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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging magnetism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The EU is recommending import controls to combat unregulated squid fishing in the Southwest Atlantic. I’m not optimistic.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

MIT formally dedicated its newly transformed Met Warehouse (Building W41) on Wednesday, in an energetic evening ceremony heralding the start of a new era for the practice of design on campus. 

The ceremony highlighted “the essential vision of the Met: connecting people, disciplines, and ideas, and inviting everyone to see where those connections might be,” said Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation, during introductory remarks.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth called the new building “a testament to the transformative power of design, which has been central to MIT from the very beginning.” She also heralded the building as a cornerstone of MIT’s “magnetic new West Campus district for art and design,” which includes the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building (W18) and the MIT Theater Arts building (W97). 

Hashim Sarkis, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, delivered keynote remarks at the event, linking together many themes of the evening and recounting the project’s development in the late 2010s.

In envisioning moving into the Met Warehouse, Sarkis said, the “building spoke to us. It offered us possibilities that we could clearly envision both outside and inside the thick brick walls. … It helped us imagine how we can live and work together as a campus and as a school. Over the months of discussions among the faculty and students across the school, it became clear that it was an idea whose time had come.”

Many members of the MIT Corporation were in attendance for the event, held in the Met Warehouse’s Sidara Auditorium. The ceremony was also an occasion for giving thanks to those who made the new Met Warehouse possible: campus leaders, donors, faculty, architects and designers, contractors and specialized builders, and many others who worked on the remarkable structure in different ways. 

“The list, I promise you, runs longer than the credits at the end of “The Odyssey,” and what an odyssey this has been,” Sarkis quipped. 

From fortress to workshop

The Met Warehouse was originally constructed from 1884 to 1923, as a massive private storage facility with 2-foot thick brick walls, a corner turret, slit-like windows, and other features making it look like a fortress. About 500 feet long, with five stories, the building was long an imposing local curiosity.

MIT acquired the Met Warehouse in the 1970s and in the 2010s began exploring possible new uses for it. By 2018, the idea of making it the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning had gained enough traction to move forward. 

The high-profile firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro won the competition to become the project architects, and created a variety of solutions to bring natural light into the warehouse and revamp its interior. With permission from the Cambridge Historical Commission, the designers replaced four segments of brick wall on the building’s north side with top-to-bottom glass sheets, which along with skylights bring in abundant light.

At the same time, the architects — led by Elizabeth Diller and Benjamin Gilmartin, who were at the dedication last night — overhauled the building’s interior, while working within many of its structural features. The refurbished Met Warehouse now features double-height design studios, an auditorium, a large entrance lobby, a ground-floor café, offices, and many flexible, reconfigurable classroom spaces designed to help faculty and students collaborate on an immense array of projects. 

The Met Warehouse also features building-long open corridors on all five floors and a central staircase connecting all of them, as elements designed to enhance circulation and connectivity within the building.

In her remarks, Kornbluth heralded the Met Warehouse’s educational potential, noting the challenges artificial intelligence presents for education, as highlighted in an MIT-wide report released in August. 

That report, she outlined, emphasized that education comes from “helping students to value the process of learning as a ‘productive struggle’ and from engaging them in ‘human settings where they … learn how to work with others, communicate their ideas, receive criticism constructively, build confidence, develop judgment, and act as members of a community.’”

With that in mind, Kornbluth said, “that sounds exactly like the kind of hands-on, in-person, collaborative problem-solving the new Met was made for. … This community is not only ready to withstand the educational challenges of AI … it’s also primed to help the rest of MIT meet the moment. And that is very good news for us all!”

Diller also addressed the audience, highlighting some of the key design challenges involved in the project and thanking many of those who worked on it, including Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the project’s associate architects, and Shawmut Design and Construction. The Met Warehouse, she emphasized, is meant to be used in many ways in the future, and was designed with enough flexibility so that it can continue to evolve. 

“This building should remain a work in progress,” Diller said, adding that she would continue to regard it as “definitively unfinished.” 

Professors John Ochsendorf, Caroline Jones, and Lawrence Vale — MIT faculty who are all associate deans in the School of Architecture and Planning — also spoke at the ceremony, outlining the implications of the building for the school’s many forms of research and collaborative work. 

“It’s working,” Ochsendorf said, now that the building is inhabited on an everyday basis by students, faculty, and staff. 

