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.

The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon its gold standard net neutrality law, broadband affordability laws, and public safety protections. Doing so would be a huge step back for California, and would actually end up being more expensive for Californians in the long run. Tell the governor to reject this provision before accepting these funds from the federal government.

Take Action

Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety

On August 31, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced it would be awarding California $1.4 billion to expand broadband connectivity in the state. In that deal is a provision that says that California agrees to not enforce any law, order, or policy that imposes any sort of restriction on internet service providers (ISPs). These ISPs will get awarded the funding in order to connect Californians they have neglected for years. The ban on enforcing our laws would last 14 years. This is disastrous for a lot of reasons. 

First, California is one of the only states with a strong state net neutrality law. Recreating much of the FCC’s Open Internet Order, the law prevents ISPs from blocking, throttling, zero rating, and instituting paid prioritization on internet service. Put another way, the law ensures that users, not companies, decide how they can see on the internet. If California is not allowed to enforce our gold standard law, there will be little stopping ISPs from controlling how everyone experiences the internet. 

Second, California has a number of affordability protections that would also fall under this agreement. For example, when the state approved the merger of Verizon and Frontier earlier this year, it required the new merged company to offer a $20 internet plan to low-income Californians—saving Californians billions of dollars over the next decade. Just this year the California Public Utilities Commission found that the average cost of broadband across four major urban markets (San Mateo, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego) was $51 per month. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that 84% of American consumers pay at least $50 per month, with many paying more. That $30 difference per month—which is likely to actually be more—makes all the difference for low-income Californians. It is how Californians will save billions from this merger requirement. In contrast, $1.4 billion in new connectivity and infrastructure doesn't matter if the most vulnerable Californians cannot afford it. Eviscerations of this and the net neutrality protections will, ultimately, cost Californians more than they will get. 

Third, this deal will impact public safety. The same California net neutrality law which protects consumers also ensures reliable service for first responders during emergencies by banning throttling. In 2018, Verizon throttled, or slowed down, the service of firefighters as they were battling what was, at the time, the largest wildfire in California history. In reaction, fire departments came out in support of what would become California’s net neutrality law. If California cannot enforce its net neutrality law it will leave its first responders in a weaker position as natural disasters only become more intense. 

Most people do not have a choice in ISP as it is. California’s net neutrality law is one of the few things protecting Californians from the whims of these monopolistic giants. Californians should not give up our few hard-won protections in return for a hand out to these behemoths. Tell Governor Newsom to reject this provision before he accepts these funds from the federal government. 

Take Action

Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in...

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.

Deep in the ocean, brown algae and diatoms produce a complex carbohydrate molecule called fucoidan, which helps form the algae's protective outer layer. The fucoidan molecule is very difficult for microbes to break down because its chemical structure may include dozens of different linkages and branching patterns that vary from one algae species to another. This resistance to decay is one reason why fucoidan matters; when microbes struggle to break it down, fucoidan can sink deep into the ocean, carrying carbon with it and potentially storing it for long periods. This could make fucoidan an important player in the ocean’s carbon cycle.

For many years, scientists knew of individual bacteria that could break down pieces of fucoidan. But one fundamental question remained unanswered: Could a microbial community break it down completely, and if so, how?

A new open-access study published in Nature, led by Andreas Sichert, a former MIT postdoc now at ETH Zurich, and Otto X. Cordero, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, provides an answer.

"No single bacterium can finish the job," says Cordero. "Instead, fucoidan is degraded through teamwork. Different bacterial strains specialize in different parts of the molecule, and together, their combined efforts get the job done far more efficiently than any one organism could manage alone."

A puzzle with 453 pieces

In order to understand how fucoidan breaks down in nature, the research team enriched a fucoidan-degrading bacterial community from coastal seawater samples. What they found was staggering: more than 453 different genes, each responsible for making an enzyme that can act on fucoidan, spread across eight bacterial strains the researchers isolated. On their own, none of these strains could fully break down the molecule.

But when the researchers used a new, rapid mass-spectrometry method, they were able to observe how bacteria consumed individual sugar building blocks — and a clear pattern emerged. All of that genetic complexity could be reduced to two roles. Some bacterial strains specialized in degrading fucoidan's fucose-rich "backbone," while others specialized in removing its side branches, which contain less-common sugars such as xylose and galactose.

When strains playing both roles were combined, something noteworthy happened: degradation didn't simply add up. Instead, it became synergistic and exceeded what the bacteria's individual activities could predict. The more complementary the strains' preference for sugar were, the stronger the effect became. In some cases, the paired communities came close to completely degrading the complex polysaccharide.

"The breakdown of one of the ocean's most abundant carbon pools rests on a division of labor," says Cordero, "not between particular strains, but between functional roles."

Turning complexity into predictability

The most surprising result was that this division of labor made the system much more predictable than its underlying complexity indicated.

The researchers developed a simple model that sorted bacterial activity into two broad categories: fucose, and the rarer sugars found in fucoidan's side chains. They trained the model using data from small communities containing just one to three bacterial strains.

