When you are done with the burner phone, make sure that you get rid of it in a thoughtful way as well. “At the end of the intended use, consider steps to eliminate information, remove SIM cards and/or memory cards, making sure not to leave a potential vulnerability after you,” says Access Now’s Al-Maskati.

Using an Alternative Phone

Depending on your risk model, it may not be appropriate or even the most practical to use a true burner phone. Instead, you may want to consider using an altphone to separate elements of your digital life.

“There is a lot of confusion, because ‘burner phone’ is a generic term,” says Matt Mitchell, CEO of the risk mitigation firm Safety Sync Group. “I usually try to group tactics and advice based on goals. It begins with why a normal phone isn’t good for privacy and then a dial on how private you’re trying to get. The privacy goals are the dial—from safer hygiene, to more secure operating systems, to straight-up locked-down phones.”

For many people, an altphone or “lighter” burner phone is likely to be a smartphone that allows a wide range of communications and access to privacy-enhancing tools such as encrypted messaging apps like Signal, VPNs, online tracker blockers, and more. This way you can tune your personal privacy dial to keep certain web browsing, software use, media consumption, or communication more private and anonymous than it would be on your normal devices.

“What are you trying to protect? If you’re just trying to obscure your phone number from somebody, you can do that in a much lighter way” than using a heavily anonymized device, the ACLU’s Williams says. “But if you’re really trying to go off grid, you have to do all this other stuff.

An altphone may be a smartphone that you separate as much as possible from your identity, perhaps a phone that you only use for attending protests. Or it could be an old phone you repurpose and use for things like traveling. How you set the privacy dial depends on the use case.

“A repurposed phone can be used for an extended period of time,” Cyberlixir’s Vo says. “A repurposed phone already has your traces, even with factory reset. There might be a sales receipt, CCTV log, or someone taking a picture of you talking on the phone. So they are useful for compartmentalizing activities. Work versus personal phone is the most obvious example. Or one for international travel.” Reused devices also retain certain identifiers such as IMEI numbers over time.

Using a smartphone as a second device does have its own considerations. When it comes to mainstream devices, “smartphones do a terrible job at protecting people’s privacy and securing their communications,” says Access Now’s Al-Maskati. “If people obtain a smartphone to use as a burner, it’s best to reset to factory settings, never connect any real accounts (AppleID, Google, social media), and do not sync any other information, as well as disabling unnecessary location and other services.”

You should only use your altphone for its intended purpose—if it’s a phone you want to take to protests, for example, it shouldn’t be used for texting friends or online shopping. As with a true burner phone, you should avoid using it in the same location that you use other devices—in other words, avoid connecting to the same Wi-Fi networks. Don’t turn your altphone on alongside your day-to-day devices and, relatedly, don’t carry them all together unless your altphone is in a Faraday bag. Only provide contact information for the altphone to those who need it.

Whether you’re using a burner phone or an altphone, though, the bottom line is that there are no guarantees or perfect solutions. And if there is absolutely no room for error, go analogue and don’t bring or involve a phone in whatever you’re doing.

An international team of researchers has, for the first time, comprehensively assessed the state of the art of commercial UVC LEDs and summarized the findings in an open-access review. These compact, efficient, and mercury-free UV light sources are considered a key technology for future disinfection and sterilization systems. The study is published in the Journal of Physics: Photonics.

The paper provides an overview of the performance and particular characteristics of the technology, offering solid data to help to open up both existing and new UVC applications with LEDs.

Ultraviolet (UV) light can inactivate pathogens on surfaces, in the air, and in water. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) operating in the UVC spectral range at wavelengths below 280 nanometers are gaining importance thanks to rapid advances in efficiency and lifetime.

In contrast to conventional UV lamps, they are extremely compact, dimmable, capable of fast switching, and, most importantly, free of mercury. Researchers from the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) in Berlin, together with four other institutions, investigated UVC LEDs from 14 manufacturers over a period of two years, covering devices with wavelengths between 260 and 280 nanometers.

The review provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of current performance and reliability, thereby bridging the gap between manufacturer’s and user’s perspective.