Giving more thanks

As with almost any large, long-term project, credit can be spread in many directions, and the speakers at the dedication ceremony gave ample thanks to those involved — and to the important supporters of the project. 

“Hashim Sarkis has been its greatest champion,” Kornbluth said. “His leadership and imagination shaped not only this building, but the ambitious future it makes possible for the school.” She also thanked MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif, a project supporter during his tenure, “for your foresight, your perseverance, and your insistence that the music, theater, and design communities at MIT deserve facilities worthy of the quality of their world-class work.”

For his part, Sarkis also gave credit to former MIT Corporation Chair Robert Millard ’73, saying, “Without Bob and his wife Bethany, this building would not be here today.” Gorenberg, in his remarks, also made a point of thanking the City of Cambridge for its extensive cooperation with MIT on the project. 

Gorenberg also expressed his deep “gratitude to the Morningside Foundation,” the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. He cited the “extraordinary generosity” of the founding gift, from family members Gerald and Beryl Chan and Ronnie and Barbara Chan, establishing the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a major interdisciplinary center at MIT located in the Met Warehouse. 

Speaking of Gerald L. Chan, Gorenberg added, “We cherish his wisdom and belief in MIT as a leading institution that can do good for the world.”

In a statement sent to MIT News, Chan said: “In this day and age when disciplinary boundaries are ever dissolving, it is important to have initiatives that tie all departments of the Institute together so that students can be facilitated to have broad exposures. Design provides such a possibility, and MAD is the venue.”

Sidara (formerly the Dar Group), a global collaborative of specialist design, engineering, and consulting firms owned by Maha and Talal Shair, supported the establishment of two central public spaces in the building, the Sidara Auditorium, and the Sidara Gallery, on the ground floor. 

“At Sidara, we share MIT’s commitment to improving lives, solving critical challenges, and making room for cultures to shine,” Talal Shair said in a statement to MIT News. “We feel a profound resonance with SA+P across all three dimensions — so it was only fitting that we would support the transformation of the MET into a hub for education, research, and innovation. We trust the Sidara Auditorium and the Sidara Gallery will serve as spaces for idea exchange, inspiring future generations to think broadly and act boldly.”

The LUMA Foundation, a Zurich-based nonprofit founded by Maja Hoffmann in 2004 to support artistic production and the organization behind LUMA Arles, an interdisciplinary creative campus in southern France, also gave an establishing gift for the MIT LUMA Lab, based in the Met Warehouse, for projects combining art, science, technology, conservation, and design. 

“LUMA Foundation has always been grounded in the belief that meaningful change begins by creating the field and conditions for people, disciplines, and forms of knowledge to encounter one another freely, critically, and with mutual respect,” Hoffmann said in a statement for MIT News. “The MET gives this principle a remarkable new context. To see faculty, students, researchers, artists, designers, scientists, and technologists connected through the MIT-LUMA Lab working alongside one another is a powerful expression of what such a place can enable. I am excited and proud to be contributing to this journey and be part of the MIT community and its future.”

Referencing MIT’s motto, “mens et manus,” which is Latin for “mind and hand,” Gorenberg wrapped up the dedication ceremony last night with an additional thought: “This is ‘mens et manus’ at its finest.” 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Investment Management Company (MITIMCo) announced today that MIT’s unitized pool of endowment and other MIT funds generated an investment return of 10.3 percent during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, as measured using valuations received within one month of fiscal year end. At the end of the fiscal year, MIT’s endowment funds totaled $29.2 billion, excluding pledges. Over the 10 years ending June 30, 2026, MIT generated an annualized return of 11.7 percent.

The endowment is the bedrock of MIT’s finances, made possible by gifts from alumni and friends for more than a century. The use of the endowment is governed by a state law that requires MIT to maintain each endowed gift as a permanent fund, preserve its purchasing power, and spend it as directed by its original donor. Most of the endowment’s funds are restricted and must be used for a specific purpose. MIT uses the bulk of the income these endowed gifts generate to support financial aid, research, and education.

The endowment supports about half of undergraduate tuition, helping to enable the Institute’s need-blind and full-need undergraduate admissions policy, which ensures that an MIT education is accessible to the most talented students in the nation and the world regardless of their financial resources. 