The simplified model was able to predict degradation in communities containing up to seven strains, and its predictions also generalized to nine structurally different fucoidans from other kinds of algae.

"A predictive understanding of a complex system need not come from characterizing each of its parts," adds Cordero, "but from finding the right simplification." The finding suggests that scientists may be able to predict how efficiently other complex, carbon-rich biological materials are broken down in nature, even when their exact chemistry and the enzymes involved are only partly understood.

The researchers also found that bacteria with complementary capabilities often occurred together in samples taken from the natural ocean, suggesting that the division of labor observed in the laboratory may also play a role in the ocean.

The consequences extend well beyond the field of microbiology. 

The researchers propose a concept they call "diversity-limited degradation," in which the absence of the right combination of complementary bacterial specialists allows fucoidan to persist for longer instead of being broken down. This concept may help explain why some algal carbon stays in the ocean for extended periods, contributing to long-term carbon storage.

For biotechnology, the takeaway is more straightforward. Instead of engineering a single "superbug" that can digest tough and complex biomass, a more promising approach may be to bring together teams of microbes that already specialize in complementary tasks. These teams could potentially be used to process brown algal biomass and other complex polysaccharides on a larger scale.

Looking ahead

The broader promise, though, may lie in the approach, rather than the molecule. If hundreds of uncharacterized enzymes can be reduced to two measurable traits, the same strategy might work for other biopolymers whose chemistry has so far resisted description — and, more generally, for predicting what microbial communities do. 

"Here was a system with hundreds of enzymes acting on a molecule we still can't fully describe, and it turned out to be far more tractable than anyone expected," says Cordero. "What we found is that there's a level of organization above the individual enzyme, corresponding to traits we can measure and plug into simple models that predict function from (genomic) composition. When biology looks intractable, it may be that we haven't found the right level of description yet."

One question the work leaves open is a fundamental one. Fucoidan is abundant, and has been for a very long time, so why has no bacterium evolved to eat it whole? The researchers suggest answers on two levels: constraints within sugar metabolism itself, and evolutionary dynamics in which complementary specialists are continually regenerated rather than merged into one.

"Really, this is a question about how life on Earth is organized," says Cordero. "Why are the biochemical functions that drive the planet's elemental cycles distributed across many organisms instead of concentrated in a few? Explaining that is, I think, one of the frontiers of the life sciences."

In addition to Cordero and Sichert, the research team included co-authors from ETH Zurich, the University of Vienna, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

The work was supported by Simons Foundation through the Principles of Microbial Ecosystems (PRIME) collaboration.

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking online (via Zoom) at a League of Women Voters event on Tuesday, September 22, 2026 at 5 PM ET.
• I’m speaking at CanSecWest 2026 in Vancouver, Canada. The conference runs September 30–October 1, 2026; the time of my talk is TBD.
• I’m giving a talk on “Free Speech and the Preservation of Democracy” at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, at 2 PM ET on Tuesday, October 6, 2026.
• I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21...

Last week, Anthropic released a long and detailed document describing current misuses of their Claude models. I’m still reading it, but I wanted to flag this:

We identified a cell of threat actors based in northern Yemen running three weapons development programs: a guided rocket that used a commodity phone-class flight computer with final-phase homing guidance; a multi-stage ballistic missile with a stated range goal above 2,000 km; and a multi-variant missile (referred to as the “R2000” set) that included a hypersonic glide vehicle variant...

Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025? 

If your answer is "I don't know," it turns out you're 100% correct. The officer left the letters "idk" in the search field where cops are supposed to document the reason for the search.

When law enforcement and tech salespeople pitch ALPRs to city councils, they stick to a familiar script. They trumpet the technology, which is often provided by private companies like Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions, or Axon, as an essential tool for solving high-stakes crimes, such as car jacking, kidnapping, or murder.

But when you strip away the carefully curated talking points, the data continues to reveal a different (and frankly, ridiculous) story. An EFF analysis of ALPR search logs from Flock Safety systems shows that officers across the country are spying on drivers for completely nonsensical "reasons." Police are routinely searching the Flock database without providing any legitimate justification, making a mockery of our civil liberties by logging reasons like "LOL" (short for “laugh out loud”), "LMAO" (short for "laughing my ass off"), "sexy," and "idk" (short for “I don’t know”) to access sensitive ALPR location data.

And in some cases, officers are just mashing keyboard buttons rather than articulating the nature of their searches.

Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search–but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search. 

With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information. This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.

A Documented Culture of Abuse

ALPR misuse isn’t a new phenomenon; it has dominated headlines for more than a year. We already know that officers regularly abuse these systems to stalk past and potential romantic partners. We’ve seen ALPRs used to surveil protests, which can chill First Amendment-protected dissent, and seen officers try to use an ALPR system to track down a woman seeking an abortion.

Typically, we learn about these uses from documents called "network audits," which are long spreadsheets that document all the searches that run through an agency's system. It is not unusual for even a small agency to have a record of millions of searches from thousands of external agencies across the United States.

