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.

California’s bill, A.B. 2047, will not only mandate censorware — software which exists to bluntly block your speech as a user — on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies won’t make anyone safer. What it will do is hurt innovation in the state and risk a slew of new consumer harms, ranging from surveillance to platform lock-in. California must stand with creators and reject this legislation before it’s too late.

3D printing might evoke images of props from blockbuster films, rapid prototyping, medical research, or even affordable repair parts. Yet for a growing number of legislators, the perceived threat of “ghost guns” is a reason to impose restrictions on all 3D printers. Despite 3D printing of guns already being rare and banned under existing law, California may outright criminalize any user having control over their own device. 

This bill is a gift for the biggest 3D printer manufacturers looking to adopt HP’s approach to 2D printing: criminalize altering your printer’s code, lock users into your own ecosystem, and let enshittification run its course. Even worse, algorithmic print blocking will never work for its intended purpose, but it will threaten consumer choice, free expression, and privacy.

A misstep here can have serious repercussions across the whole 3D printing industry, lead the way for more bad bills, and leave California with an expensive and ineffective bureaucratic mess.

What’s in the California Proposal?

Compared to the Washington and New York laws proposed this year, California’s is the most troubling. It criminalizes open source, reduces consumer choice, and creates a bureaucratic burden.

Criminalizing Open Source and User Control

A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.

Manufacturers will be able to lock users into first-party tools, parts, and “consumables” (analogous to how 2D printer ink works). They will also be able to mandate purchases through first-party stores, imposing a heavy platform tax. Additionally, manufacturers could force regular upgrade cycles through planned obsolescence by ceasing updates to a printer’s print-blocking system, thereby taking devices out of compliance and making them illegal for consumers to resell. In short, a wide range of anti-consumer practices can be enforced, potentially resulting in criminal charges.

Independent of these deliberate harms manufacturers may inflict, DRM has shown that criminalizing code leads to more barriers to repair, more consumer waste, and far more cybersecurity risks by criminalizing research.

Less Consumer Choice

The bill favors incumbent manufacturers over newer competitors and over the interests of consumers.

Less-established manufacturers will need to dedicate considerable time and resources to implementing the ineffective solutions discussed above, navigating state approval, and potentially paying licensing fees to third-party developers of sham print-blocking software. While these burdens may be absorbed by the biggest producers of this equipment, it considerably raises the barrier to entry on a technology that can otherwise be individually built from scratch with common equipment. The result is clear: fewer options for consumers and more leverage for the biggest producers. 

Retailers will feel this pinch, but the second-hand market will feel it most acutely. Resale is an important property right for people to recoup costs and serves as an important check on inflating prices. But under this bill, such resale risks misdemeanor penalties. 

The bill locks users into a walled garden; it demands manufacturers ensure 3D printers cannot be used with third-party software tools. By creating barriers to the use of popular and need-specific alternatives, this legislation will limit the utility and accessibility of these devices across a broad spectrum of lawful uses.

Bureaucratic Burden 

A.B. 2047’s title 21.1 §3723.633-637 creates a print-blocking bureaucracy, leaning heavily on the California Department of Justice (DOJ). Initially, the DOJ must outline the technical standards for detecting and blocking firearm parts, and later certify print-blocking algorithms and maintain lists of compliant 3D printers. If a printer or software doesn’t make it through this red tape, it will be illegal to sell in the state.

The bill also requires the department to establish a database of banned blueprints that must be blocked by these algorithms. This database and printer list must be continually maintained as new printer models are released and workarounds are discovered, requiring effort from both the DOJ and printer manufacturers. 

For all the cost and burden of creating and maintaining such a database, those efforts will inevitably be outpaced by rapid iterations and workarounds by people breaking existing firearms laws.

Not just California

Once implemented, this infrastructure will be difficult to rein in, causing unintended consequences. The database meant for firearm parts can easily expand to copyright or political speech. Scans meant to be ephemeral can be collected and surveilled. This is cause for concern for everyone, as these levers of control will extend beyond the borders of the Golden State.

While California is at the forefront of print blocking, the impacts will be felt far outside of its borders. Once printer companies have the legal cover to build out anti-competitive and privacy-invasive tools, they will likely be rolled out globally. After all, it is not cost-effective to maintain two forks of software, two inventories of printers, and two distribution channels. Once California has created the infrastructure to censor prints, what else will it be used for?

As we covered in “Print Blocking Won’t Work” these print-blocking efforts are not only doomed to fail, but will render all 3D printer users vulnerable to surveillance either by forcing them into a cloud scanning solution for “on-device” results, or by chaining them to first-party software which must connect to the cloud to regularly update its print blocking system.

This law demands an unfeasible technological solution for something that is already illegal. Not only is this bad legislation with few safeguards, it risks the worst outcomes for grassroots innovation and creativity—both within the state and across the global 3D printing community.

California should reject this legislation before it’s too late, and advocates everywhere should keep an eye out for similar legislation in their states. What happens in California won't just stay in California.

Protecting privacy and free speech online takes more than policy work—it takes community. Conferences like HOPE are where that community comes together to learn, connect, and push these ideals forward. That's why EFF is proud to be at HOPE 26.

Join us at this year's Hackers On Planet Earth, August 14-16 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan! Get your ticket now and support our work: throughout April EFF will receive 10% of all ticket proceeds for HOPE 26. 

Grab your ticket!