In fiscal 2026, MIT enhanced undergraduate financial aid, ensuring that all students from families with incomes below $200,000 and typical assets have tuition fully covered by scholarships, and that families with incomes below $100,000 and typical assets owe nothing toward their students’ MIT education. Eighty-eight percent of the Class of 2026 graduated with no debt. With our investments in financial aid, parents of MIT undergraduates receiving financial aid now pay on average 10 percent less on a real basis than at the end of the Great Recession.

MIT Student Financial Services works closely with all families of undergraduates who need financial aid to make MIT affordable for them. In 2025-26, the average need-based MIT undergraduate scholarship was $66,155. Fifty-eight percent of MIT undergraduates received need-based financial aid, and 44 percent of MIT undergraduate students received scholarship funding from MIT and other sources sufficient to cover the total cost of tuition.

MIT’s endowment enables it to do more cutting-edge research. Fueled by funding from the endowment, the Institute more than matches the amount of campus-based research funded by the U.S. government and other sponsors — expanding its beneficial impact without asking more from taxpayers. 

MITIMCo is a unit of MIT, created to manage and oversee the investment of the Institute’s endowment, retirement, and operating funds.

MIT’s Report of the Treasurer for fiscal year 2026, which details the Institute’s annual financial performance, was made available publicly today.

As far back as she can remember, Cathy Wu ’12, MNG ’13 wanted to find ways to solve problems to improve people’s lives. Her parents were Taiwanese immigrants, and her father had a long commute to his job, which took him away from the family. On a tight budget, the rest of the family often stayed home on a street that was too busy for playing outdoors. Wu and her siblings ended up playing a lot of computer games. 

Wu says her desire to make the world a better place, her dad’s daily battle against traffic, and the games she played, like “SimCity,” were the seeds of her motivation to design safe, efficient transportation systems. 

Wu is an associate professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Her research focuses on using machine learning and reinforcement learning (RL) to advance reliable strategies for improving a range of complex systems, including transportation.

“Designing transportation systems consists of modeling and analyzing dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of variants, which means that an evidence-driven approach to designing those systems is simply not within reach of today’s tools,” Wu says. “This is the role that RL plays. If successful, it would free transportation researchers and enable their practitioner partners to design the systems they want.”

Wu credits her older sister with instilling in her the desire to improve people’s lives, and Wu’s interest in transportation fits neatly into that ideal.

“I like transportation because it connects everyone. We all use it, we all experience it, we all have issues with it. So, at some level, we’re all interested in the system being better,” she says.

Wu got interested in applying artificial intelligence to transportation while earning her undergraduate degree at MIT, after attending a lecture on autonomous vehicles by the late professor Seth Teller. The lecture, which Teller gave during an Independent Activities Period robotics competition (that Wu actually won), was the event that honed her particular approach to transportation research, Wu says. She began working with Teller, and when he stopped concentrating on autonomous vehicles, he encouraged Wu to transfer to Professor Daniela Rus, who had done research on robotaxis.

“I’m very grateful to the people who helped me explore those interests and helped me become the person I am now,” she says, specifically naming Teller, Rus, and “my friends at Dropbox,” who invited her to do a second internship focused on transportation issues.

After her master’s degree at MIT, Wu went on to earn her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. During that time, she observed that transportation researchers were spending years developing optimization methods to model and analyze a single new variant of a system. Her approach as a computer scientist working to develop RL and optimization methodologies to address transportation challenges held the promise of exponentially improved efficiency.

In 2018, Wu’s last year of her PhD at UC Berkeley, she successfully applied RL to a traffic problem: automatically analyzing the potential traffic flow impact of autonomous vehicles in a range of different traffic networks. The research went viral.

While this could have been a “the rest is history” moment for Wu, RL turned out to be a flighty friend. Wu worked on RL theory in a postdoc at Microsoft and came back to MIT as faculty drawn, she says, by the sustainability focus of CEE, and IDSS’s emphasis on infusing data science into other disciplines.

Yet over the next two years, Wu’s further attempts to apply RL to traffic problems failed.

“That was stressful,” Wu says, “it was unclear whether the problem was me (the advisor), my students, the traffic domain, or RL itself.”

Still, the earlier research was a proof-of-concept demonstration that RL could be applied to transportation systems.