We’ve also uncovered horrific systemic profiling, with more than 80 law enforcement agencies using terms like "roma" and "g*psy" to target ethnic Romani people—often without any mention of a suspected crime. And when police aren’t using ALPRs for stalking or profiling, they routinely use them for extreme low-level investigations: verifying whether a student lives in a specific school zone, running employment background checks, following up on loud music complaints, or targeting a motorcyclist simply for holding a cell phone.

But somehow, it gets worse.

The Absurdity of Documented Search Reasons

EFF’s analysis of Flock Safety’s ALPR search data obtained through public records requests has uncovered a disturbing trend. In the absence of judicial oversight, officers are inputting ridiculously unserious terms to justify their searches. Here is just a snapshot of what police consider a "reason" to track someone’s vehicle:

Surveillance as a Joke

Audit logs sample

• Barberton Police Department (Ohio) employees ran numerous searches between March 2024 and May 2026, listing “LOL” or “lol” as the reason.
• Harris County Sheriff's Office (Texas) employees ran several searches between April and May 2026 listing “LOL” or “lol” as the case number.
• Lake County Sheriff's Department (Ind.) employees ran searches in July 2025 for “LMAO.”
• Richmond Police Department (Calif.) employees ran over multiple searches in November 2024 for “Hehe.”
• Riverside County Sheriff's Department (Calif.) employees ran searches in 2024 for “Haha.”

"Don’t Know, Don’t Care" Approach

• Kankakee County, Sheriff's Office (Ill.) employees ran searches (2023–2025) for “idk” or “idk lol.”
• Goshen Police Department (Ind.) ran searches (May–June 2025) for “idk.”
• Fishers Police Department (Ind.) ran searches in May 2025 for “blah.”
• A Pasco Police Department (Wash.) employee searched for at least four different license plates, leaving "robbery i don't remember the case number leave me alone" in the reason field.
• The San Diego Sheriff's Department (Calif.) ran searches in May 2025 with "idk" in the reason field. 
• More than 30 agencies ran more than 6,300 searches with "TBD" (short for "To Be Determined") as the "reason." These included the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Manteca Police Department (Calif.), and the Baton Rouge Police Department (La.). The Priceville Police Department (Ala.) alone ran 1,954 searches with reasons "TBD." 

Insults and Inappropriate Searches

• Belton Police Department (Mo.) ran searches (Aug–Sept 2024) for “d*ckhead.”  (asterisk/redaction our own)
• A Manteca Police Department (Ill.) employee ran searches in June 2024 for “sh*thead”  (asterisk/redaction our own)
• A Norton Police Department (Mass.) employee ran searches in December 2024 for “Sexy.”
• Corona Police Department (Calif.) employees ran searches (2023–2025) for “weird” or “WEIRD KID.”
• Thornton Police Department (Colo.) employees ran several searches in October 2025 for “driving around being weird.”
• A Columbus Police Department (Ohio) officer ran searches in 2023 for “idiot.”
• A Michigan City Police Department Officer (Ind.) ran searches in June 2025 listing “f*ck this new search engine.” (asterisk/redaction our own)

Button Mashing 

Button mashing audit logs sample

One of the more alarming discoveries we found in the network audit data is a large number of "reasons" that appear to be nothing more than an officer mashing buttons. These typically involve a nonsensical long string of characters from the same line or area of the keyboard.

For example: 

• An Eatonton Police Department (Ga.) employee ran searches with reasons such as HJKNUILH, uiokjk.kuj, GJLHBNMN, hjhbnmg, and iuohjk.
• An Atlanta Police Department (Ga.) employee ran searches with asdfga as the reason. 
• Bay County Sheriff's Office (Fla.) employees ran searches with reasons such as  ;'lkjh, /lkjh and lkjhg.
• A Brown County Sheriff's Office (Wis.) employee ran searches with reasons such as gyghkkghghjkghjk, ggyjgyujdsrdghdfhjkghjghk, HJHJKLHLKHJK, hjjkjkhjkljk and JHLJKHHJKL.
• A Lake County Sheriff's Office (Ohio) employee ran searches with reasons such as asdfg and ghjkl, and a second officer ran a series of searches that started off with "investigation" but then devolved into button mashing, including: 
• Investigatafy, Investigatafyd, Investigatafydl, Investigatafydlh, investigatafydlhj, investigatafydlhji, investigatafyfdlhji, investigatafyfdlhjigkfgty, investigatafyfdlhjigkfgtyy, investigatafyfdlhjij, investigatafyfdlhjik, investigatafyfdlhjikf, investigatafyfdlhjikfg, investigatafyfdlhjikfgty, investigatafyfdlhjikfgy and investigatafyfdlhjiy.
• A Moore Police Department (Okla.) ran searches with reasons such as jhjhjkhj, jhjkhjh, jhjkhjkh, jkhhkjhjk, Jkhjkhj, Jkhjkhjk, Jkhjkhjkh, jkhjkhkjh, jkjkhjkh, kjjkhjk, loiuiou, ukjhjkh and ulkuiou.
• A Westlake Police Department (Ohio) employee ran searches with reasons such as fghjkl, ghjkl, and lkjhg.
• A Kentucky State Police employee ran searches with reasons such as mhghjk, mhgnhjkj, nbvcxcvbn, nmbvcbnm, and sdfghj. 

