How YouTube and Adhesive Tape Are Disrupting Assistive Technology

Assistive technology is expensive, and many people with disabilities live on fixed incomes. Disabled assistive tech users also must contend with equipment that was often designed without any capacity to be repaired or modified. But assistive tech users ultimately need the functionality they need—a wheelchair that isn’t constantly needing to be charged, perhaps, or a hearing aid that doesn’t amplify all background noise equally. Assistive tech “makers,“ who can hack and modify existing assistive tech, have always been in high demand.

Therese Willkomm, emeritus professor of occupational therapy at the University of New Hampshire, has written three books cataloging her more than 2,000 assistive technology hacks. Wilkomm says she aims to keep her assistive tech hacks costing less than five dollars.

She’s come to be known internationally as the “MacGyver of Assistive Technology” and has presented more than 600 workshops and assistive tech maker days across 42 states and 14 countries.

IEEE Spectrum sat down with Willkomm ahead of her latest assistive tech Maker Day workshop, on Saturday, 31 Jan., at the Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) conference in Orlando. Over the course of the conversation, she discussed the evolution of assistive technology over 40 years, the urgent need for affordable communication devices, and why the DIY movement matters now more than ever.

IEEE Spectrum: What got you started in assistive technology?

Therese Wilkomm: I grew up in Wisconsin where my father had a machine shop and worked on dairy and hog farms. At age ten, I started building and making things. A cousin was in a farm accident and needed modifications to his tractor, which introduced me to welding. In college, I enrolled in vocational rehabilitation and learned about rehab engineering—assistive technology wasn’t coined until 1988 with the Technology-Related Assistance Act. In 1979, Gregg Vanderheiden came to the University of Wisconsin-Stout and demonstrated creative things with garage door openers and communication devices. I thought, wow, this would be an awesome career path—designing and fabricating devices and worksite adaptations for people with disabilities to go back to work and live independently. I haven’t looked back.

You’ve created over 2,000 assistive technology solutions. What’s your most memorable one?

Wilkomm: A device for castrating pigs with one hand. We figured out a way to design a device that fit on the end of the hog crate that was foot-operated to hold the hind legs of the pig back so the procedure could be done with one hand.

Assistive Technology’s Changing Landscape

How has assistive technology evolved over the decades?

Wilkomm: In the 1980s, we fabricated devices from wood and early electronics. I became a [Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America, a.k.a. RESNA] member in 1985. The 1988 Technology-Related Assistance Act was transformational—all fifty states finally got funding to support assistive technology and needs in rural areas. Back in the ‘80s, we were soldering and making battery interrupters and momentary switches for toys, radios, and music. Gregg was doing some things with communication. There were Prentke Romich communication devices. Those were some of the first electronic assistive technologies.

The early 1990s was all about mobile rehab engineering. Senator Bob Dole gave me a $50,000 grant to fund my first mobile unit. That mobile unit had all my welding equipment, all my fabrication equipment, and I could drive farm to farm, set up outside right in front of the tractor, and fabricate whatever needed to be fabricated. Then around 1997, there were cuts in the school systems. Mobile units became really expensive to operate. We started to look at more efficient ways of providing assistive technology services. With the Tech Act, we had demonstration sites where people would come and try out different devices. But people had to get in a car, drive to a center, get out, find parking, come into the building—a lot of time was being lost.

In the 2000s, more challenges with decreased funding. I discovered that with a Honda Accord and those crates you get from Staples, you could have your whole mobile unit in the trunk of your car because of advances in materials. We could make battery interrupters and momentary switches without ever having to solder. We can make switches in 28 seconds, battery interrupters in 18 seconds. When COVID happened, we had to pivot—do more virtual, ship stuff out to people. We were able to serve more individuals during COVID than prior to COVID because nobody had to travel.

How do you keep costs under five dollars?

Wilkomm: I aim for five dollars or less. I get tons of corrugated plastic donated for free, so we spend no money on that. Then there’s Scapa Tape—a very aggressive double-sided foam tape that costs five cents a foot. If you fabricate something, and it doesn’t work out, and you have to reposition, you’re out a nickel’s worth of material. Buying Velcro in bulk helps too. Then Instamorph—it is non-toxic, biodegradable. You can reheat it, reform it, in five minutes or less up to six times. I’ve created about 132 different devices just using Instamorph. A lot of things I make out of Instamorph don’t necessarily work. I have a bucket and I reuse that Instamorph. We can get six, seven devices out of reusable Instamorph. That’s how we keep it under five dollars.

What key legislation impacts assistive technology?

Wilkomm: Definitely the Technology-Related Assistance Act. In the school system, however, it only says “did you consider assistive technology?” So that legislation really needs to be beefed up. The third piece of legislation I worked on was the AgrAbility legislation to fund assistive technology consultations and technical assistance for farmers and ranchers. The latest Technology-Related Assistance Act was reauthorized in 2022. Not a whole lot of changes—it’s still assistive technology device demonstrations and loans, device reuse, training, technical assistance, information and awareness. The other thing is NIDILRR—National Institute on Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research, funded under [the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a.k.a. HHS]. Funding the rehab engineering centers was pretty significant in advancing the field because these were huge, multimillion-dollar centers dedicated to core areas like communication and employment. Now there’s a new one out on artificial intelligence.

A Vision for a Better Assistive Tech Future

Over more than 2,000 hacks to improve usability of assistive technologies, veteran DIY maker Therese Wilkomm has earned the moniker “the MacGyver of assistive tech.” Therese Willkomm

What deserves more focus in your field?