And in 2022, she and her students identified that RL algorithms are so sensitive that an algorithm that works on one problem may not on even a closely related one. A key result, which Wu says she is proudest of “because it was like the light at the end of a long tunnel of negative results,” came in 2023. She and her team of researchers devised a way to work around the sensitivity of RL. The team found that while RL may not train well on 90 percent of a group of problems, it can train quite well on 10 percent. And by training RL models on those problems that solve and generalize well, the resultant models collectively perform well on a set of related problems, even those that would not have been solved through direct training. The researchers designed an algorithm to determine which problems to use RL to train, and that algorithm improved training efficiency by up to 30 times, meaning that what would normally have required 100 training models may only require three models.

“This work gave me back the confidence that reinforcement learning can play an important role in solving hard optimization problems, including in transportation,” Wu says. “Now, a good chunk of my group works on the topic of contextual RL, which is the setting where RL seeks to solve a space of related problems.”

Wu’s more recent research applies RL to solve a hard transportation optimization problem with important policy implications: the work shows that eco-driving measures in which vehicle speeds are intelligently controlled to reduce excessive stopping and starting could reduce vehicle emissions by between 11 and 22 percent. The system provides evidence that policies instituting such measures could significantly improve system efficiency, and is “a demonstration that RL can be used to inform transportation policy on problems of practical importance,” Wu says.

“I am a big fan of evidence-based policy and believe it’s the basis for a thriving democratic society, yet our societal systems are so complex,” Wu says. “People can bicker forever about what’s better or worse, but I do believe that there are questions we bicker about that can be analyzed systematically using data and have objective answers. A large part of the reason I am in academia is to better understand how technology can support democratic societal decision-making.”

Wu says that much of the work she and her team have done over the last several years has produced algorithms “to streamline the development of solvers for hard optimization problems, whether they are related to transportation or to other systems, such as logistics, supply chains, manufacturing, and resource allocation.

“This alludes to my preferred style of work,” Wu says, “which is called use-inspired basic research,” explaining that such research addresses a practical problem, developing fundamental knowledge that often translates to other practical problems. Her students start by probing consequential problems ranging from safety to congestion to accessibility, identifying where existing methods fall short, and allowing the problems themselves to shape the direction of the research.

At the same time, Wu’s desire to help others on a more personal level plays out in her teaching.

“I love working with students, both in the classroom and research mentoring,” she says. “It makes my day when I am able to teach someone something — when I see that light bulb go on in a student.”

In addition to earning academic honors, including a 2023 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, Wu has also been formally celebrated for her teaching and mentoring, including with the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award in 2025.

What does she tell students confronting extremely complicated problems?

“Be patient. Start small. Societal impact is a lifelong endeavor, not something to be accomplished in a few years,” Wu says. “It will take years to really understand what’s going on and where the real problems are. In the meantime, try to be helpful. Be curious. Ask many questions.”

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.

Despite the “dot-com crash” in 2000, the tech industry remained an attractive career destination for many who believed technology represented the future. The digital age — defined by global connectivity and computers — had firmly taken hold, and over time, the tech industry emerged as a dominant force in the labor market. High-paying jobs for engineers, designers, and professionals across a wide range of fields became increasingly common. 

MIT PhD student JS Tan SM ’22 was among those who, upon graduating from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design in 2015, joined the tech industry. 

“A lot of us had this idea that technology, and in particular the technologies related to the internet, had the potential for bringing about a more progressive version of the world,” Tan says. 

Google echoed this ethos to its employees with its once-famous motto, “don’t be evil,” as their informal corporate philosophy and code of conduct guideline. They’ve since dropped the tagline.

But in time, particularly with the start of the first Trump administration, some tech industry employees found themselves questioning if their employers were really intent on supporting policies to support a more democratic world. According to Tan, their willingness to publicly oppose their employers’ actions — at first successfully — is currently experiencing an anti-worker backlash. 

Now, Tan and his former tech industry colleague Clarissa Redwine have published a book on the rise and fall of the tech worker labor movement. “Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry” (Haymarket Books, 2026) chronicles how tech workers organized themselves, the effective strategies they used, and the effect the movement had on Silicon Valley labor politics over the past decade.

Documenting a movement from within

In 2017, Tan was working for Microsoft and Redwine for Kickstarter, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending entry into the United States for nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days, and suspending Syrian refugees from entering the country indefinitely. 

“As a whole, I think the tech sector really pushed back against this,” says Tan. “[OpenAI co-founder] Sam Altman participated in protests of this ban at the airport. In fact, the day before he joined these protests, he wrote in his blog that the tech industry needed to take a stand against the Trump administration, and particularly its immigration policies.” 

