companies have far too much power over our political communication and organizing. Social media gave people the ability to wrest some control over political messaging away from media oligopolies. But we’ve met the new boss and while it’s not the same as the old boss, the song is pretty familiar. The real promise of the web to democratize communication is not likely to be met by social media oligarchs, no matter how sophisticated their content moderation practice.

Like many leaders today, Prabha Jha has been feeling the significant impact artificial intelligence is having on business operations. While the rapid evolution of the technology can bring fear, uncertainty, and confusion, Jha chose a different response: excitement. She began asking herself, “How do I become part of this once-in-a-lifetime thing?” 

Jha holds a bachelor’s degree in information technology from the University of Calcutta and earned her MBA while working at Verizon, where she continues to build her career. As she looked for an educational opportunity to engage more deeply with AI, MIT quickly emerged as a natural choice. 

Growing up, Jha viewed MIT as “the mecca for anybody who is in engineering and technology,” so she naturally turned to the Institute when seeking an opportunity to learn about AI. Unlike other programs that took place fully online, MIT xPRO’s AI for Senior Executives stood out to Jha primarily because it offered an in-person component that allowed her to meet and connect with peers. 

Jha decided to take the leap. She acknowledges that the program was a significant investment of both time and money, but ultimately views it as one of “the best decisions [she] made” — one she “would do all over again if [she] had to.” The experience gave Jha the opportunity she was looking for to invest in herself and strengthen her skills in AI. It also provided her with invaluable professional relationships and the confidence to develop multiple AI solutions for Verizon. Putting those news skills and relationships to work, she co-wrote, with some of her peers, “The AI Anthology,” a collection of AI insights designed to support other leaders navigating similar challenges with AI. 

An unexpected learning obstacle

Jha’s learning journey wasn’t without its curveballs, though. Just two months before she was set to complete the program, she spent two weeks in the hospital with a severe infection and was unable to graduate with her original cohort. With the help of MIT staff, she joined the next cohort, giving her an unexpected opportunity to spend another five days on campus with 100 brand-new peers. 

“You just never know what curveball life can throw and what it might be there for,” Jha says.

What initially felt like a setback turned into an unexpected benefit. Jha valued the opportunity to meet new people and spend more time on campus. She also appreciated that just six months later, the program’s content had already been refreshed. Those additional “five days of immersion” became a vital part of Jha’s learning journey, giving her and her peers more time to collaborate face-to-face and learn from one another. 

“I think it was eye-opening to be able to meet so many people with diverse backgrounds and geography, and then we connected at the human level,” she says. 

Jha particularly valued that sense of connection in the context of learning about AI, a field that, she acknowledges, comes with fears, vulnerabilities, and difficult questions. Learning alongside peers with different professional and cultural backgrounds gave her new perspectives and added another dimension to the experience. Jha estimates that “30 percent of what I was learning was from the program, material, and professor [while] 70 percent was my peers and the interactions.”

Peer discussions spark an idea

The idea that would change the trajectory of Jha’s time in the program came during a “salon gathering” at the home of Manolis Kellis, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As students shared personal stories about their experiences with AI, one story in particular stayed with Jha: that of one of her peers, whose motivation to explore AI solutions stemmed from her work to find a cure for her mother’s Alzheimer's disease and dementia. 

At that moment, Jha realized that AI is personal. She still “gets goosebumps thinking of that moment where AI really became human and a connecting point.”

She saw the value in capturing these diverse perspectives and experiences with AI that go beyond operational efficiency and revenue growth, and wanted to continue the conversation beyond the program. Jha expressed to her peers an interest in capturing these stories and connections in a book. One year later, Jha and 20 other leaders released “The AI Anthology,” a collection of essays examining the influence AI has had across industries and across society. 

One of the biggest takeaways from the AI for Senior Executives program — and one that Jha hopes readers will take from her book — is the importance of thinking differently. 

Jha believes leaders may be missing a fundamental shift: “We are still kind of stuck in this traditional measurement of success,” she says. “We cherish revenue; we like cost-cutting and time-saving, and converting them to dollars.” 

While Jha acknowledges this mindset makes sense in corporate America, she believes leaders must move beyond it in order to find more empowerment through AI and its capabilities. She notes that future generations are already asking different questions, including: “What can I get in the quality of my life?” and “How can I use my time in a way that is fulfilling for me early on?” 

The future of embracing AI for business and a better world 

Jha recognizes that AI adoption is not optional for businesses, and that everyone must learn about and embrace it. At the same time, she is a steadfast believer in AI’s ability to create a better world. Instead of viewing AI as a foregone burden, she sees it as a “transformation unlike any other” that is providing us with the opportunity to overcome insecurity, adapt and grow, and invest in ourselves. 

In her work at Verizon, Jha takes seriously the company’s role as “a brand name for reliable, quality service” providing “critical infrastructure” to groups, such as first responders or children, who depend on their services. This responsibility comes with a privileged obligation to participate in and protect society, and Jha finds it empowering that AI can help enable this. In her own experience, she’s appreciated the ability to accelerate progress and impact, when she may have previously needed to rely on a larger team. 

So, what’s next for Jha? Currently, she is working on a new initiative focused on supporting small and medium-sized businesses that are navigating AI implementation. Her goal is to help them understand what tools they need, how AI fits into their specific operational model, and how they can measure success, so they can focus on their strengths as a business and how they can drive value. 

Angeline Peng doesn’t come from a strong faith tradition, but she is a big believer in the power of discussion. In her role with the Addir Fellows Interfaith Dialogue Program at MIT, she convenes and leads regular, small-group interfaith conversations to help other students — and herself — grapple with big questions.

The Addir Fellows Program was started in 2005 through a grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. It is now supported by MIT’s Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life. The program has maintained a steady focus on “sharing spiritual values and experiences, not just opinions,” says MIT Chaplain Thea Keith-Lucas.

A fourth-year math major, Peng sees deep connections between what she’s learning in class and the Addir Program. Here, she describes her work with the program, the link between faith and logic, and how she believes discussing big questions changes people.

Q: What is the Addir Fellows program?

A: It’s an interfaith dialogue club. “Addir” comes from the Sumerian word for “bridge,” and that's what we're here to do — build bridges between people from different walks of life. 

We meet every week in small groups of five to eight people. The groups start off with what we call our “spiritual autobiographies.” As much as we can, everyone gives a description of where they're coming from. After that, every week we pick a topic and discuss it. 

We try to balance faith traditions in the small groups. The biggest limiting factor is scheduling. That turns out to be really complicated. 

Q: What’s your own spiritual autobiography?

A: My family is atheist. I was born in Singapore, which is very multicultural, and we moved to Lehi, Utah, when I was 10. Utah is very homogeneous; most people in my neighborhood were part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Sometimes in high school I would ask friends about their beliefs, but college was the first time I could really explore. 

