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Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Friday afternoon directing the Department of Energy to “consider using all lawful authority to rescind” or weaken regulations for water and energy efficiency for dishwashers and washing machines. The action also includes water use standards for showers, faucets, toilets, and urinals.
It closes out a week of attacks on policies meant to save Americans money by incentivizing manufacturers to make products that save water and energy. Earlier in the week, CNN and E&E News reported that the Trump administration would shutter the Energy Star program as part of a “reorganization” planned at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Energy Star certifies products for energy efficiency, allowing consumers to choose the most energy-efficient home appliances by spotting the recognizable blue Energy Star label. The rules President Trump is targeting now are actually consumer protections, meant to ensure that any customer can purchase something that meets reasonable efficiency standards.
“Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.”
A White House fact sheet says the Secretary of Energy should work with the Office of Legislative Affairs to make recommendations to Congress on any water pressure “or related energy efficiency laws” that ought to change or be repealed altogether.
It also says the Secretary of Energy should pause enforcement of the rules mentioned in the memorandum until they’re rescinded or revised. “The Federal Government should not impose or enforce regulations that make taxpayers’ lives worse,” the presidential memorandum says.
“It’ll only raise costs for consumers to get rid of these standards, if they get rid of these standards,” says Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.”
Trump also signed four bills approved through the Congressional Review Act undoing Biden-era efficiency standards for water heaters, refrigerators, walk-in coolers, and more. In April, the president signed an executive order to purportedly make “America’s showers great again” by rescinding an Obama-era definition of showerheads that raised efficiency standards.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
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Nintendo is making it harder for consumers to sue in its latest EULA update, which adds a class action waiver in section 16 that prohibits users from filing class action lawsuits against the company.
Initially spotted on the Nintendo subreddit and later published by GamesRadar+, the new section of the agreement states:
“This arbitration provision precludes you and Nintendo from suing in court, having a trial by jury, or participating in a class action. You and Nintendo agree that arbitration will be solely on an individual basis and not as a class arbitration, class action, or any other kind of representative proceeding. You and Nintendo are each waiving the right to trial by a jury.”
Rather than holding the company legally accountable in court, Nintendo prefers that dissatisfied users direct their complaints to its Contact Center. Players can opt out of Nintendo’s arbitration clause by mailing a written notice within 30 days of agreeing to the EULA.
If they do, any disputes will follow Section 18, which states that all claims, including those involving intellectual property, are governed by Washington State law and must be resolved in King County courts, with both sides agreeing not to contest the location. If a claim arises between Nintendo and a user, both parties are expected to try resolving it informally in “good faith,” with 30 days for negotiations, or longer if they both agree.
Given the class action suits from 2019 and 2020 over Joy-Con drift, it seems that Nintendo is now trying to get ahead of any similar potential lawsuits.
From Polygon via this RSS feed
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A mannequin explodes as part of a live demonstration warning consumers of fireworks hazards. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) held this educational event on June 29, 2023. | Photo by Getty Images
On Friday, Donald Trump abruptly removed the three sitting Democrat appointees on the five-person U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — the independent watchdog agency that issues recalls and regulates everyday products, including consumer electronics. With no apparent cause for removal, the firings violate existing Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1935, as did Trump’s removals of the Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) back in March.
The firing comes in the wake of a draft budget proposal that would have eliminated the CSPC, whose commissioners are bipartisan by law and who serve five-year terms. The proposal would have instead rolled the commission’s regulatory powers into the Department of Health and Human Services, which is led by a political appointee — presently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The Washington Post reported that the firings came shortly after the three Democrats on the commission — Richard Trumka, Mary Boyle and Alexander Hoehn-Saric, all Biden appointees — voted to publish safety standards for small lithium-ion batteries used in electric bikes and electric scooters, with the two Republicans voting against it. The report specifically noted that these batteries have a record of catching on fire and “resulting in at least 39 fatalities and 181 injuries nationwide.”
The following Thursday, two members of DOGE appeared at the CPSC’s offices. The next day, Trumka and Boyle received letters notifying them that they were fired. Hoehn-Saric did not receive a letter, but according to The Hill,he and his staff found themselves locked out of the building. All three members released statements saying that they planned to appeal their firings to the courts and that Trump had acted illegally.
The three members received support from Consumer Reports, which stated in a press release that the firings were “an appalling and lawless attack on the independence of our country’s product safety watchdog.”
Rather than state a cause for removal, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once again reiterated the White House’s position that the president “has the right to fire people within the executive branch.”
In March, the president fired the Democrats serving on the Federal Trade Commission, another independent agency, in contravention of the longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey’s Executor, which limits presidential power to remove officers at independent agencies — like the FTC — that have authority delegated to them from the legislative branch. The White House has consistently asserted that the president has the power to fire anyone under him, andTrump’s Department of Justice has announced its intention to overturn Humphrey’s Executor at the Supreme Court. The new Republican chair of the FTC has also publicly backed this interpretation of the Constitution. Fired FTC commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya have since sued the administration.
The Supreme Court has previously signaled a willingness to overturn its own precedent in favor of expanding executive power, but the FTC case has not yet reached the court. Humphrey’s Executor remains the law of the land for now, though that could very well change in the near future. But that only makes it all the more baffling as to why the president is, once again, illegally firing commissioners of independent agencies.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
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Google is set to pay $1.375 billion to settle claims of data privacy violations brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, according to a press release.