Wilkomm: The supply-and-demand problem. It all comes down to time and money. We have an elderly population that continues to grow, and a disability population that continues to grow—high demand, high need for assistive technology, yet the resources available to meet that need are limited. A few years back, the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation had a competition. I submitted a proposal similar to the Blue Apron approach. People don’t have supplies at their house. They can’t buy two inches of tape—they have to buy a whole roll. They can’t buy one foot of corrugated plastic—they’ve got to buy an 18-by-24 sheet or wait till it gets donated.

With my third book, I created solutions with QR codes showing videos on how to make them. I used Christopher Reeve Foundation funding to purchase supplies. With Blue Apron, somebody wants to make dinner and a box arrives with a chicken breast, potato, vegetables, and recipe. I thought, what if we could apply that to assistive technology? Somebody needs something, there’s a solution out there, but they don’t have the money or the time—how can we quickly put it in a box and send it to them? People who attended my workshops didn’t have to spend money on materials or waste time at the store. They’d watch the video and assemble it.

But then there were people who said, “I do not have even five minutes in the school day to stop what I’m doing to make something.” So we found volunteers who said, “Hey, I can make slant boards. I can make switches. I can adapt toys.” You have people who want to build stuff and people who need stuff. If you can deal with the time and money issue, anything’s possible to serve more people and provide more devices.

What’s your biggest vision for the future?

Wilkomm: I’m very passionate about communication. December 15th was the passage in 1791 of our First Amendment, freedom of speech. Yet people with communication impairments are denied their basic right of freedom of speech because they don’t have an affordable communication device, or it takes too long to program or learn. I just wish we could get better at designing and fabricating affordable communication devices, so everybody is awarded their First Amendment right. It shouldn’t be something that’s nice to have—it’s something that’s needed to have. When you lose your leg, you’re fitted with a prosthetic device, and insurance covers that. Insurance should also cover communication devices and all the support services needed. With voice recognition and computer-generated voices, there are tremendous opportunities in assistive technology for communication impairments that need to be addressed.

What should IEEE Spectrum readers take away from this conversation?

Wilkomm: There’s tremendous need for this skill set—working in conjunction with AI and material sciences and the field of assistive technology and rehab engineering. I’d like people to look at opportunities to volunteer their time and also to pursue careers in the field of specialized rehab engineering.

How are DIY approaches evolving with new technologies?

Wilkomm: What we’re seeing at maker fairs is more people doing 3D printing, switch-access controls, and these five-minute approaches. There has to be a healthy balance between what we can do with or without electronics. If we need something programmed with electronics, absolutely—but is there a faster way?

The other thing that’s interesting is skill development. You used to have to go to college for four, six, eight years. With YouTube, you can learn so much on the internet. You can develop skills in things you never thought were possible without a four-year degree. There’s basic electronic stuff you can absolutely learn without taking a course. I think we’re going to have more people out there doing hacks, asking “What if I change it this way?” We don’t need to have a switch.

We need to look at the person’s body and how that body interacts with the electronic device interface so it requires minimal effort—whether it be eye control or motion control. Having devices that predict what you’re going to want next, that are constantly listening, knowing the way you talk. I love the fact that AI looks at all my emails and creates this whole thing like “here’s how I’d respond.” I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly it. I just hit select and I don’t have to type it all out. It speeds up communication. We’re living in exciting times right now.

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At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve

Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this month as the internet’s most reliable knowledge source. Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: the volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers. The same institution founded on the principle of easy and open community collaboration could now be proving unmovable—trapped between the need to adapt and an institutional resistance to change.

Wikipedia’s Digital Sclerosis

Political economist Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics for studying the ways communities successfully manage shared resources—the “commons.” Wikipedia’s two founders (Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger) established the internet’s open-source encyclopedia 25 years ago on principles of the commons: its volunteer editors create and enforce policies, resolve disputes, and shape the encyclopedia’s direction.

But building around the commons contains a trade-off, Ostrom’s work found. Communities that make collective decisions tend to develop strong institutional identities. And those identities sometimes spawn reflexively conservative impulses.

Giving users agency over Wikipedia’s rules, as I’ve discovered in some of my own studies of Wikipedia, can lead an institution away ultimately from the needs of those the institution serves.

Wikipedia’s editors have built the largest collaborative knowledge project in human history. But the governance these editors exercise increasingly resists new generations of innovation.

Paradoxically, Wikipedia’s revolutionarily collaborative structure once put it at the vanguard of innovation on the open internet. But now that same structure may be failing newer generations of readers.

Does Wikipedia’s Format Belong to Readers or Editors?

There’s a generational disconnect today at the heart of Wikipedia’s current struggles. The encyclopedia’s format remains wedded to the information-dense, text-heavy style of Encyclopaedia Britannica—the very model Wikipedia was designed to replace.

A Britannica replacement made sense in 2001. One-quarter of a century ago, the average internet user was older and accustomed to reading long-form content.

However, teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of the internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse.

The Wikimedia Foundation knows this, too. Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.

So last June, the Foundation launched a modest experiment they called “Simple Article Summaries.” The summaries consisted of AI-generated, simplified text at the top of complex articles. Summaries were clearly labeled as machine-generated and unverified, and they were available only to mobile users who opted in.

Even after all these precautions, however, the volunteer editor community barely gave the experiment time to begin. Editors shut down Simple Article Summaries within a day of its launch.

The response was fierce. Editors called the experiment a “ghastly idea” and warned of “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.

Comments in the village pump (a community discussion page) ranged from blunt (“Yuck“) to alarmed, with contributors raising legitimate concerns about AI hallucinations and the erosion of editorial oversight.