“Our data support both manufacturers and end-users in making well-informed decisions for the development and deployment of UVC LED systems,” explains Dr. Jan Ruschel, one of the lead authors and a researcher at FBH.

Applications from water purification to air cleaning

UVC LEDs open up a wide range of everyday applications: from environmentally friendly drinking water treatment and air purification in schools and hospitals to the disinfection of refrigerators, dishwashers, touchscreens, and production facilities in the food industry.

In regions without stable power supply, their compact design and low energy requirements enable mobile, solar-powered solutions. Unlike the low-pressure UV lamps that are still commonly used today, UVC LEDs do not contain toxic mercury, show relatively low sensitivity of emission properties to temperature changes, and often have longer lifetimes already.

A guide for manufacturers and users

The paper surveys key parameters of UVC LEDs available on the market that are critical for developing disinfection systems. Both lifetime and efficiency vary significantly—depending on operating conditions, design, and manufacturer. The researchers address thermal, optical, and electrical effects, and how these can be influenced through material selection and operating parameters.

Among other factors, the package type plays an important role. A particular focus is placed on lifetime studies in the form of long-term stress tests under various conditions. Users who want to integrate UVC LEDs into their systems can use this information to derive how cooling, power control, optics, and LED monitoring should be designed.

“With this, we have successfully closed the gap between laboratory research and practical application,” emphasizes Ruschel. “As an application-oriented research institute, it is of special importance to us that innovations truly find their way into real-world use.”

Millions of words spoken in the U.K.’s highest court risk being misunderstood, misquoted or simply missed because transcribing them accurately is too difficult and too expensive, according to a new study from the University of Surrey.

In a new article published in Applied Sciences, the researchers detail how they built an artificial intelligence system that can automatically transcribe U.K. Supreme Court hearings and link them directly to the written judgments—helping lawyers, academics and the public navigate justice like never before.

Every year, more than 449,000 cases move through U.K. tribunals, yet recordings of court hearings remain hard to use. Traditional transcription is slow, costly and prone to errors. Off-the-shelf speech recognition tools struggle with courtroom language, mishearing “my lady” (pronounced “mee-lady” by barristers when addressing a female judge) as “melody” or legal terms like “inherent vice” as “in your advice.”

To tackle this, researchers developed a custom speech recognition system trained on 139 hours of Supreme Court hearings and legal documents. By fine-tuning the model with specialist vocabulary and court etiquette, the system reduced transcription errors by up to 9% compared with leading commercial tools. It also proved more reliable at capturing crucial entities such as provisions, case names and judicial titles.

Professor Constantin Orăsan, co-author of the study and Professor of Language and Translation Technologies at the University of Surrey, said, “Our courts deal with some of the most important questions in society. Yet the way we record and access those hearings is stuck in the past.

“By tailoring AI to the unique language of British courtrooms, we’ve built a tool that makes justice more transparent and accessible—whether you’re a barrister preparing an appeal or a member of the public trying to understand why a judgment was reached.”

The second part of the project used AI to semantically match paragraphs of judgments with the precise timestamp in the video where the argument was made. A prototype interface now lets users scroll through a judgment, click on a paragraph and instantly watch the relevant exchange from the hearing. Tests showed the system correctly linked text and video with an F1 score of 0.85.

An F1 score is a way of measuring how well a system balances two things:

• Precision—of all the results it gave, how many were actually correct.
• Recall—of all the correct results that existed, how many it managed to find.

It punishes a system that is very good at one but bad at the other. It ranges from 0 to 1:

• 1.0 means perfect precision and recall (the system found everything and made no mistakes).
• 0 means total failure.

Evaluation with real users showed that their productivity is dramatically increased when using the UI. Without AI assistance, a legal expert needed 15 hours to identify 10 links, whereas with AI support they were able to validate 220 links in just three hours.

The tool is already attracting interest from legal bodies, including the U.K. Supreme Court and the National Archives. By reducing hours of manual searching into seconds, it promises to help lawyers prepare cases, speed up legal training and allow the public to see how decisions are formed.