An arbitrator has decided in favor of Meta in a case the company brought against Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former Meta employee who wrote a memoir published this week detailing alleged claims of misconduct at the company. Macmillan Publishers and its imprint that published the memoir, Flatiron Books, were also named as respondents.

The memoir, titled Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, details alleged claims of sexual harassment, including by current policy chief Joel Kaplan, who was her boss, according to NBC News.

In the decision, the arbitrator said Wynn-Williams must stop making disparaging remarks against Meta and its employees and, to the extent that she can control, cease further promoting the book, further publishing the book, and further repetition of previous disparaging remarks. The decision also says she must retract disparaging remarks from where they have appeared.

However, it’s unclear if this arbitrator actually has the authority to halt the publishing of the book or if Wynn-Williams can stop the creation of future versions; as of this writing, it’s currently for sale at stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. In the decision, the arbitrator noted that the lawyer representing Macmillian and Flatiron objected to its jurisdiction. Wynn-Williams appears to have signed an arbitration agreement when she left Meta in 2017.

Meta, Macmillan, and Flatiron didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.

“This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone says in a statement. “This urgent legal action was made necessary by Williams, who more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project and avoided the industry’s standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to shelves after waiting for eight years.”

Meta has spent more than a year advocating for new laws requiring app stores to give parents control over kids’ app downloads, and just saw an early victory in the states. But Google charges that it’s really just a misguided effort to “offload” Meta’s own responsibility to keep kids safe.

The missive follows the passage of Utah’s App Store Accountability Act, the first of its kind to advance to the governor’s desk, putting the onus on app store operators to keep kids from accessing inappropriate content. There are similar bills in more than a dozen states across the country in a growing trend of kids safety legislation, in the wake of the Kids Online Safety Act’s failure to become law last year, and ongoing legal battles over many other state laws.

While Meta, Snap, and X issued a joint statement praising the Utah bill’s passage, Google calls it “concerning.” Rather than protect kids and give parents more control, Google director of public policy Kareem Ghanem writes, the legislation “requires app stores to share if a user is a kid or teenager with all app developers (effectively millions of individual companies) without parental consent or rules on how the information is used. That raises real privacy and safety risks, like the potential for bad actors to sell the data or use it for other nefarious purposes.” Social media companies would be the real beneficiaries of the law, Ghanem writes, because they could “avoid that responsibility despite the fact that apps are just one of many ways that kids can access these platforms.” Both Meta and Google’s YouTube have come under fire in the past for allegedly not doing enough to keep its youngest users safe on their platforms by pushing videos of kids to potential predators or keeping teens in a content loop that makes them feel bad about themselves. Both companies have said they maintain robust policies and resources to create healthy experiences on their platforms.

“We welcome Google’s concession that they can share age information with app developers, and we agree this should be done in a privacy-preserving manner,” Meta spokesperson Jamie Radice says in a statement. “But with millions of apps on Google’s app store, and more added every day, it’s unclear how they’ll determine which apps are eligible to receive this data. The simplest way to protect teens online is to put parents in charge. That’s why legislation should require app stores to obtain parental consent before allowing children to download apps.” In the past, Meta has argued that the app store is the optimal place for parents to grant permission and to vet users’ ages before they ever download apps. This method would also protect users’ privacy, Meta global head of safety Antigone Davis wrote in 2023, because “by verifying a teen’s age on the app store, individual apps would not be required to collect potentially sensitive identifying information.” How exactly users’ ages get verified is a major concern for privacy advocates, but it’s one that’s not yet entirely worked out in some of the legislation. Utah’s, for example, says that app store operators can use either “commercially available methods that are reasonably designed to ensure accuracy,” or other methods to be determined and deemed acceptable by state regulators.

Google believes it has “a better way.” To Google, that means that app stores should only provide age assurance securely to developers that “actually need them” — meaning only for apps that offer risky content, and probably not for something more mundane like a weather app. In that vein, Google proposes putting more discretion on app developers, rather than app stores, to determine the appropriate protections to put in place for a given age group. “Because developers know their apps best, they are best positioned to determine when and where an age-gate might be beneficial to their users, and that may evolve over time, which is another reason why a one-size-fits-all approach won’t adequately protect kids,” Ghanem writes. Google is also proposing “clear consequences for developers who violate users’ trust” by doing things like “improperly accessing or sharing the age signal.”

Apple has similarly raised concerns about potentially excessive data collection. In a white paper announcing steps it would take to help protect kids online, including letting parents share kids’ age ranges with developers, Apple emphasized the importance of collecting just the minimal amount of data to protect users’ privacy.

“Everyone wants to protect kids and teens online, and make sure they engage with age-appropriate content,” Ghanem writes, “but how it’s done matters.”

The United Kingdom’s mobile browser market is “not working well for consumers and businesses” according to a final report from Britain’s competition watchdog, which says that Apple and Google are largely to blame.