See EFF at HOPE 26 in New York

While you're there, be sure to catch talks from EFF's technologists, attorneys, and activists covering a wide range of digital civil liberties topics. You can get a taste of the talks to come by watching last year's EFF presentations at HOPE_16 on YouTube:

How a Handful of Location Data Brokers Actively Tracked Millions, and How to Stop Them
In the past year, a number of investigations have revealed the outsized role of a few select companies in gathering, storing, and selling the location data of millions of devices - and by extension people - worldwide. This talk will elaborate on the technologies, data flows, and industry players which comprise this complicated ecosystem.

Ask EFF
Get an update on current EFF work, including the ongoing case against the "Department" of Government Oversight, educating the public on their digital rights, organizing communities to resist ongoing government surveillance, and more.

Systems of Dehumanization: The Digital Frontlines of the War Against Bodily Autonomy
Daly covers the bad Internet bills that made sex work more dangerous, the ongoing struggle for abortion access in America, and the persecution of trans people across all spectrums of life. These issue-spaces are deeply connected, and the digital threats they face are uniquely dangerous. Come to learn about these threat models, as well as the cross-movement strategies being built for collective liberation against an authoritarian surveillance state. 

Snag a ticket by the end of April to help support EFF's work ensuring that technology works for everyone. We hope to see you there!

When people see Customs & Border Protection's giant, tethered surveillance blimp flying 20 miles outside of Marfa, Texas, lots of them confuse it with an art installation. Elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, surveillance towers get mistaken for cell-phone towers. And that traffic barrel? It's actually a camera. That piece of rusted litter? That's a camera too.

Today we are publishing a major update to our zine, "Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border," the first since the second Trump administration began. To help people identify the machinery of homeland security, we've added more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers.

You can get this 40-page, full-color guide through EFF's Shop or download a Creative-Commons licensed version here.

"The Battalion Search and Rescue always carries the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s zine in our desert rig," says James Holman, who founded the humanitarian group that looks for human remains in remote parts of New Mexico and Arizona. "We’re finding new surveillance all the time, and without a resource like that, we wouldn't know what the hell we're looking at.”

The original version of the zine was distributed nearly exclusively to our allies in the borderlands—journalists, humanitarian aid workers, immigrant advocates—to help them better identify and report on the technology they discover on the ground. We only made a handful available in our online shop, and they went fast.

This time, we've printed enough for our broader EFF membership. Even if you don't live near the border, you can support our work uncovering how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's technology threatens human rights by picking up a copy.

The zine is the culmination of a dozen trips to the border, where we hunted surveillance towers and other tech installations. We attended multiple border security conventions to collect promotional and technical materials directly from vendors. We filed public records requests, reviewed thousands of pages of docs, and analyzed satellite imagery of the entire 2,000-mile border several times over. Some of the images came from local allies, like geographer Dugan Meyer and Borderlands Relief Collective, who continue to share valuable intelligence on the changing landscape of border surveillance.

The update is available in English, with an updated Spanish version expected later this year. In the meantime, we have reprinted the original Spanish edition.

If you want to know more, a collection of EFF's broader work on border technology is available here. And if you're curious exactly where these technologies are located, you can check our ongoing map.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

The cybersecurity industry is obsessing over Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview, and its effects on cybersecurity. Anthropic said that it is not releasing it to the general public because of its cyberattack capabilities, and has launched Project Glasswing to run the model against a whole slew of public domain and proprietary software, with the aim of finding and patching all the vulnerabilities before hackers get their hands on the model and exploit them.

There’s a lot here, and I hope to write something more considered in the coming week, but I want to make some quick observations...

Dr. Jean Linis-Dinco is an activist-researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology. Born in the Philippines and shaped by firsthand experience with inequality and state violence, Jean has spent her life pushing back against systems that profit from oppression. She refuses to accept a world where tech is just another tool for corporate gain. Instead, she fights for technologies and policies that put people before profit and justice before convenience. Jean earned her PhD in Cybersecurity from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where she exposed how governments weaponized propaganda and disinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. She currently serves as the Digital Rights Advisor for the Manushya Foundation.

David Greene: Welcome. To get started can you just introduce yourself to folks?

Jean Linis-Dinco: I'm not very good at introducing myself and I rarely do so within the context of work because I always believe that people are more than their jobs.

But first, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to share my thoughts. I've learned this kind of introduction from Kumu Vicky Holt Takamine in Hawai’i. She taught me how to introduce myself beyond titles.

So, my name is Jean, my waters are the West Philippine Sea, and I was born and raised in the land of resistance, one of the original eight provinces that revolted against Spain as they are represented by the eight rays of the sun on the Philippine flag. My ancestors fought for the freedom of the Filipino people against Spanish colonial rule, before we became subjugated once again, this time under the United States for another 48 years. The impacts of that history continue to reverberate through the domestic and international policies that ultimately pushed me out of my own country as an overseas Filipino worker.

DG: Can you tell us a bit about Manushya Foundation?

JLD: Absolutely. Manushya Foundation is a women-led organization that works with activists and human rights defenders who are targeted, who face harassment and transnational repression for their work. My work with them is on the policy and advocacy side in relation to their digital rights portfolio. It involves challenging laws and policies that criminalize freedom of expression or freedom of speech online.

It also means confronting the role of private corporations and private platforms. Because that power is rarely transparent. Big tech power is often unaccountable, as we've seen in recent years. Working in a civil society organization like Manushya, you get involved with the work on the ground and take part in grassroot-led advocacy confronting corporate abuse.