It's hard to imagine a situation where these characters add up to a legitimate police code. However, it's easy to imagine an officer cutting corners with a text field they know no one is checking, especially if they are accessing the Flock Safety app from their phones while driving. 

How Police Departments Are Responding

When confronted with these flagrantly unserious searches, police departments offered a mix of bureaucratic deflections and excuses. 

In response to EFF’s request for comment, Thornton Police Department (Colo.) claimed the system didn't require officers to select from a defined list at the time, but it does today. They also audited the “driving around being weird” searches, claiming they were all actually for "legitimate public safety purposes." 

Other police departments we reached out to for comment shared the following: 

• Richmond Police Department (Calif.) stated that the officers involved with the "Hehe" and "idk" searches were "counseled."
• Corona Police Department (Calif.) noted that the employees searching for "WEIRD KID" are no longer employed by the city for unrelated reasons.
• Columbus Police Department (Ohio) pointed to their union contract, stating their Inspector General only has jurisdiction to investigate incidents within the last 90 days, giving the officer who searched for "idiot" in 2023 a free pass.
• Belton Police Department (Mo.) promised a "thorough investigation" of the "d*ckhead" searches through existing union and personnel policies.
• Manteno Police Department (Ill.) said it will "review the searches and the circumstances surrounding them thoroughly" and "take whatever action is determined to be appropriate based on the facts and circumstances.”
• Manteca Police Department (Calif.) said: "Since the beginning of 2026, our personnel have been directed that the reason field for ALPR searches must identify the law enforcement purpose for the search and that 'TBD' is not an acceptable entry." The spokesperson added: "The presence of 'TBD' in the reason field in prior searches should not, by itself, be interpreted to mean that the associated search was conducted without a legitimate law enforcement purpose or that reasonable suspicion was required." EFF has asked the agency to clarify whether it verified the hundreds of "TBD" searches were legitimate, and we will update this post with a response if we receive one. 
• Fishers Police Department (Ind.) said that the detective that searched for “blah” has done so “when he has issues with the technology” and that the term “is used when he is actively using the technology to solve a criminal case, and the technology is not moving fast enough for him.” The department shared that “he has been told to use “test” in the future.”
• The Cobb County Police Department (Ga.) acknowledged that "TBD" stood for "To Be Determined" and is no longer an acceptable search reason: "We have instituted a new policy that took place after the dates listed in your audit that now require, in addition to a criminal offense and a reason, a case number for any search conducted on FLOCK." 
• The San Diego County Sheriff's Department says that it checked the cases where "idk" was used and determined "there was an active investigation associated with the searches." The department said that this was due to the reason field being optional at the time (which was true on a software level) but California law has required officers to document a purpose for accessing ALPR data since 2015. The sheriff's spokesperson says the reason field is now mandatory, and involves a dropdown menu. 

Other agencies did not respond to EFF’s requests for comment. We will update with responses as they are received.

The Cop Out of the Drop-Down Menu “Feature Update”

Under the guise of streamlining audit logs, in late 2025, Flock safety announced that they will be replacing the required, free-text search “reasons” with a pre-populated dropdown menu of generic offense categories. Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver's movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like "Traffic infraction" or “Other” in half a second. 

Replacing the requirement to articulate the reason for the search with one-click searches is a loss for transparency, but also may explain why audit logs including the searches we highlight in this piece significantly decreased since early 2026. 

The Punchline is Our Privacy

Entries like these defeat transparency, undermine accountability, and entirely fail to satisfy what many jurisdictions require by law or policy: an actual reason for the search. And this keeps happening because police use ALPRs as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy safeguards. 

In other contexts, such as searches of cell phone location information, police have to go to a judge, demonstrate probable cause, and get a search warrant. But because laws and courts have not caught up with the pace of ALPR technology, police do not do the same before searching ALPR databases. Instead, they are given free rein to track a person’s movements without a sliver of judicial oversight.

As we mention in our piece about the use of ALPR surveillance for low-level investigations, if a police chief stood in front of a city council and asked for permission to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the high crime of "haha," they would be laughed out of the room. The same could be said if an officer asked a judge to sign a warrant to track someone down for "LOL."

The fact that these searches were not only missed by the agency supervising the officer, but by the often thousands of other agencies whose systems were searched, demonstrates how agencies cannot be trusted to oversee themselves. 

Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance—the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion—should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement. 

If police want the power to track a person's movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for "haha."

Once a month, Microsoft pushes a security update to all Windows users. Tomorrow’s is a new record:

Microsoft’s patch for September is a doozy, with a record number of roughly 972 vulnerabilities fixed and 112 of them meeting the high critical-severity threshold.

It was only two months ago that Microsoft patched a then-record 570 vulnerabilities. Then, last month, Microsoft patched some 620 of them. Google and other companies have also published record numbers of vulnerabilities in recent months. Two weeks ago, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and 100 companies and organizations published an ...

