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.

There has been a raft of site-blocking bills in the latest Congress, and the latest is called the “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property” aka the “DEFEND IP Act.” The problem is that instead of “defending IP,” this bill will incentivize censorship, overblocking, and bad faith attempts to block access to a website. DEFEND IP Act, and all of these site-blocking proposals, threaten the open web. 

We keep seeing attempts to pass site-blocking legislation–from SOPA/PIPA in 2012 to Block BEARD, FADPA, and ACPA this year. Every one of them has at its core the rotten idea that enforcing copyrights requires building a censorship machine for websites into the architecture of the internet. This is, of course, a disaster for a free and open web. There is no way to create a mechanism for blocking access to an entire website that does not invite both deliberate abuse and lots of collateral harm to free and lawful speech.

DEFEND IP deputizes every service provider into a copyright cop, so long as a rightsholder has accused a website of copyright infringement. Let’s be clear: this isn’t about removing access to an infringing work–that already exists via the DMCA. This isn’t about getting damages from the website or the uploader. It is about making an entire website inaccessible for everyone trying to visit it.

DEFEND IP lets any rightsholder go to a court and get an order requiring service providers to block access to an entire website after alleging copyright infringement. What DEFEND IP does not have is any deterrent for someone seeking to block a website in bad faith. There are no punishments for getting a website blocked for protected speech. There are no meaningful remedies for those whose speech is vanished from the internet due to an entire website being disappeared. It creates a one-stop shop for getting an entire website–again, not an instance of infringement but an entire site hosting all sorts of user content–removed. But for those whose business, speech, or access to information is affected, there is no easy way to get the site restored.

DEFEND IP scales up the extraordinary legal structures that already exist for copyright enforcement. In doing so, it likewise scales up the problems those regimes pose to protected speech. 

We see this with DMCA takedowns all the time. We see it with bad faith takedowns used to silence criticism or commentary. We see it with the voluntary use of copyright filters by sites like YouTube, where seconds of sound matching seconds of sound in another video can prevent an entire work from reaching its audience. In these existing systems, there are at least some mechanisms of challenge available to the targeted creator. DEFEND IP has none. Instead, site owners, users, or readers will have to find a lawyer and go to court and hope to challenge the order, a slow, expensive, and daunting process

Those existing systems are already frustrating for the targeted creators and users, but under DEFEND IP a whole class of people doing protected speech will find themselves deplatformed because of the actions of others

This bill is not a defense of creativity or creators. It is a way to reshape the internet by building a vast new infrastructure of censorship. Congress should put aside DEFEND IP and the failed idea of site-blocking laws, for good. 

Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA), H.R. 10364, a bill that would give copyright owners a new legal tool to block Americans’ access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. 

The basic idea is all too familiar, and it’s still dangerous. A copyright owner first asks a court to label a foreign website a “foreign piracy site.” Once that happens, the copyright owner could seek orders requiring internet service providers, DNS providers, and—new and explicit in this bill—VPN providers to take “commercially reasonable steps” to stop their users in the United States from accessing those sites. The decision to label a website as a “foreign piracy site” can happen without the accused site even showing up in court to defend itself. 

ACPA Goes Further Than Other Site-Blocking Proposals 

In some ways, the ACPA is even worse than a site-blocking legislation introduced last year, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), which EFF also opposed. That bill at least excluded companies that provide only VPN services, as well as providers that offer DNS resolution exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols. The ACPA drops those protections. In fact, the bill explicitly includes VPNs among the service providers that can be ordered to block access to a website. 

The bill also broadens the definition of a “piracy site.” Last year’s site blocking bill covered sites with “no commercially significant purpose or use” other than infringement. ACPA changes that to sites with “only limited commercially significant purpose or use” beyond infringement. In other words, under ACPA, even a website with legitimate commerce going on could still be labeled a “foreign piracy site” and ultimately blocked for all Americans. 

Better Process Still Doesn’t Fix The Problem 

The ACPA includes some procedural protections, such as requiring service providers that could be subject to a blocking order to receive legal notice and an opportunity to respond. The bill also requires courts to consider the potential harm to other websites and internet users before ordering intermediaries to block websites. It further requires the copyright owner to post a bond, in an amount determined by the court, sufficient to cover the costs and damages incurred by any service provider found to have been wrongfully enjoined. The bill also provides a mechanism for operators or users of third-party online services affected by erroneous blocking to seek compensation after the fact in certain circumstances. Finally, a site operator can ask a court to rescind its designation as a “foreign piracy site.”

These safeguards are significant and positive changes, but they don’t solve the basic, and severe, due process problem. The initial decision to label a website a “foreign piracy site” can still be made without the site operator appearing to defend itself. The court can appoint a “special master,” which is an independent expert who helps the judge evaluate evidence, to review the copyright owner’s case—but that step is not required. In any case, a special master  is not a lawyer who actually represents the accused website, nor the users whose access to information and speech may be affected. 

We know what site-blocking looks like when it’s put into practice. Supporters of site-blocking like to point to its use in other countries. But what we’re seeing in other countries is serious collateral damage to lawful websites. In Italy, 510 benign, non-streaming websites, including a Catholic convent and a telehealth platform, were blocked by the country’s “Piracy Shield” program. In Spain, a site-blocking system blocked more than 550,000 domains during soccer broadcasts, including sites belonging to Greenpeace and Harvard University.

Congress Should Reject Site-Blocking Proposals

More than a decade ago, Congress abandoned SOPA and PIPA after internet users pushed back against site-blocking and other threats to the open internet. We shouldn't start building that infrastructure now.

ACPA adds some safeguards, but those don’t fundamentally change what Congress is being asked to create: a system for blocking Americans’ access to entire websites at the request of copyright owners. By explicitly bringing VPNs into that system, the bill also reaches into basic tools that people use to access the internet safely and privately. Adding somewhat better procedures to a bad idea doesn’t turn it into a good idea.

Judge Allows Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Move Forward

NEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online can move forward, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

On October 1, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The case was filed in October 2025 on behalf of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Muslim Advocates (MA), and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA) represent the labor unions.

This decision is a victory: The Court held that claims that the government’s social media surveillance program is harming the unions’ members, as well as hampering the ability of the unions to associate with their members and potential members, can move forward.

The Court ruled that: "This threat of adverse immigration consequences, under a government whose harsh immigration crackdowns has been heavily publicized and reported on, is certainly enough to 'deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights.' It is objectively reasonable that noncitizens would limit their expression of disfavored viewpoints under the [Challenged Surveillance Program] given the credible threat of adverse immigration action from the Government."

"The freedom of Plaintiffs' members to speak, associate, and appear publicly is not incidental to union work, but rather is the mechanism through which unions recruit, organize, communicate, and bargain," the Court further explained. "A program alleged to silence members and drive them from the unions' rolls therefore strikes at the unions' representational function itself, which is the 'grounds that bring [their] membership together.'"