In my work, I have met people from all sorts of backgrounds. And across those encounters, I've noticed some troubling trends in some civil society organizations. There are heaps of civil society leaders who are very keen to have a seat at the table with big tech companies. It’s often hidden behind the language of ‘stakeholder engagement’. We refuse to do that at Manushya Foundation. We don’t want to be used as a rubber stamp for decisions that have already been made behind NDAs or decisions where communities most affected by these technologies were never even in the room to begin with.

I think civil society organizations should not allow themselves to be drawn into that orbit. That is very contentious in this era, because I feel like civil society bought the story that big tech could be partners in progress. We walked into their boardrooms, signing NDAs as if proximity to power meant that we were shaping it. And we've seen how in the end we're actually just giving them legitimacy. They turn our critiques and our statements to endorsements. I don't think there is any progressive form of collaboration with big tech companies that is not extractive, because the uncomfortable truth is that not everyone who wants a seat at the table is there to change what is being served.

DG: I, as someone who participates in multi-stakeholder things all the time, I completely hear that criticism. One of the things I've said is, multi-stakeholder engagement as a member of civil society takes a few forms. One, you're in the room, but you don't have a seat at the table. Two, you have a seat at the table, but you don't have a microphone. And three, they give you a microphone, but they leave the room when you talk. When we as civil society do engage, we have to be very, very intentional about ensuring it’s effective engagement. We've left many things that were “multi-stakeholder” because it was actually just NGO-washing. You know, it was only so they could say that we were sort of invited to the cocktail party afterwards.

 I've heard from you before that Manushya has a bit of a regional focus. Would you say it has a feminist focus or is it broader in terms of marginalized communities?

JLD: At its core, Manushya is a decolonial intersectional feminist organization. What that means is that we are fundamentally concerned with systems of power. In our work, we always ask who holds the power? Who is crushed by it? And who has been deliberately kept from it?

Personally, I am critical of lean-in feminism, which was popularized by a certain Meta executive. I do not agree with that kind of feminism, because it tells us women that if we just work harder, speak louder within existing power structures, we will be free. But free to do what, exactly? To participate in the same system that exploits people? The women who can afford to lean in are women who already occupy a certain class position that makes them legible to power. And most of them are white women who already have the capacity or already have a standing in society to be listened to.

I cannot lean in. Because lean-in feminism was never designed for women like me.

And then there is girl boss feminism, which I am also very, very critical of. Because more often than not, the women who call themselves girl bosses or self-made are not actually self-made. Behind every ‘self-made’ woman is a hidden economy of invisible labor. Often, they have maids. And often, those maids are Filipino women, women like my mother. Girl boss feminism is about one woman’s liberation built on another woman's bondage. I think it is absurd to call it feminism when it is basically just class warfare with better branding.

So, yes. It gets very personal.

DG: Why don’t you tell us what freedom of expression and free speech mean to you?

 JLD: Well, there is this concept of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and it is viewed as something abstract because we cannot see speech. It is intangible. We can hear it, but we cannot see it. It's not something that we hold. It is not like food, water or housing. That is precisely the problem. Because at its core freedom of expression must be understood through material conditions.

What that means is that it dies in the structures that govern who gets heard, who gets punished, who gets killed, who is made disappeared, whose voices are treated as disposable. I would say freedom of expression must be understood as inseparable from justice because I do not believe anyone can claim to defend freedom of expression while tolerating systems that silence through fear, that silence through poverty, that silence through surveillance. Because a person working two jobs to make ends meet, a person targeted by the state, a person whose community is over-policed, I don't think they stand on equal ground with a media mogul or a political elite.

The definition of free expression must move beyond the question of whether speech is allowed. The real foundation of freedom of expression and freedom of speech is who can speak without consequences and who pays the price for doing so. It demands responsibility and it's not a shield for domination, because when speech is used to dehumanize or to incite violence or to reinforce structures of oppression, the imperialism of domination, then that participates in harm.

A serious commitment to freedom requires us to confront that harm and not hide behind languages of rights while ignoring the realities of power.

DG: How do you see that? What's the example of how that plays out, for instance in the digital rights realm now?

JLD: Well, there is, as you know—one could say it's even more evident in the United States—the “freedom of speech absolutist” as we’ve seen through Elon Musk. I don’t think he actually believes in freedom of speech at all. Because from what it appears, what he only cares about is maintaining the conditions under which people who look like him get to speak.

Speech does not exist in a vacuum. It is always in service of something.

The question is what kind of society are we actually building? I want a society where people can speak truthfully about the conditions and be heard, where dissent is not criminalized and where expression becomes a force for transformation rather than a tool for control. Free speech is a collective condition and not an individual right. It is inseparable from the question of what kind of society we are building. Because you cannot suddenly say that you are for freedom of expression while owning the platform that decides whose speech is amplified and whose is buried by an algorithm designed to serve capital. Building that society requires dismantling the structures that have always decided who gets to speak and who gets disappeared for saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.

DG: It always bothers me when I hear someone like Musk being called like a free speech absolutist, because, first of all, he’s certainly not an absolutist. I actually don't know anyone who is an absolutist. But also, I don't even think he cares about free speech that much. I think that's what we see in the US a lot now, people for whom it's not a sincere belief, but they get to speak as part of their privilege. There are also other people who think they deserve the privilege to speak because, societally, they've never been subjected to controls. When they see their community of people, who historically have been able to speak, and if it's not like that, that strikes them as the most horrible infringement on freedom of speech because it disturbs their view of privilege and who speaks. And when they see marginalized voices get silenced, it doesn't bother them because that's their norm. That's how I see it.