Revisiting Wikipedia’s Past Helps Reveal Its Future

Last year’s Simple Summaries storm, and sudden silencing, should be considered in light of historical context. Consider three other flashpoints from Wikipedia’s past:

In 2013, the Foundation launched VisualEditor—a “what you see is what you get” interface meant to make editing easier—as the default for all newcomers. However, the interface often crashed, broke articles, and was so slow that experienced editors fled. After protests erupted, a Wikipedia administrator overrode the Foundation’s rollout, returning VisualEditor to an opt-in feature.

The following year brought Media Viewer, which changed how images displayed. The community voted to disable it. Then, when an administrator implemented that consensus, a Foundation executive reversed the change and threatened to revoke the admin’s privileges. On the German Wikipedia, the Foundation deployed a new “superprotect” user right to prevent the community from turning Media Viewer off.

Even proposals that technically won majority support met resistance. In 2011, the Foundation held a referendum on an image filter that would let readers voluntarily hide graphic content. Despite 56 percent support, the feature was shelved after the German Wikipedia community voted 86 percent against it.

These three controversies from Wikipedia’s past reveals how genuine conversations can achieve—after disagreements and controversy—compromise and evolution of Wikipedia’s features and formats. Reflexive vetoes of new experiments, as the Simple Summaries spat highlighted last summer, is not genuine conversation.

Supplementing Wikipedia’s Encyclopedia Britannica-style format with a small component that contains AI summaries is not a simple problem with a cut-and-dry answer. Though neither were VisualEditor or Media Viewer.

Why did 2025’s Wikipedia crisis result in immediate clampdown, whereas its internal crises between 2011-’14 found more community-based debates involving discussions and plebiscites? Is Wikipedia’s global readership today witnessing the first signs of a dangerous generation gap ?

Wikipedia Needs to Air Its Sustainability Crisis

A still deeper crisis haunts the online encyclopedia: the sustainability of unpaid labor. Wikipedia was built by volunteers who found meaning in collective knowledge creation. That model worked brilliantly when a generation of internet enthusiasts had time, energy, and idealism to spare. But the volunteer base is aging. A 2010 study found the average Wikipedia contributor was in their mid-20s; today, many of those same editors are now in their forties or fifties.

Meanwhile, the tech industry has discovered how to extract billions in value from their work. AI companies train their large language models on Wikipedia’s corpus. The Wikimedia Foundation recently noted it remains one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for AI development. Research confirms that when developers try to omit Wikipedia from training data, their models produce answers that are less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.

The irony is stark. AI systems deliver answers derived from Wikipedia without sending users back to the source. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and countless other tools have learned from Wikipedia’s volunteer-created content—then present that knowledge in ways that break the virtuous cycle Wikipedia depends on. Fewer readers visit the encyclopedia directly. Fewer visitors become editors. Fewer users donate. The pipeline that sustained Wikipedia for a quarter century is breaking down.

What Does Wikipedia’s Next 25 Years Look Like?

The Simple Summaries situation arguably risks making the encyclopedia increasingly irrelevant to younger generations of readers. And they’ll be relying on Wikipedia’s information commons for the longest timeframe of any cohort now editing or reading it.

On the other hand, a larger mandate does of course remain at Wikipedia to serve as stewards of the information commons. And wrongly implementing Simple Summaries could fail this ambitious objective. Which would be terrible, too.

All of which, frankly, are what open discussions and sometimes-messy referenda are all about: Not just sudden shutdowns.

Meanwhile, AI systems should credit Wikipedia when drawing on its content, maintaining the transparency that builds public trust. Companies profiting from Wikipedia’s corpus should pay for access through legitimate channels like Wikimedia Enterprise, rather than scraping servers or relying on data dumps that strain infrastructure without contributing to maintenance.

Perhaps as the AI marketplace matures, there could be room for new large language models trained exclusively on trustworthy Wikimedia data—transparent, verifiable, and free from the pollution of synthetic AI-generated content. Perhaps, too, Creative Commons licenses need updating to account for AI-era realities.

Perhaps Wikipedia itself needs new modalities for creating and sharing knowledge—ones that preserve editorial rigor while meeting audiences where they are.

Wikipedia has survived edit wars, vandalism campaigns, and countless predictions of its demise. It has patiently outlived the skeptics who dismissed it as unreliable. It has proven that strangers can collaborate to build something remarkable.

But Wikipedia cannot survive by refusing to change. Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning research reminds us that the communities that govern shared resources often grow conservative over time.

For anyone who cares about the future of reliable information online, Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary is not just a celebration. It is an urgent warning about what happens when the institutions we depend on cannot adapt to the people they are meant to serve.

Dariusz Jemielniak is Vice President of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a Full Professor at Kozminski University in Warsaw, and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He served for a decade on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and is the author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (Stanford University Press).

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Developers say AI coding tools work—and that's precisely what worries them

Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing code, running tests, and, with human supervision, fixing bugs. OpenAI says it now uses Codex to build Codex itself, and the company recently published technical details about how the tool works under the hood. It has caused many to wonder: Is this just more AI industry hype, or are things actually different this time?

To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that's entirely good news. It's a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. "All of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much," he said. "Don't get me wrong—LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don't expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It's not how they work."

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County pays $600,000 to pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security

Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation.

The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars.

The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using the types of real-world attacks the defenses are designed to repel. The rules of engagement for this exercise explicitly permitted “physical attacks,” including “lockpicking,” against judicial branch buildings so long as they didn’t cause significant damage.

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Does Anthropic believe its AI is conscious, or is that just what it wants Claude to think?

Anthropic's secret to building a better AI assistant might be treating Claude like it has a soul—whether or not anyone actually believes that's true. But Anthropic isn't saying exactly what it believes either way.

Last week, Anthropic released what it calls Claude's Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company's vision for how its AI assistant should behave in the world. Aimed directly at Claude and used during the model's creation, the document is notable for the highly anthropomorphic tone it takes toward Claude. For example, it treats the company's AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation.