Since taking power, the Trump administration has created a mass surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected speech by noncitizens lawfully present in the U.S. Using AI and other automated technologies, the program surveils the social media accounts of visa and green card holders with the goal of identifying and punishing those who express viewpoints the government disfavors. The surveillance program has been paired with a public intimidation campaign—silencing not just noncitizens with immigration status, but also the families, coworkers, and friends with whom their lives are integrated.

In October 2025, UAW, CWA, and AFT sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security, alleging that this viewpoint-based surveillance program violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act.

"No one should have to fear government surveillance or retaliation against their immigration status for expressing their views or participating in their union. We're pleased the Court has allowed this challenge to move forward and will continue fighting to protect the rights of everyone to speak, organize, and advocate without fear," said UAW President Shawn Fain.

"This is a victory for working people, for the labor movement, and for our democracy," said CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. "Our very freedom is under attack by the Trump administration's online surveillance program, and today's decision is a critical first step toward affirming our freedom to speak, to protest, to organize without fear of government retaliation. These essential freedoms underpin our union rights to join together and fight to improve our working conditions. CWA is a fighting union, and our members remain ready to stand together to protect our rights and our freedoms."

"Today’s decision is a critical step toward vindicating our Constitutional right to freedom of speech and rejecting the Trump Administration’s cynical attempts to criminalize and punish those who disagree with them," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "Government surveillance to monitor the 'opposition' is a tool of dictators that erodes the democratic principles this country was founded on. We will continue to remain vigilant in defending our 250-year-old rights—not just for our members, but for all Americans."

"Our plaintiff-unions have members that have wholly changed the way they interact with social media—including limiting their engagement with union content—because of the government's social media surveillance program," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lisa Femia. "Many have stopped posting online together, and have even stopped engaging in offline activities, for fear of being scrutinized or targeted related to immigration benefits. We are pleased that the Court has agreed to let the case proceed, and allow unions and their members to seek justice for infringement of their rights."

"Today’s ruling is an important step forward in holding the government accountable for its ever-expansive online surveillance program that silenced non-citizens, stoking fear that exercise of their protected First Amendment rights could result in unfavorable treatment on their immigration applications or worse." said Sadaf Hasan, Staff Attorney at Muslim Advocates. "We will keep fighting until all non-citizens are able to freely associate, organize, and speak out without the looming threat of visa revocation and immigration enforcement simply because the government dislikes their views."

"Defendants' attempt to evade accountability on specious jurisdictional grounds was rightly rejected by the Court," said Nick Jones, a student in the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. "We are excited to see the case now proceed to the merits, where we expect to prevail as well.”

For the ruling: https://www.eff.org/document/uaw-v-dos-opinion-order-denying-motion-dismiss

For more about the litigation: https://eff.org/cases/united-auto-workers-v-us-department-state

Contacts:
Electronic Frontier Foundation: press@eff.org
Muslim Advocates: melissa@muslimadvocates.org

St. Lucie County in Florida discovered (alt link) a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can’t identify, and that the county government had not permitted.

I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown.

My guess is that in the StingRay case, the devices were operated by foreign actors. This Flock case is more likely some local government entity that didn’t bother getting approval. Were I a foreign actor, I would rather hack the existing Flock network—like Israel ...

In a new blow to Ola Bini’s legal guarantees, Ecuadorean authorities retained the free software developer and security expert yesterday in Quito and ordered his immediate deportation from the country. He is barred from returning to Ecuador for 10 years. 

According to information released by his lawyer, Bini was intercepted by a car with four people who identified themselves as immigration agents. He was then taken to an immigration office without further information or a formal order from a competent authority. There, officials told Bini that his visa had been revoked but didn’t show any supporting document.  

Bini's defense filed a habeas corpus to safeguard his freedom and prevent his deportation. Yet, Ecuadorian authorities affirmed that the developer represents a threat or risk to public security and the state structure, and must leave the country. The ground for deportation is a secret report which allegedly asserts that Bini committed acts against the security of Ecuador. The defense could not access its contents.  

The deportation hearing started yesterday at 5pm Quito time. Human rights organizations tried to attend the hearing but were denied entry. The hearing was suspended but later reinstalled establishing his immediate deportation. Ola Bini was relocated to Quito's airport and must stay there until fly back to Sweden. 

The case that led to Bini's unfounded criminal conviction has expired (the statute of limitations ran out) and the court had already formally lifted all precautionary measures against him. Yesterday's events open a new chapter in the nefarious persecution of Ola Bini by Ecuadorean authorities.  

Since Bini’s arbitrary arrest in 2019, EFF has reported about his criminal prosecution fraught with misconceptions and rights violations. The script of what happened yesterday follows the same patterns we saw in the entire case, from its outset with unjustified allegations that Bini was a national security risk. The Observation Mission of Ola Bini’s case, joined by EFF and other digital and human rights organizations, has published reports and raised international awarenness about the perils of this case to the protection of rights online and the beneficial work of security experts.  

In a case surrounded by political interests, Ola Bini’s unanimous acquittal by the lower court in 2023 was overturned after the prosecution’s appeal. The majority of the appeals court convicted Bini for attempted unauthorized access of a telecommunications system without actual evidence to corroborate the accusation claims.  

Now, once again we must sound the alarm. Ecuadorean authorities must explain the accusations against the security expert. We will remain vigilant and ensure that at least this time his rights are respected.  

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them.

Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. The candidates themselves are quiet about how they are using the technology in their own campaigns. It’s a sensitive issue that we have been tracking closely since we started writing our book, Rewiring Democracy...

The book “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” by Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management, walks readers through the 24 steps of starting a venture. With more than half a million copies sold, the approach has proven remarkably effective: MIT students who use the framework in the delta v startup accelerator program have a 61 percent survival/acquisition rate and have collectively raised over $3 billion dollars.

But while the framework is taught at hundreds of colleges around the world, it is not designed for younger students who want to learn about entrepreneurship. To fill that gap, the Trust Center created a free, AI-powered youth entrepreneurship platform called Dear Dreamer, made possible through a gift from the Frank and Eileen Foundation. 

Dear Dreamer is open to all students in middle and high school. It adapts the disciplined entrepreneurship framework into a digital, self-paced learning experience featuring short educational videos, interactive exercises, and personalized feedback on the user’s idea. Aulet says the goal is to empower 50,000 young entrepreneurs by 2030.

MIT News spoke with Aulet about the mission of the project and how it came together.

Q: What was the impetus for creating Dear Dreamer?

A: We’ve had a lot of success teaching the disciplined entrepreneurship framework at MIT. Then we made it a course on the online learning platform edX, and we got hundreds of thousands of people taking the class. I used to get emails from people saying, “For the first time in my life, I see myself as an entrepreneur,” or “I see economic security.” At MIT, we often say, “MIT in the world, for the world.” At the Trust Center, we see our mission as, first, train people here at MIT, but also to create more entrepreneurs outside of MIT. 