At some point I realized it's important to know myself better, to understand and have my own principles. Exploring different religions is an attempt — and I am still building this — to understand what I think is important, what I value, what I think is right, and what I think is wrong. 

Getting insight from different faith traditions is really helpful. I believe different religions, or different approaches to religion, are all interpretations of universal truth — and so exploring from all kinds of perspectives will give me a better understanding of what that could mean. 

I'll say, I'm not too sure about it yet. I don't know if there's some kind of universal good, or bad, or whatever. But I do think there are some kernels in everything. 

Q: Who participates? Does the program bring together a range of faith traditions?

A: When I signed up for my first Addir event, I met grad students and undergrads from just about everywhere. It was very refreshing, like — “Wow! I didn't know there were all these people here!” At MIT, you can end up in a kind of bubble. You know people from your dorm or your major. This program’s different.

The people come from a wide spectrum of traditions and backgrounds. Also, we have quite a lot who are somewhat agnostic or less extreme in their beliefs. 

A big part of why people sign up for Addir is they want to listen to other people and learn. Sometimes, this means they don't talk as much. I do my best to instigate — play devil’s advocate and push at people's ideas. I believe that’s part of my job.

Q: Do you think participants feel pressure to speak “for” their faiths?

A: I wouldn't say anyone is trying to represent their faith, because there are so many facets of just one faith anyway. When there are questions, everybody gives an answer like, “This is what I think.” Sometimes people will bring up a text and say, “It says this, and this is how I interpret it, or this is how certain people in my life interpret it.” That can be really helpful.

Also, I wouldn't say we’re focused on just religion. A lot of people are just trying to find their way in life, whether it’s through spiritual or secular questions. In my small groups, we've talked quite a bit about what we can do to just be a better person; exploring different aspects of that, and dealing with more everyday stuff like regrets, guilt, pleasure, pain, punishment. Obviously, religion can help you with answers. 

I like to think: How can we answer those questions as a group, in that room, in that moment? The answers might be different for everyone, but if we can hear what other people think, maybe we can get insight and be persuaded into believing something new. 

Q: How does the mathematician in you come out during these conversations? 

A: I think part of why I do math is spiritual, so they're connected in that sense. It all relates to how I want to live my life. Some people describe doing math like making art — they're in pursuit of beauty and some deeper truth. I think math is really pretty, and there's a lot of beauty in the truth. 

One of the great tools of mathematics is that it teaches you how to abstract and understand which details are just details, and what are the core ideas. Doing a lot of math helps me stay objective, abstracting away things that are less important. 

Q: Can it be difficult to reconcile issues of faith and logic? 

A: You have to always believe in something. It's like picking your axioms. You start with faith in something, and from there you can extrapolate away what you think.  

It can be very difficult. Gödel's incompleteness theorem says you can't prove everything with any set of axioms. You can choose whatever set of axioms you like, and it either is incomplete or inconsistent; incomplete, as in you can't prove every statement is either true or false, and inconsistent in that you will at some point prove that something is both true and false. So you can't have both. But we want both! 

Mathematicians live with the incomplete, and this is probably true for any belief system. Some people are deeply unhappy not knowing the answer, and some people are more OK with it. I tend to be very OK with it. 

Q: Do you think this program changes people?

A: Definitely. Over time, people's opinions really do change. We all have the more “press-ready” opinions we give to others. Even in Addir, it's got to be half or two-thirds of the year before I feel comfortable talking about everything I really believe. This program is genius because you actually become friends by the end. 

To actually care about another person — as a person, outside of what they believe — is really a function of time. You need to be together and have this dialogue for a while. When there’s conflict, finding solutions is very situation-dependent, and maybe not possible. But eventually, you get to know each other. You can talk about controversial issues or opinions that maybe you were scared of sharing before. It's so nice to have this space as your opinion is changing. 

Because of Addir, maybe one person learns a little bit, and they go back to their own group of people and share that perspective. And when they share it, someone else learns. I'm a big proponent of let's try to change things locally — very locally; person by person — and maybe we can spread that positivity. 

New records obtained by EFF expose additional issues with Medicare’s AI-driven prior authorization program and show why we need stronger legal limits around government use of automated decision-making. 

EFF sued the government back in March for information about the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model, a new Medicare program that uses AI to evaluate prior authorization requests for certain medical services. We previously released records showing that WISeR has resulted in delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Today, we’re publishing over 800 new pages of records, including:

• Requests for information (RFIs) or requests for corrective action plans (CAPs) sent from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to four of the six WISeR vendors, along with the vendors’ responses.
• Applications of 66 companies to the WISeR model, including those of the 6 selected companies. 
• Task orders and contracts for the evaluation, implementation, and monitoring of the WISeR model.

Documents obtained through EFF’s lawsuit are available here.

These newly released documents show that the WISeR rollout was rushed and rocky from the start, highlighting the dangers that arise when governments treat AI like a silver bullet for complex problems. The documents also highlight the need for more transparency about safeguards against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. The public still lacks the information needed to assess whether clinician review is providing meaningful oversight of AI systems and whether appropriate data is being used to evaluate prior authorization requests. 

EFF has long argued that AI has no place in consequential government decisions about peoples’ rights or access to benefits, such as immigration enforcement and policing decisions. That’s because using automated decision-making in these contexts risks decisions that violate people’s rights or deprive them of benefits they’re entitled to based on biased or inappropriate considerations and without proper due process or accountability if there is an error. 

By outsourcing decision-making to private AI companies without sufficient transparency, testing, or legal limits, WISeR jeopardizes seniors’ access to medical care. Congress should step in to place greater legal limits on the use of automated decision-making in Medicare. 

WISeR’s Rollout Was Rushed and Rocky 

CMS launched the WISeR program just six months after announcing it, ignoring calls from medical providers to delay its rollout. In records previously released by EFF, CMS acknowledged this “extremely condensed timeline.” 

New records suggest that WISeR’s unusually rapid rollout contributed to widespread problems in the first few months of the program. CMS did not disclose the extent of these issues to the public, even as agency employees privately contacted vendors about potential noncompliance with program requirements. 

In the first three months of the program, CMS sent RFIs or requests for CAPs to at least four of the six WISeR vendors. These requests, which describe delays, technical failures, and a lack of communication with providers, suggest that widespread problems during the program’s rollout were not limited to one vendor or state. 

These letters underscore the severity of the problems with the program. For example, CMS requested information from one vendor, Virtix, about numerous reported issues, including “determination turnaround times that exceed established guidelines,” “denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria,” and “inadequate customer service.” CMS’s RFI to Zyter–a vendor that uses Palantir software infrastructure–observed that the agency had received reports that “Zyter is not issuing determination letters in a timely manner” and communications indicating that it “may lack adequate processes for responding to and escalating provider/supplier concerns.” The vendor Innovaccer received two CAP requests and a “Performance Notice of Non-Compliance” over its failure to implement a fully functional portal for WISeR providers and suppliers.