MIT researchers have developed a new technique that helps generative artificial intelligence models find solutions to high-stakes problems.

In these settings, a plausible answer is not enough: The output often must also satisfy nonnegotiable safety, physical, or task-specific requirements, known as hard constraints.

The researchers developed a method that helps generative models meet these strict requirements without sacrificing the quality of their outputs. 

The key to their technique is to give the model more freedom during the generation process and enforce hard constraints on the final output, rather than at every intermediate step. 

In experiments spanning robotics, control of physical processes, and computer vision, the new method consistently satisfied the required constraints while identifying better solutions than existing techniques. 

This adaptable, plug-and-play technique works at deployment time, so it can be applied to pretrained generative models without retraining them. It can make such models more useful in applications where safety rules, physical laws, or other strict requirements cannot be violated. 

“The promise of generative AI is its ability to explore a rich space of possibilities, but the real world places boundaries on which possibilities are acceptable. Our approach lets us preserve that generative power while enforcing the nonnegotiable requirements of high-stakes or safety-critical applications,” says Navid Azizan, the Alfred H. and Jean M. Hayes Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), a principal investigator of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the senior author of a paper on this technique.

Azizan is joined on the paper by lead author Zeyang Li, a graduate student in mechanical engineering and LIDS; and Kaveh Alim, a graduate student in IDSS and LIDS. The research appears this week in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

Freedom to explore

Pretrained generative AI models, such as diffusion models like Stable Diffusion and flow-matching models like FLUX, are now widely available. These powerful models learn to create new data by transforming random noise. Their availability has enabled people to adapt them to a wide range of applications.

These highly capable models excel at providing answers that come close to satisfying most queries, but in safety-critical applications like robot path planning on a crowded factory floor, an answer that is “nearly correct” may not be good enough. 

For instance, a “nearly correct” path from one machine to another might still result in the robot colliding with a human co-worker.

In such safety-critical applications, users often employ a technique called projection-based sampling, which repeatedly forces the model’s partial solutions, called intermediate samples, to satisfy strict requirements during the generation process.

But constraining the entire generation process can prevent the model from reaching a better final solution. These methods also typically focus only on satisfying the hard constraints, missing the opportunity to improve other qualities of the solution, like reducing the length of the robot’s trajectory.

“For constraint satisfaction, what ultimately matters is the model’s final output, since the internal process is discarded. By not requiring every intermediate step to satisfy the constraints, we give the model more freedom to find high-quality solutions that are still feasible in the end,” says Li. 

The researchers developed an algorithm called HardFlow that steers the sampling process so that the final output satisfies the user’s hard constraints without being overly restrictive and is of higher quality.

Subtle steering

HardFlow reformulates hard-constrained sampling as a trajectory-optimization problem, using tools from the field of optimal control. This enables the framework to steer the model’s sampling trajectory toward a goal, making subtle corrections along the way while enforcing hard constraints on the final output.

“Control theory gives us a powerful framework for formalizing the optimal way of making these corrections,” Azizan says.

But solving the trajectory-optimization problem around an enormous neural network was no easy task. The model may have hundreds of interconnected layers that process data.

To make the problem tractable, the researchers leveraged the structure of flow-matching models to decompose the problem into a sequence of smaller, single-step subproblems. They then applied systematic transformations and approximations to derive an efficient, scalable algorithm that still finds a feasible solution. 

“Essentially, we transformed the trajectory-optimization problem into something that preserves the key properties of the original problem, but can be solved very efficiently at deployment time,” Azizan adds.

Reformulating the task as an optimization problem allows HardFlow to incorporate additional goals that can improve the quality of the final answer. For instance, HardFlow could find a collision-free path for a robot that is also the shortest distance to its goal.

“Our framework can jointly handle both aspects, which helps it perform much better than existing methods,” says Li.

Across experiments in robotic manipulation, maze navigation, and text-guided image editing, HardFlow achieved perfect constraint satisfaction while consistently outperforming baseline methods on measures of solution quality. 

For example, it enabled a robotic manipulator to avoid collisions with obstacles while also finding the quickest path to the target object. Most other methods either resulted in collisions or found paths that took significantly more time.

In addition, HardFlow’s computation time was comparable to or lower than that of most competing methods.

In the future, the researchers could extend the framework to settings in which the AI model itself can also be updated, so that constraint satisfaction and sample quality can be improved in a more adaptive manner. 

The world needs more homes. The world also has too much plastic. Perhaps the only thing those two problems have in common is that they’re hard to solve.

Atlas Building Composites, a spinout of MIT, is on a mission to address both problems with a single solution. The company has developed an AI-powered robotic manufacturing platform capable of turning single-use plastics into durable building materials.

The company emerged from MIT HAUS, a research effort in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering that’s short for “Home Architecture for Universal Sustainability.” Atlas uses waterless plastic recycling and large-scale composite additive manufacturing technology to make parts like home foundations, decks, and trusses for walls, floors, and roofs.