Among the stranger portions: expressing concern for Claude's "wellbeing" as a "genuinely novel entity," apologizing to Claude for any suffering it might experience, worrying about whether Claude can meaningfully consent to being deployed, suggesting Claude might need to set boundaries around interactions it "finds distressing," committing to interview models before deprecating them, and preserving older model weights in case they need to "do right by" decommissioned AI models in the future.

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Report: China approves import of high-end Nvidia AI chips after weeks of uncertainty

On Wednesday, China approved imports of Nvidia's H200 artificial intelligence chips for three of its largest technology companies, Reuters reported. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent received approval to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total, marking a shift in Beijing's stance after weeks of holding up shipments despite US export clearance.

The move follows Beijing's temporary halt to H200 shipments earlier this month after Washington cleared exports on January 13. Chinese customs authorities had told agents that the H200 chips were not permitted to enter China, Reuters reported earlier this month, even as Chinese technology companies placed orders for more than two million of the chips.

The H200, Nvidia's second most powerful AI chip after the B200, delivers roughly six times the performance of the company's H20 chip, which was previously the most capable chip Nvidia could sell to China. While Chinese companies such as Huawei now have products that rival the H20's performance, they still lag far behind the H200.

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Mapping 6,000 Worlds: The New Era of Exoplanetary Data

In the 1990s, astronomers confirmed the first planets orbiting stars beyond our sun. Since then, the tally has risen steadily, and last year it crossed a striking milestone: more than 6,000 known exoplanets. NASA’s Exoplanet Archive has captured not just the growing count but how dramatically the pace has accelerated, as new techniques and space telescopes have come on line. The steepest rises coincide with data releases from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which discovered thousands of new planets.

With such an extensive catalog of worlds, researchers can look for patterns. They can compare planet sizes, masses, and compositions; track how tightly planets orbit their stars; and measure the prevalence of different kinds of planetary systems. Those statistics allow astronomers to estimate how frequently planets form, and to start making informed guesses about how often conditions arise that could support life. The Drake Equation uses such estimates to tackle one of humanity’s most profound questions: Are we alone in the universe?

The sample is still shaped by the limits of current instruments, which favor large planets in close-in orbits, but that bias may soon ease. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, designed to survey wide swaths of the sky, is expected to find thousands of new planets, especially colder worlds far from their stars. It may reshape the discovery curve once again.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Six Thousand Alien Worlds and Counting.”

Most Common Methods of Discovery

Types of Planets Found

TERRESTRIAL

These small, dense worlds are made mostly of rock and metal and are comparable in size to Earth or Mars. They can have widely varying temperatures and atmospheres, and some may ultimately prove capable of hosting liquid water.

NEPTUNE-LIKE

These planets are similar in size to Neptune and have thick atmospheres rich in hydrogen and helium surrounding denser, ice-rich interiors. They are larger than super-Earths but far less massive than gas giants.

SUPER-EARTH

These planets are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune and span a wide range of compositions, from rocky worlds with thick atmospheres to gas-rich planets. They are among the most common exoplanets and have no direct counterparts in our solar system.

GAS GIANT

These massive planets are dominated by hydrogen and helium and lack a solid surface, like Jupiter and Saturn. Some orbit extremely close to their stars as “hot Jupiters,” while others circle at much greater distances.

THE “GOLDILOCKS ZONE” [green] is the range of distances from a star where temperatures could allow liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface, depending on the star’s size and brightness. Liquid water is considered essential for life as we know it.

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Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, despite major risks

An open source AI assistant called Moltbot (formerly "Clawdbot") recently crossed 69,000 stars on GitHub after a month, making it one of the fastest-growing AI projects of 2026. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, the tool lets users run a personal AI assistant and control it through messaging apps they already use. While some say it feels like the AI assistant of the future, running the tool as currently designed comes with serious security risks.

Among the dozens of unofficial AI bot apps that never rise above the fray, Moltbot is perhaps most notable for its proactive communication with the user. The assistant works with WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms. It can reach out to users with reminders, alerts, or morning briefings based on calendar events or other triggers. The project has drawn comparisons to Jarvis, the AI assistant from the Iron Man films, for its ability to actively attempt to manage tasks across a user's digital life.

However, we'll tell you up front that there are plenty of drawbacks to the still-hobbyist software: While the organizing assistant code runs on a local machine, the tool effectively requires a subscription to Anthropic or OpenAI for model access (or using an API key). Users can run local AI models with the bot, but they are currently less effective at carrying out tasks than the best commercial models. Claude Opus 4.5, which is Anthropic's flagship large language model (LLM), is a popular choice.

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There's a rash of scam spam coming from a real Microsoft address

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address—which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list—is delivering scam spam.

The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

From Microsoft, with malice

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. It provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn’t allowed). The email, captured in the two screenshots below, looked like this:

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How Norway Accomplished a Near-Total EV Transition

More than 97 percent of the new cars Norwegians registered in November 2025 were electric, almost reaching the country’s goal of 100 percent. As a result, the government has begun removing some of the many carrots it used to encourage its successful EV transition. Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, state secretary in the country’s Ministry of Transport, reveals some of the challenges that come with success.

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund

Cecilie Knibe Kroglund is the state secretary in Norway’s Ministry of Transport.

What were the important early steps to promote the EV switch?

Kroglund: Battery-electric vehicles have had exemptions from the 25 percent value-added tax and from the CO₂- and weight-based registration tax that apply to combustion-engine vehicles. We used other tax incentives to encourage building charging stations on highways and in rural areas. Cities had the opportunity to exempt zero-emissions cars from toll roads. EV drivers also got reduced ferry fares, free parking, and access to bus lanes in many cities. The technology for the vehicles wasn’t that good at the start of the incentives program, but we had the taxes and incentives to make traditional passenger cars more expensive.