Excerpts from CMS’ letters to vendors describe problems during WISeR’s rollout:

Excerpt from the RFI for Virtix, March 17, 2026

Excerpt from the RFI for Zyter, February 27, 2026

Excerpt from the Performance Notice of Non-Compliance for Innovaccer, February 20, 2026

Vendors’ responses to CMS provide further evidence that WISeR’s rushed rollout contributed to its problems. Innovaccer claimed it warned CMS months in advance that it might not be ready to provide full portal functionality by the launch date, even before signing a Participation Agreement. Another vendor claimed that “technical and workflow stabilization challenges were encountered due to the compressed implementation timeframe” it faced after joining the WISeR program a month after the other vendors. 

Excerpt from Innovaccer’s Proposed CAP, January 16, 2026

The issues reflected in CMS’s letters to vendors, and the vendors’ responses, illustrate the risks of deploying automated decision-making systems without proper testing or safeguards. While vendors’ responses describe fixes for the problems CMS identified, after-the-fact remedies cannot undo the harms that patients and providers already experienced during WISeR’s rushed rollout. 

More Transparency Needed About AI Safeguards

The public still knows far too little about any safeguards that WISeR vendors may have adopted—in part because the government chose to conceal some of this information. Transparency about these safeguards is critical to protecting patients, especially because WISeR’s payment structure gives vendors, as the government put it, “an incentive to deny as many claims as possible.” 

 Information provided by a vendor about safeguards that it says "ensure the responsible and clinically appropriate application of automation” appears to have been redacted from records released to EFF

The public has limited means to evaluate the effectiveness of even the safeguards that weren’t redacted from records released to EFF. For example, one vendor’s application touts safeguards like “Human-in-the-loop (HITL) workflows,” “Continuous model monitoring,” and “Transparent audit trails.” Yet it remains unclear whether these measures effectively prevent improper prior authorization denials. Some evidence suggests they may not: the company denied more requests than it approved in the first few months of the program, and CMS inquired about “denials that appear inaccurate or inconsistent with applicable criteria.”

Ultimately, the records obtained by EFF raise more questions than they answer about the safeguards used by WISeR vendors. 

Having a Human in the Loop Is Probably Not Enough

CMS has emphasized having a human in the loop as a key safeguard against inappropriate, AI-driven denials. The WISeR FAQ page on the CMS website states that “Non-affirmations will require the review of a human clinician and cannot be performed solely by technology.” But whether human review provides any meaningful protection depends on the details of its implementation, such as whether human reviewers have enough time to evaluate requests and practical authority to override AI recommendations. We still lack many of those details for WISeR vendors. 

A growing body of scholarship points to the substantial limitations of “human in the loop” policies as guardrails for AI systems. AI-generated recommendations can unduly influence human decisions, leading reviewers to over-rely on automated judgements and rubber stamp them as correct. Even worse, at least one health insurance company actively pressured clinical reviewers to accept its AI systems’ recommendations. Another company built a system that allowed clinical reviewers to reject claims without opening patient files; clinical reviewers using this system spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each case.

Is the Right Kind of Data Informing Companies’ Decisions?

Some WISeR vendors’ applications offer general descriptions of the types of data informing their decisions. But far more details are needed to allow medical professionals to assess whether the data inputs to these AI systems are appropriate for evaluating prior authorization requests. 

Inappropriate training data or input data can lead to biased, unfair, or inaccurate decisions. CMS guidance for Medicare Advantage organizations using AI to make coverage decisions emphasizes the importance of basing decisions on individual patients’ circumstances. It cautions against using “an algorithm that determines coverage based on a larger data set instead of the individual patient's medical history, the physician’s recommendations, or clinical notes.” 

WISeR vendors’ applications reference data sources like “provider behavior,” “patient demographics,” “utilization management datasets,” “provider and payer performance metrics,” and “historical claims data.” Whether these sources could introduce bias or give too much weight to population-level patterns depends on how vendors use them to inform individual decisions. But we don’t yet have these important details about vendors’ data and algorithms. By outsourcing decision-making to private companies’ AI systems, the government has made it harder for the public to evaluate whether decisions are being made fairly.

Next Steps

As the government expands its use of automated decision-making, the potential for consequential mistakes increases rapidly. The records we’ve obtained so far raise questions about the rushed rollout and lack of guardrails for automated decision-making by the U.S. government. EFF urges transparency, oversight, and legal limits to protect people from the harms of automated decision-making in high risk systems.  

Related Cases: EFF v. CMS

At any given moment, a U.S. Air Force pilot may be maneuvering an aircraft mid-mission, a U.S. Navy officer resurfacing a submarine after weeks undersea, or a U.S. Army technician offloading drone data in a combat zone. Each operation depends on satellite communications (satcom) and, specifically, on cryptographic keys that allow terminals to communicate securely while keeping adversaries locked out.

At the scale of modern operations, managing these keys is a technical challenge. Every terminal needs to have the right keys at the right time, quickly and securely, and if any keys are compromised, they need to be refreshed without leaving out devices that may be offline, disconnected, or under attack.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers have now solved this challenge with the Protected Anti-Jam Tactical Satcom (PATS) Key Management System (KMS) Prototype. This new architecture enables keys to refresh rapidly across terminals dispersed worldwide, even in contested or bandwidth-constrained environments.

"We're enabling the nation to achieve highly assured, highly available communications. Even when adversaries know where forces are operating and are trying to stop them from communicating, they're unable to do so, because we've built in smarts across this entire system to keep talking,” says Joseph Sobchuk, a principal investigator of the PATS KMS Prototype program and researcher in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group.

This architecture is being adopted as the cryptographic backbone of the U.S. Space Force's next-generation satcom system, PATS. The KMS Prototype serves as the gold-standard reference implementation for the industry-built operational KMS, which will be integrated across the PATS ecosystem, encompassing satellites, user terminals on military platforms, and ground-based communication hubs.

Developed under sponsorship of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC), the KMS Prototype reflects Lincoln Laboratory's end-to-end approach to technology development, from shaping the core key-management concepts to putting them into practice in a prototype to transitioning a technical baseline to government and industry. For this transitioned innovation, the SSC and Lincoln Laboratory team received a 2025 R&D 100 Award, recognizing the KMS Prototype among the year’s most impactful new technologies.

Managing key challenges

Cryptographic keys are foundational to secure communications. These keys, strings of random characters used by cryptographic algorithms, help protect communications by encrypting data and supporting protected transmission patterns, such as frequency hopping. Without key protection, the communications sent and received by terminals are more susceptible to eavesdropping and interference.

