Research has shown that large language models (LLMs) tend to overemphasize information at the beginning and end of a document or conversation, while neglecting the middle.

This “position bias” means that, if a lawyer is using an LLM-powered virtual assistant to retrieve a certain phrase in a 30-page affidavit, the LLM is more likely to find the right text if it is on the initial or final pages.

MIT researchers have discovered the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

They created a theoretical framework to study how information flows through the machine-learning architecture that forms the backbone of LLMs. They found that certain design choices which control how the model processes input data can cause position bias.

Their experiments revealed that model architectures, particularly those affecting how information is spread across input words within the model, can give rise to or intensify position bias, and that training data also contribute to the problem.

In addition to pinpointing the origins of position bias, their framework can be used to diagnose and correct it in future model designs.

This could lead to more reliable chatbots that stay on topic during long conversations, medical AI systems that reason more fairly when handling a trove of patient data, and code assistants that pay closer attention to all parts of a program.

“These models are black boxes, so as an LLM user, you probably don’t know that position bias can cause your model to be inconsistent. You just feed it your documents in whatever order you want and expect it to work. But by understanding the underlying mechanism of these black-box models better, we can improve them by addressing these limitations,” says Xinyi Wu, a graduate student in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and first author of a paper on this research.

Her co-authors include Yifei Wang, an MIT postdoc; and senior authors Stefanie Jegelka, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of IDSS and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Ali Jadbabaie, professor and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a core faculty member of IDSS, and a principal investigator in LIDS. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

Analyzing attention

LLMs like Claude, Llama, and GPT-4 are powered by a type of neural network architecture known as a transformer. Transformers are designed to process sequential data, encoding a sentence into chunks called tokens and then learning the relationships between tokens to predict what words comes next.

These models have gotten very good at this because of the attention mechanism, which uses interconnected layers of data processing nodes to make sense of context by allowing tokens to selectively focus on, or attend to, related tokens.

But if every token can attend to every other token in a 30-page document, that quickly becomes computationally intractable. So, when engineers build transformer models, they often employ attention masking techniques which limit the words a token can attend to.

For instance, a causal mask only allows words to attend to those that came before it.

Engineers also use positional encodings to help the model understand the location of each word in a sentence, improving performance.

The MIT researchers built a graph-based theoretical framework to explore how these modeling choices, attention masks and positional encodings, could affect position bias.

“Everything is coupled and tangled within the attention mechanism, so it is very hard to study. Graphs are a flexible language to describe the dependent relationship among words within the attention mechanism and trace them across multiple layers,” Wu says.

Their theoretical analysis suggested that causal masking gives the model an inherent bias toward the beginning of an input, even when that bias doesn’t exist in the data.

If the earlier words are relatively unimportant for a sentence’s meaning, causal masking can cause the transformer to pay more attention to its beginning anyway.

“While it is often true that earlier words and later words in a sentence are more important, if an LLM is used on a task that is not natural language generation, like ranking or information retrieval, these biases can be extremely harmful,” Wu says.

As a model grows, with additional layers of attention mechanism, this bias is amplified because earlier parts of the input are used more frequently in the model’s reasoning process.

They also found that using positional encodings to link words more strongly to nearby words can mitigate position bias. The technique refocuses the model’s attention in the right place, but its effect can be diluted in models with more attention layers.

And these design choices are only one cause of position bias — some can come from training data the model uses to learn how to prioritize words in a sequence.

“If you know your data are biased in a certain way, then you should also finetune your model on top of adjusting your modeling choices,” Wu says.

Lost in the middle

After they’d established a theoretical framework, the researchers performed experiments in which they systematically varied the position of the correct answer in text sequences for an information retrieval task.

The experiments showed a “lost-in-the-middle” phenomenon, where retrieval accuracy followed a U-shaped pattern. Models performed best if the right answer was located at the beginning of the sequence. Performance declined the closer it got to the middle before rebounding a bit if the correct answer was near the end.

Ultimately, their work suggests that using a different masking technique, removing extra layers from the attention mechanism, or strategically employing positional encodings could reduce position bias and improve a model’s accuracy.

“By doing a combination of theory and experiments, we were able to look at the consequences of model design choices that weren’t clear at the time. If you want to use a model in high-stakes applications, you must know when it will work, when it won’t, and why,” Jadbabaie says.

In the future, the researchers want to further explore the effects of positional encodings and study how position bias could be strategically exploited in certain applications.

“These researchers offer a rare theoretical lens into the attention mechanism at the heart of the transformer model. They provide a compelling analysis that clarifies longstanding quirks in transformer behavior, showing that attention mechanisms, especially with causal masks, inherently bias models toward the beginning of sequences. The paper achieves the best of both worlds — mathematical clarity paired with insights that reach into the guts of real-world systems,” says Amin Saberi, professor and director of the Stanford University Center for Computational Market Design, who was not involved with this work.

This research is supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

MIT researchers have designed a compact, low-power receiver for 5G-compatible smart devices that is about 30 times more resilient to a certain type of interference than some traditional wireless receivers.

The low-cost receiver would be ideal for battery-powered internet of things (IoT) devices like environmental sensors, smart thermostats, or other devices that need to run continuously for a long time, such as health wearables, smart cameras, or industrial monitoring sensors.

The researchers’ chip uses a passive filtering mechanism that consumes less than a milliwatt of static power while protecting both the input and output of the receiver’s amplifier from unwanted wireless signals that could jam the device.

Key to the new approach is a novel arrangement of precharged, stacked capacitors, which are connected by a network of tiny switches. These miniscule switches need much less power to be turned on and off than those typically used in IoT receivers.

The receiver’s capacitor network and amplifier are carefully arranged to leverage a phenomenon in amplification that allows the chip to use much smaller capacitors than would typically be necessary. 

“This receiver could help expand the capabilities of IoT gadgets. Smart devices like health monitors or industrial sensors could become smaller and have longer battery lives. They would also be more reliable in crowded radio environments, such as factory floors or smart city networks,” says Soroush Araei, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on the receiver.

He is joined on the paper by Mohammad Barzgari, a postdoc in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); Haibo Yang, an EECS graduate student; and senior author Negar Reiskarimian, the X-Window Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor in EECS at MIT and a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories and RLE. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

A new standard

A receiver acts as the intermediary between an IoT device and its environment. Its job is to detect and amplify a wireless signal, filter out any interference, and then convert it into digital data for processing.

Traditionally, IoT receivers operate on fixed frequencies and suppress interference using a single narrow-band filter, which is simple and inexpensive.

But the new technical specifications of the 5G mobile network enable reduced-capability devices that are more affordable and energy-efficient. This opens a range of IoT applications to the faster data speeds and increased network capability of 5G. These next-generation IoT devices need receivers that can tune across a wide range of frequencies while still being cost-effective and low-power.

“This is extremely challenging because now we need to not only think about the power and cost of the receiver, but also flexibility to address numerous interferers that exist in the environment,” Araei says.

To reduce the size, cost, and power consumption of an IoT device, engineers can’t rely on the bulky, off-chip filters that are typically used in devices that operate on a wide frequency range.

One solution is to use a network of on-chip capacitors that can filter out unwanted signals. But these capacitor networks are prone to special type of signal noise known as harmonic interference.

In prior work, the MIT researchers developed a novel switch-capacitor network that targets these harmonic signals as early as possible in the receiver chain, filtering out unwanted signals before they are amplified and converted into digital bits for processing.

Shrinking the circuit

Here, they extended that approach by using the novel switch-capacitor network as the feedback path in an amplifier with negative gain. This configuration leverages the Miller effect, a phenomenon that enables small capacitors to behave like much larger ones.

“This trick lets us meet the filtering requirement for narrow-band IoT without physically large components, which drastically shrinks the size of the circuit,” Araei says.

Their receiver has an active area of less than 0.05 square millimeters.

One challenge the researchers had to overcome was determining how to apply enough voltage to drive the switches while keeping the overall power supply of the chip at only 0.6 volts.

In the presence of interfering signals, such tiny switches can turn on and off in error, especially if the voltage required for switching is extremely low.

To address this, the researchers came up with a novel solution, using a special circuit technique called bootstrap clocking. This method boosts the control voltage just enough to ensure the switches operate reliably while using less power and fewer components than traditional clock boosting methods.

Taken together, these innovations enable the new receiver to consume less than a milliwatt of power while blocking about 30 times more harmonic interference than traditional IoT receivers.

“Our chip also is very quiet, in terms of not polluting the airwaves. This comes from the fact that our switches are very small, so the amount of signal that can leak out of the antenna is also very small,” Araei adds.

Because their receiver is smaller than traditional devices and relies on switches and precharged capacitors instead of more complex electronics, it could be more cost-effective to fabricate. In addition, since the receiver design can cover a wide range of signal frequencies, it could be implemented on a variety of current and future IoT devices.

Now that they have developed this prototype, the researchers want to enable the receiver to operate without a dedicated power supply, perhaps by harvesting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signals from the environment to power the chip.

This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

Gaspare LoDuca has been appointed MIT’s vice president for information systems and technology (IS&T) and chief information officer, effective Aug. 18. Currently vice president for information technology and CIO at Columbia University, LoDuca has held IT leadership roles in or related to higher education for more than two decades. He succeeds Mark Silis, who led IS&T from 2019 until 2024, when he left MIT to return to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay area.

Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor announced the appointment today in an email to MIT faculty and staff.

“I believe that Gaspare will be an incredible asset to MIT, bringing wide-ranging experience supporting faculty, researchers, staff, and students and a highly collaborative style,” says Shor. “He is eager to start his work with our talented IS&T team to chart and implement their contributions to the future of information technology at MIT.”

LoDuca will lead the IS&T organization and oversee MIT’s information technology infrastructure and services that support its research and academic enterprise across student and administrative systems, network operations, cloud services, cybersecurity, and customer support. As co-chair of the Information Technology Governance Committee, he will guide the development of IT policy and strategy at the Institute. He will also play a key role in MIT’s effort to modernize its business processes and administrative systems, working in close collaboration with the Business and Digital Transformation Office.

“Gaspare brings to his new role extensive experience leading a complex IT organization,” says Provost Cynthia Barnhart, who served as one of Shor's advisors during the search process. “His depth of experience, coupled with his vision for the future state of information technology and digital transformation at MIT, are compelling, and I am excited to see the positive impact he will have here.”

“As I start my new role, I plan to learn more about MIT’s culture and community to ensure that any decisions or changes we make are shaped by the community’s needs and carried out in a way that fits the culture. I’m also looking forward to learning more about the research and work being done by students and faculty to advance MIT’s mission. It’s inspiring, and I’m eager to support their success,” says LoDuca.

In his role at Columbia, LoDuca has overseen the IT department, headed IT governance committees for school and department-level IT functions, and ensured the secure operation of the university’s enterprise-class systems since 2015. During his tenure, he has crafted a culture of customer service and innovation — building a new student information system, identifying emerging technologies for use in classrooms and labs, and creating a data-sharing platform for university researchers and a grants dashboard for principal investigators. He also revamped Columbia’s technology infrastructure and implemented tools to ensure the security and reliability of its technology resources.

Before joining Columbia, LoDuca was the technology managing director for the education practice at Accenture from 1998 to 2015. In that role, he helped universities to develop and implement technology strategies and adopt modern applications and systems. His projects included overseeing the implementation of finance, human resources, and student administration systems for clients such as Columbia University, University of Miami, Carnegie Mellon University, the University System of Georgia, and Yale University.

“At a research institution, there’s a wide range of activities happening every day, and our job in IT is to support them all while also managing cybersecurity risks. We need to be creative and thoughtful in our solutions, and consider the needs and expectations of our community,” he says.

LoDuca holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Michigan State University. He and his wife are recent empty nesters, and are in the process of relocating to Boston.

In 2023, about 4.4 percent (176 terawatt-hours) of total energy consumption in the United States was by data centers that are essential for processing large quantities of information. Of that 176 TWh, approximately 100 TWh (57 percent) was used by CPU and GPU equipment. Energy requirements have escalated substantially in the past decade and will only continue to grow, making the development of energy-efficient computing crucial. 

Superconducting electronics have arisen as a promising alternative for classical and quantum computing, although their full exploitation for high-end computing requires a dramatic reduction in the amount of wiring linking ambient temperature electronics and low-temperature superconducting circuits. To make systems that are both larger and more streamlined, replacing commonplace components such as semiconductors with superconducting versions could be of immense value. It’s a challenge that has captivated MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center senior research scientist Jagadeesh Moodera and his colleagues, who described a significant breakthrough in a recent Nature Electronics paper, “Efficient superconducting diodes and rectifiers for quantum circuitry.”

Moodera was working on a stubborn problem. One of the critical long-standing requirements is the need for the efficient conversion of AC currents into DC currents on a chip while operating at the extremely cold cryogenic temperatures required for superconductors to work efficiently. For example, in superconducting “energy-efficient rapid single flux quantum” (ERSFQ) circuits, the AC-to-DC issue is limiting ERSFQ scalability and preventing their use in larger circuits with higher complexities. To respond to this need, Moodera and his team created superconducting diode (SD)-based superconducting rectifiers — devices that can convert AC to DC on the same chip. These rectifiers would allow for the efficient delivery of the DC current necessary to operate superconducting classical and quantum processors.

Quantum computer circuits can only operate at temperatures close to 0 kelvins (absolute zero), and the way power is supplied must be carefully controlled to limit the effects of interference introduced by too much heat or electromagnetic noise. Most unwanted noise and heat come from the wires connecting cold quantum chips to room-temperature electronics. Instead, using superconducting rectifiers to convert AC currents into DC within a cryogenic environment reduces the number of wires, cutting down on heat and noise and enabling larger, more stable quantum systems.

In a 2023 experiment, Moodera and his co-authors developed SDs that are made of very thin layers of superconducting material that display nonreciprocal (or unidirectional) flow of current and could be the superconducting counterpart to standard semiconductors. Even though SDs have garnered significant attention, especially since 2020, up until this point the research has focused only on individual SDs for proof of concept. The group’s 2023 paper outlined how they created and refined a method by which SDs could be scaled for broader application. 

Now, by building a diode bridge circuit, they demonstrated the successful integration of four SDs and realized AC-to-DC rectification at cryogenic temperatures. 

The new approach described in their recent Nature Electronics paper will significantly cut down on the thermal and electromagnetic noise traveling from ambient into cryogenic circuitry, enabling cleaner operation. The SDs could also potentially serve as isolators/circulators, assisting in insulating qubit signals from external influence. The successful assimilation of multiple SDs into the first integrated SD circuit represents a key step toward making superconducting computing a commercial reality. 

“Our work opens the door to the arrival of highly energy-efficient, practical superconductivity-based supercomputers in the next few years,” says Moodera. “Moreover, we expect our research to enhance the qubit stability while boosting the quantum computing program, bringing its realization closer." Given the multiple beneficial roles these components could play, Moodera and his team are already working toward the integration of such devices into actual superconducting logic circuits, including in dark matter detection circuits that are essential to the operation of experiments at CERN and LUX-ZEPLIN in at the Berkeley National Lab.

This work was partially funded by MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Advanced Concepts Committee, the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Army Research Office, and U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day.

But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don’t—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce.

AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won’t always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won’t always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement...

Russ Vought offered a soothing picture of hurricane season. Some experts believe he is using misdirection.

The federal money would have helped train inmates at seven California prisons to ask for help while recommending ways to prevent heat deaths.

A bill awaiting action by the governor would block most developers of carbon capture projects from seizing property to build pipelines.

The budget bill in Congress would end a Biden program to convert highway sections into areas for recreation and commerce.

A report ranked automakers by how they are decarbonizing, including the use of green steel.

The investment bank’s finding comes as President Donald Trump tries to reverse clean energy tax credits.

Despite the state's experience and expertise, Florida has historically relied on tens of billions of recovery dollars provided by FEMA.

Tropical diseases are already causing havoc in southern Europe, while heat-related deaths are on the rise.

Three boats sank on Lake Tumba during extreme weather last Wednesday, with 107 passengers remaining missing, said officials.

In the 1950s, Earth averaged about one planetary wave event a summer. Now it's getting about three per summer, according to a new study.

In 1989, New York City opened a new jail. But not on dry land. The city leased a barge, then called the “Bibby Resolution,” which had been topped with five stories of containers made into housing, and anchored it in the East River. For five years, the vessel lodged inmates.

A floating detention center is a curiosity. But then, the entire history of this barge is curious. Built in 1979 in Sweden, it housed British troops during the Falkland Islands war with Argentina, became worker housing for Volkswagen employees in West Germany, got sent to New York, also became a detention center off the coast of England, then finally was deployed as oil worker housing off the coast of Nigeria. The barge has had nine names, several owners, and flown the flags of five countries.

In this one vessel, then, we can see many currents: globalization, the transience of economic activity, and the hazy world of transactions many analysts and observers call “the offshore,” the lightly regulated sphere of economic activity that encourages short-term actions.

“The offshore presents a quick and potentially cheap solution to a crisis,” says MIT lecturer Ian Kumekawa. “It is not a durable solution. The story of the barge is the story of it being used as a quick fix in all sorts of crises. Then these expediences become the norm, and people get used to them and have an expectation that this is the way the world works.”

Now Kumekawa, a historian who started teaching as a lecturer at MIT earlier this year, explores the ship’s entire history in “Empty Vessel: The Global Economy in One Barge,” just published by Knopf and John Murray. In it, he traces the barge’s trajectory and the many economic and geopolitical changes that helped create the ship’s distinctive deployments around the world.

“The book is about a barge, but it’s also about the developing, emerging offshore world, where you see these layers of globalization, financialization, privatization, and the dissolution of territoriality and orders,” Kumekawa says. “The barge is a vehicle through which I can tell the story of those layers together.”

“Never meant to be permanent”

Kumekawa first found out about the vessel several years ago; New York City obtained another floating detention center in the 1990s, which prompted Kumekawa to start looking into the past of the older jail ship, the former “Bibby Resolution,” from the 1990s. The more he found out about its distinctive past, the more curious he became.

“You start pulling on a thread, and you realize you can keep pulling,” Kumekawa says.

The barge Kumekawa follows in the book was built in Sweden in 1979 as the “Balder Scapa.” Even then, commerce was plenty globalized: The vessel was commissioned by a Norwegian shell company, with negotiations run by an expatriate Swedish shipping agent whose firm was registered in Panama and used a Miami bank.

The barge was built at an inflection point following the economic slowdown and oil shocks of the 1970s. Manufacturing was on the verge of declining in both Western Europe and the U.S.; about half as many people now work in manufacturing in those regions, compared to 1960. Companies were looking to find cheaper global locations for production, reinforcing the sense that economic activity was now less durable in any given place.

The barge became part of this transience. The five-story accommodation block was added in the early 1980s; in 1983 it was re-registered in the UK and sent to the Falkland Islands as a troop accommodation named the “COASTEL 3.” Then it was re-registered in the Bahamas and sent to Emden, West Germany, as housing for Volkswagen workers. The vessel then served its stints as inmate housing — first in New York, then off the coast of England from 1997 to 2005. By 2010, it had been re-re-re-registered, in St. Vincent and Grenadines, and was housing oil workers off the coast of Nigeria.

“Globalization is more about flow than about stocks, and the barge is a great example of that,” Kumekawa says. “It’s always on the move, and never meant to be a permanent container. It’s understood people are going to be passing through.”

As Kumekawa explores in the book, this sense of social dislocation overlapped with the shrinking of state capacity, as many states increasingly encouraged companies to pursue globalized production and lightly regulated financial activities in numerous jurisdictions, in the hope it would enhance growth. And it has, albeit with unresolved questions about who the benefits accrue to, the social dislocation of workers, and more.

“In a certain sense it’s not an erosion of state power at all,” Kumekawa says. “These states are making very active choices to use offshore tools, to circumvent certain roadblocks.” He adds: “What happens in the 1970s and certainly in the 1980s is that the offshore comes into its own as an entity, and didn’t exist in the same way even in the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a money interest in that, and there’s a political interest as well.”

Abstract forces, real materials and people

Kumekawa is a scholar with a strong interest in economic history; his previous book, “The First Serious Optimist: A.C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics,” was published in 2017. This coming fall, Kumekawa will be team-teaching a class on the relationship between economics and history, along with MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Jacob Moscona.

Working on “Empty Vessel” also necessitated that Kumekawa use a variety of research techniques, from archival work to journalistic interviews with people who knew the vessel well.

“I had a wonderful set of conversations with the man who was the last bargemaster,” Kumekawa says. “He was the person in effect steering the vessel for many years. He was so aware of all of the forces at play — the market for oil, the prices of accommodations, the regulations, the fact no one had reinforced the frame.”

“Empty Vessel” has already received critical acclaim. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai writes that this “elegant and enlightening book is an impressive feat.”

For his part, Kumekawa also took inspiration from a variety of writings about ships, voyages, commerce, and exploration, recognizing that these vessels contain stories and vignettes that illuminate the wider world.

“Ships work very well as devices connecting the global and the local,” he says. Using the barge as the organizing principle of his book, Kumekawa adds, “makes a whole bunch of abstract processes very concrete. The offshore itself is an abstraction, but it’s also entirely dependent on physical infrastructure and physical places. My hope for the book is it reinforces the material dimension of these abstract global forces.”

For the third time since October 2023, Gaza has faced a near-total telecommunications blackout—plunging over 2 million residents into digital darkness and isolating them from the outside world. According to Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh, the latest outage began on June 11, 2025, and lasted three days before partial service was restored on June 14. As of today, reports from inside Gaza suggest that access has been cut off again in central and southern Gaza. 

Blackouts like these affect internet and phone communications across Gaza, leaving journalists, emergency responders, and civilians unable to communicate, document, or call for help.

Cutting off telecommunications during an active military campaign is not only a violation of basic human rights—it is a direct attack on the ability of civilians to survive, seek safety, and report abuses. Access to information and the ability to communicate are core to the exercise of freedom of expression, press freedom, and the right to life itself.

The threat of recurring outages looms large. Palestinian digital rights groups warn of a complete collapse of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure, which has already been weakened by years of blockade, lack of spare parts, and now sustained bombardment.

These blackouts systematically silence the people of Gaza amidst a humanitarian crisis. They prevent the documentation of war crimes, hide the extent of humanitarian crises, and obstruct the global community’s ability to witness and respond.

EFF has long maintained that governments and occupying powers must not disrupt internet or telecom access, especially during times of conflict. The blackout in Gaza is not just a local or regional issue—it’s a global human rights emergency.

As part of the campaign led by 7amleh to #ReconnectGaza, we call on all actors, including governments, telecommunications regulators, and civil society, to demand an end to telecommunications blackouts in Gaza and everywhere. Connectivity is a lifeline, not a luxury. 

With this week’s release of Android 16, Google added a new security feature to Android, called Advanced Protection. At-risk people—like journalists, activists, or politicians—should consider turning on. Here’s what it does, and how to decide if it’s a good fit for your security needs.

To get some confusing naming schemes clarified at the start: Advanced Protection is an extension of Google’s Advanced Protection Program, which protects your Google account from phishing and harmful downloads, and is not to be confused with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which enables end-to-end encryption for most data in iCloud. Instead, Google's Advanced Protection is more comparable to the iPhone’s Lockdown Mode, Apple’s solution to protecting high risk people from specific types of digital threats on Apple devices.

Advanced Protection for Android is meant to provide stronger security by: enabling certain features that aren’t on by default, disabling the ability to turn off features that are enabled by default, and adding new security features. Put together, this suite of features is designed to isolate data where possible, and reduce the chances of interacting with unsecure websites and unknown individuals.

For example, when it comes to enabling existing features, Advanced Protection turns on Android’s “theft detection” features (designed to protect against in-person thefts), forces Chrome to use HTTPS for all website connections (a feature we’d like to see expand to everything on the phone), enables scam and spam protection features in Google Messages, and disables 2G (which helps prevent your phone from connecting to some Cell Site Simulators). You could go in and enable each of these individually in the Settings app, but having everything turned on with one tap is much easier to do.

Advanced Protection also prevents you from disabling certain core security features that are enabled by default, like Google Play Protect (Android’s built-in malware protection) and Android Safe Browsing (which safeguards against malicious websites).

But Advanced Protection also adds some new features. Once turned on, the “Inactivity reboot” feature restarts your device if it’s locked for 72 hours, which prevents ease of access that can occur when your device is on for a while and you have settings that could unlock your device. By forcing a reboot, it resets everything to being encrypted and behind biometric or pin access. It also turns on “USB Protection,” which makes it so any new USB connection can only be used for charging when the device is locked. It also prevents your device from auto-reconnecting to unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

As with all things Android, some of these features are limited to select devices, or only phones made by certain manufacturers. Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), which attempts to mitigate memory vulnerabilities by blocking unauthorized access, debuted on Pixel 8 devices in 2023 is only now showing up on other phones. These segmentations in features makes it a little difficult to know exactly what your device is protecting against if you’re not using a Pixel phone.

Some of the new features, like the ability to generate security logs that you can then share with security professionals in case your device is ever compromised, along with the aforementioned insecure network reconnect and USB protection features, won’t launch until later this year.

It’s also worth considering that enabling Advanced Protection may impact how you use your device. For example, Advanced Protection disables the JavaScript optimizer in Chrome, which may break some websites, and since Advanced Protection blocks unknown apps, you won’t be able to side-load. There’s also the chance that some of the call screening and scam detection features may misfire and flag legitimate calls.

How to Turn on Advanced Protection

Advanced Protection is easy to turn on and off, so there’s no harm in giving it a try. Advanced Protection was introduced with Android 16, so you may need to update your phone, or wait a little longer for your device manufacturer to support the update if it doesn’t already. Once you’re updated, to turn it on:

• Open the Settings app.
• Tap Security and Privacy > Advanced Protection, and enable the option next to “Device Protection.” 
• If you haven’t already done so, now is a good time to consider enabling Advanced Protection for your Google account as well, though you will need to enroll a security key or a passkey to use this feature.

We welcome these features on Android, as well as the simplicity of its approach to enabling several pre-existing security and privacy features all at once. While there is no panacea for every security threat, this is a baseline that improves the security on Android for at-risk individuals without drastically altering day-to-day use, which is a win for everyone. We hope to see Google continue to push new improvements to this feature and for different phone manufacturer’s to support Advanced Protection where they don’t already.

In recent years, some grass lawns around the country have grown a little taller in springtime thanks to No Mow May, a movement originally launched by U.K. nonprofit Plantlife in 2019 designed to raise awareness about the ecological impacts of the traditional, resource-intensive, manicured grass lawn. No Mow May encourages people to skip spring mowing to allow for grass to grow tall and provide food and shelter for beneficial creatures including bees, beetles, and other pollinators.

This year, MIT took part in the practice for the first time, with portions of the Kendall/MIT Open Space, Bexley Garden, and the Tang Courtyard forgoing mowing from May 1 through June 6 to make space for local pollinators, decrease water use, and encourage new thinking about the traditional lawn. MIT’s first No Mow May was the result of championing by the Graduate Student Council Sustainability Subcommittee (GSC Sustain) and made possible by the Office of the Vice Provost for Campus Space Management and Planning. 

A student idea sprouts

Despite being a dense urban campus, MIT has no shortage of green spaces — from pocket gardens and community-managed vegetable plots to thousands of shade trees — and interest in these spaces continues to grow. In recent years, student-led initiatives supported by Institute leadership and operational staff have transformed portions of campus by increasing the number of native pollinator plants and expanding community gardens, like the Hive Garden. With No Mow May, these efforts stepped out of the garden and into MIT’s many grassy open spaces. 

“The idea behind it was to raise awareness for more sustainable and earth-friendly lawn practices,” explains Gianmarco Terrones, GSC Sustain member. Those practices include reducing the burden of mowing, limiting use of fertilizers, and providing shelter and food for pollinators. “The insects that live in these spaces are incredibly important in terms of pollination, but they’re also part of the food chain for a lot of animals,” says Terrones. 

Research has shown that holding off on mowing in spring, even in small swaths of green space, can have an impact. The early months of spring have the lowest number of flowers in regions like New England, and providing a resource and refuge — even for a short duration — can support fragile pollinators like bees. Additionally, No Mow May aims to help people rethink their yards and practices, which are not always beneficial for local ecosystems. 

Signage at each No Mow site on campus highlighted information on local pollinators, the impact of the project, and questions for visitors to ask themselves. “Having an active sign there to tell people, ‘look around. How many butterflies do you see after six weeks of not mowing? Do you see more? Do you see more bees?’ can cause subtle shifts in people’s awareness of ecosystems,” says GSC Sustain member Mingrou Xie. A mowed barrier around each project also helped visitors know that areas of tall grass at No Mow sites are intentional.

Campus partners bring sustainable practices to life

To make MIT’s No Mow May possible, GSC Sustain members worked with the Office of the Vice Provost and the Open Space Working Group, co-chaired by Vice Provost for Campus Space Management and Planning Brent Ryan and Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. The Working Group, which also includes staff from Open Space Programming, Campus Planning, and faculty in the School of Architecture and Planning, helped to identify potential No Mow locations and develop strategies for educational signage and any needed maintenance. “Massachusetts is a biodiverse state, and No Mow May provides an exciting opportunity for MIT to support that biodiversity on its own campus,” says Ryan. 

Students were eager for space on campus with high visibility, and the chosen locations of the Kendall/MIT Open Space, Bexley Garden, and the Tang Courtyard fit the bill. “We wanted to set an example and empower the community to feel like they can make a positive change to an environment they spend so much time in,” says Xie. 

For GSC Sustain, that positive change also takes the form of the Native Plant Project, which they launched in 2022 to increase the number of Massachusetts-native pollinator plants on campus — plants like swamp milkweed, zigzag goldenrod, big leaf aster, and red columbine, with which native pollinators have co-evolved. Partnering with the Open Space Working Group, GSC Sustain is currently focused on two locations for new native plant gardens — the President’s Garden and the terrace gardens at the E37 Graduate Residence. “Our short-term goal is to increase the number of native [plants] on campus, but long term we want to foster a community of students and staff interested in supporting sustainable urban gardening,” says Xie.

Campus as a test bed continues to grow

After just a few weeks of growing, the campus No Mow May locations sprouted buttercups, mouse ear chickweed, and small tree saplings, highlighting the diversity waiting dormant in the average lawn. Terrones also notes other discoveries: “It’s been exciting to see how much the grass has sprung up these last few weeks. I thought the grass would all grow at the same rate, but as May has gone on the variations in grass height have become more apparent, leading to non-uniform lawns with a clearly unmanicured feel,” he says. “We hope that members of MIT noticed how these lawns have evolved over the span of a few weeks and are inspired to implement more earth-friendly lawn practices in their own homes/spaces.”

No Mow May and the Native Plant Project fit into MIT’s overall focus on creating resilient ecosystems that support and protect the MIT community and the beneficial critters that call it home. MIT Grounds Services has long included native plants in the mix of what is grown on campus and native pollinator gardens, like the Hive Garden, have been developed and cared for through partnerships with students and Grounds Services in recent years. Grounds, along with consultants that design and install our campus landscape projects, strive to select plants that assist us with meeting sustainability goals, like helping with stormwater runoff and cooling. No Mow May can provide one more data point for the iterative process of choosing the best plants and practices for a unique microclimate like the MIT campus.

“We are always looking for new ways to use our campus as a test bed for sustainability,” says Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. “Community-led projects like No Mow May help us to learn more about our campus and share those lessons with the larger community.”

The Office of the Vice Provost, the Open Space Working Group, and GSC Sustain will plan to reconnect in the fall for a formal debrief of the project and its success. Given the positive community feedback, future possibilities of expanding or extending No Mow May will be discussed.

This post was written by EFF legal intern Alexa Chavara.

Black box technology has no place in the criminal legal system. That’s why we’ve once again filed an amicus brief arguing that the both the defendant and the public have a right to information regarding face recognition technology (FRT) that was used during an investigation to identify a criminal defendant.

Back in June 2023, we filed an amicus brief along with Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) in State of New Jersey v. Arteaga. We argued that information regarding the face recognition technology used to identify the defendant should be disclosed due to the fraught process of a face recognition search and the many ways that inaccuracies manifest in the use of the technology. The New Jersey appellate court agreed, holding that state prosecutors must turn over detailed information to the defendant about the FRT used, including how it works, its source code, and its error rate. The court held that this ensures the defendant’s due process rights with the ability to examine the information, scrutinize its reliability, and build a defense.

Last month, partnering with the same organizations, we filed another amicus brief in favor of transparency regarding FRT in the criminal system, this time in the New Jersey Supreme Court in State of New Jersey v. Miles.

In Miles, New Jersey law enforcement used FRT to identify Mr. Miles as a suspect in a criminal investigation. The defendant, represented by the same public defender in Arteaga, moved for discovery on information about the FRT used, relying on Arteaga. The trial court granted this request for discovery, and the appellate court affirmed. The State then appealed to the New Jersey Supreme Court, where the issue is before the Court for the first time.

As explained in our amicus brief, disclosure is necessary to ensure criminal prosecutions are based on accurate evidence. Every search using face recognition technology presents a unique risk of error depending on various factors from the specific FRT system used, the databases searched, the quality of the photograph, and the demographics of the individual. Study after study shows that facial recognition algorithms are not always reliable, and that error rates spike significantly when involving faces of people of color,  especially Black women, as well as trans and nonbinary people.

Moreover, these searches often determine the course of investigation, reinforcing errors and resulting in numerous wrongful arrests, most often of Black folks. Discovery is the last chance to correct harm from misidentification and to allow the defendant to understand the evidence against them.

Furthermore, the public, including independent experts, have the right to examine the technology used in criminal proceedings. Under the First Amendment and the more expansive New Jersey Constitution corollary, the public’s right to access criminal judicial proceedings includes filings in pretrial proceedings, like the information being sought here. That access provides the public meaningful oversight of the criminal justice system and increases confidence in judicial outcomes, which is especially significant considering the documented risks and shortcomings of FRT.