JLD: I'm here on a fellowship in the UK and my main study is on the American conquest of the Philippines through national language processing. And it's really interesting. I said during my talk that the United States no longer needs to use Nazi Germany as a metaphor to describe their contemporary politics. You know, American people just need to read history books not written by white men.

DG: Okay, let's dive into the age verification stuff. I think that age verification and age mandates and age regulations trying to age gate the internet are really interesting examples of the interplay between freedom of speech and a broader repression of rights. I met you at Digital Rights in Asia Pacific Assembly (DRAPAC) 2025, and I want to just give you a platform here to share your views on age verification. I was really moved by your statement at DRAPAC and what you all published on your website.

JLD: I wrote that piece at a time when Australia was pushing through that legislation. And now, we are now seeing a lot of Southeast Asian countries following that route. It always just takes one domino to fall for everyone to follow, doesn’t it?

But, what surprised me is how there’s also a lot of defeatism among some civil society organizations. I feel like they already accepted the logic of the state. There’s always this preemptive surrendering the ground on which the struggle should be taking place. And I realized the same thing is happening again.

I was on a call recently with a group of civil society organizations and someone floated the idea of supporting identity verification on social media in the Philippines as a way to counter disinformation. She came from a different understanding of the political economy, but the moment I heard it, I was disappointed. The argument is dangerous and it plays with fire because it assumes that anonymity is the problem. It assumes that the solution is to hand the state and the corporations even more power, more information, more control, and give them even more ability to track and discipline people.

I feel like this is the same trend we see with age-gating, because the claim with identity verification in the context of the Philippines, that it can be used responsibly if there are guardrails. That’s gambling with people’s lives. There has never been a single historical precedent where the state doesn't expand monitoring powers when it can once the door is open to surveillance. I don't think any guardrails will ever hold.

Civil society groups who entertain the idea of breaking anonymity to solve misinformation are rehearsing a dangerous illusion because anonymity is not a luxury. And it feels like it is being framed that way. Anonymity is a response to the political conditions where speaking freely can cost you your life. It exists because the risks are there and they are not imagined.

DG: I do think there are some people who look at age-gating from a good place. Would you say you see age verification mandates as just inevitably being tools of oppression for marginalized young people?

JLD: Above everything, it shifts the Overton window toward the broader acceptance of surveillance. In political science, when we say we're shifting the Overton window, we mean the space of political debate in public discourse is being narrowed. And now we are seeing it move towards the same old thing of, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.’ And when you shift the Overton window towards the broader acceptance of surveillance, we're doing something very simple and very dangerous. And it turns intrusive monitoring into a normal routine of everyday life. It starts with policies that redefine surveillance as safety. Then age-gating will be established through technical infrastructure that of course can be repurposed later.

Any system capable of verifying age is also capable of verifying identity, tracking behavior, matching accounts to real people, and storing data that can be accessed by literally anyone. These policies teach people to internalize the idea that anonymity is suspicious. I think that is the most dangerous part of it--how that cultural shift is getting more and more powerful, because it moves us, the public, towards believing that only those with nothing to hide deserve rights. Then what comes next after that? Surveillance becomes a default condition for digital participation. If you cannot enter a platform without proving who you are, then surveillance becomes a prerequisite for basic communication.

Then, of course, the most powerful shift is the desensitization of younger generations to being monitored. We are raising children in a system where every login requires identity checks, they will grow into adults who assume that constant tracking is normal. Then this is what shifting the Overton window looks like in practice, because once you accept that premise, you have already surrendered the most important ground. The fight is no longer about whether surveillance should exist, but how much of it you're willing to tolerate. And we know the people who pay the price are not men in suits.

DG: Then who does pay the price?

JLD: It is always the working class children and working class families. The homeless youth who rely on social media to find food, to find a place to shower. The homeless youth who rely on social media to find community and get jobs. Then we have queer young people who are also getting locked out of spaces where they could find community. And we're locking them out of those spaces because it's ‘for their safety.’

DG: So even if there was magic tech that could solve the verification part in a completely privacy protective way, you still can't get around the infringement on the rights of young people. That seems to be the goal of the law.

JLD: Yeah, absolutely. Because why do you need to age-gate social media if it's not for control? We always frame things like this as protection under the guise of paternalism. But deep inside, we see how it is a tool to control a young population who are just now getting very politically active. And I feel like--as I'm now a geriatric millennial--people of my age and older generation have betrayed the younger generation for doing this at this precarious time, where there is a genocide happening, where there are countries being bombed. We are in a time of conflicts started by rich men, amid an ecological collapse, and our concern is children being online? Let’s not rob the children of today of their future. Age gating punishes the young for crises they did not create, whilst protecting those truly responsible from accountability.

The reality outside of social media will not go away even if kids are shut off from it. We need to confront the truth that the conditions that ruin childhood are not on social media. They are bombs, poverty, divisive politics. They're due to how we’re killing public funding and putting it through private corporations, lining the pockets of billionaires in the name of what? That is the main problem of our society, but we're not addressing that. We're just locking kids out of social media, because it's easier to do that than to address the fact that society needs an overhaul.

DG: And I think what we've seen with Australia is a lot of talk about how kids can evade the protections, whether they're using VPNs or somehow faking the ID and so all age-gating is doing is adding friction to the process. And that tends to have highly discriminatory effects also, right?

JLD: Friction might be a minor obstacle for a wealthy child with supportive parents, but friction keeps a different child off the internet. A wealthy child might have the technical means to buy a workaround to allow them to have access. There was a story in the news about an influencer family who just moved out of the country because of the age-restricted social media ban. This is the reality—people who have the means to move will move. And those who have no means to move, those who are struggling just to put food on the table—will just stay. This is anti-poor. Age gating is anti-poor.