Historically, operators manually uploaded keys to terminals before missions. More recently, some systems have supported over-the-air key updates, but bandwidth constraints, security concerns, and operational complexity have limited real-time, wide-scale refresh.  

"Key management is the linchpin that turns advanced, anti-jam hardware and waveforms into a usable mission capability," says Roger Khazan, leader of the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group. "Without a scalable way to deliver the right keys to the right systems at the right time, protected satcom cannot operate reliably across a dynamic force."

One primary threat to satcom is signal jamming, where adversaries flood specific frequencies with noise. To resist jamming, PATS uses frequency hopping, in which signals jump rapidly between frequencies in a pattern that looks random to anyone without the key. This hopping only works when every legitimate terminal holds current keys and stays in sync. Keeping all those terminals correctly keyed is the KMS's job. "Designing a system to handle that coordination efficiently, without breaking the conversation, is incredibly difficult," Sobchuk says.

Maintaining synchronization becomes even more critical when devices are compromised. Terminals share keying material so they can communicate as a group and follow protected hopping patterns. If an adversary captures a device, such as a downed drone, and extracts its keys, the exposure can extend beyond that one device. Depending on what keying material is exposed, an adversary may gain access to protected communications or help a jammer follow the hopping pattern. Restoring security means refreshing keys for legitimate terminals — including those that may be offline or operating in contested conditions — while locking the captured device out.

But here's the catch: To send new keys, you need to establish a secure link to terminals, and to establish a secure link, terminals need valid keys. This situation creates a long-standing "chicken-or-egg" problem for key management.

Solving the chicken-or-egg problem

Lincoln Laboratory's solution is a hybrid key distribution method using a "pull-and-push" approach. Each month, each terminal "pulls" a package of keys tailored to that terminal over the satcom link. Then, daily, the satellite "pushes" a smaller key to every terminal. The monthly keys encrypt the daily keys, creating layered security. The daily key determines the unpredictable frequency-hopping patterns. Even if an adversary captures today's key, tomorrow's will be different, and encrypted to exclude them.

"This way of sending keys hadn't existed before," Sobchuk says, adding that Lincoln Laboratory researchers have been pioneering this key-management technology for more than a decade. "The combination of pull and push, monthly and daily, is the magic behind all of it."

This hybrid approach also solves the issue of leaving out devices that were disconnected during a key refresh. For instance, if a submarine submerges for six months, it can request keys for the entire period in advance. Even if keys are refreshed while it's offline, the submarine can immediately reconnect when it resurfaces because the monthly keys provide access to the daily key.

"Submarine crews want to log on to the satellite and talk right away, not wait to get back to shore for new keys. They want to turn on their system and have it work," Sobchuk says.

Monthly and daily key broadcasts must reach thousands of devices spanning the globe. To enable this large-scale sharing, the team adapted theoretical algorithms from academia to create the first operational-scale implementation of broadcast encryption for such a protected satcom application. Broadcast encryption is a method for securely sending information to many users at once. These algorithms encrypt each daily key using just a small subset of keys instead of separately encrypting the daily key for every terminal. This implementation preserves communication bandwidth that would otherwise be consumed just by sending keys.

"The point isn't just stronger cryptography. It's making secure communications usable at operational scale, in contested conditions, without imposing a crippling burden on the warfighters and operators who depend on them," says Sean O'Melia, an assistant leader in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group.

Transitioning to operations

Lincoln Laboratory has transitioned the KMS Prototype to multiple government and industry partners developing PATS components across service branches. To facilitate this coordination, the team has supported dozens of integration events and produced in-depth technical documentation. The prototype is allowing developers to test and validate their components while defense contractors build the operational version of KMS.

The laboratory's work is also enabling contractors to achieve National Security Agency (NSA) certification of end cryptographic units (ECUs), the hardware devices within a terminal that transmit, receive, or store keys. Last year, the first PATS ECU — the space-hub ECU that goes on the satellite — earned NSA certification. Achieving this certification is an arduous process requiring proof that the design, implementation, and supporting processes are all secure.

After years of work, the team is grateful to have helped lay a foundation for the future of secure satcom, both through the KMS Prototype and the larger PATS technical vision, Khazan says. The effort brought together expertise from across the laboratory’s Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division and Communication Systems Division.

"PATS KMS is the kind of problem Lincoln Laboratory was built to solve: high-risk research, rigorous engineering, and transition into a national-security capability. Working with Space Systems Command and the PATS community, our team helped turn advanced key-management ideas into a technical baseline that industry can build on and the government can use. The result is a more-resilient satcom architecture that can scale across a complex operational ecosystem," he says.

A nonprofit service that protects internet users’ privacy is leaving France. Quad9, a free DNS resolver, has said it will reluctantly stop serving users in France on November 24. This follows a French court order that Quad9 must block access to websites that are accused of infringing the copyrights of a sports broadcaster. Forcing a responsible privacy service out of an important market is a predictable result of trying to force infrastructure providers to be copyright police.

When you visit a website, a DNS resolver reads the domain name you type in—like eff.org— and translates it into a numerical IP address that’s used to direct data across the internet. A DNS resolver can see the names of websites you connect to, so its privacy policies are important. Quad9 is an NGO that’s incorporated in Switzerland, in part to protect its users from data demands. The company also helps protect users from malware and phishing by blocking domains that are known to be malicious. Services like Quad9 offer an alternative to the DNS resolvers of local internet service providers and wireless carriers, which are vulnerable to demands from law enforcement, censorship, and commercial surveillance.

In a blog post explaining its decision, Quad9 explains that the French court’s order forces it to make a decision that, either way, is bad for users. It could either “extend French law to the whole world (blocking globally)” or try to identify and block users only in France—something that it can’t do reliably, and a move that could leave the company facing massive fines if it fails to block websites perfectly within France. Quad9 says it is facing about 20 other lawsuits in France seeking similar blocking orders. 

Rather than accept these demands, Quad9 has decided to withdraw its service from France. That is a real loss for French users who rely on the service to protect their privacy and security. It is also the right thing to do, when faced with the alternative: making promises it can’t keep, or abandoning users’ rights worldwide. 

Quad9’s decision will not remove any allegedly infringing material from the internet. The organization doesn’t host websites. Users looking for particular websites can  easily switch to another DNS resolver. So the material targeted by copyright holders will remain online and accessible, even while they drive a privacy-protecting service out of France. 

These events matter beyond the borders of France, and U.S. lawmakers should pay attention. Congress is considering multiple site-blocking proposals, which would require ISPs and other intermediaries, including DNS resolvers, to block access to websites in the name of protecting copyright. These bills threaten speech and our ability to access information online, and they are invitations to abuse. The Quad9 withdrawal shows another cost: if internet services get forced into being copyright cops, users can lose services that they rely on for privacy and security. 