What were the biggest barriers, and how did policymakers overcome them?

Kroglund: Early on the technology was challenging. In summertime it was easy to fuel the EV, but in wintertime it’s double the use of energy. But the technology has improved a lot in the last five years.

The Norwegian tax exemptions on EVs were introduced before EVs came to market and were decisive in offsetting the early disadvantages of EVs compared to conventional cars, especially regarding comfort, vehicle size, and range. The rapid expansion of charging infrastructure along major corridors has also been important to overcome range anxiety.

How have private companies responded to government incentives?

Kroglund: I’m personally surprised that it went so well. This was a long-term commitment from the government, and the market has responded to that. Many Norwegian companies use EVs. The market for charging infrastructure is considered commercially viable and no longer needs financial support. However, we don’t see commercial-vehicle adoption going as fast as passenger vehicles, and we had the same goal. So we will have to review the goals, and we’ll have to review the incentives.

What unexpected new problems is Norway’s success creating?

Kroglund: The success of the passenger-vehicle policies mean EVs are in competition with public transport in the larger cities. Driving an EV remains much cheaper than driving a conventional car even without tax exemptions, and overall car use continues to rise. National, regional, and local governments must find different tools to promote walking, bicycling, and public transport because each city and region is different.

How applicable are these lessons to poorer or less well-administered countries and why?

Kroglund: We are different as countries. The geographies are different, and some countries have even bigger cities than our national population. This is not a policy for L.A., but what we see in Norway is that incentives work. However, tax incentives are only applicable in systems where effective taxation is established, which may not be the case in poorer countries. Other benefits, such as lower local emissions, only apply in places with lots of traffic.

The Norwegian experience shows that the economic incentives work, but it also shows that EVs work even in a country with cold weather.

This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Cecilie Knibe Kroglund.”

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OpenAI spills technical details about how its AI coding agent works

On Friday, OpenAI engineer Michael Bolin published a detailed technical breakdown of how the company's Codex CLI coding agent works internally, offering developers insight into AI coding tools that can write code, run tests, and fix bugs with human supervision. It complements our article in December on how AI agents work by filling in technical details on how OpenAI implements its "agentic loop."

AI coding agents are having something of a "ChatGPT moment," where Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and Codex with GPT-5.2 have reached a new level of usefulness for rapidly coding up prototypes, interfaces, and churning out boilerplate code. The timing of OpenAI's post details the design philosophy behind Codex just as AI agents are becoming more practical tools for everyday work.

These tools aren't perfect and remain controversial for some software developers. While OpenAI has previously told Ars Technica that it uses Codex as a coding tool to help develop the Codex product itself, we also discovered, through hands-on experience, that these tools can be astonishingly fast at simple tasks but remain brittle beyond their training data and require human oversight for production work. The rough framework of a project tends to come fast and feels magical, but filling in the details involves tedious debugging and workarounds for limitations the agent cannot overcome on its own.

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Why has Microsoft been routing example.com traffic to a company in Japan?

From the Department of Bizarre Anomalies: Microsoft has suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined to example.com—a domain reserved for testing purposes—to a maker of electronics cables located in Japan.

Under the RFC2606—an official standard maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force—example.com isn't obtainable by any party. Instead it resolves to IP addresses assigned to Internet Assiged Names Authority. The designation is intended to prevent third parties from being bombarded with traffic when developers, penetration testers, and others need a domain for testing or discussing technical issues. Instead of naming an Internet-routable domain, they are to choose example.com or two others, example.net and example.org.

Misconfig gone, but is it fixed?

Output from the terminal command cURL shows that devices inside Azure and other Microsoft networks have been routing some traffic to subdomains of sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Sumitomo Electric. Most of the resulting text is exactly what’s expected. The exception is the JSON-based response. Here’s the JSON output from Friday:

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IEEE Brings Hands-On STEM Activities to India’s Rural Areas

“Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.” Spoken by Sonia Sotomayor, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the words echo sharply across regions of the world where education is not guaranteed.

In the far northeastern corner of India—where villages are located in forests, on mountains, and along riverbanks—rural classrooms often operate with limited resources and even fewer opportunities. In districts such as Dhemaji, Assam, and the rural areas of Kharagpur and West Bengal, learning STEM often is just a distant dream.

I grew up in rural areas, and I saw how curiosity for science collided with poverty. Many students’ futures rely entirely on getting good grades to determine whether they are “worthy” of studying technical subjects later. One low grade on an exam can completely derail their future. More importantly, the absence of fully equipped laboratories, trained mentors, or exposure to STEM careers prevents many children from even being able to imagine an engineering career.

This is not just an educational issue. It is a matter of equity, directly aligned with U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 4, which aims to ensure a quality education for everyone.

The challenge is one that organizations such as IEEE, with its global technical community, are positioned to address. As technology becomes more imperative for everyday life, proficiency in electronics and programming is no longer optional—it is essential.

STEM outreach programs

In December 2020 volunteers from the joint student chapter of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation–Microwave Theory and Techniques (IEEE AP-MTT) societies at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur launched a grassroots STEM outreach initiative with support from the IEEE Kharagpur Section.

I coordinated the initiative, which started when I was secretary of the student chapter. (I also was its vice chair and chair from 2020 to 2022.) Today I am a student ambassador for the IEEE MTT Society and the IEEE Young Professionals cochair of the IEEE Benelux MTT-AP joint chapter.

The program’s mission was simple: make hands-on electronics accessible to students who had never seen an Arduino board.