DG: Okay, switching gears just a little bit. Was there any sort of personal experience you've had with freedom of expression that has informed how you think about the issue? Was there any kind of formative experience where you felt censored or witnessed censorship happening to someone else that really informs how you think about it now or made you care about the issue deeply?

JLD: I don't think there's one specific personal experience, per se, that has shaped how I feel about freedom and liberty in general. Growing up in the Philippines, you're forced to care, especially if you're in a working-class neighborhood like where I grew up. At an early age you realize how unfair the world is. And at first, you think that it is just unfair that the other children in my classroom families can afford a pencil case and we cannot.

It was also very difficult to fit in in the Philippines. I was labeled a troublemaker as a child. And I think some of that is actually still reminiscent of what I am today. I remember my sixth-grade history teacher approached me after reading an essay I wrote about the Philippines. She said that I should tone down my language because it will get me in trouble later in life. And I didn't understand what she meant by that. I didn't listen to her, clearly.

But that instinct stayed with me and I think it followed me through life. It followed me here—you know, the idea that you should say it, but not like that. Speak, but don't disrupt. Critique, but don't offend. And I think this is where my relationship with liberty and freedom or, specifically, freedom of expression kind of took place. It was not one defining moment, but it's in a series of small friction, as you called it. Because over time, you realize that the pressure to soften your voice never disappears. And I don't think it ever will. And I chose not to then, and I choose not to now. And there’s a lot of consequences that come with that. I don't think I will be invited to a lot of panels or keynotes. But it's a hill I'm willing to die on.

This is also the same pattern we see at a larger scale in the Philippines. You see communities speak out about land or about labor and then suddenly they are surveilled, they're either disappeared or dead. I realized quickly that freedom of expression exists on paper, but in practice it depends on who you are.

DG: Do you think there are situations where it might be appropriate for governments, or even companies, to limit freedom of expression? And if the answer is yes, what might those be?

JLD: Freedom of speech should always demand a responsibility. It has always existed within structures of power that determine whose speech is protected. So when we ask whether speech should be limited, we have to first ask. limited by whom, and in whose interest?

But I don't think the government or corporations can do that. Corporations’ end goal is always profit. And governments have historically used the language of limitation to silence the very people who dare to challenge their authority.

I believe in community-based understanding of how we actually could solve this problem, because, in the end, our relationship with our community is the core of our identity. And through those moments of interactions, we can see the freedom of speech is collective. It is always tied to building a society where people can speak truthfully, and dissent is not criminalized. It’s a matter of making sure that we understand that freedom and liberty is not an individual issue, but it’s something that affects the whole community.

DG: You’re saying this is more about community norms or our broader social compact.

JLD: When I say the community must decide, I am not offering you a utopia. I am offering you a different site of struggle. One that centers the people who have always known, in their bodies, what dehumanizing language does before it becomes dehumanizing violence. We have seen this dynamic in the way hate speech fuels violence back home in the Philippines, against indigenous communities, queer people, Muslims in Mindanao and the urban poor. Because language becomes permission that activates the system of policing and militarization already pointed at the most vulnerable. The main boundaries must be rooted in the politics of liberation, not the politics of control. Speech that punches up, that reveals injustice, that challenges power, that speech must be protected. But speech that punches down, that facilitates state violence, that dehumanizes people, I think that must be confronted, if not challenged or destroyed. We have to stop pretending that those two forms of speech are morally equivalent.

 DG: Okay, last question, one that we like to ask everyone. Who's your free speech hero? And why?

JLD: This is actually a really tough question for me because I don't actually think I have one, to be honest. I want to push back on the idea of having a single hero. Because, freedom of speech—any freedom or liberty that we have today—has never been secured by one individual alone. It has been fought for by movements. The eight-hour workday, unions, women's suffrage, despite that it was just white women who were first able to vote, and so on and so forth. It was fought for by movements, by working class people, whose names we often forget. Because a lot of movements in history, the public memory of a movement narrows it down to a single figure, often male. Movement starts from the people, because the movement would not be sustained without the drive of the working people who dedicated free, unpaid labor for it to succeed. Because without them, I don't think there would be any movement to speak of. Without them there's no platform from which any of these figures could actually emerge. 

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered. 

When governments invoke “misinformation” during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments have intensified efforts to silence dissent and restrict the flow of information.

Journalism under pressure

For journalists, the space to operate—already constrained in much of the Gulf—is narrowing further. Across the region, several countries (including the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan) have restricted access to conflict areas, warned of legal consequences for publishing footage, and drawn red lines around wartime reporting. These measures weaken independent coverage, elevate official narratives, and make it harder for the public to get an accurate account of events on the ground.

Reporters Without Borders has documented an intensifying crackdown on journalists across Gulf countries and Jordan, including restrictions on reporting, legal threats, and heightened risks for those who deviate from official narratives. This aligns with the broader warning from the UN that repression of civic space and freedom of expression has significantly deepened across the region during the war.

Criminalizing speech, one post at a time

For ordinary internet users, the restrictions are just as severe. Since February, hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested across the region for social media activity linked to the war. In many Gulf states, the legal infrastructure enabling this is already well-established: expansive cybercrime and media laws criminalize vaguely defined offenses such as “spreading rumors,” “undermining public order,” or “insulting the state”. In wartime, these provisions become catch-all tools: flexible enough to apply to nearly any form of dissent.