Worse still, if neutral services like Quad9 are forced to build site-blocking systems for the benefit of copyright holders, it becomes far easier for other powerful interests, including repressive governments, to demand the same systems be used to censor speech they dislike, globally. 

Congress should reject site-blocking bills. They’re a threat to the open internet, and don’t help creators or creativity. 

Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities”

Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret under cryptographic assumptions, even given full access to model weights, extending prior work from hiding fixed strings to arbitrary computations. We implement our proof of concept constructions in PyTorch and evaluate elicitation through fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, using a small chemical reaction prediction task as a proxy for CBRN-relevant capabilities. Our results demonstrate resistance to these methods and, together with our cryptographic guarantees, reveal a limit of elicitation-based capability audits. We release our models to support the improvement of defenses...

MIT researchers developed a new type of origami-based construction method that could be used to build complex structures that are cheaper and easier to assemble, and use less material than those built with some conventional techniques.

This scalable system simplifies the process of designing lightweight, rigid structural shells from modular components that can be fabricated from flat sheets of material and then folded into shape. 

The units are connected to build a larger lattice structure using simple tools and a foolproof assembly process. They form a strong, load-bearing structural shell that doesn’t need interior support columns.

This method could be particularly well-suited for disaster relief shelters that can be rapidly fabricated and shipped efficiently as flat panels, then set up quickly by workers at the site of an earthquake or flood. It could also be used to develop strong, lightweight components for airplanes or modular robots, or architectural elements like sound-dampening panels and building facades.

The researchers’ technique can generate structures that are many times stiffer than those made using some other forms of structural origami, while requiring only about two-thirds as much material. This could make it a more sustainable form of construction.

In addition to developing small prototypes, the researchers demonstrated the scalability of this approach by fabricating a room-sized folded aluminum sculpture that was recently hung at the Boston Public Library as an exhibition inaugurated for the annual Fab Lab Conference and Symposium.

“This work shows that the power of digital manufacturing can go beyond personal fabrication projects and start touching the real world, enhancing the way we design houses and large structures. We are demonstrating structural origami on building scales,” says Alfonso Parra Rubio, a graduate student in the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT and lead author of a paper on this method.

He is joined on the paper by Riccardo Foschi, a researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy; Rupert Maleczek, a senior scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria; Tomohiro Tachi, a professor at the University of Tokyo; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and the director of the CBA. The research appears in the International Journal of Solids and Structures.

Lightweight, rigid components

The researchers drew inspiration from the folded tessellations developed by the artist and scientist Ron Resch in the 1960s. Resch employed repeating patterns of polygonal unit cells to create complex 3D structures (like a honeycomb). 

But rather than creating a shape from one folded piece of material, like Resch’s tessellations, the researchers fabricate unit cells that are folded individually and connected to form the 3D structure.

By designing individual building blocks, they can simplify the fabrication process and create more complex shapes.

While working in the Tachi lab, Parra Rubio developed a method for combining two tripod-shaped unit cells from a Resch tessellation into a building block that has zero degrees of freedom, which means it is completely rigid and locked in place. 

These rigid building blocks can be connected into a network of interwoven beams that form a 3D structure with extremely high stiffness and stability, but very light weight.

“This helps us build strong structures while minimizing the amount of material we are using,” Parra Rubio explains.

But it would be enormously challenging to manually design polygonal building blocks that will form a structure that meets a user’s constraints.

To simplify the process, Parra Rubio joined forces with CBA graduate student Erik Strand to develop an automated solver that designs a series of manufacturable unit cells that will form the user’s desired structure. These design files can be fed to a CNC milling machine that automatically cuts the building blocks from flat sheets of material, like aluminum. 

“On the computational part, we break this big problem down into many small subproblems. Now, we solve each cell independently to make sure that it is foldable, and then we globally assemble them after that,” Strand says.

Simplified assembly

Builders fold the individual units into shape and assemble them into a finished structure using only hand tools, like screwdrivers. 

The assembly process does not require any large-scale welding equipment, which could make it simpler, faster, and cheaper than some other forms of construction. In addition, the unit cells are designed so they adjust naturally into their correct shape as the structure is assembled. 

“The way the unit cells are designed, the structure can only exist in one configuration. The connection is the same everywhere, even though each unit cell is different,” Parra Rubio says.

Simulations indicated that this method yields structures about 3.5 times stiffer than those made with some other origami-based techniques, while using less material. In addition, the resulting structures could be strong enough for some architectural applications, Parra Rubio adds. 

To demonstrate the versatility of this approach, the researchers assembled a 23-foot sculpture from pieces of folded aluminum that was hung from the ceiling of the atrium in the Boston Public Library. A team with no professional construction experience built the entire structure in a matter of days, Parra Rubio says.

“It was really fun to work on something at such a quick pace where the theory was really meeting a practical use for it. We had to think a lot about how we could tweak the design to achieve each objective,” Strand says.

In the future, the researchers want to test this approach in larger, architectural structures. They also want to explore the use of unit cells with more complex geometries, which could offer greater strength or stiffness, and develop a user-friendly design interface. 

“This work shows that folding metal is a method that is ready to be used for building structures. We can do it big enough and strong enough, now that we can bring it out of the lab and to the construction site,” Gershenfeld says.

“Within the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, complex structures are often delivered through a fragmented sequence of handoffs between design, engineering, fabrication, and construction teams, with each transition creating opportunities for miscoordination, rework, and loss of design intent. By embedding geometric, structural performance, and assembly intelligence directly into each module, Rubio’s approach maintains a seamless digital thread from design through erection, enabling unprecedented customization while ensuring precise execution,” says James Coleman, SM ’14, MArch ’14, cofounder of SumPoint, a project installation specialty firm. 

Coleman works on design for fabrication and erection of complex architectural projects, and was not involved with this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the Center for Bits and Atoms Research Consortia, the University of Bologna in Italy, and the Austrian Research Agency.

J-PAL North America, a research and policy center in the MIT Department of Economics, is launching a free Homelessness Evaluation Resource Hub. 

The hub — a public repository of evergreen multimedia content developed with a grant from Google.org — aims to equip decision-makers with foundational tools on how to leverage evidence to reduce homelessness and improve housing stability.

Homelessness represents both a cause and a consequence of poverty and inequality. Rigorous evidence is critical in identifying effective solutions to eliminating homelessness, but rising constraints on time, funds, and other resources can create difficult barriers to developing and accessing high-quality evidence.

J-PAL North America aims to increase access to evidence-informed paths to housing stability by providing essential tools for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to evaluate the impact of their programs, expand the body of literature on what works to reduce homelessness, and leverage existing evidence to inform programs and decision-making. 