The platform was inspired by the vision of Audrey McLoghlin, the founder and CEO of apparel brand Frank and Eileen and president of the Frank and Eileen Foundation. In my first meeting with Audrey, we were already asking ourselves, “How do we make more entrepreneurs in the world?” I showed her Jetpack, MIT’s generative AI tool trained on disciplined entrepreneurship, which walks MIT students through the entrepreneurial process, and her eyes lit up. She said, “This is how we create more entrepreneurs: We make the work that you guys are doing here accessible to young people.” She wished she had a tool like this when she first started. She also said her daughter wants to be an entrepreneur, but students don’t get much guidance on entrepreneurship at school. MIT has been a great place to keep making this more accessible.

Q: How does the platform work?

A: It takes the core disciplined entrepreneurship curriculum that we know works from our data, and makes it more interactive and engaging for young people. We spent a lot of time working with younger students to figure out how to make it more digestible to a 10-year old, 12-year old, or 14-year old. We put in different case studies and examples for each step of the framework, and we’ve designed the user interface to make it more like Instagram or YouTube, with videos featuring people that students can relate to. But ultimately the content follows the same path we know works; it’s just presented differently from what you would present to an MIT MBA or PhD.

Q: How might learning about entrepreneurship benefit students?

A: Entrepreneurship is a mindset, a skillset, and a way of operating. It allows you to deal with change, and the world’s rate of change is going faster and faster. It’s really not just about founding companies. Founding companies is a great way to learn the mentality that, ‘We can be different. We can build something. We can achieve a lot.’ Someone once said, ‘If you give a person a job, you give them dignity.’ But if you make someone an entrepreneur, it’s like giving them super dignity. They go from a job seeker to a job creator, and they can focus on the things that they’re most interested in, working with the people they want, in the culture they want. We teach students the entrepreneurial mindset and we train them to systematically take an idea and then come up with a solution in an ambiguous, uncertain environment, and iterate on that. 

Everyone might not start a company, but even if they go to work at bigger companies, there are a lot of benefits to the entrepreneurial mindset. I’m an entrepreneur now and I’m at MIT, which is not a startup. In a world that’s moving faster and faster, everyone has to deal with change and ambiguity. Starting companies is just a great way to learn. It’s kind of like learning to paint from a blank canvas. 

In 2017, a man named Michael walked onto stage in front of a packed Kresge Auditorium at MIT and attempted to draw a spiral, a common test doctors use to diagnose Parkinson’s disease. His tremors, caused by the disease, made the exercise difficult. 

Then, Michael put on a wristband device made by a team of MIT students as part of 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), who were presenting their prototype that evening.

Michael pressed a button and the device produced a subtle vibration. The vibration sent signals up his wrist and into his brain. His tremors dramatically decreased, and within seconds he was able to draw the spiral with much more precision, to a roaring ovation from the audience.

“When this device is turned on, I feel like I used to feel when I didn’t have Parkinson’s disease,” Michael told the crowd. “It’s an amazing, amazing feeling.”

The performance was so impressive that the student team received requests from classmates and others asking where they could buy the device for family and friends living with tremors. Unfortunately, the students had to explain there was only one — for the time being.

The event set off a near decade-long journey that began by leveraging MIT entrepreneurial resources like MIT Sandbox, MIT FUSE, and the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. In 2020, the student team turned into an official company, Encora Therapeutics. But there were still dozens of hardware iterations ahead. Then there were clinical trials. In one trial, 78 percent of patients reported benefits after 90 days of home use.

This February, nine years after Michael’s brave demonstration, all that work finally paid off: The FDA cleared Encora’s device to help adults with essential tremor, a condition similar to Parkinson’s that causes shaking, often in the hands. 

“It’s been a long and difficult — very difficult — journey, but also very rewarding, especially when we get feedback from patients,” says Daniel Carballo ’18, SM ’20, an Encora co-founder and vice president of strategy. “We hear stories from patients about how they’ve struggled with their condition and how much they benefit from this. It reminds us why we keep going.”

From classroom to commercialization

The three founders of Encora who are still with the company are Carballo, Allison Davanzo ’18, and Kyle Pina ’18. They were each seniors in 2017 when they enrolled in 2.009, MIT’s popular product-design class.

The semester began with a brainstorming session in which groups of about 17 students were asked to come up with dozens of potential product ideas. Carballo proposed a wearable device that used mechanical vibration to send signals to the brain to reduce tremors. The initial idea was to help patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“It was one of hundreds of throwaway ideas,” Carballo recalls. “The initial concept was inspired by classes I had taken in robotics around neural control of movement. I had a preliminary understanding of how an electromechanical device might interact with the body’s control systems and feedback loops that control movement to relieve pathological control of movement.”

The team eventually whittled their long list of ideas down to a few. Carballo’s idea was finally selected by a vote of 16-1 — with Carballo the only dissenting vote.

“I tried to explain to the team that this was so far-fetched that there was no way, in one semester, we would be able to make anything,” Carballo recalls. “Thankfully, I got outvoted.”

Through most of the semester, Carballo’s pessimism looked justified. At every class milestone, the team lagged behind other teams. Then, the week before final presentations, they met Michael, whose severe hand tremors were the result of early-onset Parkinson’s.

“He was a home renovator, so he worked with his hands, but his tremors had progressed to the point that he struggled to turn a screwdriver, use a drill, or even fill out paperwork,” Carballo recalls. “He had become reliant on his wife and daughter not only to run his business, but to help him with everyday activities.”

By this point, the 2.009 team had a prototype that would vibrate to send mechanical feedback to the brain. Carballo described it as “a foamcore box with a Raspberry Pi chip and some wires coming out.” When Michael put on the device and turned it on, his tremors dramatically decreased.

“It was like a light switch turned on and his tremors stopped,” Carballo says. “His wife and daughter started crying. A week later, he was gracious enough to repeat the process on stage for the final presentations.”

The presentation — and the outpouring of interest from people who wanted it for loved ones with Parkinson’s — made the team determined.

“It showed us there were a lot of people with this problem that could really benefit from this,” Carballo says. “A subset of the team became possessed. It would have been such a shame to know this could exist and to have it never leave the classroom.”

Some team members began using MIT’s entrepreneurial resources to commercialize the technology, initially focusing on Parkinson’s. They ran their first clinical trial with 20 Parkinson’s patients in 2022 in collaboration with MassGeneral Brigham. But they soon learned more patients are living with essential tremor.

“It was a greater unmet need,” Carballo says. “There are a lot of drugs being developed for Parkinson’s disease, but essential tremor hasn’t experienced that same innovation.”

Today scientists think tremor is caused by malfunctioning signals in the regions of the brain responsible for interpreting sensory input and coordinating movement.

“In these diseases, neurotransmitter deficiencies result in this pulsed signaling in the brain that manifests as tremors that are basically pulsed motor outputs,” Carballo says.

One current approach to target those signals is surgery that involves drilling holes in the skull to insert electrodes that drive new electrical patterns in the brain. Encora’s watch-like product targets the same brain regions with mechanical vibrations at the wrist.