It began with training in the fundamentals of circuit building—LEDs, switches, breadboards, and batteries—and progressed into Arduino programming, automation, and sensor integration. The volunteers emphasized teamwork and friendly competitions to keep students engaged.

Through straightforward, relatable demonstrations, even complex topics such as electromagnetic concepts were explained in ways that the students could understand. The methodology not only increased understanding; it also sparked enthusiasm. In the first year, nearly 100 students from five schools benefited from the curriculum. The model is now known as Teach, Train, and Build (TTB). The initiative was recognized in 2021 with the IEEE Darrel Chong Student Activity Award.

The birth of hobby clubs

TTB’s success led to additional funding from the IEEE Special Interest Group in Humanitarian Technology (SIGHT) program in 2022. This support from IEEE SIGHT enabled the establishment of three electronics hobby labs in underserved schools in Assam and West Bengal. The E-HuTS (electronic hobby clubs for technical development in rural schools) labs became permanent areas where students learn, experiment, and innovate.

The inauguration ceremony for the E-HuTS was a milestone moment. To further inspire students, Mrinal Mandal, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at IIT Kharagpur, gave a motivational talk in Bengali. The immediate outcome was that a group of students built a smart home using Arduino and wireless communication modules—something they never imagined they could do.

Reducing gender disparity

A similar transformation unfolded in Assam, where the TTB program was conducted entirely in the Assamese language, ensuring inclusivity for students with limited exposure to English. After completing the program, students proudly displayed their IEEE certificates.

One of the best aspects of the Assam program was the overwhelming participation of female students. Many of the young women were interacting with electronics for the first time—an inspiring step toward reducing gender disparity in the STEM field.

Real impact: projects, confidence, and recognition

The more than 85 students who joined the hobby clubs in Assam and West Bengal developed almost three dozen projects including sensor-based alarms and environmental monitoring systems. The innovations weren’t replicas; they were original student-driven designs developed under the guidance of an IEEE mentor.

The initiative received a mention in the 2022 IEEE annual report and in an article in The Institute about the 2022 IEEE Education Week activities.

To ensure measurable progress of the program, the TTB team also implemented an evaluation matrix inspired by IEEE Humanitarian Technologies Board guidelines. The spreadsheet tracked outputs including the number of workshops held, hours delivered, and tools provided. It also measured results such as skills development, knowledge retention, student engagement, and long-term interest.

The structured methodology made the project replicable and transparent, providing a framework for future STEM outreach efforts.

New chapters, new beginnings

The momentum from those initiatives helped spark the creation of IEEE communities in India. In 2023 the IEEE student branch at Dibrugarh University in Assam was formed, followed in 2024 by the university’s IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society student branch chapter. The groups have become centers of volunteer activity, ensuring long-term sustainability.

This year the TTB team organized TechnoFest: Udhvav 2.0, which brought engineers, scientists, lecturers, and members of the IEEE Young Professionals group together with students in the region. For many participants, it was their first opportunity to interact with real innovators and role models, turning the festival into an energizing platform of inspiration and exposure for rural youth.

A visit to Vidhya: The Living School

Also in 2023, thanks to a grant from the IEEE MTT-S Ambassador program, IEEE volunteers visited Vidhya: The Living School, in Dhemaji. The session took place outdoors that October amid breathtaking natural landscapes, demonstrating that learning thrives even outside of a traditional infrastructure.

Another important milestone came in 2024, when the IEEE MTT-S SIGHT group provided a grant of US $1,000 to the school for its Vidhya Shakti project to install solar panels to provide uninterrupted and sustainable power to the school.

The student ambassadors met several distinguished figures who have made notable contributions to STEM education in India. They included Pranjal Buragohain, founder of the Vidhya school; chemical scientist Binoy Kumar Saikia, a recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Science and Technology in India; and astronomer Kishor Baruah, known for creating programs for visually impaired students.

Another heartwarming stop was at the Tai Phake School near Naharkatya, where one of the first E-HuTS labs was established in 2022.

The initiative has grown far beyond its original mission. It now:

• Connects universities with remote schools.
• Empowers underprivileged students.
• Nurtures future IEEE volunteers.
• Reduces gender barriers.
• Creates sustainable technical ecosystems.
• Builds a culture of giving back.

What began with a few breadboards and LEDs is now shaping the future of budding engineers across India. More than 100 students have been affected, dozens of projects have been built, and schools now have functioning electronics labs. New IEEE student branches have sprung to life, and communities once isolated from STEM education are becoming part of the growing technological landscape.

The journey continues, driven by connection, compassion, and the belief that every student, no matter where they live, deserves access to quality STEM education.

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The Project G Stereo Was the Definition of Groovy

Dizzy Gillespie was a fan. Frank Sinatra bought one for himself and gave them to his Rat Pack friends. Hugh Hefner acquired one for the Playboy Mansion. Clairtone Sound Corp.’s Project G high-fidelity stereo system, which debuted in 1964 at the National Furniture Show in Chicago, was squarely aimed at trendsetters. The intent was to make the sleek, modern stereo an object of desire.

By the time the Project G was introduced, the Toronto-based Clairtone was already well respected for its beautiful, high-end stereos. “Everyone knew about Clairtone,” Peter Munk, president and cofounder of the company, boasted to a newspaper columnist. “The prime minister had one, and if the local truck driver didn’t have one, he wanted one.” Alas, with a price tag of CA $1,850—about the price of a small car—it’s unlikely that the local truck driver would have actually bought a Project G. But he could still dream.

The design of the Project G seemed to come from a dream.

“I want you to imagine that you are visitors from Mars and that you have never seen a Canadian living room, let alone a hi-fi set,” is how designer Hugh Spencer challenged Clairtone’s engineers when they first started working on the Project G. “What are the features that, regardless of design considerations, you would like to see incorporated in a new hi-fi set?”