To launch the hub, J-PAL North America is hosting a virtual event on Oct. 27.

David Phillips, director of research at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) and research professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, served as the scientific advisor on the hub. 

“I’m thrilled to have been able to contribute to J-PAL North America’s Homelessness Evaluation Resource Hub,” Phillips says. “In my 15 years working with nonprofit and government leaders on program evaluations, I've seen how much value comes from practitioners and academics entering each others’ world, learning to speak each others’ languages, and, most of all, learning from each other. This resource hub builds shared language for research design so teams can move forward with clarity and confidence — creating more time to focus on the shared goals of continuous learning and improving outcomes for communities.”

The hub includes resources focused on two primary activities: using evidence, and generating evidence. The Using Evidence section provides newly developed two-page policy briefs that synthesize experimental and quasi-experimental research results on five established homelessness and housing interventions — “Housing First,” emergency financial assistance, case management, legal assistance in housing court, and housing vouchers — with more on the way. 

The section also features J-PAL North America’s 2019 Evidence Review, “Reducing and Preventing Homelessness: Lessons from Randomized Evaluations,” which synthesizes results from 40 rigorous evaluations of 18 distinct programs related to homelessness prevention and reduction in North America. 

The Generating Evidence section houses seven modules on foundational concepts of rigorous impact evaluations such as ethics, data and measurement, and opportunities for randomization, and how to apply them to evaluations in the homelessness sector. These resources build upon J-PAL’s experience training over 30,000 learners over two decades to become better users and producers of evidence. 

“We are proud to be launching the Homelessness Evaluation Resource Hub,” says Laina Sonterblum, a J-PAL North America policy and communications manager who oversees the organization’s housing and homelessness portfolio. “These resources are informed by over a decade of experience working with partners and researchers to understand the current literature and build the base of rigorous research on the best ways to address homelessness. We’re hoping the hub can provide a free, accessible entry point for anyone curious about how evidence can be a tool for learning and maximizing the effectiveness of programs and policies.”

The resources in the hub are also informed by nearly 20 informational interviews with prominent researchers, intermediaries, government leaders, and service providers in the region and build off a decade of experience working with partners and researchers to build the base of rigorous evidence on the best ways to address homelessness. J-PAL North America developed these resources in close collaboration with partners at LEO at Notre Dame and is especially grateful to David Phillips, who provided meticulous guidance and subject matter expertise. 

Explore the Resource Hub. 

Hashim Sarkis will step down as dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at the end of June 2027. During his 12 years as dean, Sarkis elevated the school’s role and impact by creating new academic centers, adding more support for students, and, quite visibly, moving into a new home in MIT’s renovated Met Warehouse building. 

To an unusual degree, these achievements are interconnected: The Met Warehouse, dedicated this month, features innovative and expanded spaces for education, research, and public engagement. The building enables SA+P to add programs, host interdisciplinary work, and stage events of Institute-wide interest. 

Sarkis, the Elizabeth and James Killian (1926) Professor at MIT, and a professor of architecture and urban planning, also led the Institute’s “One Community = One Campus” planning project from 2016 to 2018, which conceptualized MIT as a contiguous urban space. The report helped MIT add sustainable infrastructure as well as new buildings, from dormitories to the theater arts and music buildings — and now the Met Warehouse. 

For Sarkis, providing more support for SA+P students is as important as any other accomplishment. The school will provide full tuition support in multiyear graduate programs, starting with new students in the fall of 2027. 

“I do believe education is a right for every student,” Sarkis says, when asked to cite the most meaningful changes he has helped enact. 

In a letter to the MIT community, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan wrote that Sarkis had crafted “a remarkable tenure as dean,” one that has “advanced a distinctive role for SA+P within MIT: connecting technology to society through design, planning, making, and creative practice.”

Sarkis, a lauded architect who has published widely and runs an international design practice, became dean in January 2015. He will take a sabbatical in the 2027-28 academic year, then return as a professor and head of the MIT-LUMA Lab. 

In his letter to the community, Chandrakasan also announced the formation of a search committee to identify the next dean of SA+P. The 17-person committee is being chaired by Justin Steil, professor of law and urban planning in DUSP.

The “transformative power of design”

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning is a broad-ranging place, encompassing the Department of Architecture; the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; the MIT Media Lab, which is home to the graduate program in Media Arts and Sciences; the Center for Real Estate; the program in Art, Culture, and Technology; the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism; and the Morningside Academy for Design. One of the hallmarks of Sarkis’ tenure has been the growth of existing interdisciplinary programs at SA+P and the development of new ones. In 2016, a gift from the Leventhal family expanded the Center for Advanced Urbanism, established in 2013, and renamed it in honor of Norman B. Leventhal ’38. The center enables research and hands-on projects addressing complex design and planning challenges in cities globally. 

During Sarkis’ tenure, MIT also introduced an undergraduate minor in design in 2016 and relaunched its bachelor of science in art and design in 2018, expanding opportunities for students across the Institute. The school also established DesignX, an accelerator supporting entrepreneurship in design and the built environment.

In 2020, MIT launched the Mobility Initiative, bringing together researchers from across the Institute to examine the future of transportation and mobility. Led by Professor Jinhua Zhao, now head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the initiative connects research in transportation, technology, urban planning, and policy.

In 2022, with support from the Morningside Foundation, the Institute founded the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), an interdisciplinary design center allowing for campus-wide collaboration. And in 2024, with support from the LUMA Foundation, SA+P launched the MIT-LUMA Lab, which works across a wide range of fields, including design, science, technology, and art, to explore solutions for climate-based and other environmental challenges.

In a different vein, SA+P also collaborated with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing this year to establish the MIT and HPI AI and Creativity Hub (MHACH), which aims to further work in design and computing at a time of rapid expansion for AI applications. 

Three of these centers — LCAU, MAD, and MIT-LUMA Lab — are located in the transformed Met Warehouse building, a leading example of adaptive reuse in architecture and engineering. The huge brick edifice, which initially had tiny window slits bringing in minimal light, was used for about a century as a storage facility, until 2015, when MIT began exploring other possibilities for the building.

By 2018, the concept of moving SA+P into the Met Warehouse had gained traction, with Sarkis publicly telling MIT News, “It’s about really creating a design hub for MIT on the campus. ... Moving does not address just the school’s aspirations, but MIT’s aspirations.” 

After working with the Cambridge Historical Commission, the project architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, replaced large segments of brick wall with glass sheets, added skylights, and reconfigured the interior, which now has multiheight design studios, modular classrooms and common spaces, an auditorium, public galleries, a large entrance lobby with a café, and building-long corridors on all floors. For almost a decade, Sarkis served as the key driver of the project — and was an advocate for adaptive reuse, rather than creating a new building requiring a greater carbon footprint. 