“We’re applying mechanical stimulus, basically vibration, to stretch receptors in the wrist, which tell your body where it is in space,” Carballo explains. “The stimulation causes the receptors to activate and send a patterned signal to peripheral nerves of the wrist, that then carry the signal to the peripheral nervous system and into the central nervous system, to the same regions of the brain targeted by surgery.”

In 2024, Encora ran a randomized control trial with 47 patients living with essential tremor. Last year, the team ran a 59-person trial where patients used the devices at home. In both trials, more than 70 percent of patients experienced meaningful improvement.

The results were promising enough to gain what’s known as 510(k) clearance from the FDA for use as a medical device, in February of this year.

Helping patients

Most patients see rapid benefit when using Encora’s device. Patients have described the device as life-changing. Some say it allows them to do tasks they haven’t been able to do in years.

“We see some patients using the device 12, 14 hours a day,” Carballo says.

Today, Encora is focused on building a national sales force and working to secure coverage from insurers. As the company ramps up production, the product will finally become available for patients who qualify.

Further down the line, Encora hopes to fulfill its original mission of helping mitigate tremors in patients with Parkinson’s. Carballo believes the approach also holds promise for many other patients.

“There is a surprisingly long list of diseases that this could work for,” Carballo says.  “The most obvious are neurological movement disorders, but the bigger picture of wearable neuromodulation is a rapidly growing field that has seen therapeutic benefit across a broad range of diseases. We see this as a platform technology.”

“What you see is what you get” is a guiding principle for many software engineers — create programs where the content you’re editing looks the same as the final product. But when you’re using generative artificial intelligence systems to 3D print, say, a mug, you’ll likely get a cup that can’t hold your coffee. Why is that?

The issue is that AI models understand how an object should look, but not how it works, leading to impractical designs that undermine an item’s intended use. Even if you want to fix these errors, the models are typically hard to edit, especially for users new to 3D design.

A new approach called “InstructMesh” makes it much easier to design and print household items, accessories, and robots that work in the real world. The design software, which was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Google, and Northeastern University, can be prompted to generate a 3D design for a pair of glasses, for instance, and users can then highlight specific parts of the blueprint they’d like refined before 3D printing. It’s an AI-driven interface designed to understand how these designs should look and which edits experts and novices alike want to make, helping them create the objects they actually want to see.

CSAIL researchers used InstructMesh to put a personalized, creative spin on otherwise regular items. For example, the tool produced a mug that appears to be enveloped by a dragon, with its tail being the handle. It also fabricated a shiny blue whistle resembling a shell and a pair of glasses with butterfly wings spreading out just above the lens. Getting even more creative, it made an octopus-like dispenser, with liquids flowing out of each tentacle to distribute drinks into several cups at once.

What makes InstructMesh so adept at following such unique prompts? It pairs Microsoft’s TRELLIS system, which creates 3D models from text and image prompts, with the large language model (LLM) GPT-4, which supports ChatGPT — in other words, visual and textual knowledge combined.

“We wanted to bring together the talents of 3D generators and the reasoning skills of LLMs in an interactive space to make objects that people actually want,” says Faraz Faruqi SM ’22, PhD ’26, lead author on a paper presenting the project, graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and recent CSAIL affiliate. “Language models are great at text and images, while TRELLIS’s talent lies in its ability to create 3D models, since it’s seen so many.”

InstructMesh’s strengths come in handy in other, more surprising areas. MIT scientists used the program to fabricate a knee brace that looks like denim to match a patient’s jeans. InstructMesh can even help create robots — that is, clever enclosures that house wireless components. The researchers made a “bristle bot” that resembles a colorful shrimp to demonstrate this. It has a motor hidden inside, and when switched on, it can slide across surfaces, sort of like a wind-up toy.

Faruqi and his colleagues found that InstructMesh could easily make their desired items. But what would someone who’s never 3D modeled anything think of their program? And could they really detect design flaws before fabrication?

The team has TRELLIS recreate popular 3D models found on Thingiverse, a platform home to millions of 3D printable models, to help them find out. Nearly 80 percent of the models it generated were structurally flawed in some way. CSAIL researchers then asked novices to identify and fix these issues in InstructMesh — and they were able to do both around 90 percent of the time, as reviewed by an expert. What these newcomers lacked in expertise, they made up for in intuition.

InstructMesh scaffolds the actual modeling process, which previously required domain expertise in 3D modeling tools. “With manipulation happening in the latent space of the generative model, InstructMesh supports natural language description of issues, and creates interpretive changes in the geometry for the user to evaluate and approve,” says Faruqi. 

Users then created items resembling things like phone stands and vases, noting that InstructMesh was easy to use. They also found that InstructMesh enabled them to express a wide range of ideas, while the sliders gave them more precision to make certain tweaks, such as enlarging or extruding a particular part of the model.

“The users got what they prompted for and easily tweaked designs where needed,” adds Faruqi. “What they saw is what they got, and the items worked as advertised, so to speak.” 

While users enjoyed using the InstructMesh, Faruqi has an even grander vision for the project. He now works at Google, where he may soon incorporate InstructMesh into an augmented reality (AR) platform. The idea: Prompt the system by explaining what you need using the context of your surroundings, then it’ll rapidly 3D print it (e.g., making a phone case that matches your wallet).

InstructMesh may also begin to incorporate physics simulations to model how your design may react to specific uses, such as whether a bowl breaks when dropped, and which materials would work best. The software might also integrate the more recent TRELLIS.2 to refine even smaller features in 3D models.

Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and mechanical engineering at MIT, and a member of CSAIL, is a senior author on the paper. Faruqi and Mueller wrote the paper with Google researchers Ahmed Katary ’23; Fabian Manhardt; Vrushank Phadnis MEng ’13, PhD ’20; Ruofei Du; and Federico Tombari. Other co-authors were Northeastern University Assistant Professor Megan Hofmann along with several CSAIL colleagues: Demircan Tas SM ’24 and SMArchS ’24, a PhD student in EECS and architecture; former visiting researcher Theresa Hradilak; Ning Zhang ’25, a graduate student in EECS; postdoc Jiaji Li; and Martin Nisser SM ’19, PhD ’24.

The researchers’ work was supported, in part, by Google and the MIT-HPI Collaborative Research Program. They will present it at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in November.

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the county at risk and is especially dangerous for immigrants, abortion seekers, and other targets of the federal government.

Today, we sent the Marin County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) a demand letter and request for records under the California Public Records Act following the Point Reyes Light’s recent report that MCSO provided non-California agencies access to its ALPR database. This directly violates California law and the terms of the 2022 Settlement Agreement in our case Lagleva v. Marin County Sheriff.

ALPRs are cameras that capture images of vehicles and upload their location to a searchable, shareable database. They are a mass surveillance technology that collects data indiscriminately on every vehicle on the road.

Sharing ALPR data with out-of-state or federal agencies—for any reason—violates California law (SB 34). If this data is shared for the purpose of assisting with immigration enforcement, agencies violate an additional California law (SB 54).  