An independent inquiry group has concluded its mobile browsers investigation for the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), identifying Apple’s policies around iOS, Safari, and WebKit as making it difficult for third-party web browser providers to compete and restricting the market as a result. Google’s Android mobile ecosystem is also complicit in impeding competition, according to the CMA report, albeit to a lesser extent.

The issues flagged by the investigation include Apple requiring all browsers on iOS to run on its WebKit browser engine, giving Safari preferential access to features compared to competing WebKit-based browsers, limitations placed on in-app browsing, and having Safari pre-installed and prominently displayed as the default browser on iPhones. While users can change the default iPhone web browsing app, investigators say that Safari’s designation as the pre-installed default on iPhones reduces user awareness of alternative apps.

Investigators found similar concerns regarding Chrome being pre-installed as the default web browser on the vast majority of Android devices. However, the report notes that both Apple and Google have taken steps to make it easier for users to switch to alternative browsers since the investigation announced its provisional findings in November, which have “addressed some, but not all, of the concerns relating to choice architecture.”

The investigation also found that revenue sharing arrangements that see Google paying Apple a significant share of search revenue in exchange for being the default search engine on iPhones was “significantly reducing their financial incentives to compete.”

Apple and Google have yet to respond to our request for comment on the CMA’s report.

The CMA has put forward potential remedies aimed at improving competition within the UK’s mobile browser market, which include forcing Apple to allow developers to use alternative browser engines on iOS, requiring Apple and Google to offer a browser choice screen during device setup, and prohibiting the Chrome revenue sharing arrangements between the two companies. These suggestions are currently unenforceable, however, that could change in the coming months.

In January, the CMA launched separate investigations into Apple and Google’s mobile ecosystems to decide whether to designate them as having strategic market status (SMS) under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC). Much like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) law introduced by the European Union, the DMCC allows UK regulators to make select companies with “substantial and entrenched market power” meet stricter antitrust requirements.

SMS companies can be imposed with “conduct requirements” intended to address anticompetitive behavior, and risk fines of up to 10 percent of their annual turnover for violating DMCC rules. If Apple or Google are designated with SMS, the mobile browser investigation is encouraging the CMA to “consider imposing appropriate interventions,” similar to the suggestions it outlined. The SMS investigations into Google and Apple are currently ongoing and expected to conclude later this year.

“Following our in-depth investigation, we have concluded that competition between different mobile browsers is not working well, and this is holding back innovation in the UK,” said Margot Daly, Chair of the CMA’s independent inquiry group. “I welcome the CMA’s prompt action to open strategic market status investigations into both Apple and Google’s mobile ecosystems. The extensive analysis we’ve set out today will help that work as it progresses.”

Sure enough, AMD’s exciting Radeon 9070 and 9070 XT graphic card prices, quoted at $550/$600, are looking too good to be true. Newegg, Overclockers UK, and even Micro Center are among the outlets that have now quietly raised the prices on the supposedly entry-level MSRP models of these graphics cards by $50-$130. Last Thursday, AMD wouldn’t deny reports that its partners are explicitly allowed to rapidly increase those prices beyond MSRP, and a week later, that’s already coming to pass.

While it’s true that board partners like ASRock, Gigabyte, PowerColor, Sapphire, and XFX generally charge more for cards with fancier cooling solutions, those aren’t the cards we’re talking about today. We’ve been tracking prices on ten specific models of the AMD 9070 and AMD 9070 XT that were originally introduced at their $550 and $600 MSRPs.

None of those cards are currently in stock at any retailer we’ve checked — but some retailers have already modified their pricetags ahead of new shipments. Here are the changes we’ve seen:

AMD Radeon 9070 XT

• Newegg now lists PowerColor’s 9070 XT Reaper at $700, a $100 jump
• Newegg now lists XFX’s 9070 XT Swift at at $730, a $130 jump
• Newegg now lists ASRock’s 9070 XT Steel Legend at $670, a $70 jump
• OCUK now lists PowerColor’s 9070 XT Reaper and Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT at £650, an £80 jump
• OCUK now lists ASRock’s 9070 XT Steel Legend at £669, a £99 jump

AMD Radeon 9070

• Micro Center now lists XFX’s 9070 Swift OC at $630, an $80 jump
• Micro Center now lists Gigabyte’s 9070 Gaming OC at $670, a $130 jump
• OCUK now lists PowerColor’s 9070 Reaper at £570, a £40 jump
• OCUK now lists Sapphire’s Pulse 9070 at £570, a £40 jump

Not every retailer has changed out the pricetags on every card. Best Buy, which only listed a single model of the 9070 and 9070 XT at MSRP to begin with, hasn’t changed those prices yet — though they’re admittedly still out of stock. (It also now lists a pair of out-of-stock Gigabyte cards at MSRP.) Micro Center also still lists three models of 9070 and four models of 9070 XT at MSRP, though all are out of stock.