Altman’s Jan. 28, 2017, blog post read, in part, “Tech companies go to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain employees; those employees have a lot of leverage. If employees push companies to do something, I believe they’ll have to. At a minimum, companies should take a public stance. But talking is only somewhat effective, and employees should push their companies to figure out what actions they can take.”

Tan says Altman’s words inspired tech workers across the industry to publicly voice their opposition and “push for the values they believed in.” For the next several years, workers staged walkouts and protested their employers’ contracts with U.S. military and immigration enforcement agencies, as well as workplace policies they considered sexist. 

“That was a time in which a lot of tech workers felt that their companies were walking back the values that they had initially promised,” says Tan.

Their objections initially met with some success. In 2018, following protests by Google employees, the company decided not to renew its contract for Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative using artificial intelligence to analyze drone surveillance footage. Nearly 4,000 employees signed an open letter to their CEO stating, “Google should not be in the business of war.”

Fast forward eight years. Earlier this year, more than 600 employees signed an open letter urging Google’s CEO to reject classified AI work with the Pentagon, citing concerns about potential uses including lethal autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. 

“The way Google responded to them this time was to say, basically, ‘Too bad, we’re committed to working with the Pentagon,’” says Tan. “So, there is this kind of shift as to how Google is positioning itself politically, as well as to their employees.”

What happened to the tech industry employee leverage? 

Tan’s book outlines several events that he argues have negatively impacted their formerly strong influence. First, following interest rate hikes in 2022, the tech industry lost hundreds of billions in market valuation and set out to cut costs, the most significant of them being the expensive salaries of their employees. In other words, the labor market soured on tech workers, giving employers opportunity to wrest back control, Tan suggests. 

Second, he points to the drastic effect of agentic AI coding systems on the nature of their work, arguing that these tools have deskilled workers and made everyone much more worried about job security.  

“Tech workers had to face these shocks on their own. With a union or some ability to coordinate across workers and bargain as a group, they might’ve had more power to actually push back,” says Tan.  

Documenting the past to support the future

Tan enrolled at MIT in 2020, earning a master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a focus on the political economy of the tech sector.

At various points in their careers, Tan and his co-author had been involved with organizing in the tech sector. Redwine was a prominent organizer in the union drive at Kickstarter. She was fired from the company in 2019; Redwine said her dismissal was retaliation for her organizing activity, while Kickstarter denied that claim. One reason Tan and Redwine wrote this book is because they saw that the bandwidth for labor organizing among tech workers had hit a new low. 

“Tech workers want to have a say over the way their technologies are designed,” says Tan. “They want to be able to push for the right guardrails around technologies that they’re building. We wanted to use this book as an opportunity to analyze why it was that, within eight years, the tech worker movement had sort of fallen into this state of paralysis.”

They began writing the book in 2024, reliving the highs and lows of the past decade. This is Tan’s first book. He says writing it was an “exhilarating experience” and one that he profoundly enjoyed.

“It’s why, in part, I’m drawn to academia. To a large extent, I believe in the power of research and of writing. To have the opportunity to do this about a subject that I care deeply about has been an amazing experience.”

A book launch and discussion about “Against Tech Oligarchy,” co-hosted by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, will take place on Oct. 26.

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 ...

On the first day of class 16.445J/STS.468J (Entrepreneurship in Aerospace and Mobility Systems), David Mindell, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics (AeroAstro) and the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, asked his students to take a look at an image of a textbook. The cover featured a bright and inspiring collage of rockets, planets, and all manner of futuristic air- and spacecraft. The title: “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace: A Guide for Founders and Investors.”

“This is the most up-to-date guide on the topic,” Mindell said, describing the book’s treatment of the concepts and procedures involved in innovating in aerospace, an industry experiencing a renaissance of entrepreneurship led by venture-backed startups and rapid innovation, and one that, whether or not we realize it, we all depend on every day. 

Konark Chopra, a graduate student in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations Program, raised his hand. “Sounds great — how can we get a copy?”

“It doesn’t exist,” replied Mindell. “You’re going to write it this semester.”

After conducting over 50 interviews with founders, operators, engineers, and investors across the aerospace industry, the class pulled it off. The 100-page industry report, titled “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace,” provides comprehensive insight into what it actually takes to build an aerospace venture today, and makes predictions about what is needed in the near future.