But network audit logs obtained by Point Reyes Light show that during the final months of 2024, Marin County Sheriff’s Office shared ALPR data with multiple out-of-state and federal agencies, including 254,131 times in November 2024 alone. Many of these searches were conducted by law enforcement in states that impose severe restrictions on reproductive care and have a history of assisting ICE, including Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas.

This sharing violated state law and “exposed sensitive driver location information to misuse by the federal government and by states that lack California’s robust privacy protections,” the letter explains.

This is not the first time MCSO has shared Marin County ALPR information with federal and out-of-state agencies in violation of California law.

Back in 2021, on behalf of community activists, EFF and ACLU sued the Marin County Sheriff for illegally sharing millions of local drivers’ license plate numbers and location data with hundreds of federal and out-of-state agencies, including ICE and Border Patrol.

The parties eventually reached a settlement, under which the Sheriff agreed to stop sharing license plate and location information with agencies outside of California to comply with state laws SB 34 and SB 54.

“MCSO’s November 2024 audit report shows that your office has violated not only SB 34, but the terms of the Lagleva Settlement Agreement as well,” the letter explains.

EFF and ACLU are urging MCSO to launch a thorough audit of its ALPR database, institute new protocols for compliance, and assess penalties for any employee found to be sharing ALPR information out of state.

“While your office claims that it took deliberate steps to disable nationwide data-access capabilities and ensure your system operated within strict privacy safeguards, you have not explained how outside agencies nonetheless obtained access, how you plan to prevent future violations of SB 34 and the Lagleva Settlement Agreement, or why you did not take steps to inform the public and the Marin County Inspector General once you learned about the breach,” the letter explains.

As we’ve demonstrated over and over again, many California agencies continue to ignore these laws, exposing sensitive location information to misuse and putting entire communities at risk. As federal agencies continue to carry out violent ICE raids, and many states enforce harsh, draconian restrictions on abortion, ALPR technology is already being used to target and surveil immigrants and abortion seekers. These incidents have made it clear that having ALPR programs are incompatible with the protection of residents. California agencies, including Marin County Sheriff’s Office, have an obligation to protect the rights of Californians, even when those rights are not recognized by other states or the federal government. 

See the full letter here: https://www.eff.org/document/20261001-letter-aclu-norcal-and-eff-marin-sheriff

If you are an Android user, you may have noticed it already: Google has begun allowing rival, third-party app stores to be distributed through the Google Play Store. And if you are a developer, you may have noticed new options for billing and distributing your apps. 

For years, Epic Games, maker of games such as Fortnite, has been suing Google, alleging violations of antitrust law. Specifically at issue were Google's restrictions on the distribution of alternate app stores through the Play Store, restrictions on app developers who have little practical choice but to distribute their apps through the Play Store, and Google’s rules governing in-app payments and the fees associated with them. 

Epic’s challenge ultimately resulted in a court order requiring significant changes to Google’s practices. Among other changes, rival, third-party Android app stores are now allowed to access the Play Store’s catalog and to be distributed through the Google Play Store. Developers also have greater freedom to direct users to alternative payment and distribution options.   

These changes give users and developers more choices and create new opportunities for competition in the Android ecosystem, breaking the power Google once had over many facets of the app ecosystem. This is a win for competition and antitrust enforcement. But the benefits can extend beyond competition itself—more meaningful choice can also create opportunities for greater freedom of online expression, privacy, and security. 

With alternate app stores able to compete for Android users, Google no longer has the first and last say on what apps can reach users and on what terms. Developers have more options for reaching their audiences, rather than having a single company’s rules determine the terms of access. 

More importantly, Android users are no longer trapped in an arrangement of feudal security with Google, where users must depend on the goodwill of a monopolist to protect them and guarantee their safety. If Google does not adequately protect their data or security, Android users can now switch to a competitor that does a better job. And if that competitor fails them, they can choose another. 

Competition in the app store market therefore means competition not only over which apps are offered, the user experience, and developer fees, but also over privacy and security. Users and developers gain something fundamental in the process: the ability to choose. 

As we’ve previously written, antitrust has never been just about prices—it’s also about power. It is about who gets to control and shape the future of the internet. A world in which a handful of dominant platforms can dictate how users access apps or programs, how developers reach them, and what rules govern those interactions is one in which users have fewer meaningful choices. Without Epic’s successful antitrust challenge and the changes that followed, users would have remained in a world of feudal security, where they would have been left begging their feudal tech lord for more. 

The arrival of competitor app stores on Google Play does not solve every problem with the Android ecosystem. But it opens the door to something that dominant platforms have spent years trying to keep out: meaningful competition. And each new competitor gives users another opportunity to choose something better. 

Related Cases: Epic Games v. Google

When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works, users rely on courts to recognize that laws can’t make technical impossibilities a reality. That’s why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah’s attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). 

In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73, the state’s draconian anti-VPN age verification law. The decision comes as EFF submitted our comments to the Utah Department of Commerce, detailing how forcing platforms to detect and block privacy-preserving tools undermines user privacy and security worldwide while demanding the impossible.  

What SB 73 Does 

Signed into law earlier this year, SB 73 attempted to regulate adult websites by requiring them to block VPN users or to identify the physical location of visitors using them or similar tools that mask their network traffic. It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks. This made Utah, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates. 

The Utah federal court halted enforcement of the law's VPN provisions last week, ruling that the law likely violates the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on passing laws that significantly burden businesses and people outside Utah’s borders.  

SB 73 burdens the rights of all internet users outside of Utah because it requires adult websites to either know every visiting user’s physical location, and then block those in Utah, or to verify every visitor’s age just in case they might be in Utah. The law’s “actual-location provision in practice requires an entity to perform age verification services for every user visiting its site from any location because the entity would violate the law if even one of those users happened to be obfuscating,” the court wrote. The court essentially ruled that Utah has less-burdensome ways to prevent Utah minors from accessing adult websites than requiring all users in the world to comply with SB 73. 

Aylo’s lawsuit does not challenge SB 73’s provision prohibiting the websites covered by the law from sharing information about VPNs. 

The Legal Challenge 

This court order follows months of legal maneuvering.  

Initially set to go into effect in May 2026, SB 73 sparked an immediate constitutional challenge from Aylo, the parent company of major online adult platforms like Pornhub. In response to the lawsuit, Utah and Aylo initially agreed that the state would pause enforcement while the court considered the preliminary injunction request or until administrative rules setting specific compliance terms were finalized. Those proposed compliance rules (R152-78B, see Utah State Bulletin, page 6) were published by the Utah Department of Commerce’s Division of Consumer Protection on September 1st, and EFF submitted formal comments to the Department in opposition. According to the notice, the proposed rules could be effective as soon as October 8, 2026. However, Judge Barlow’s decision means that it cannot be enforced pending further action by the court. 