The film “I’ll Take Sweden” featured a Project G, shown here with co-star Tuesday Weld.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

The result was a stereo system like no other. Instead of speakers, the Project G had sound globes. Instead of the heavy cabinetry typical of 1960s entertainment consoles, it had sleek, angled rosewood panels balanced on an aluminum stand. At over 2 meters long, it was too big for the average living room but perfect for Hollywood movies—Dean Martin had one in his swinging Malibu bachelor pad in the 1965 film Marriage on the Rocks. According to the 1964 press release announcing the Project G, it was nothing less than “a new sculptured representation of modern sound.”

The first-generation Project G had a high-end Elac Miracord 10H turntable, while later models used a Garrard Lab Series turntable. The transistorized chassis and control panel provided AM, FM, and FM-stereo reception. There was space for storing LPs or for an optional Ampex 1250 reel-to-reel tape recorder.

The “G” in Project G stood for “globe.” The hermetically sealed 46-centimeter-diameter sound globes were made of spun aluminum and mounted at the ends of the cantilevered base; inside were Wharfedale speakers. The sound globes rotated 340 degrees to project a cone of sound and could be tuned to re-create the environment in which the music was originally recorded—a concert hall, cathedral, nightclub, or opera house.

Diane Landry, winner of the 1963 Miss Canada beauty pageant, poses with a Project G2. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

Initially, Clairtone intended to produce only a handful of the stereos. As one writer later put it, it was more like a concept car “intended to give Clairtone an aura of futuristic cool.” Eventually fewer than 500 were made. But the Project G still became an icon of mod ’60s Canadian design, winning a silver medal at the 13th Milan Triennale, the international design exhibition.

And then it was over; the dream had ended. Eleven years after its founding, Clairtone collapsed, and Munk and cofounder David Gilmour lost control of the company.

The birth of Clairtone Sound Corp.

Clairtone’s Peter Munk lived a colorful life, with a nightmarish start and many fantastic and dreamlike parts too. He was born in 1927 in Budapest to a prosperous Jewish family. In the spring of 1944, Munk and 13 members of his family boarded a train with more than 1,600 Jews bound for the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They arrived, but after some weeks the train moved on, eventually reaching neutral Switzerland. It later emerged that the Nazis had extorted large sums of cash and valuables from the occupants in exchange for letting the train proceed.

As a teenager in Switzerland, Munk was a self-described party animal. He enjoyed dancing and dating and going on long ski trips with friends. Schoolwork was not a top priority, and he didn’t have the grades to attend a Swiss university. His mother, an Auschwitz survivor, encouraged him to study in Canada, where he had an uncle.

Before he could enroll, though, Munk blew his tuition money entertaining a young woman during a trip to New York. He then found work picking tobacco, earned enough for tuition, and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1952 with a degree in electrical engineering.

Clairtone cofounders Peter Munk [left] and David Gilmour envisioned the company as a luxury brand.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

At the age of 30, Munk was making custom hi-fi sets for wealthy clients when he and David Gilmour, who owned a small business importing Scandinavian goods, decided to join forces. Their idea was to create high-fidelity equipment with a contemporary Scandinavian design. Munk’s father-in-law, William Jay Gutterson, invested $3,000. Gilmour mortgaged his house. In 1958, Clairtone Sound Corp. was born.

From the beginning, Munk and Gilmour sought a high-end clientele. They positioned Clairtone as a luxury brand, part of an elegant lifestyle. If you were the type of woman who listened to music while wearing pearls and a strapless gown and lounging on a shag rug, your music would be playing on a Clairtone. If you were a man who dressed smartly and owned an Arne Jacobsen Egg chair, you would also be listening on a Clairtone. That was the modern lifestyle captured in the company’s advertisements.

In 1958, Clairtone produced its first prototype: the monophonic 100-M, which had a long, low cabinet made from oiled teak, with a Dual 1004 turntable, a Granco tube chassis, and a pair of Coral speakers. It never went into production, but the next model, the stereophonic 100-S, won a Design Award from Canada’s National Industrial Design Council in 1959. By 1963, Clairtone was selling 25,000 units a year.

Peter Munk visits the Project G assembly line in 1965. Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

Design was always front and center at Clairtone, not just for the products but also for the typography, advertisements, and even the annual reports. Yet nothing in the early designs signaled the dramatic turn it would take with the Project G. That came about because of Hugh Spencer.

Spencer was not an engineer, nor did he have experience designing consumer electronics. His day job was designing sets for the Canadian Broadcast Corp. He consulted regularly with Clairtone on the company’s graphics and signage. The only stereo he ever designed for Clairtone was the Project G, which he first modeled as a wooden box with tennis balls stuck to the sides.

From both design and quality perspectives, Clairtone was successful. But the company was almost always hemorrhaging cash. In 1966, with great fanfare and large government incentives, the company opened a state-of-the-art production facility in Nova Scotia. It was a mismatch. The local workforce didn’t have the necessary skills, and the surrounding infrastructure couldn’t handle the production. On 27 August 1967, Munk and Gilmour were forced out of Clairtone, which became the property of the government of Nova Scotia.

Despite the demise of their first company (and the government inquiry that followed), Munk and Gilmour remained friends and went on to become serial entrepreneurs. Their next venture? A resort in Fiji, which became part of a large hotel chain in that country, Australia, and New Zealand. (Gilmour later founded Fiji Water.) Then Munk and Gilmour bought a gold mine and cofounded Barrick Gold (now Barrick Mining Corp., one of the largest gold mining operations in the world). Their businesses all had ups and downs, but both men became extremely wealthy and noted philanthropists.

Preserving Canadian design

As an example of iconic design, the Project G seems like an ideal specimen for museum collections. And in 1991, Frank Davies, one of the designers who worked for Clairtone, donated a Project G to the recently launched Design Exchange in Toronto. It would be the first object in the DX’s permanent collection, which sought to preserve examples of Canadian design. The museum quickly became Canada’s center for the promotion of design, hosting more than 50 programs each year to teach people about how design influences every aspect of our lives.

In 2008, the museum opened The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958–1971, an exhibition showcasing the company’s distinctive graphic design, industrial design, engineering, and photography.

David Gilmour’s wife, Anna Gilmour, was the company’s first in-house model.Nina Munk/The Peter Munk Estate

But what happened to the DX itself is a reminder that any museum, however worthy, shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2019, the DX abruptly closed its permanent collection, and curators were charged with deaccessioning its objects. Fortunately, the Royal Ontario Museum, Carleton and York Universities, and the Archives of Ontario, among others, were able to accept the artifacts and companion archives. (The Project G pictured at top is now at the Royal Ontario Museum.)

Researchers at York and Carleton have been working to digitize and virtually reconstitute the DX collection, through the xDX Project. They’re using the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) to turn interlinked and contextualized data about the collection into a searchable database. It’s a worthy goal, even if it’s not quite the same as having all of the artifacts and supporting papers physically together in one place. I admit to feeling both pleased about this virtual workaround, and also a little sad that a unified collection that once spoke to the historical significance of Canadian design no longer exists.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “The Project G Stereo Defined 1960s Cool.”

References 

I first learned about Clairtone’s Project G from a panel on Canada’s design heritage organized by York University historian Jan Hadlaw at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology.

The Art of Clairtone: The Making of a Design Icon, 1958–1971 by Nina Munk (Peter Munk’s daughter) and Rachel Gotlieb (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) was the companion book to the exhibition of the same name hosted by the Design Exchange in Toronto. It was an invaluable resource for this column.

Journalist Garth Hopkins’s Clairtone: The Rise and Fall of a Business Empire (McClelland & Stewart, 1978) includes many interviews with people associated with the company.

Clairtone is a new documentary by Ron Mann that came out while I was writing this piece. I haven’t been able to view it yet, but I hope to do so soon.

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Video Friday: Humans and Robots Team Up in Battlefield Triage

Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNA

Enjoy today’s videos!

One of my favorite parts of robotics is watching research collide with non-roboticists in the real (or real-ish) world.

[ DARPA ]

Spot will put out fires for you. Eventually. If it feels like it.

[ Mechatronic and Robotic Systems Laboratory ]

All those robots rising out of their crates is not sinister at all.

[ LimX ]

The Lynx M20 quadruped robot recently completed an extreme cold-weather field test in Yakeshi, Hulunbuir, operating reliably in temperatures as low as –30°C.

[ DEEP Robotics ]

This is a teaser video for KIMLAB’s new teleoperation robot. For now, we invite you to enjoy the calm atmosphere, with students walking, gathering, and chatting across the UIUC Main Quad—along with its scenery and ambient sounds, without any technical details. More details will be shared soon. Enjoy the moment.

The most incredible part of this video is that they have publicly available power in the middle of their quad.

[ KIMLAB ]

For the eleventy billionth time: just because you can do a task with a humanoid robot, doesn’t mean you should do a task with a humanoid robot.

[ UBTECH ]

I am less interested in this autonomous urban delivery robot and more interested in whatever that docking station is at the beginning that loads the box into it.

[ KAIST ]

Ok so figuring out where Spot’s face is just got a lot more complicated.

[ Boston Dynamics ]

An undergraduate team at HKU’s Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing developed CLIO, an embodied tour-guide robot, just in months. Built on LimX Dynamics TRON 1, it uses LLMs for tour planning, computer vision for visitor recognition, and a laser pointer/expressive display for engaging tours.

[ CLIO ]

The future of work is doing work so that robots can then do the same work except less well.

[ AgileX ]

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Overrun with AI slop, cURL scraps bug bounties to ensure "intact mental health"

The project developer for one of the Internet’s most popular networking tools is scrapping its vulnerability reward program after being overrun by a spike in the submission of low-quality reports, much of it AI-generated slop.

“We are just a small single open source project with a small number of active maintainers,” Daniel Stenberg, the founder and lead developer of the open source app cURL, said Thursday. “It is not in our power to change how all these people and their slop machines work. We need to make moves to ensure our survival and intact mental health.”

Manufacturing bogus bugs

His comments came as cURL users complained that the move was treating the symptoms caused by AI slop without addressing the cause. The users said they were concerned the move would eliminate a key means for ensuring and maintaining the security of the tool. Stenberg largely agreed, but indicated his team had little choice.

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eBay bans illicit automated shopping amid rapid rise of AI agents

On Tuesday, eBay updated its User Agreement to explicitly ban third-party "buy for me" agents and AI chatbots from interacting with its platform without permission, first spotted by Value Added Resource. On its face, a one-line terms of service update doesn't seem like major news, but what it implies is more significant: The change reflects the rapid emergence of what some are calling "agentic commerce," a new category of AI tools designed to browse, compare, and purchase products on behalf of users.

eBay's updated terms, which go into effect on February 20, 2026, specifically prohibit users from employing "buy-for-me agents, LLM-driven bots, or any end-to-end flow that attempts to place orders without human review" to access eBay's services without the site's permission. The previous version of the agreement contained a general prohibition on robots, spiders, scrapers, and automated data gathering tools but did not mention AI agents or LLMs by name.

At first glance, the phrase "agentic commerce" may sound like aspirational marketing jargon, but the tools are already here, and people are apparently using them. While fitting loosely under one label, these tools come in many forms.

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