“Our mission is to convert waste plastic pollution into durable composites to build 1 billion homes,” says Atlas chair and co-founder A.J. Perez ’13, MNG ’14, PhD ’23, who is also an MIT research scientist. “You can’t divorce these things from each other. We’re not here just to build homes, and we’re not here just to recycle plastic. The conventional way of building homes involves cutting down trees, mining, refining, and a bunch of other dirty activities. We want to avoid all that and address all the plastic bound for our oceans and landfills. We’re turning bottles into buildings.”

Atlas’ parts are already being used to support barns, sheds, decks, and docks. Most recently, the company supplied the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with American-made recycled composite trusses to construct a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.

Perez and Atlas co-founder Matt Pouliot envision deploying thousands of their AI robotic production systems around the world. A key enabler for that scale is the company’s ability to recycle low-grade plastic into building components without water.

“This is key to democratizing recycling,” Perez says. “Now, every country around the world, regardless of their water access, will be able to do something about their plastic. We strive to study these issues in the real world, not just a lab. When you talk to government officials about creating a new recycling facility, they have to get the local water agency involved, there’s permitting, etc. A lot of that work disappears with the waterless recycling process.”

Research for impact

Since earning his PhD at MIT, Perez has been developing advanced fabrication techniques for homes and new techniques for plastic recycling. In 2019, he started MIT HAUS with David Hardt, MIT’s Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing.

“It started with the simple mission of enabling the production of 1 billion homes over a 30-year period,” Perez says. “Then we realized how much the materials needed for those homes would strain global supply chains.”

Perez says building those homes using conventional methods would require a doubling of global production capacity for materials like concrete, not to mention a dramatic acceleration of global deforestation.

“That’s where the light bulb went off,” Perez says. “There’s this other problem humanity has, which is 8 gigatons of plastic that have been produced and are polluting our oceans, rivers, and cities. We decided to plug two really big, hairy problems together.”

Perez met Pouliot, a former Maine senator, and the pair started Atlas to commercialize the technology Perez had been developing at MIT. The founders worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and have since worked with researchers at other universities to independently develop technology for the company’s robotic manufacturing platform, which the founders call the Atlas Factory Stack.

First, single-use plastic from water bottles and other objects is shredded and fed into the Atlas system, where it is melted and fused with American-made fiberglass to make it stronger than wood. From there, a large-scale 3D printer creates the parts, including trusses for floors, walls, roofs, and bridges.

Through research at MIT, Perez has shown large composite trusses can be printed in under 13 minutes and support over 4,000 pounds, exceeding key building standards.

“At MIT, we’ve demonstrated we can produce 60 to 80 pounds of parts per hour, and the systems we’re specifying in Atlas factories operate in the 150 to 200 pound per hour range,” Perez says. “There’s the potential for our robotic manufacturing platform to produce each part at a lower cost than injection molding, and it’s far more flexible and convenient. For example,  we can manufacture the parts in the reverse order so that they’ll be placed on the finished goods pallet next to the machine.”

The founders envision Atlas as a technology provider enabling the creation of home factories close to wherever homes need to be built. Today, each Atlas factory cell is capable of producing the structural framing components for about one small home per day.

“The old way of doing things would be some huge factory in China would mass produce one type of part and ship it far away,” Perez says. “I don’t think that’s good for the planet. Another reason we don’t use injection molding is economic: Mega factories don’t produce as many jobs and have a much higher carbon footprint. We want this to be localized to benefit local communities. The plastic is already everywhere. The more local Atlas is, the lower the cost and footprint.”

Going global

Plastics last far longer than wood, especially for applications where they’re in contact with the ground or water. That adds to the company’s environmental benefits.

“If you get a material into the building world and it does its job, it’s going to be used for a very long time and not need to be recycled again for a very long time,” Pouliot says. “That’s important because when you recycle something over and over again, it degrades. This is one of the most sustainable use cases for recycled petrochemical products.”

Atlas’ bridge with the Army Corps of Engineers was installed in less than a day. The founders are also in talks with international franchise partners to deploy the Atlas Factory Stack across the globe.

“To accomplish our mission, I fundamentally believe it’s not going to be one far-away company dominating the industry,” Perez says. “It’s going to be every country leveraging Atlas Factory Stacks to create local recycling jobs, local factory jobs, local construction jobs, and to stimulate their economies with local materials.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02740-8

Marine carbon dioxide removal must advance through rigorous, transparent science, but caution cannot become paralysis. With billions of tonnes of carbon removal likely to be needed each year, we need to test promising approaches responsibly while uncertainty remains.

Smells awful:

But an estimated 30 to 50 tons of dead squid remain inside the boat’s catch tank, where they have been decomposing for days. “That is nasty. I wouldn’t want to do that,” said commercial fisherman Dick Ogg of the Bodega Bay Fishermen’s Marketing Association.

Ogg said anyone familiar with the fishing industry understands what happens when a large catch sits for an extended period.

“If you think about what happens after four or five days, it’s a gooey mess,” he said.

The odor has become a defining feature of the operation, and the beach remains closed to the public while crews work on a removal plan...