The Ruling 

EFF welcomes Judge Barlow’s ruling, which recognizes the fundamental disconnect between state legislation of the internet and how technology works. In his ruling, Judge Barlow noted that the statute requires a technical impossibility on pain of legal liability. “Aylo is correct that the statute, as amended, now essentially imposes strict liability for entities like it when it comes to determining the location of its websites’ users.” 

The court recognized that the problem is that SB 73 “requires entities like Aylo to geolocate its website users with perfection to avoid liability.” But, at the same time, the court acknowledged “that geolocation perfection is not presently possible.” 

EFF explained this technical impossibility in our comment to the Department of Commerce. VPNs protect user privacy by routing web traffic through intermediary servers. Because destination websites only see the IP address of the VPN server, they have no reliable mechanism to tell whether a connection originates from Salt Lake City, Seattle, or Shanghai. So, under Utah's current statutory framework, platforms are left with an impossible choice: completely block all VPN traffic nationwide or withdraw access from Utah entirely. Judge Barlow agreed, asserting:  

Because the law requires perfection in the absence of perfect geolocation tools, Aylo would need to verify those 28 million users—whether located in Salt Lake City, Boston, New Orleans, Anchorage, or Honolulu—to ensure compliance and avoid liability.

The Rulemaking 

The administrative rules drafted by the state compelled commercial entities to implement "commercially reasonable geolocation obfuscation detection systems", which is a directive, we argue, that demands a technical impossibility.  

In our submission to the Utah Department of Commerce, EFF also detailed how these rules force an invasive data collection regime onto internet users everywhere. So, in response to internet users trying to avoid invasive data collection required by age-verification requirements, SB 73 requires even greater surveillance of internet users’ online activities. The Department’s suggested detection heuristics (like monitoring connection latency or device time zones) are notoriously unreliable and easily skewed by normal network conditions. This active surveillance inevitably leads to widespread misclassification, unwarranted access blocks, and severe impacts on users’ privacy far beyond Utah's borders.  

You can read EFF’s full comments to the Department of Commerce here. 

What Now? 

As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship. 

Mandating invasive tracking and punishing the use of essential security tools turns genuine privacy concerns into mere compliance theater and requires more state-mandated surveillance of internet users who rely on VPNs. As is the case in heavily censored regions, VPN services and obfuscation tools will simply adapt, making this framework fundamentally unsustainable.  

As we’ve said time and time again: the internet will always route around censorship. 

While Utah legislators have indicated they may attempt to revise the law during the next legislative session, the court's preliminary injunction sets an important precedent: state lawmakers should not weaponize age verification to force dragnet tracking or undermine essential security tools.  

As other states consider similar anti-VPN proposals, EFF will continue pushing back against these technically impossible mandates and defending users’ privacy and anonymity. Thus, we urge legislators and regulators to reject anti-privacy rules, prioritize real user security, and safeguard constitutional protections for all users. 

Over the years, the major tech companies have found all sorts of ways to embed themselves into our lives. We often use their software, their AI tools, their social media, and their operating systems by default without even thinking about potential alternatives. It’s time to rethink that relationship. 

Last year, we created Opt Out October to help remind ourselves of the variety of ways we can take back control of our data through small steps inside apps, operating systems, and other various forms. This year, we highlight the idea that sometimes the best way to control your data is to leave a platform, app, or operating system altogether. 

To do so, we’ve created a hub of resources sharing ways to find new software that isn’t made by the tech giants, take advantage of the growing universe of new social media options, install a whole new operating system, and better control how various popular tools and software use your data for AI training. 

As an incentive, we’ve made merit badges like the one below to help you track your own wins and share them with others. Complete any of these tasks and let the world know by sharing that accomplishment on social media or changing your profile image! Better, more privacy-respecting, and less-enshittified tools are out there. We just have to find and use them.

Head over to our Opt Out October landing page and start taking the first steps to regaining control of the tools and software you use.

MIT Future Fest launched on Wednesday afternoon, featuring a visit from Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey before an opening panel at Kresge Auditorium.

Both Healey and MIT President Sally Kornbluth emphasized the power of curiosity and innovation during introductory remarks, while formally kicking off MIT Future Fest as a new kind of event that opens MIT’s doors to the world.

Spanning five days and featuring talks from leading MIT scholars, panel discussions, open labs, exhibitions, performances, screenings, and much more, MIT Future Fest adds up to a demonstration of campus research, teaching, thinking, and discovery.

“MIT and Massachusetts are known around the world as leaders in innovation,” Healey said. “Future Fest is a chance to celebrate that. But it’s also a chance to connect with each other. To learn from each other, and to imagine what comes next. In life sciences and biotech, robotics, advanced manufacturing, in energy and climate technology and quantum, and in the people who make it all happen.”  

In remarks preceding Healey’s talk, Kornbluth observed that “in a world as complex and interconnected as ours, we aim to invent the future. We need all the help we can get, and that’s why it’s so important to have all of you join us over the next five days in exploration, conversation, and curiosity.”

Future Fest also underscores that at MIT, as Kornbluth put it, “We feel a drive to explore, to understand, to solve, to invent, to design, all in service of society.” 

Since its founding, “MIT has long stood at the forefront of innovation and invention,” Healey noted. “‘The future starts here’ isn’t just a fitting theme for the next few days. It’s something we’ve been doing for the better part of 250 years in Massachusetts.”

Healey later appeared at an event about ocean sciences at the MIT Museum, whose staff have helped develop and organize MIT Future Fest. 

All told, MIT Future Fest features over 100 speakers at more than 50 events, among many other activities. The MIT Museum is free to the public during Future Fest; MIT’s newly opened Met Warehouse is hosting its first public events on Saturday; and Sunday features the Cambridge Science Carnival, a series of family activities. 

The remarks by Healey and Kornbluth were followed by a panel discussion, “The Future Begins Here,” featuring participants Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, founder of Flagship Pioneering and co-founder of Moderna; Sangeeta Bhatia SM ’93, PhD ’97, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and director of MIT’s Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine; and Bob Mumgaard PhD ’15, CEO and co-founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. 

Massachusetts Economic Development Secretary Eric Paley moderated the wide-ranging discussion, which touched on the cutting-edge Massachusetts innovation ecosystem, the implications of artificial intelligence for research and industry, and more. 

The panelists noted that a confluence of ingredients — universities, other research institutions such as hospitals, venture capital, and more — has helped make Massachusetts the world leader in biotechnology and other forms of innovation. 

“You can’t be here and not feel like things that the rest of the world feel are not possible are possibly possible,” Afeyan said. “It’s really interesting how the environment makes you feel like you should also do something special.” He added that the various ecosystem elements have created a “critical mass” needed to sustain broad-ranging innovation. 

“This critical mass accumulated between the academic science, the hospital research, the entrepreneurial companies, large companies moved in, the government stepped in, state level, to try to help this community,” Afeyan observed. “It’s an inherent advantage of any ecosystem, it’s the co-location, it’s the connections.”

Mumgaard, whose company is building the first fusion power plant in the U.S., concurred that the combination of elements available in the state ecosystem is crucial for advanced innovation. 