Texas filed two lawsuits in 2022 against Google for “unlawfully tracking and collecting users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data,” the release says. Before now, no single state has “attained a settlement against Google for similar data-privacy violations greater than $93 million.”
“This settles a raft of old claims, many of which have already been resolved elsewhere, concerning product policies we have long since changed,” Google spokesperson José Castañeda tells The Verge. “We are pleased to put them behind us, and we will continue to build robust privacy controls into our services.”
In 2022, Google agreed to pay $391.5 million to 40 states over allegations of location tracking without user consent. Last year, Meta agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and photo tags.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
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happened yesterday night I’m typing in my room
i haven't gotten out yet
>be me
>20
>university student
>have a best friend
>met last year, share a lot of subjects
>naturally spend lots of time with him
>we have a friend group but we mostly stick together
>friends joke about us being gay
>we don't feel insecure and laugh with them
>get called twinks regularly by year two
>eventually start to do these jokes myself bc my friend is kinda cute
>summer break closing in
>his parents rich
>big house in the mountains
>they go on a vacation when break starts, leaving him alone
>he knows my relationship with my parents is fucked,
invites me over for summer, like last year
>instantly accept
>having a great time, we hike, laze around, play games
>one day we get home completely beat
>decide to throw ourselves a small party
>grab some drinks
>actually get wasted on some fancy shit
>my drunk ass makes more gay jokes
>say we look like boyfriends living together
>friend laughs and says he's going to make things gayer
>he leaves to his room
>comes back a minute later, in an oversized shirt,
booty shorts and thigh high socks
>severely drunk at this point but it clicks
>he's been gay the entire time
>never had a girlfriend
>probably took my jokes for flirting
>he is completely drunk and self unaware
>sits on my lap
>ohgodohfuck
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Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans on photographing every single person who leaves the US by car, an agency spokesperson told Wired. The agency says it will start using facial recognition technology at official border crossings to match all outbound travelers’ faces to their passports, visas, or other travel documents, though there’s no public timeline for when this will happen.
“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner told Wired. It’s an expansion of the agency’s current practice of photographing travelers as they enter the country and matching those photos with “all documented photos, i.e., passports, visas, green cards, etc,” the agency has on record.
CBP has been working on ways to track people as they leave the US for over a decade. After two years of lab tests, CBP experimented with collecting travelers’ biometrics at airports in 2016. That year, the agency partnered with Delta Air Lines to photograph passengers boarding a Tokyo-bound flight at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
The agency’s collection of outgoing travelers’ biometric data has expanded since then. CBP currently uses “biometric facial comparison technology” to process travelers exiting the US at 57 airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Los Angeles International Airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York — some of the busiest airports in the country. The airport panopticon continues to expand.
“We found that facial recognition was intuitive for people. Everybody knows how to stand in front of a camera and have his or her photo taken,” John Wagner, the deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of field operations, said in an agency article promoting CBP’s biometric technologies. “Not so with iris scans and fingerprints. Every time a traveler does the process wrong, someone has to instruct him or her the right way to do it.”
Collecting passengers’ fingerprints may be less intuitive than taking their pictures, but CBP does that, too. Agents stationed at airports across the country use a handheld device called Biometric Exit Mobile to take certain travelers’ fingerprints before they board their flights. Those fingerprints are then run against law enforcement databases.
If CBP’s role is to process people for entry into the US, why track people on the way out? Wired notes that biometric databases could be used to monitor self-deportations. Having realized that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacks the resources to arrest, detain, and deport each and every one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, President Donald Trump is encouraging undocumented immigrants to leave the US on their own, offering people $1,000 if they leave the country voluntarily.
But CBP was devising ways to collect travelers’ photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data long before Trump took office. The agency says it collects this data to run people’s biometrics against law enforcement databases, therefore ensuring that people with criminal records are removed from the US. The agency’s promotional article touting its biometric technologies includes a “success story” involving a Polish couple who had “criminal histories with multiple identities” caught leaving the US under false names. Since DHS’s formation in the wake of the September 11th attacks, immigration enforcement has blurred the lines between criminal enforcement and national security. Every international traveler is a potential criminal or terrorist, justifying mass surveillance.
Trump didn’t invent this playbook. But his mass deportation agenda is getting a helpful boost from decades of bipartisan turbocharging of the surveillance state.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
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The paid release of Deltarune, Toby Fox’s episodic Undertale spinoff, will be available for most people at the same time the Nintendo Switch 2 launches in Japan, Fox says in the Deltarune newsletter for May 2025. Deltarune’s first two chapters, released in 2018 and 2021 respectively, were free, but this new release, which adds chapters 3 and 4, will be a paid version that costs $24.99.
How the release timing will work is a little confusing, but let me explain. For PS4, PS5, Steam, and the original Switch, Deltarune will launch on June 5th at 12AM in Japan, which translates to June 4th at 11AM ET / 8AM PT for people in the US.
The Nintendo Switch 2 version of Deltarune, on the other hand, will launch at midnight local time in most regions on June 5th. This decision actually means that people in New Zealand or Australia who get a Switch 2 at midnight have a slight head start. “But, for convenience’s sake, we’re just going to ignore you guys and pretend that the game is not out… Meanwhile, don’t say anything about it please,” Fox says.
Future updates to Deltarune will be added for free, Fox said in a newsletter last month, and the Switch 2 version will have a special room that takes advantage of the console’s mouse controls.
From The Verge via this RSS feed
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