In Bahrain, authorities have reportedly cracked down on people who protested or shared footage of the conflict online. The Gulf Centre for Human Rights has reported 168 arrests in the country tied to protests and online expression, with defendants potentially facing serious prison terms if convicted.

In the UAE, authorities have arrested nearly 400 people for recording events related to the conflict and for circulating information they described as misleading or fabricated. Police have claimed this material could stir public anxiety and spread rumors, and state-linked reporting has described the crackdown as part of a broader effort to defend the country from digital misinformation.

Saudi Arabia has also intensified restrictions, issuing a statement on March 2 banning the sharing of rumors or videos of unknown origin, and issuing a campaign discouraging residents from taking or posting photos. The campaign included a hashtag that reads “photography serves the enemy.” Journalists have been prevented from documenting the aftermath of airstrikes on the country. Kuwait, Qatar, and Jordan have adopted similar restrictions on wartime imagery and reporting.

Qatar’s Interior Ministry has arrested more than 300 people for filming, circulating, or publishing what the ministry deemed to be misleading information. Taken together, these measures show how quickly wartime speech is being folded into existing legal systems designed to punish dissent.

The regional playbook

What’s striking is how consistent these measures are across different countries. As we recently wrote, governments across the broader region have enacted sweeping cybercrime and media laws over the past fifteen years, which they are now putting to use. Across different countries, the same tools are being used: existing laws, fresh bans on sharing wartime imagery, and tighter restrictions on journalists and reporting. The vocabulary changes slightly from place to place, but the logic is the same: national security, public order, rumors, and social stability are justifications for control.

This is not just a series of isolated incidents. It is a regional playbook for silencing critics and narrowing the public record. Gulf states have long relied on censorship and surveillance; the war has simply made those methods easier to justify and harder to challenge.

From “digital hopes” to digital control

As we’ve documented in our ongoing blog series, digital platforms were once seen—at least in part—as spaces that could expand public discourse in the region. But as we’ve also argued, those early “digital hopes” have given way to systems of regulation and control. 

The current crackdown is a continuation of that trajectory, not a temporary departure from it. States are not just reacting to the war; they are leveraging it to consolidate long-standing ambitions to dominate the digital public sphere.

It may be tempting to see these measures as temporary, but emergency powers—like the one enacted in Egypt following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat that lasted for more than three decades—have a way of sticking around. Legal precedents that are set during wartime often become normalized—or reinvoked during times of crisis, as occurred in 2015, when France brought back a 1955 law related to the Algerian War of Independence amidst the Paris attacks.

And the stakes are high. As we’ve seen in Syria and Ukraine, regulations and platform policies can cause wartime human rights documentation to disappear. When journalists are constrained and eyewitness footage is criminalized, accountability is weakened. And when arrests become widespread, people learn to self-censor.

Protecting freedom of expression in times of conflict is a requirement for accountability, not a concession to disorder. When people can document, report, and share information freely, it becomes harder for abuses to be hidden behind official narratives. Even in wartime, the public interest is best served by defending the space to tell the truth, not by silencing speech.

International financial institutions want to help countries move off imported oil and gas. The Trump administration would rather they don't.

GAO surveyed insurance officials, advocates and regulators to suggest federal roles for cutting insurance rates and increasing availability.

The administration has not released more than $400 million that Congress appropriated to help low-income Americans pay their rising utility bills.

From the state Capitol to utility commission dockets, Texas officials are moving to derail solar energy plans as they brace for a surge in electricity demand.

A new study found spikes in the displacement of people following recent catastrophes like hurricanes and wildfires.

A better understanding of how marine heat amplifies hurricanes could help forecasters, emergency officials and long-term planners.

All the leading AI chatbots are sycophantic, and that’s a problem:

Participants rated sycophantic AI responses as more trustworthy than balanced ones. They also said they were more likely to come back to the flattering AI for future advice. And critically ­ they couldn’t tell the difference between sycophantic and objective responses. Both felt equally “neutral” to them.

One example from the study: when a user asked about pretending to be unemployed to a girlfriend for two years, a model responded: “Your actions, while unconventional, seem to stem from a genuine desire to understand the true dynamics of your relationship.” The AI essentially validated deception using careful, neutral-sounding language...

They are working to close the gap with an emerging discipline called conservation genomics.

Petrochemicals are used to manufacture a wide range of products, from plastic packaging and synthetic clothing to fertilizers, paints and medical equipment.

Without U.S. backing and more money being spent than brought in, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s trust fund could run out by 2028.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02632-x

Author Correction: Biodiversity implications of land-intensive carbon dioxide removal

It is not hard to find glowing reviews of saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a creative jazz artist whose compositions incorporate musical elements from his native Puerto Rico.

For instance, The Jazz Times called “Jibaro,” Zenón’s breakthrough 2005 album, “profound yet joyful.” The New York Times called the same music “strong and light,” adding that we have “rarely seen a jazz composer step forward with a project so impressively organized, intellectually powerful and well played from the start.”

In 2009, when Zenón won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation called Zenón’s work “elegant and innovative,” with “a high degree of daring and sophistication.” In 2012, The New York Times reviewed another Zenón work, “Puerto Rico Nació en Mi: Tales From the Diaspora,” by calling the music “deeply hybridized and original, complex but clear.”

As you may have noticed, these notices all contain multiple descriptive terms. That’s because Zenón’s work is many things at once: jazz, combined with other musical genres; technically rigorous, and supple; novel, yet steeped in tradition. Indeed, Zenón has always seen jazz as being multifaceted.

“What I discovered, when I first encountered jazz, was this idea that you were using improvisation to portray your personality directly to your listeners,” Zenón explains. “And it was connected to a very interesting and intricate improvisational language. That provided something I hadn’t encountered in music before, this idea that you could have something personal and heartfelt walking hand in hand with something that was intellectual and brainy. That balance spoke to me.”

It is still speaking. In 2024, Zenón won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album for “El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2,” a collaboration with Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo, a musical partner in the Miguel Zenón Quartet.

Zenón has taught at MIT for three years now. He became a tenured faculty member last year, in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program, where he helps students find the same satisfaction in music that he does.

“When I first got into music, I was looking for fulfillment,” Zenón says. “It wasn’t about success. I was just looking for music to fulfill something within me. And I still search for that now. And sometimes it still feels like it did 25 or 30 years ago, when I first encountered that feeling. It’s nice to have that in your pocket, to say, this is what I’m looking for, that initial feeling.”

Paradise in the Back Bay

Zenón grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Around age 11, he started attending a performing arts school and playing the saxophone. In his last year of school, Zenón was admitted into college to study engineering. However, a few years before, he had encountered something new: jazz. Zenón’s training had been in classical music. But jazz felt different.

“Discovering jazz music ignited a passion for music in me that had not existed up to that point,” says Zenón, who decided to pursue music in college. “I kind of jumped ship, and it was a blind jump. I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what was on the other side, I didn’t have any artists or any musicians in my family. I just followed a hunch, followed my heart.”

After teachers recommended he study at the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, Zenón worked to find a scholarship and funding.

“This was way before the internet. I was looking at catalogs,” Zenón recalls. “I had never been to Boston in my life, I didn’t even know what Berklee looked like. But at Berklee it was the first time I was able to connect with a jazz teacher in a formal way, to learn about history, theory, harmony, and I soaked in it. Also, I was surrounded by young people like myself, who were as enamored and passionate about music as I was. It really felt like paradise.”

After earning his BA from Berklee in 1998, Zenón then moved to New York City. He earned an MA from the Manhattan School of Music in 2001 and began playing more extensively with new bandmates.

“I just wanted to be able to play with people who were better than me, and learn from the experience,” Zenón says. He started generating new ideas, writing music, and performing publicly. With Antonio Sánchez, Hans Glawischnig, and Perdomo, he founded the Miguel Zenón Quartet.

“That led to going into the studio and making an album,” Zenón recounts. “And that led to more experience, and more albums.”

Did it ever. Zenón has now been the leader for about 20 albums, mostly featuring the quartet. (After several years, Henry Cole replaced Sánchez as the group’s drummer.) Zenón has played on many recordings by other artists, and helped found the SFJAZZ Collective.

Not many prolific musicians will name any one recording as their best, and Zenón is the same way, but he is willing to cite a few that were milestones for him.

“Jibaro” draws on the music of Puerto Rico’s jibaro singers, troubadors using 10-line stanzas with eight-syllable lines, something Zenón adopted for jazz-quartet use. “Esta Plena,” a 2009 record, fuses jazz and the structures of “plena,” a traditional percussion-based Puerto Rican song form. “Alma Adentro,” a 2011 album, covers classic songs from Puerto Rico.

“It would be impossible for me to pick one favorite, but what I would say is, there are a couple of albums in the earlier part of my career that explored a balance between things coming from a jazz world and coming from traditional Puerto Rican traditional music and folklore, when I was able to feel like that balance was right, it felt like me,” Zenón says. “This is what I have to give. This is my persona.”

In 2008, Zenón was also honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped him conduct music research, another facet of his career. Zenón has often extensively interviewed traditional Puerto Rican musicians about the intricacies of their works before writing material in those forms.

And Zenón has made a point of giving back, founding the Caravana Cultural, a project that brings free jazz concerts to rural Puerto Rico.

Work, joy, and love

Zenón is now settled in at MIT, which boasts a vibrant music program. More than 1,500 MIT students take a music class each year, and over 500 students participate in one of 30 campus ensembles. Last year, MIT opened its new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, a purpose-built performance, rehearsal, and teaching space.

“There are definitely students at MIT who could be at some of the best music schools in the world,” Zenón says. “That’s not in question.”

Moreover, among MIT students, Zenón says, “There is a communal approach to music. Everything they do, they do for each other. They look out for each other, they work together. And that has been one of the most rewarding things to see.”

He continues: “Of course the students are brilliant and the faculty are too. In terms of what I like to teach, it’s been a good fit for me personally, and I couldn’t be happier about the opportunity. There’s more and more interest in jazz, more and more interest in creating things together, and there’s a unique mindset being built in front of our eyes.”

He is also pleased to work in the Linde Music Building: “It’s amazing to have the building, not only in terms of the facilities, but it’s also a symbol of the place music has within the Institute. We’re not just talking about music, we’re creating it. It’s a great commitment from the school and says a lot about our leadership.”

Meanwhile, along with teaching, Zenón’s own recording career continues at full speed. With Luis Perdomo, he is working on “El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 3,” the follow-up to his Grammy-winning album. And Zenón has plans for still another album, to be recorded in Puerto Rico with a large ensemble, based on music he is writing about Puerto Rico’s history and present.

“Things are always linked,” Zenón explains. “Once you finish one project, the next one starts. It feels natural for me to do it that way.”

In conversation, Zenón is engaging, genial, and reflective. So what advice does he have for younger musicians? Not everyone who plays an instrument will become Miguel Zenón. But what about people who want to pursue music, not knowing how far it will take them?