“In many ways the challenge is simply scale,” Mumgaard said. “How do you get enough capital, how do you get enough smart people, how do you get enough people that are hard workers, how do you get the alignment from the institutions that can give you the permissions and tailwinds to be able to go and do that? And we did find that in Massachusetts.” 

He added: “You could not have really have built this company outside of Massachusetts.” 

For her part, Bhatia, a leader in developing nanoscale technologies that have made inroads in battling numerous forms of cancer, observed that part of the inspiration for her career came from visiting the MIT campus as a high school-age student.

“It was just that idea that you could engineer things, you could create instruments to improve human health, that started me on my journey,” Bhatia said. 

As a faculty member, she has helped found eight spinoff companies and helped direct an MIT study about how the Institute — which has already helped generate about 30,000 new companies — can do even more to produce startups and technology transfer. Ultimately, she has concluded, teaching researchers about the tools and skills they need to found companies can help generate even more productive networks of entrepreneurial activity.  

“We can be more intentional. We can create communities. … There are all kinds of ways to do more,” Bhatia said.

The panel discussion included reflections on AI and forecasts about the future of technology 20 years out, while ending with a reminder from Afeyan that, while the future is hard to forecast, it is at least partially shaped by people working consistently hard in pursuit of their goals. 

“We can envision the future a lot better than we can predict it,” Afeyan said, when asked to forecast the effects of technology in a couple of decades, near the end of the discussion.

Afeyan concluded: “My parting thought on this would be to say … I think you can either live in the present, do the things you do, and get the future you deserve, or you can envision the future you want, and do everything in service of that.”

Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports, evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers:

To determine this, CR dug through thousands of pages of automakers’ privacy policies and asked questions of 15 different automakers­BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. We also reviewed corporate, regulatory, and legal filings from data brokers operating in the “insurtech” industry­the technology companies and data brokers that help insurance companies set their rates. And we spoke to several car privacy experts, who, at industry conferences and in market reports, have described the profit potential of individual driving data as the “new oil.”...

When the rich and powerful try to use the court to silence negative reporting about themselves, it’s worth calling out that behavior for what it is: an attack on free speech. This is why EFF is happy to stand up for reporters who find themselves in that situation.

The California Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to strike a former Premise Data CEO’s meritless lawsuit against a journalist who exposed the CEO’s secret arrest for felony domestic violence. Jack Poulson, the writer and publisher of All Source Intelligence, reported details from the San Francisco Police Department’s report of the arrest and posted a copy of the report after receiving the document from a confidential source. Poulson later learned the arrest record had been sealed. The CEO, Maury Blackman, sued Poulson, Substack, AWS, and another organization for damages to try and force the removal of Poulson’s reporting from the internet.

The trial court tossed the entire case under California’s anti-SLAPP statute—SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation” and describes cases where the goal isn’t vindication in court so much as it is costing someone time, money, and peace of mind fighting the lawsuit. To fight SLAPP cases, states like California have passed anti-SLAPP laws, which are invaluable tools for protecting the First Amendment. California’s law provides an avenue for early dismissals of these baseless lawsuits, which curtails their intended effect on the target. Blackman appealed the court’s decision, arguing that a court order sealing the arrest overrides Poulson’s right to report the news.

The Court of Appeals correctly rejected Blackman’s appeal and affirmed the decision to throw out the case. The court held that the First Amendment protects Poulson’s publications. As the court explained in its decision, “the First Amendment protects the lawfully obtained truthful publication of the information at issue absent ‘a need to further a state interest of the highest order,’” a standard that Blackman’s privacy interests do not satisfy. The Court also found that Poulson, as the publisher of the All Source Intelligence newsletter, was protected by California’s Shield Law, relying on precedent established by EFF in 2006. The Court also affirmed that Substack and the other website, which had merely temporarily hosted a copy of the arrest record, were immunized from liability by Section 230.

This decision is a win for free speech, for Jack Poulson, and for everybody.  

Related Cases: Blackman v. Substack, et al.

With the launch of iOS 27, Apple is rolling out a variety of new AI features to its familiar voice assistant, Siri. But how are AI tools like these handling our data? In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about the privacy complications of AI phone features.

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers drones and our right to record the law enforcement, video doorbell footage privacy, and how to limit what data Apple's new Siri AI can access.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time we're asking EFF's Thorin Klosowski about the difference between AI phone features that are computed on-device and ones that are computed on external servers—and what that means for data protection. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

%3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Ff5abca72-7d82-4e94-9c0b-0d9f991891f0%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

   

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Google.org announced on Sept. 15 that the MIT Transit Lab is a recipient of $2.1 million in funding — one of only 15 projects selected in the worldwide Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Government Innovation. The funding from Google’s philanthropic arm will support NGOs, social enterprises, and academic institutions as they integrate artificial intelligence-powered solutions across topics like health, resilience, and economy.

The Transit Lab’s winning project, the Public Transit Intelligence Hub (PTIQ), aims to unify public transportation agencies’ real-time monitoring, operations control, and passenger communication systems into a single centralized AI-orchestrated platform that will allow transit control center staff to make better-informed, on-the-spot decisions, and provide riders with more immediate and accurate information.

The control centers of public transportation agencies are similar in appearance to the portrayal of NASA mission control in movies: rooms filled with employees monitoring dozens of radio feeds and computer screens relaying real-time camera data about stations and their operations, transit vehicle locations, riders, traffic, and road conditions. Unfortunately, the information coming in is fragmented, rather than integrated into a centralized system with overall awareness of the network’s conditions. This system creates an intense work environment for the transit staff making operations and communications decisions that can affect thousands of passengers relying on transit to get them where they need to go.

“Public transportation agencies are required to make decisions around the clock regarding real-time operations, control, and passenger communication,” says Awad Abdelhalim, associate director of the Transit Lab, and PTIQ co-principal investigator, project director, and technical lead. “Our goal isn't to automate those decisions, but to make sure the people making them have the best information possible. By unifying and streamlining data and information flow from fragmented and siloed internal systems, PTIQ will improve the experience of both riders and the transit workforce.”

Jinhua Zhao, the MIT Class of 1941 Professor of City and Transportation, head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and founder and director of the MIT Mobility Initiative (MMI), is the other co-principal investigator on the project. The PTIQ program manager is MIT Lecturer Jim Aloisi, who directs the Transit Research Consortium, which will also work on the project. That consortium is comprised of researchers from the Transit Lab, MMI, and Northeastern University, where Professor Haris Koutsopoulos takes the lead. 

In addition to providing funding for the three-year project, Google.org will provide pro bono support from its own engineers and AI product experts.

"AI holds incredible potential to transform public services, but there is often a gap between promise and practice,” says Maggie Johnson, global head of Google.org. “By equipping the 15 selected organizations with funding and pro bono support from Google's own AI experts, we are empowering the people closest to the problem to show what is truly possible. Together, we can ensure that AI makes a profound, positive difference in the everyday lives of communities worldwide."