“I think it sends a very good message that this vanguard school of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is moving into a historic building and adapting it for the future,” Sarkis told MIT News this summer. 

At the building’s formal dedication ceremony on Oct. 1, MIT President Sally Kornbluth called the Met Warehouse “a testament to the transformative power of design, which has been central to MIT from the very beginning.” She also heralded it as a model for education, noting that future learning in many fields may call for “exactly like the kind of hands-on, in-person, collaborative problem-solving the new Met was made for. … It’s also primed to help the rest of MIT meet the moment.”

The many sources of design and democracy

Sarkis grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, with a childhood interest in architecture. His views about the civic applications of design have long had many sources. He received his BA in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, then earned an MA in 1989 and PhD in 1995, in architecture, from Harvard University. At Harvard, his PhD work included political philosophy, as he studied with legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger and philosophers Hilary Putnam and John Rawls, among others. 

Sarkis was a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design from 1998 until he joined MIT in 2015. He has published widely, including the 2003 book “Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis.” He edited the 2002 volume “CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival,” and co-edited, with Eric Mumford, the 2008 volume “Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969.” He is also co-author, with Roi Salguiero Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowski, of the 2020 book, “The World as an Architectural Project.” 

In 1998, Sarkis also established his practice, HashimSarkis Studios, which has offices in Lebanon and Massachusetts. Among his best-known works are the Byblos Town Hall in Lebanon, completed in 2016, which features three volumes rising above a glass-enclosed ground floor, to represent and help constitute the transparency needed for democratic government. His first major project, Housing for the Fishermen of Tyre, also in Lebanon, was cited as one of the most significant buildings of the century in the “Phaidon Atlas of 21st-Century World Architecture.”

During his upcoming sabbatical, Sarkis will work on a variety of projects in locations including Venice, Egypt, and Armenia. 

In addition to his many duties as dean, Sarkis served as the curator of the Venice Biennale’s 2021 International Architecture Exposition. The exhibition’s theme was a question Sarkis has long contemplated: “How Will We Live Together?” Featuring work conceptualized at many scales, the exhibition displayed projects by 112 designers from 46 countries and was critically acclaimed; The New York Times called it “a case study for how to begin to tackle such questions.”

A dose of optimism

Sarkis’ seriousness of purpose as SA+P dean has long meshed with what he has called a “quirky” sense of humor, in the MIT vein. In 2016 he served as a judge for the “Crossing the Charles” competition, in which dozens of inventive MIT-designed watercraft floated across the Charles River to mark the 100th anniversary of MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge. A parade also unfolded on the bridge carrying Massachusetts Avenue across the river. 

In an echo of those events, last month SA+P organized its own procession into the Met Warehouse, complete with costumes gesturing at the Bucentaur, the boat that in 1916 carried MIT’s charter across the river. The procession was conceptualized and directed by MIT Professor Azra Akšamija, and developed in collaboration with many students, faculty, and staff. 

Meanwhile, when it comes to the experience of having other architects redesign the Met Warehouse, Sarkis quips, “I learned to be a client.” 

More seriously, talking about high points of his tenure as dean, Sarkis quickly calls the organized visioning process for the Met Warehouse “inspiring,” adding, “We needed a common framework, and faculty were able to project forward and identify it.” The building, Sarkis emphasizes, helps reinforce what he believes is central and distinctive about design work at the Institute: “the MIT model of conducting research and education at the same time.” 

In the face of current challenges confronting education, Sarkis steadfastly stuck with the Met Warehouse project, helping complete it while continuing to build up the School of Architecure and Planning and solidifying MIT’s place at the leading edge of design. That may be a larger sign that such progress remains possible. 

“Optimism is integral to our fields,” Sarkis says. 

Each year, Climate Week NYC brings together more than 100,000 people in more than 1,000 events across the city to discuss climate challenges, explore solutions, and spur action. Participants come from industry, academia, philanthropy, nonprofits, government, and finance and venture capital. And this year, the mix included a strong, cross-campus presence from MIT.

The MIT community could be seen multiple days during Climate Week, with appearances by Evelyn Wang, vice president for energy and climate, at the official opening ceremony discussing artificial intelligence and the climate equation; an event co-hosted by MIT and the Bezos Earth Fund on climate innovation; and 14 sessions organized by the MIT Climate Project and eight MIT departments, labs, centers, and initiatives — including the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Open Learning, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), the MIT Climate Policy Center, and the Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Center for Social Impact.

“The MIT Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization, but no single institution can deliver the climate solutions the world needs — from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to adapting to a changing climate and building more-resilient communities and systems,” said Wang, who is also the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Climate Week New York is important because it convenes the range of stakeholders and sectors that must work together to confront these challenges. When we connect the MIT community with this global network, we uncover powerful possibilities to strengthen not only our own efforts, but the world’s capacity for change.”

One location, numerous events

Climate Week NYC was held Sept. 21-27 at venues across Manhattan and other New York boroughs. Utilizing multiple spaces at the Dream Downtown Hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the MIT coalition attracted more than 700 attendees for events ranging from small, private conversations to workshops and panel presentations.

Larger sessions included “The Future of Data Centers: Technologies to Change the Paradigm.” “Data centers are at an inflection point, facing interconnected technical, operational, economic, and community constraints that demand cross-sector dialogue and innovation,” says Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and faculty director of the Climate Project at MIT.

Chen, who leads the Data Centers of the Future frontier for the Climate Project, convened a panel of experts across research and industry to address technologies that can change the paradigm. “Technology can't solve all the challenges we’re facing with data centers, but technology has a significant role to play in shaping a future role that is more sustainable and better for the communities that are home to these facilities,” Chen says. “This session was a productive conversation on data center challenges and the potential solutions to overcome them.” 

The workshop “Next-Generation Super Pollutant Solutions: Challenges and Opportunities,” hosted by Jesse Kroll, a faculty director and lead for the Super Pollutants frontier for the Climate Project, convened speakers from the Environmental Defense Fund, Spark Climate Solutions, and across MIT labs and initiatives. 

Accounting for nearly half of all global anthropogenic warming to date, super pollutants currently lack viable solutions for adequate abatement. Many super pollutants have shorter atmospheric lifespans than carbon dioxide, with solutions providing an “emergency brake” to decrease peak warming in our lifetimes. Investments in tackling super pollutants can generate economic benefits, including lowering health-care costs and increasing productivity, and require cross-disciplinary teams to develop and advance the next-generation solutions to meaningfully address super pollutant emissions. 