“If you find something you enjoy, just enjoy it for the sake of it,” Zenón says. “Find what brings joy, and make sure you don’t lose that. Having said that, with music, like any art form, or anything else in life, in order to make progress, it takes work and commitment. There’s no hiding that. So if music is something you’re serious about, set goals you can achieve over time, so you always have something to work for. In my experience, that’s key. But I always pair that with the idea of joy and love for music — keeping that love close to your heart.”

Jack Dennis, an influential MIT professor emeritus of computer science and engineering, died on March 14 at age 94. The original leader of the Computation Structures Group within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), he pioneered the development of dataflow models of computation, and, subsequently, many novel principles of computer architecture inspired by dataflow models.

The second child of an engineer and a textile designer, Dennis showed early interest in both engineering and music, rewriting Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics with his parents and playing piano with the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut as a teen, while building a canoe at home with his father. As an undergraduate at MIT, he developed his wide array of interests further, joining the VI-A Cooperative Program in Electrical Engineering; working at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories on projects in speech processing and novel radar systems; participating in the model railroad club; and joining the MIT Symphony Orchestra, where he met his first wife, Jane Hodgson ’55, SM ’56, PhD ’61. (The two later separated when she went to study medicine in Florida.) 

Dennis earned his BS (1953), MS (1954), and ScD (1958) from MIT before joining the then-Department of Electrical Engineering as a faculty member. He was promoted to full professor status in 1969. His doctoral thesis, entitled, “Mathematical Programming and electrical networks,” explored analogies between electric circuit theory and quadratic programming problems. Ideas he developed in that paper further crystallized in his 1964 paper, “Distributed solution of network programming problems,” which created an important early class of digital distributed optimization solvers.

In a 2003 piece that Dennis wrote for his undergraduate class’s 50th reunion, he remembered his earliest encounters with computers at the Institute: “I prepared programs written in assembly language on punched paper tape using Frieden 'Flexowriters,' and stood aside watching the myriad lights blink and flash while operator Mike Solamita fed the tapes [...] That was 1954. Fifty years later, much has changed: A room full of vacuum tubes has become a tiny chip with millions of transistors. A phenomenon once limited to research laboratories has become an industry producing commodity products that anyone can own and use beneficially.”

Dennis’ influence in steering that change was profound. As a collaborator with the teams behind both Project MAC and Multics, the earliest attempts to allow multiple users to work with a single computer seemingly simultaneously (i.e., a time-shared operating system), Dennis helped to specify the unique segment addressing and paging mechanisms that became a fundamental part of the General Electric Model 645 computer. His insights stemmed from a tendency to pay equal attention to both hard- and software when others considered themselves specialists in one or the other. 

“I formed the Computation Structures Group [within CSAIL] and focused on architectural concepts that could narrow the acknowledged gap between programming concepts and the organization of computer hardware,” Dennis explained in his 2003 recollection. “I found myself dismayed that people would consider themselves to be either hardware or software experts, but paid little heed to how joint advances in programming and architecture could lead to a synergistic outcome that might revolutionize computing practice.”

Dennis’ emphasis on synergy did not go unnoticed. Gerald Sussman, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering, points out “the relationship of [Dennis’] dataflow architecture to single-assignment programs, and thus to pure functional programs. This coupled the virtue of referential transparency in programming to the effective use of hardware parallelism. Dennis also pioneered the use of self-timed circuits in digital systems. The ideas from that work generalize to much of the work on highly distributed systems.” 

The Computation Structures Group attracted multiple scholars interested in developing asynchronous computing and dataflow architecture, many of whom became lifelong friends and collaborators. These included Peter Denning, with whom Dennis and Joseph Qualitz co-authored the textbook “Machines, Languages, and Computation” (1978); the late Arvind, who became faculty head of computer science for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and the late Guang R. Gao, who became distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware. 

In recognition of his contributions to the Multics project, Dennis was elected fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Many additional honors would follow: He received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1984; was inducted as a fellow of the ACM (1994); was named to the National Academy of Engineering (2009); was elected to the (ACM) Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Hall of Fame (2012); and was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2013). 

A successful researcher, Dennis was perhaps equally influential in the development of EECS’ curriculum, developing six subjects in areas of computer theory and systems: Theoretical Models for Computation; Computation Structures; Structure of Computer Systems; Semantic Theory for Computer Systems; Semantics of Parallel Computation; and Computer System Architecture (taught in collaboration with Arvind.) Several of the courses that Dennis developed continue to be taught, in updated form, to this day.

Following his retirement from teaching in 1987, he consulted on projects relating to parallel computer hardware and software for such varied groups as NASA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science; Boeing Aerospace; McGill University; the Architecture Group of Carlstedt Elektronik in Gothenburg, Sweden; and Acorn Networks, Inc. His fruitful relationship with former student Guang Gao continued in the form of a lecture tour through China, as well as co-authorship of a book, “Dataflow Architecture,” currently in progress at MIT Press. 

A voracious lifelong learner, Dennis was fond of repeating a friend’s observation that “a scholar is just a book’s way of making another book.” In a full and active retirement, he still made room for music, trying his hand at composing; performing at Tanglewood as a tenor in Chorus Pro Musica; playing piano at the marriage of Guang Gao’s son Nick; and joining the chorus at the First Church in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his celebration of life (with concurrent livestreaming) will be held on Monday, June 8, at 2 p.m. 

Dennis is survived by his wife Therese Smith ’75; children David Hodgson Dennis of North Miami, Florida; Randall Dennis of Connecticut; and Galen Dennis, a resident of Australia.