The challenge to produce the report was inspired by the bestselling guide “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” by Bill Aulet, professor of the practice in the MIT Sloan School of Management and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship. Originally published in 2013, the book provides an outline for entrepreneurs in any industry to cultivate skills for success. “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace” builds on Aulet’s framework to provide an industry-specific guide. “Aerospace is its own special industry with a unique set of constraints and aspirations,” says Mindell.

“Putting together this report let the students learn what they won’t get from a regular class about aerospace entrepreneurship,” he says. “This is the view of the industry from the young people building its future. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve accomplished.”

Betting on the known unknowns

During spring 2026, while the class was in session, major developments were shaping the aerospace sector, from NASA’s Artemis II mission to SpaceX’s launch of what would become the largest initial public offering in history. “The entire industry landscape shifted like crazy during the semester,” says Mindell, as just one of the reasons that the report was especially timely. 

The report argues that the volume of capital, talent, and policy attention directed toward aerospace is “structurally different from any prior point in the industry’s history,” creating a pivotal moment for the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors.

The report further outlines five predictions about the new space economy: terrestrial infrastructure for compute, manufacturing, and energy will move off-world; autonomous systems, robots, and humans will continue to work together, but with humans in a supervisory capacity; venture capital investment will run ahead of economic justifications; government investment will become the fastest way for young companies to fundraise; and that we are years away from a global regulatory framework for space companies to operate within. Each prediction, or “bet,” includes a section on “where serious people disagree,” laying out relevant counterarguments to their conclusions.

As a guide, the report also translates its findings into practical tools, including a diagnostic for determining how many independent breakthroughs a company needs to succeed. “One of my favorite tools from the report is the miracle count,” says Chopra. “If your company needs one breakthrough to work, that’s a venture bet. If it needs three, that’s a research project pretending to be a startup.”

The report’s findings were informed both by existing research and by interviews with current aerospace professionals. Students were graded, in part, on how many people they spoke with. Their interviews focused on what excites people about the industry, reasons for their optimism (or pessimism), and how people are working within their organizations to address the challenges they see. 

The experience also allowed the students to expand their professional networks, practicing a core entrepreneurial skill while gaining insider perspectives.

“We sought out people from different corners of aerospace and were always asking, ‘Who else should we talk to?’” says Nicole Lee, a graduate student in AeroAstro. “Not only was I able to reconnect with people in my own network, but I got to introduce classmates to those contacts, and then benefit from the networks they brought in, too. That exchange was a big part of what made the interview process, and the class, so special.”

Engineers as entrepreneurs

The report’s authors — 16 classmates from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Wellesley College — bring a range of academic backgrounds and career ambitions to the project, using those different perspectives to connect the realities of aerospace engineering with the economic forces impacting the industry. Their research interests and experiences range from spacecraft propulsion and human spaceflight to investment banking and military operations. Collectively, they have worked across organizations like NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, and a range of startups.

“What I’ll remember most is the team,” says Chopra. “Everyone showed up with their own wisdom and a willingness to challenge each other, learn from each other, and simply have fun. Those are the teams we hope to keep building with.” 

For Lee, those industry experiences support the report’s predictions about where the field itself is headed. “Entrepreneurship in space is going to involve a much broader group of founders, engineers, researchers, policymakers, and operators,” says Lee. “Everyone working in space can take something away from understanding the entrepreneurial mindset and the cultural shift we’re seeing in commercial space. A much wider range of people will be shaping entrepreneurship in the future. I think that shift has already started with us.”

Mindell sees value in that entrepreneurial mindset, regardless of whether the students go on to found companies of their own. “I don’t know if every student in this class is going to found their own company, and I don’t expect them to, but I do expect them to drive their own careers forward,” he says. “And I think for the moment we’re at, providing that opportunity is the best thing MIT can be doing for our students.”

For Chopra, who has had his sights set on founding an aerospace company for as long as he can remember, the findings from the report are immediately applicable. “The heart of a business, a sustainable business, is the demand. What do the customers want? Sure, I could build cool technology, but if we don’t have anyone buying it, it’s a project, not a company.”

Now armed with a clear and evidence-backed picture of the landscape, Chopra wants the report to generate even more activity across the industry. “If our industry report inspires one person to go out and found a company, or invest in a company, or even think about entrepreneurship in aerospace, it’s a pretty big win.”

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.