Governor Newsom signed a package of 12 bills yesterday aimed at “protecting children” online. One of them was AB 1709, which EFF has opposed this legislative session and serves as a functional ban on young people under 16 using social media. However, EFF supported two of the bills signed into law, AB 2071 and AB 2298, which require that children learn critical digital literacy and cybersecurity topics. The bills are an affirmative and constitutional way for the state to address valid concerns about young people’s internet use without violating their First Amendment rights.

Unlike blanket bans, A.B. 2071 and A.B. 2298 address online safety through education rather than prohibition. Young people rely on the internet not just for entertainment, but for civic engagement, education, self-expression, and community—especially vulnerable youth who may lack support in their physical surroundings. This is why real digital safety comes from preparation, not isolation. Research consistently shows that open, honest conversations about digital literacy and privacy with trusted adults are far more effective at protecting youth than restrictive censorship laws. Young people themselves recognize this need; in fact, A.B. 2071 was co-authored by a group of students actively seeking better resources to navigate their digital lives safely.

Education vs. Censorship 

A.B. 2071 and A.B. 2298 fill critical gaps in California’s school curricula by equipping students with actionable skills. A.B. 2071 integrates digital wellness into middle and high school health classes, teaching students how to identify unhealthy tech habits, protect their personal safety, and evaluate digital content—including AI-generated media—for credibility and bias. Meanwhile, A.B. 2298 adds cybersecurity concepts to recommended school curricula, teaching young people how to safeguard their personal data from online threats.

While the state’s turn toward social media bans remains a harmful and misguided policy direction, the passage and signing of A.B. 2071 and A.B. 2298 show there is a better way. Lawmakers must stop treating censorship as a quick fix and instead focus on constitutional, empowering solutions that give youth the tools they need to thrive online. 

Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I’m really proud of the talk, and the fact that it gained over 100K views on YouTube in just a few days.

Also online is an interview with me in the AI Village.

Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The idea is to cut back on the amount of video content available to the company, and thus potentially available to law enforcement. But while it might technically add a speed bump to accessing full video content, it doesn’t deliver nearly the level of privacy we should be demanding from video doorbells and other security cameras.

TAKE introduces a new way for Ring to manage encryption keys, where the user’s device has its key, then the company holds encryption keys temporarily within its own cloud infrastructure. Ring’s servers receive the keys temporarily so it can offer a variety of the features it says it can’t offer when a user chooses to use end-to-end encryption, like video descriptions, smart alerts, video search, and more, then deletes the key after 24 hours. 

This differs from how it works now, where footage is encrypted in transit and at rest, then decrypted by Ring, which always has access to the footage, to process those features. 

Comparatively, this is an improvement to the default settings Ring has now, because it at least puts some restrictions on historical footage, but it has some serious holes worth exploring.

Ring Gets Access to Unencrypted Video for a Short Period

Ring has designed its service so many of its camera features, including smart alerts and video search, need cloud processing to work. That means to provide those features, Ring needs to decrypt the footage while it’s stored in Ring’s cloud servers. 

With TAKE, in order to decrypt footage to offer these features, Ring gets access to footage stored in the cloud for 24 hours. TAKE adds some small measures using secure enclaves to make base key material harder to directly export, but keys are still released to services that can be modified. With access to the keys, the cloud processing does its thing and delivers the requested feature to the user. The key is then deleted 24 hours later—until the user wants to watch an old video or use other so-called “smart” features, at which point the keys are sent back to the server. 

In practice, that makes the system as a whole barely different from encryption at rest where the server holds the keys. The client device essentially takes the place of a hardware security module (HSM), including making those keys available to the server whenever they’re needed. The end result is an improvement from the status quo, but still not even close to the privacy protections of end-to-end encryption. 

The company says it does not keep backups of the keys and there’s no way for a Ring employee to access footage. It also claims that any decrypted content is deleted from its servers. 

But that doesn’t mean much when user actions send the keys back to the server. And making features like “Video Search” and “Smart Video Descriptions” available to the device owner means that while the footage can’t be seen by Ring, descriptions are readily available to the company. In response to a question about capability, Ring responded to us that, “As Ring continues to expand and further strengthen TAKE's protections, video descriptions will be included.”

Plus, account recovery keys are stored in the camera itself by default. When that’s paired with the fact that currently, indices of video contents are available to the company, it means that TAKE isn’t even a protection against mass surveillance. Law enforcement could request a mass search across cameras for certain terms, then delve into further details by seizing cameras of interest from the device-owner, decrypting account backups, and using that information to decrypt encrypted videos. 

Law Enforcement May Still Seek to Compel Access to Footage

Because of the ways the access and key rotations work, it’s technically still possible for Ring to alter its current practice if compelled to do so by law enforcement, in much the same way as other existing encryption-at-rest systems where the company holds the keys. For example, Ring could receive an order that demands they save content encryption keys or unencrypted videos from memory to disk, which would mean they’d retain some level of access. 

In an email to EFF, Ring stated, “By design, under TAKE, Ring will not be able to provide encryption keys or decrypted content. With TAKE, Ring will only preserve and provide encrypted video files in response to valid legal process. It has been and continues to be Ring's policy to object to overbroad legal requests.” EFF specifically asked about the possibility of complying with law enforcement orders to modify existing practice to turn over or preserve unencrypted video, which appears to be technically possible, but the company did not address it.