The project will build on the group’s decades of experience in applied-research collaborations with transit agencies in major metropolitan areas throughout the world. PTIQ’s decision support interface for control center staff will integrate predictive models, optimization engines, and large language model-based contextual reasoning. But ultimately the decision-making based on that information will be left to transit staff, who can better balance the trade-offs of making one decision over another in these often incredibly complex situations.

“The hard part of integrating AI in transit is not the technology; it’s the institution,” Zhao says. “AI is evaluated on benchmarks. Public transit is assessed in the control center and on the streets. Over decades of work with transit agencies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, London, Boston, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, we have learned to ask a different question. Not whether AI can do this, but whether it can work in the organization and whether the staff trust it. PTIQ is designed to ground AI in the institutional reality and behavioral nuances of a transit agency, and bring machine intelligence and human judgment into one place.”

“Currently the evaluation of AI models relies heavily on deterministic, objective tasks, such as solving mathematical equations or generating code,” Abdelhalim explains. “However, the vast majority of real-world operational tasks — like delivering public transit services — are highly dynamic, multi-stakeholder, and lack a single correct objective answer. These complex spatiotemporal environments are the ultimate testbed for evaluating what AI systems can add to society.”

PTIQ aims to transform the transit workforce experience, the transit rider experience, and the overall ability of transit agencies to efficiently respond to disruptions and unexpected events. 

“We expect that PTIQ will take what is largely a siloed environment and connect it in ways that provide powerful benefits for the agency workforce and its riders,” says Aloisi, who is also a former secretary of transportation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. “[Doing this by] improving response time, reducing platform and bus stop crowding, providing riders with higher quality and timely information, and supporting agency staff — from dispatchers to vehicle operators and communications staff — with high-quality, reliable, real-time information and solution sets.”

A new AI system that excels at challenging games with hidden information could someday help human decision-makers select ideal strategies to outfox opponents in complicated situations like military maneuvers.

Using advances in machine-learning, researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, and Stanford University developed an AI that defeated top-ranked human players of the board wargame Stratego by a large margin — something no AI system had been able to achieve. 

Stratego, a two-player game of imperfect information, in which the opponent’s piece identities remain hidden, is often used as a benchmark to test the strategic thinking abilities of powerful AI models.

To build their model, the researchers combined efficient training algorithms with new techniques tailored for calculated decision-making in hidden information settings. 

The AI system achieved greater performance at Stratego than the next best models, while being far cheaper and less computationally demanding to train. The system also outperformed top human players in other strategic games with different rules and designs, demonstrating how it can be generalized for a variety of use-cases.

The AI system could be adapted to help humans tackle many real-world problems with hidden information, such as business negotiations or cybersecurity. 

“In the kind of imperfect information tasks you would face in reality, you often don’t have the luxury of enumerating through all the possibilities. There are just too many. Having AI algorithms that are general purpose and can provably perform this challenging task so well is a big step forward,” says Gabriele Farina, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and senior author of a paper on this AI system.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Samuel Sokota, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon; Eugene Vinitsky, an assistant professor at NYU; Zico Kolter, a professor at Carnegie Mellon; Hengyuan Hu, a graduate student at Stanford; and Zhiyuan Fan, an EECS graduate student at MIT. The research appears today in Nature.

Hidden information

The world is full of imperfect information problems. 

In these interactions, some parties possess information others do not. For instance, traders in financial markets may not know the rationale behind the trades of others, while military forces likely don’t have full knowledge of enemy positions. 

With hidden information, the decisions parties make, as well as the decisions they choose not to make, are intertwined in such a way that it is extremely difficult to determine the best steps to take next.

“The more you bluff, the more your opponent expects it, and the less each bluff is worth. It’s not obvious how to reason about that,” Sokota explains. “It’s very different from a setting like chess, where the best move is still the best move no matter how often you’ve played it.”

Stratego is often used to model imperfect information situations. In this board wargame, which resembles military chess, players arrange 40 pieces on their side of a board and then move pieces across the board to capture their opponent’s flag. 

But the identity of all pieces remains secret until they collide, and then the lower-ranking piece is eliminated.

The possible piece configurations number more than 10 to the 66th power — an exponentially greater number than in chess — making Stratego extremely difficult for an AI system to play well. 

Past efforts, such as Google’s DeepMind, relied on sophisticated operations that were computationally demanding and costly. But even with millions of dollars in training costs, these models were still not strong enough to beat top human Stratego players.

“With Stratego, there is an explosion of possible universes you might have to deal with. AI techniques that were developed for games like poker definitely could not scale in this setting,” Farina says.

The MIT researchers set out to develop a full AI system that could achieve superhuman performance for less cost, which they called Ataraxos (a Greek word used to describe one who is unbothered or free from anxiety).

A two-pronged approach

To build Ataraxos, the researchers trained the model using a technique called self-play reinforcement learning. The model plays against itself many times to learn a strong “blueprint strategy” of how to excel at Stratego. 

They designed especially efficient algorithms, which enabled Ataraxos to learn much faster than prior methods while ensuring it didn’t get stuck trying to predict every possible move. This reduces training costs and boosts performance. 

“Our system reaches strictly higher playing strength than DeepNash (DeepMind’s system) while using less than one hundredth of the training examples and less than one thirtieth of the self-play games, indicating a massive improvement in efficiency,” says Farina.

During a game, Ataraxos uses the blueprint strategy as a starting point to set up the board and begin thinking about its next moves at each round of play. 

But before acting, it refines its choices on the fly using a technique called decision-time planning. The system employs a generative model that uses probabilities to estimate the likely identities of the opponent’s hidden pieces, then evaluates future choices before selecting the next move. 

“Rather than just guessing blindly, we use decision-time planning to find the most plausible state of the board. Using this generative model allows us to really zoom in on the specific board and opponent we are facing,” Farina says.

The innovative use of this generative model for decision-time planning was the missing piece that enabled Ataraxos to achieve superhuman performance.

Ataraxos beat the strongest Stratego player in the world by a record margin of 15-1-4 and achieved a 39-2 record against top human players at the Stratego world championship. “Ataraxos is good at calculating risk in a way that humans are not. A human might start freaking out if their most valuable piece is exposed, but the bot can be surprisingly composed. It doesn’t overcorrect and give away its secrets,” Farina says.

The researchers also adapted Ataraxos for other imperfect information games, including Barrage Stratego (a faster-paced variant with fewer pieces), Hanabi (a cooperative card game with many players), and Dou dizhu (a game in which two players cooperate against a third).

The system achieved superhuman performance in each instance, demonstrating the generality of this method.

In the future, the researchers want to build interpretability measures into Ataraxos so the system can explain its decision-making in a way that a human could understand. 

“Humans must have the final say in whether a recommendation is followed, so before adoption can happen, we need a way to audit the model’s decisions. We still have a long way to go, but I hope these algorithms can be the foundation for a lot more work to come,” Farina says.

This research is funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the New York University Department of Civil and Urban Engineering, the C2SMART Center, the National Science Foundation, and a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship.