This is the ninth installment in a blog series documenting EFF’s findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here.  

Meta has been getting content moderation wrong for years, like most platforms that host user-generated content. Sometimes it’s a result of deliberate design choices—privacy rollbacks, opaque policies, features that prioritize growth over safety—made even when the company knows that those choices could negatively impact users. Other times, it’s simply the inevitable outcome of trying to govern billions of posts with a mix of algorithms and overstretched human reviewers. Importantly, users shouldn’t have to worry about their posts being deleted or their accounts getting banned when they share factual health information that doesn’t violate the platforms' policies. But knowing more about what the algorithmic moderation is likely to flag can help you to avoid its mistakes. 

We analyzed the roughly one-hundred survey submissions we received from social media users in response to our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Their stories revealed some clear patterns: certain words, images, and phrases seemed to trigger takedowns, even when posts didn’t come close to violating Meta’s rules. 

For example, your post linking to information on how people are accessing abortion pills online clearly is not an offer to buy or sell pills, but an algorithm, or a human content reviewer who doesn’t know for sure, might wrongly flag it for violating Meta’s policies on promoting or selling “restricted goods.” 

That doesn’t mean you’re powerless. For years, people have used “algospeak”—creative spelling, euphemisms, or indirection—to sidestep platform filters. Abortion rights advocates are now forced into similar strategies, even when their speech is perfectly legal. It’s not fair, but it might help you keep your content online. Here are some things we learned from our survey: 

Practical Tips to Reduce the Risk of Takedowns 

While traditional social media platforms can help people reach larger audiences, using them also generally means you have to hand over control of what you and others are able to see to the people who run the company. This is the deal that large platforms offer—and while most of us want platforms to moderate some content (even if that moderation is imperfect), current systems of moderation often reflect existing societal power imbalances and impact marginalized voices the most. 

There are ways companies and governments could better balance the power between users and platforms. In the meantime, there are steps you can take right now to break the hold these platforms have:   

• Images and keywords matter. Posts with pill images, or accounts with “pill” in their names, were flagged often—even when the posts weren’t offering to sell medication. Before posting, consider whether you need to include an image of, or the word “pill,” or whether there’s another way to communicate your message. 

• Clarity beats vagueness. Saying “we can help you find what you need” or “contact me for more info” might sound innocuous, but to an algorithm, it can look like an offer to sell drugs. Spell out what kind of support you do and don’t provide—for example: “We can talk through options and point you toward trusted resources. We don’t provide medical services or medication.” 

• Be careful with links. Direct links to organizations or services that provide abortion pills were often flagged, even if the organizations operate legally. Instead of linking, try spelling out the name of the site or account. 

• Certain word combos are red flags. Posts that included words like “mifepristone,” “abortion,” and “mail” together were frequently removed. You may still want to use them—they’re accurate and important—but know they make your post more likely to be flagged. 

• Ads are even stricter. Meta requires pharmaceutical advertisers to prove they’re licensed in the countries they target. If you boost posts, assume the more stringent advertising standards will be applied. 

Alternatives and Backups 

Big platforms give you reach, but they also set the rules—and those rules usually favor corporate interests over human rights. You don’t have to accept that as the only way forward: 

• Keep a backup. Export your data regularly so you’re not left empty-handed if your account disappears overnight. 

• Build your own space. Hosting a website isn’t free, but it puts you in control. 

• Explore other platforms. Newsletters, Discord, and other community tools offer more control than Facebook or Instagram. Decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t perfect, but they show what’s possible when moderation isn’t dictated from the top down. (Learn more about the differences between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, and how these kinds of platforms help us build a better internet.) 

• Push for interoperability. Imagine being able to take your audience with you when you leave a platform. That’s the future we should be fighting for. (For more on interoperability and Meta, check out this video where Cory Doctorow explains what an interoperable Facebook would look like.) 

Protect Your Privacy 

If you’re working in abortion access—whether as a provider, activist, or volunteer—your privacy and security matter. The same is true for patients. Check out EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense for tailored guides. Look at resources from groups like Digital Defense Fund and learn how location tracking tools can endanger abortion access. If you run an organization, consider some of the ways you can minimize what information you collect about patients, clients, or customers, in our guide to Online Privacy for Nonprofits. 

Platforms like Meta insist they want to balance free expression and safety, but their blunt systems consistently end up reinforcing existing inequalities—silencing the very people who most need to be heard. Until they do better, it’s on us to protect ourselves, share our stories, and keep building the kind of internet that respects our rights. 

This is the ninth post in our blog series documenting the findings from our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Read more in the series: https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion 

Affected by unjust censorship? Share your story using the hashtag #StopCensoringAbortion. Amplify censored posts and accounts, share screenshots of removals and platform messages—together, we can demonstrate how these policies harm real people.  

His conclusion:

Context wins

Basically whoever can see the most about the target, and can hold that picture in their mind the best, will be best at finding the vulnerabilities the fastest and taking advantage of them. Or, as the defender, applying patches or mitigations the fastest.

And if you’re on the inside you know what the applications do. You know what’s important and what isn’t. And you can use all that internal knowledge to fix things­—hopefully before the baddies take advantage.

Summary and prediction

1. Attackers will have the advantage for 3-5 years. For less-advanced defender teams, this will take much longer. ...

Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities. 

In marketing materials, Flock has been touting new features to their Raven product—including the ability of the device to alert police based on sounds, including “distress.” The online ad for the product, which allows cities to apply for early access to the technology, shows the image of police getting an alert for “screaming.” 

It’s unclear how this technology works. For acoustic gunshot detection, generally the microphones are looking for sounds that would signify gunshots (though in practice they often mistake car backfires or fireworks for gunshots). Flock needs to come forward now with an explanation of exactly how their new technology functions. It is unclear how these devices will interact with state “eavesdropping” laws that limit listening to or recording the private conversations that often take place in public. 

Flock is no stranger to causing legal challenges for the cities and states that adopt their products. In Illinois, Flock was accused of violating state law by allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency, access to license plate reader data taken within the state. That’s not all. In 2023, a North Carolina judge halted the installation of Flock cameras statewide for operating in the state without a license. When the city of Evanston, Illinois recently canceled its contract with Flock, it ordered the company to take down their license plate readers–only for Flock to mysteriously reinstall them a few days later. This city has now sent Flock a cease and desist order and in the meantime, has put black tape over the cameras. For some, the technology isn’t worth its mounting downsides. As one Illinois village trustee wrote while explaining his vote to cancel the city’s contract with Flock, “According to our own Civilian Police Oversight Commission, over 99% of Flock alerts do not result in any police action.”

Gunshot detection technology is dangerous enough as it is—police showing up to alerts they think are gunfire only to find children playing with fireworks is a recipe for innocent people to get hurt. This isn’t hypothetical: in Chicago a child really was shot at by police who thought they were responding to a shooting thanks to a ShotSpotter alert. Introducing a new feature that allows these pre-installed Raven microphones all over cities to begin listening for human voices in distress is likely to open up a whole new can of unforeseen legal, civil liberties, and even bodily safety consequences.

The Trump administration had tried to eviscerate climate offices before the shutdown. Now, the cuts are deeper.

A data center development known as Project Washington could use twice as much electricity as is consumed by every home in the state.

The prominent climate scientist known for tangling with conservatives retains two other positions with the University of Pennsylvania, including as a professor.

DOJ wants to stop Michigan from suing the oil industry over climate change before the state actually goes to court.

The Department of Transportation had funding for the University of California, Davis, in a wider purge of climate and diversity efforts.

“If they don’t listen to us, they’re going to face some harsh realities,” says the GMB union chief.

There was no structural damage to homes and no injuries were reported, according the city of Rancho Palos Verdes' website.

The shrinkage is the fourth-largest after those in 2022, 2023 and back in 2003.

A European Central Bank board member said lenders “are emerging as industry leaders” in managing sustainable funds and green bonds.

Designing a complex electronic device like a delivery drone involves juggling many choices, such as selecting motors and batteries that minimize cost while maximizing the payload the drone can carry or the distance it can travel.

Unraveling that conundrum is no easy task, but what happens if the designers don’t know the exact specifications of each battery and motor? On top of that, the real-world performance of these components will likely be affected by unpredictable factors, like changing weather along the drone’s route.

MIT researchers developed a new framework that helps engineers design complex systems in a way that explicitly accounts for such uncertainty. The framework allows them to model the performance tradeoffs of a device with many interconnected parts, each of which could behave in unpredictable ways.

Their technique captures the likelihood of many outcomes and tradeoffs, giving designers more information than many existing approaches which, at most, can usually only model best-case and worst-case scenarios.

Ultimately, this framework could help engineers develop complex systems like autonomous vehicles, commercial aircraft, or even regional transportation networks that are more robust and reliable in the face of real-world unpredictability.

“In practice, the components in a device never behave exactly like you think they will. If someone has a sensor whose performance is uncertain, and an algorithm that is uncertain, and the design of a robot that is also uncertain, now they have a way to mix all these uncertainties together so they can come up with a better design,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this framework.

Zardini is joined on the paper by lead author Yujun Huang, an MIT graduate student; and Marius Furter, a graduate student at the University of Zurich. The research will be presented at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

Considering uncertainty

The Zardini Group studies co-design, a method for designing systems made of many interconnected components, from robots to regional transportation networks.

The co-design language breaks a complex problem into a series of boxes, each representing one component, that can be combined in different ways to maximize outcomes or minimize costs. This allows engineers to solve complex problems in a feasible amount of time.

In prior work, the researchers modeled each co-design component without considering uncertainty. For instance, the performance of each sensor the designers could choose for a drone was fixed.

But engineers often don’t know the exact performance specifications of each sensor, and even if they do, it is unlikely the senor will perfectly follow its spec sheet. At the same time, they don’t know how each sensor will behave once integrated into a complex device, or how performance will be affected by unpredictable factors like weather.

“With our method, even if you are unsure what the specifications of your sensor will be, you can still design the robot to maximize the outcome you care about,” says Furter.

To accomplish this, the researchers incorporated this notion of uncertainty into an existing framework based on category theory.

Using some mathematical tricks, they simplified the problem into a more general structure. This allows them to use the tools of category theory to solve co-design problems in a way that considers a range of uncertain outcomes.

By reformulating the problem, the researchers can capture how multiple design choices affect one another even when their individual performance is uncertain.

This approach is also simpler than many existing tools that typically require extensive domain expertise. With their plug-and-play system, one can rearrange the components in the system without violating any mathematical constraints.

And because no specific domain expertise is required, the framework could be used by a multidisciplinary team where each member designs one component of a larger system.

“Designing an entire UAV isn’t feasible for just one person, but designing a component of a UAV is. By providing the framework for how these components work together in a way that considers uncertainty, we’ve made it easier for people to evaluate the performance of the entire UAV system,” Huang says.

More detailed information

The researchers used this new approach to choose perception systems and batteries for a drone that would maximize its payload while minimizing its lifetime cost and weight.

While each perception system may offer a different detection accuracy under varying weather conditions, the designer doesn’t know exactly how its performance will fluctuate. This new system allows the designer to take these uncertainties into consideration when thinking about the drone’s overall performance.

And unlike other approaches, their framework reveals distinct advantages of each battery technology.

For instance, their results show that at lower payloads, nickel-metal hydride batteries provide the lowest expected lifetime cost. This insight would be impossible to fully capture without accounting for uncertainty, Zardini says.

While another method might only be able to show the best-case and worst-case performance scenarios of lithium polymer batteries, their framework gives the user more detailed information.

For example, it shows that if the drone’s payload is 1,750 grams, there is a 12.8 percent chance the battery design would be infeasible.

“Our system provides the tradeoffs, and then the user can reason about the design,” he adds.

In the future, the researchers want to improve the computational efficiency of their problem-solving algorithms. They also want to extend this approach to situations where a system is designed by multiple parties that are collaborative and competitive, like a transportation network in which rail companies operate using the same infrastructure.

“As the complexity of systems grow, and involves more disparate components, we need a formal framework in which to design these systems. This paper presents a way to compose large systems from modular components, understand design trade-offs, and importantly do so with a notion of uncertainty. This creates an opportunity to formalize the design of large-scale systems with learning-enabled components,” says Aaron Ames, the Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Control and Dynamical Systems, and Aerospace at Caltech, who was not involved with this research. 

Every day, corporations track our movements through license plate scanners, building detailed profiles of where we go, when we go there, and who we visit. When they do this to us in violation of data privacy laws, we’ve suffered a real harm—period. We shouldn’t need to prove we’ve suffered additional damage, such as physical injury or monetary loss, to have our day in court.

That's why EFF is proud to join an amicus brief in Mata v. Digital Recognition Network, a lawsuit by drivers against a corporation that allegedly violated a California statute that regulates Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs). The state trial court erroneously dismissed the case, by misinterpreting this data privacy law to require proof of extra harm beyond privacy harm. The brief was written by the ACLU of Northern California, Stanford’s Juelsgaard Clinic, and UC Law SF’s Center for Constitutional Democracy.

The amicus brief explains:

This case implicates critical questions about whether a California privacy law, enacted to protect people from harmful surveillance, is not just words on paper, but can be an effective tool for people to protect their rights and safety.

California’s Constitution and laws empower people to challenge harmful surveillance at its inception without waiting for its repercussions to manifest through additional harms. A foundation for these protections is article I, section 1, which grants Californians an inalienable right to privacy.

People in the state have long used this constitutional right to challenge the privacy-invading collection of information by private and governmental parties, not only harms that are financial, mental, or physical. Indeed, widely understood notions of privacy harm, as well as references to harm in the California Code, also demonstrate that term’s expansive meaning.

What’s At Stake

The defendant, Digital Recognition Network, also known as DRN Data, is a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions that provides access to a massive searchable database of ALPR data collected by private contractors. Its customers include law enforcement agencies and private companies, such as insurers, lenders, and repossession firms. DRN is the sister company to the infamous surveillance vendor Vigilant Solutions (now Motorola Solutions), and together they have provided data to ICE through a contract with Thomson Reuters.

The consequences of weak privacy protections are already playing out across the country. This year alone, authorities in multiple states have used license plate readers to hunt for people seeking reproductive healthcare. Police officers have used these systems to stalk romantic partners and monitor political activists. ICE has tapped into these networks to track down immigrants and their families for deportation.

Strong Privacy Laws

This case could determine whether privacy laws have real teeth or are just words on paper. If corporations can collect your personal information with impunity—knowing that unless you can prove bodily injury or economic loss, you can’t fight back—then privacy laws lose value.

We need strong data privacy laws. We need a private right of action so when a company violates our data privacy rights, we can sue them. We need a broad definition of “harm,” so we can sue over our lost privacy rights, without having to prove collateral injury. EFF wages this battle when writing privacy laws, when interpreting those laws, and when asserting “standing” in federal and state courts.

The fight for privacy isn’t just about legal technicalities. It’s about preserving your right to move through the world without being constantly tracked, catalogued, and profiled by corporations looking to profit from your personal information.

You can read the amicus brief here.

Mostafa Fawzy became interested in physics in high school. It was the “elegance and paradox” of quantum theory that got his attention and led to his studies at the undergraduate and graduate level. But even with a solid foundation of coursework and supportive mentors, Fawzy wanted more. MIT Open Learning’s OpenCourseWare was just the thing he was looking for.  

Now a doctoral candidate in atomic physics at Alexandria University and an assistant lecturer of physics at Alamein International University in Egypt, Fawzy reflects on how MIT OpenCourseWare bolstered his learning early in his graduate studies in 2019.  

Part of MIT Open Learning, OpenCourseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Fawzy was looking for advanced resources to supplement his research in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics, and he was immediately struck by the quality, accessibility, and breadth of MIT’s resources. 

“OpenCourseWare was transformative in deepening my understanding of advanced physics,” Fawzy says. “I found the structured lectures and assignments in quantum physics particularly valuable. They enhanced both my theoretical insight and practical problem-solving skills — skills I later applied in research on atomic systems influenced by magnetic fields and plasma environments.”  

He completed educational resources including Quantum Physics I and Quantum Physics II, calling them “dense and mathematically sophisticated.” He met the challenge by engaging with the content in different ways: first, by simply listening to lectures, then by taking detailed notes, and finally by working though problem sets. Although initially he struggled to keep up, this methodical approach paid off, he says. 

Fawzy is now in the final stages of his doctoral research on high-precision atomic calculations under extreme conditions. While in graduate school, he has published eight peer-reviewed international research papers, making him one of the most prolific doctoral researchers in physics working in Egypt currently. He served as an ambassador for the United Nations International Youth Conference (IYC), and he was nominated for both the African Presidential Leadership Program and the Davisson–Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, a prestigious annual prize offered by the American Physical Society.  

He is grateful to his undergraduate mentors, professors M. Sakr and T. Bahy of Alexandria University, as well as to MIT OpenCourseWare, calling it a “steadfast companion through countless solitary nights of study, a beacon in times when formal resources were scarce, and a living testament to the nobility of open, unbounded learning.”  

Recognizing the power of mentorship and teaching, Fawzy serves as an academic mentor with the African Academy of Sciences, supporting early-career researchers across the continent in theoretical and atomic physics.  

“Many of these mentees lack access to advanced academic resources,” he explains. “I regularly incorporate OpenCourseWare into our mentorship sessions, using it as a foundational teaching and reference tool. It’s an equalizer, providing the same high-caliber content to students regardless of geographical or institutional limitations.” 

As he looks toward the future, Fawzy has big plans, influenced by MIT. 

“I aspire to establish a regional center for excellence in atomic and plasma physics, blending cutting-edge research with open-access education in the Global South,” he says. 

As he continues his research and teaching, he also hopes to influence science policy and contribute to international partnerships that shine the spotlight on research and science in emerging nations.  

Along the way, he says, “OpenCourseWare remains a cornerstone resource that I will return to again and again.”  

Fawzy says he’s also interested in MIT Open Learning resources in computational physics and energy and sustainability. He’s following MIT’s Energy Initiative, calling it increasingly relevant to his current work and future plans.  

Fawzy is a proponent of open learning and a testament to its power. 

“The intellectual seeds sown by Open Learning resources such as MIT OpenCourseWare have flourished within me, shaping my identity as a physicist and affirming my deep belief in the transformative power of knowledge shared freely, without barriers,” he says. 

Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the concrete around us could one day double as giant “batteries.”

As MIT researchers report in a new PNAS paper, optimized electrolytes and manufacturing processes have increased the energy storage capacity of the latest ec3 supercapacitors by an order of magnitude. In 2023, storing enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home would have required about 45 cubic meters of ec3, roughly the amount of concrete used in a typical basement. Now, with the improved electrolyte, that same task can be achieved with about 5 cubic meters, the volume of a typical basement wall.

“A key to the sustainability of concrete is the development of ‘multifunctional concrete,’ which integrates functionalities like this energy storage, self-healing, and carbon sequestration. Concrete is already the world’s most-used construction material, so why not take advantage of that scale to create other benefits?” asks Admir Masic, lead author of the new study, MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub (EC³ Hub) co-director, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT.

The improved energy density was made possible by a deeper understanding of how the nanocarbon black network inside ec3 functions and interacts with electrolytes. Using focused ion beams for the sequential removal of thin layers of the ec3 material, followed by high-resolution imaging of each slice with a scanning electron microscope (a technique called FIB-SEM tomography), the team across the EC³ Hub and MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub was able to reconstruct the conductive nanonetwork at the highest resolution yet. This approach allowed the team to discover that the network is essentially a fractal-like “web” that surrounds ec3 pores, which is what allows the electrolyte to infiltrate and for current to flow through the system. 

“Understanding how these materials ‘assemble’ themselves at the nanoscale is key to achieving these new functionalities,” adds Masic.

Equipped with their new understanding of the nanonetwork, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations to see how they impacted energy storage density. As Damian Stefaniuk, first author and EC³ Hub research scientist, highlights, “we found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec3. This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”

At the same time, the team streamlined the way they added electrolytes to the mix. Rather than curing ec3 electrodes and then soaking them in electrolyte, they added the electrolyte directly into the mixing water. Since electrolyte penetration was no longer a limitation, the team could cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.

The team achieved the greatest performance when they switched to organic electrolytes, especially those that combined quaternary ammonium salts — found in everyday products like disinfectants — with acetonitrile, a clear, conductive liquid often used in industry. A cubic meter of this version of ec3 — about the size of a refrigerator — can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s about enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.

While batteries maintain a higher energy density, ec3 can in principle be incorporated directly into a wide range of architectural elements — from slabs and walls to domes and vaults — and last as long as the structure itself.

“The Ancient Romans made great advances in concrete construction. Massive structures like the Pantheon stand to this day without reinforcement. If we keep up their spirit of combining material science with architectural vision, we could be at the brink of a new architectural revolution with multifunctional concretes like ec3,” proposes Masic.

Taking inspiration from Roman architecture, the team built a miniature ec3 arch to show how structural form and energy storage can work together. Operating at 9 volts, the arch supported its own weight and additional load while powering an LED light.

However, something unique happened when the load on the arch increased: the light flickered. This is likely due to the way stress impacts electrical contacts or the distribution of charges. “There may be a kind of self-monitoring capacity here. If we think of an ec3 arch at architectural scale, its output may fluctuate when it’s impacted by a stressor like high winds. We may be able to use this as a signal of when and to what extent a structure is stressed, or monitor its overall health in real time,” envisions Masic.

The latest developments in ec³ technology bring it a step closer to real-world scalability. It’s already been used to heat sidewalk slabs in Sapporo, Japan, due to its thermally conductive properties, representing a potential alternative to salting. “With these higher energy densities and demonstrated value across a broader application space, we now have a powerful and flexible tool that can help us address a wide range of persistent energy challenges,” explains Stefaniuk. “One of our biggest motivations was to help enable the renewable energy transition. Solar power, for example, has come a long way in terms of efficiency. However, it can only generate power when there’s enough sunlight. So, the question becomes: How do you meet your energy needs at night, or on cloudy days?”

Franz-Josef Ulm, EC³ Hub co-director and CEE professor, continues the thread: “The answer is that you need a way to store and release energy. This has usually meant a battery, which often relies on scarce or harmful materials. We believe that ec3 is a viable substitute, letting our buildings and infrastructure meet our energy storage needs.” The team is working toward applications like parking spaces and roads that could charge electric vehicles, as well as homes that can operate fully off the grid.

“What excites us most is that we’ve taken a material as ancient as concrete and shown that it can do something entirely new,” says James Weaver, a co-author on the paper who is an associate professor of design technology and materials science and engineering at Cornell University, as well as a former EC³ Hub researcher. “By combining modern nanoscience with an ancient building block of civilization, we’re opening a door to infrastructure that doesn’t just support our lives, it powers them.”

The Financial Times reports that the U.K. is once again demanding that Apple create a backdoor into its encrypted backup services. The only change since the last time they demanded this is that the order is allegedly limited to only apply to British users. That doesn’t make it any better.

The demand uses a power called a “Technical Capability Notice” (TCN) in the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act. At the time of its signing we noted this law would likely be used to demand Apple spy on its users.

After the U.K. government first issued the TCN in January, Apple was forced to either create a backdoor or block its Advanced Data Protection feature—which turns on end-to-end encryption for iCloud—for all U.K. users. The company decided to remove the feature in the U.K. instead of creating the backdoor.

The initial order from January targeted the data of all Apple users. In August, the US claimed the U.K. withdrew the demand, but Apple did not re-enable Advanced Data Protection. The new order provides insight into why: the U.K. was just rewriting it to only apply to British users.

This is still an unsettling overreach that makes U.K. users less safe and less free. As we’ve said time and time again, any backdoor built for the government puts everyone at greater risk of hacking, identity theft, and fraud. It sets a dangerous precedent to demand similar data from other companies, and provides a runway for other authoritarian governments to issue comparable orders. The news of continued server-side access to users' data comes just days after the UK government announced an intrusive mandatory digital ID scheme, framed as a measure against illegal migration.

A tribunal hearing was initially set to take place in January 2026, though it’s currently unclear if that will proceed or if the new order changes the legal process. Apple must continue to refuse these types of backdoors. Breaking end-to-end encryption for one country breaks it for everyone. These repeated attempts to weaken encryption violates fundamental human rights and destroys our right to private spaces.

It's spooky season—but while jump scares may get your heart racing, catching up on digital rights news shouldn't! Our EFFector newsletter has got you covered with easy, bite-sized updates to keep you up-to-date.

In this issue, we spotlight new ALPR-enhanced police drones and how local communities can push back; unpack the ongoing TikTok “ban,” which we’ve consistently said violates the First Amendment; and celebrate a privacy win—abandoning a phone doesn't mean you've also abandoned your privacy rights.

Prefer to listen in? Check out our audio companion, where we interview EFF Staff Attorney Lisa Femia who explains the findings from our investigation into abortion censorship on social media. Catch the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

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EFFECTOR 37.13 - ❌ HOW META IS CENSORING ABORTION

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

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Palladium is one of the keys to jump-starting a hydrogen-based energy economy. The silvery metal is a natural gatekeeper against every gas except hydrogen, which it readily lets through. For its exceptional selectivity, palladium is considered one of the most effective materials at filtering gas mixtures to produce pure hydrogen.

Today, palladium-based membranes are used at commercial scale to provide pure hydrogen for semiconductor manufacturing, food processing, and fertilizer production, among other applications in which the membranes operate at modest temperatures. If palladium membranes get much hotter than around 800 kelvins, they can break down.

Now, MIT engineers have developed a new palladium membrane that remains resilient at much higher temperatures. Rather than being made as a continuous film, as most membranes are, the new design is made from palladium that is deposited as “plugs” into the pores of an underlying supporting material. At high temperatures, the snug-fitting plugs remain stable and continue separating out hydrogen, rather than degrading as a surface film would.

The thermally stable design opens opportunities for membranes to be used in hydrogen-fuel-generating technologies such as compact steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking — technologies that are designed to operate at much higher temperatures to produce hydrogen for zero-carbon-emitting fuel and electricity.

“With further work on scaling and validating performance under realistic industrial feeds, the design could represent a promising route toward practical membranes for high-temperature hydrogen production,” says Lohyun Kim PhD ’24, a former graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Kim and his colleagues report details of the new membrane in a study appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The study’s co-authors are Randall Field, director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI); former MIT chemical engineering graduate student Chun Man Chow PhD ’23; Rohit Karnik, the Jameel Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS); and Aaron Persad, a former MIT research scientist in mechanical engineering who is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.

Compact future

The team’s new design came out of a MITEI project related to fusion energy. Future fusion power plants, such as the one MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems is designing, will involve circulating hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium at extremely high temperatures to produce energy from the isotopes’ fusing. The reactions inevitably produce other gases that will have to be separated, and the hydrogen isotopes will be recirculated into the main reactor for further fusion.

Similar issues arise in a number of other processes for producing hydrogen, where gases must be separated and recirculated back into a reactor. Concepts for such recirculating systems would require first cooling down the gas before it can pass through hydrogen-separating membranes — an expensive and energy-intensive step that would involve additional machinery and hardware.

“One of the questions we were thinking about is: Can we develop membranes which could be as close to the reactor as possible, and operate at higher temperatures, so we don’t have to pull out the gas and cool it down first?” Karnik says. “It would enable more energy-efficient, and therefore cheaper and compact, fusion systems.”

The researchers looked for ways to improve the temperature resistance of palladium membranes. Palladium is the most effective metal used today to separate hydrogen from a variety of gas mixtures. It naturally attracts hydrogen molecules (H2) to its surface, where the metal’s electrons interact with and weaken the molecule’s bonds, causing H2 to temporarily break apart into its respective atoms. The individual atoms then diffuse through the metal and join back up on the other side as pure hydrogen.

Palladium is highly effective at permeating hydrogen, and only hydrogen, from streams of various gases. But conventional membranes typically can operate at temperatures of up to 800 kelvins before the film starts to form holes or clumps up into droplets, allowing other gases to flow through.

Plugging in

Karnik, Kim and their colleagues took a different design approach. They observed that at high temperatures, palladium will start to shrink up. In engineering terms, the material is acting to reduce surface energy. To do this, palladium, and most other materials and even water, will pull apart and form droplets with the smallest surface energy. The lower the surface energy, the more stable the material can be against further heating.

This gave the team an idea: If a supporting material’s pores could be “plugged” with deposits of palladium — essentially already forming a droplet with the lowest surface energy — the tight quarters might substantially increase palladium’s heat tolerance while preserving the membrane’s selectivity for hydrogen.

To test this idea, they fabricated small chip-sized samples of membrane using a porous silica supporting layer (each pore measuring about half a micron wide), onto which they deposited a very thin layer of palladium. They applied techniques to essentially grow the palladium into the pores, and polished down the surface to remove the palladium layer and leave palladium only inside the pores.

They then placed samples in a custom-built apparatus in which they flowed hydrogen-containing gas of various mixtures and temperatures to test its separation performance. The membranes remained stable and continued to separate hydrogen from other gases even after experiencing temperatures of up to 1,000 kelvins for over 100 hours — a significant improvement over conventional film-based membranes.

“The use of palladium film membranes are generally limited to below around 800 kelvins, at which point they degrade,” Kim says. “Our plug design therefore extends palladium’s effective heat resilience by roughly at least 200 kelvins and maintains integrity far longer under extreme conditions.”

These conditions are within the range of hydrogen-generating technologies such as steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking.

Steam methane reforming is an established process that has required complex, energy-intensive systems to preprocess methane to a form where pure hydrogen can be extracted. Such preprocessing steps could be replaced with a compact “membrane reactor,” through which a methane gas would directly flow, and the membrane inside would filter out pure hydrogen. Such reactors would significantly cut down the size, complexity, and cost of producing hydrogen from steam methane reforming, and Kim estimates a membrane would have to work reliably in temperatures of up to nearly 1,000 kelvins. The team’s new membrane could work well within such conditions.

Ammonia cracking is another way to produce hydrogen, by “cracking” or breaking apart ammonia. As ammonia is very stable in liquid form, scientists envision that it could be used as a carrier for hydrogen and be safely transported to a hydrogen fuel station, where ammonia could be fed into a membrane reactor that again pulls out hydrogen and pumps it directly into a fuel cell vehicle. Ammonia cracking is still largely in pilot and demonstration stages, and Kim says any membrane in an ammonia cracking reactor would likely operate at temperatures of around 800 kelvins — within the range of the group’s new plug-based design.

Karnik emphasizes that their results are just a start. Adopting the membrane into working reactors will require further development and testing to ensure it remains reliable over much longer periods of time.

“We showed that instead of making a film, if you make discretized nanostructures you can get much more thermally stable membranes,” Karnik says. “It provides a pathway for designing membranes for extreme temperatures, with the added possibility of using smaller amounts of expensive palladium, toward making hydrogen production more efficient and affordable. There is potential there.”

This work was supported by Eni S.p.A. via the MIT Energy Initiative.

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