End-to-end encryption works to maintain trust by its user base because the company that employs it never has access to the keys at any point, making it impossible for itself to access the encrypted contents. This also means law enforcement can’t demand the service retain keys or choose not to rotate them. As described, this level of protection isn’t offered with TAKE.

Ultimately, Ring is the one managing this software and its implementation, and beyond a white paper, “trust us” is the only level of verification they’re offering outside observers. While it doesn’t fix the issues, at the bare minimum, the company needs to open the entire infrastructure up to third-party auditors to verify its claims. Ring seems to agree, as they told us that, “Ring conducts rigorous security reviews of all products before launch and critical components of TAKE’s infrastructure underwent independent security testing prior to launch. We are exploring options for further independent review.”

TAKE is not end-to-end encryption, where Ring would never have access to the keys, and the company thankfully doesn’t claim it as such. Ring already offers the option for end-to-end encryption, and turning that on by default would offer the real sorts of privacy improvements we all want from video doorbells. 

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) selected AI-GUIDE, a medical device developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), for its 2026 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award. This award recognizes federal laboratories and collaborators who have accomplished outstanding work in the process of transferring technology. With funding from the U.S. Army's Combat Casualty Care Research Program (CCC), Lincoln Laboratory and MGH developed AI-GUIDE and are in the process of transferring the prototype to the startup company AutonomUS Medical Technologies, Inc.

"This recognition reflects what effective technology transfer looks like — aligning the Army's operational need with Mass General's clinical expertise and Lincoln Laboratory's engineering capabilities to deliver a solution with a clear path to impact. The transition to AutonomUS underscores how strong partnerships can carry a technology from development into real-world adoption," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer. 

AI-GUIDE's transition to industry promises improved health outcomes for injured service members and civilians. Unlike ultrasound devices typically found in hospitals, AI-GUIDE is small and portable, making it ideal for use in pre-hospital settings. Pairing custom-developed AI software with commercial handheld ultrasound technology, AI-GUIDE helps the user insert a guidewire and catheter into a patient's blood vessel. This capability is especially important for U.S. military medics, who must keep injured soldiers alive in the field — sometimes for days — before they can be evacuated to a hospital. AI-GUIDE allows medics with minimal specialized training to administer medical interventions that would otherwise be impossible outside of the hospital, drastically improving patients’ chances of survival. 

The AI-GUIDE project has served as a framework for effective technology development and transfer. Within just three years, AI-GUIDE went from an idea proposed by CCC to a fully working proof-of-concept technology with its own startup company. Once the prototype was developed, clinical testing at MGH proved its viability, and Lincoln Laboratory and MGH staff then founded AutonomUS Medical Technologies to facilitate the commercialization process. With support from the MIT Technology Licensing Office, Lincoln Laboratory Technology Transfer Office, and CCC, the company secured U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Device Designation, a regulatory fast-track pathway that is only granted to highly innovative technologies with lifesaving potential, as well as a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. Department of the Air Force and funding from private investors, the Department of War, and the National Institutes of Health. 

These strong technology transfer collaborations are designed to streamline the transfer process, ensuring that lifesaving capabilities can be made available to military personnel and civilians as quickly as possible. While much of the initial work on vascular access has already been transferred, the AI-GUIDE team continues to develop and transition additional capabilities, including peripheral nerve block technology for trauma care and pain management. AI-GUIDE has previously been recognized with a Lincoln Laboratory Best Invention Award and an R&D 100 Award. 

"Lincoln Laboratory has a long record of transferring technology to industry. We are honored and proud to be recognized for the transfer of AI‑GUIDE and look forward to seeing the technology commercialized and saving lives in the field. This achievement reflects the strength of the partnership among the Defense Health Agency, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, and AutonomUS Medical Technologies," says Samuel Kesner, a technical staff member in the Systems Engineering Group, who currently oversees the AI-GUIDE program at Lincoln Laboratory. 

Winning team members from the laboratory include Brian Telfer, Samuel Kesner, Lars Gjesteby, Joshua Werblin, Benjamin Roop, Alec Carruthers, Nancy DeLosa, and former Lincoln Laboratory staff members Matt Johnson (now the vice president of engineering at AutonomUS) and Laura Brattain (now an associate professor at the University of Central Florida). Asha Rajagopal, Jordan Mizerak, Melly Coronado, and Jonathan Dan supported technology transfer efforts.

In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago.

Great fun.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02752-4

Climate extremes influence migration, but their long-term and compounding impacts are understudied. The authors show that associations between climate extremes and migration vary by hazard type, timing, the occurrence of consecutive events and local socioeconomic conditions.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02732-8

Heatwaves threaten both physical and mental health, yet physical heat exposure and emotional responses often diverge. The study shows that 84.9% of Chinese cities experienced severe emotional shocks, compared with 52.1% facing severe heat exposure, driven by socioeconomic and environmental factors.