“Super pollutant mitigation is getting a lot of attention as an ‘emergency brake’ for near-term climate warming. But a huge fraction of our super pollutant emissions simply cannot be mitigated with current technologies and approaches,” said Kroll, the Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Our session focused on the innovation — technical and otherwise — needed to tackle these hard-to-abate pollutants.”

Other events included:

• “2026 State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report” with the MIT CTL
• “Building Flood Resilience” with MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• “Climate Communication for Impact” from the MIT Climate Project
• “Climate Impact Founder and Funder Connect” with the PKG Center for Social Impact
• “Educating Tomorrow's Climate Leaders: An MIT Perspective” from the MIT Climate Project
• “Trading for Food Security in a Changing Climate” with J-WAFS 
• “Industrial Decarbonization: Pathways to Productivity and Growth” with MIT INM
• “Mobilizing Climate Knowledge for Action” with MIT Open Learning
• “Rethinking Climate Innovation” from the MIT Climate Project
• “What is Sectoral Acceleration and How Do We Fund It” with the Sloan Sustainability Initiative
   

Rethinking the climate innovation pipeline with the Bezos Earth Fund

A critical climate challenge is moving from breakthrough technology to real-world impact at scale. MIT and the Bezos Earth Fund brought together leaders from industry, venture capital, government, academia, philanthropy, and startups to explore solutions for a stronger innovation pipeline. 

A panel of MIT faculty and alumni spinout leaders Asegun Henry, Seonghoon Woo, Ariel Furst, and Assil Halimi, moderated by Ray Rothrock, venture capitalist and life member of the MIT Corporation, explored the period between a promising scientific invention and commercial deployment. For many breakthroughs that can benefit climate and nature, that journey requires more early-stage science and engineering research, specialized testing infrastructure, validation, patient capital, and pathways to demonstration and pilot projects.

“A breakthrough in the lab is not yet impact in the world. For climate and energy technologies, we need to think about the entire journey — from discovery and invention through validation, commercialization, and deployment — and build better pathways through the gaps along the way,” Wang said in a conversation with Tom Taylor, Bezos Earth Fund president and CEO. 

Tapping into global nexus to find and scale solutions

New York Climate Week is a global nexus for climate, where the connections required to develop, test, and scale potential solutions form. Across the board, MIT sessions addressed the need for solutions to be large in magnitude, technically feasible, and contextually realistic. 

 “Even when a technology is low-cost, it doesn’t mean it will diffuse naturally or get widely adopted,” said Claire Walsh, global director of policy and communications at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. “Frontier technologies are often more expensive to start, so that means it’s even more important for scientists and engineers to think about end user adoption, and their incentives and constraints, from the start.”

Last week, researchers at Citizen Lab revealed a horrifying new malware campaign, dubbed “AdFection.” It used an ad network to distribute spyware to journalist’s devices to infect them without the target ever needing to click anything. This sort of attack on journalists is dangerous and incredibly concerning, especially since it’s built on the backbone of a technology we already object to: behavioral advertising. Although this type of attack has only been described targeting journalists, you can take a few steps we outline in the next section to mitigate the risk no matter who you are.

A few factors combined to make this attack a noteworthy first-of-its-kind. First, it utilized the surveillance ad-tech ecosystem to specially target the malicious code. Second, the spyware it delivered was so-called “zero-click,” meaning it required no interaction from the user to be infected: all that is required is for the ad to be delivered and code bundled along with it to be run, which happens automatically. Neither malvertising nor zero-click attacks are new on their own. What’s novel about the AdFection attack is combining them, creating a highly targeted, extremely dangerous attack which is difficult to defend against and even harder to detect.

Let’s take a deeper look from the perspective of one of the Windows devices supplied to the researchers from Al Jazeera. Here’s how the report describes the infection happening: 

• Someone browsing the web or using an app on that machine is served an ad created by Discover-Tech, a company exposed in the report as “purporting to be a legitimate advertising company, [but] appears to be a front for large-scale ad espionage abuse.” 
• The ad contains a small snippet of JavaScript code which is automatically executed when rendered in the app or website. 
• This code reaches back out to a Discover-Tech server, referred to as their “NOAS server,” with detailed information about the machine rendering it: its cookie-set advertising ID, IP address, and more.

So far, nothing particularly unusual has happened. Ads that contain JavaScript code and reach back out to their servers with lots of information on your device—and by extension you—are commonplace. It’s all part of the data-driven advertising ecosystem. What happens next is more interesting:

• The NOAS server uses this detailed information to determine it is an Al Jazeera machine requesting the ad. 
• Instead of returning an empty response (as it does most of the time), it responds with a malicious, zero-click spyware payload. That payload was created by Discover-Tech’s partner Candiru/Integrity Labs, a company previously exposed for involvement in sophisticated malware attacks. 
• The payload is then executed and infects the targeted machine.

Companies targeting zero-click malware attacks against journalists might seem like the plot of a blockbuster spy thriller. But this attack was enabled by the everyday practices of ad-tech companies, which unfortunately have extreme latitude in the collection of users’ data. By leveraging the tracking identifiers and data collected on devices for the purpose of delivering targeted ads to specific individuals, mercenary spyware companies can repurpose this data in order to fine-tune who they infect—and hide that they’re doing it from everyone else. 

Most ads are not delivered directly by the ad creators, but rather by intermediaries that facilitate Real-Time Bidding auctions. Nonetheless, winning bidders are given the ability to execute JavaScript code in the browser of the person who receives the targeted ad. This allows for interactive ads to be displayed, but also (as we’ve seen) for the compromise of a device just by delivery of malicious code.

While the different components in this attack chain are not novel on their own, the exposure of this combined attack is significant because it reveals a technique to hyper-target individuals and organizations for infection. Luckily, there are steps you can take to protect yourself from the myriad of dangers presented by the ad-tracking industry. Here’s how.

What You Can Do About It

As we work towards fundamental fixes to the ad ecosystem and banning online behavioral ads altogether, the onus is on all of us to protect ourselves. This is especially important for higher risk individuals or journalists working in states with heavy surveillance. Citizen Lab outlines several steps, depending on your threat model, to take to help protect yourself:

• Take some simple steps to lock down your devices right now.
• Establish strong security fundamentals. Sites like our own Surveillance Self-Defense and Consumer Reports’ Security Planner can help get you started.
• Use a browser extension to reduce tracking. Our Privacy Badger extension is an excellent start. Network-wide ad blocking services are also worth considering if you’re comfortable handling the set up process.
• On mobile phones, disable or reset your AD ID. Here are directions to do so for Android and iPhone.
• Consider using more privacy protective browsers.

These steps can be very helpful in protecting yourself, but there is only so much you can do as an individual. Banning behavioral ads like this would be a good place to start. Behavioral ads aren’t just a privacy nightmare as designed. They are the perfect vehicle for malvertising and similar threats, just as we see here.