On the Nvidia front, there doesn’t seem to be much retailer/board partner scalping going on yet, at least at major US retailers. We’re tracking six different models of $550 RTX 5070, three different models of $750 RTX 5070 Ti, and three different models of $1,000 RTX 5080 which were originally listed at MSRP prices. Best Buy, Newegg, and Micro Center are still listing the ones they stock at MSRP today.

Last week, AMD told us that “we expect cards to be available from multiple vendors at $549 / $599,” and that more cards are coming. AMD did not say which board partners or retailers would agree to offer cards at those prices, or how few those partners would have to sell at those prices before charging more.

Amtrak is revamping its mobile app to include more helpful features like making it easier to look up schedule changes and track your train’s progression from station to station. The changes come as Amtrak campaigns to attract customers and encourage them to travel by train instead of cars and planes.

Amtrak’s app already helped riders plan their ride, purchase tickets, display eTickets, manage Amtrak Guest Rewards, and more. Now, the new app displays train status and schedule changes right on the reservation screen (within 24 hours of the trip) so it’s easier to find. Riders on business class like Acela (or other assigned seating trains) can also now use the app to choose preferred seating during the booking process.

Based on customer feedback, Amtrak also updated the homescreen to separate tickets from marketing info and messages. And its new My Trips tab provides easier viewing of active trips and lets you jump to upcoming or past ones. Finally, you can modify part of your trip through the app, making travel adjustments easier “while keeping the best available fares.” 

In all, the app “looks a lot cleaner” and “scrolls smoother,” according to my sister, who often rides on Amtrak. The new app update is available now on iOS and Android.

Intel has appointed a new CEO, three months after former CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out of the company. The company’s new chief executive is Lip-Bu Tan, who served as CEO of chip design hardware and services company Cadence from 2009 to 2021 and as a member of Intel’s board of directors from 2022 to 2024.

While Intel’s official story was that Gelsinger retired after less than four years in the CEO post, reporting quickly came out that he was pushed out by the board of directors after they lost faith in his strategy to turn things around at the beleaguered company. Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, before leaving and eventually returning in 2021 to take the CEO job.

Tan will take over as CEO on March 18th from interim co-CEOs David Zinsner and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus. Zinser will continue to be Intel’s CFO, while Johnston Holthaus will still be CEO of Intel Products.

“Intel has a powerful and differentiated computing platform, a vast customer installed base and a robust manufacturing footprint that is getting stronger by the day as we rebuild our process technology roadmap,” Tan says in a statement. “I am eager to join the company and build upon the work the entire Intel team has been doing to position our business for the future.”

This isn’t the first time Tan has been tapped to become CEO following a period on a company’s board; that happened with Cadence as well. According to Intel’s press release, Tan more than doubled Cadence’s revenue while he was CEO.

The question now is whether Tan will resume Intel’s previous plan to win with its own wholly owned chipmaking business while simplifying its aims, accelerate plans to spin off some or all of its manufacturing business, or maybe even wind up selling off parts of the company.

In his first public memo as CEO, Tan doesn’t offer many obvious hints about what he wants to do next, but he does suggest that Intel will continue to offer manufacturing as well as chip design:

Together, we will work hard to restore Intel’s position as a world-class products company, establish ourselves as a world-class foundry and delight our customers like never before. That’s what this moment demands of us as we remake Intel for the future.

He also says Intel will be “an engineering-focused company,” and one that needs to “take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog” in future.

Three days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the White House confirmed the recent Columbia graduate hadn’t been charged with a crime. Instead, Khalil’s arrest had been personally ordered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The secretary of state has the right to revoke a green card or visa for individuals who are adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. Khalil, she claimed, had “organized group protests” that disrupted classes and harassed Jewish American students. On top of that, she said, he had “distributed pro-Hamas propaganda: flyers with the logo of Hamas.”

Contrary to Leavitt’s statement, Rubio can’t just snap his fingers and order someone’s deportation. But the provision of the law she cited, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), is very real. It’s an obscure McCarthy-era statute passed at the height of Cold War paranoia — meant to help root out “subversives” from every area of public life. 

Read the full story at The Verge.

In a first for the US, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal last year, according to a new report from energy think tank Ember. Coal fell to a historic low, generating 15 percent of the country’s electricity compared to 17 percent from solar and wind combined.

The federal government is now taking a sharp turn away from clean energy under the Trump administration. But the gains made last year show the market forces at play could keep momentum going despite President Donald Trump’s disdain for windmills and solar panels.

Solar was the fastest-growing source of electricity in 2024, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration. It accounted for 81 percent of added annual capacity. Utility scale solar grew by a record 31 gigawatts. For context, a single gigawatt of power is comparable to 1.9 million photovoltaic panels. 

Solar energy reached historically low costs in 2020, becoming the cheapest source of electricity in most parts of the world. While solar supply chains are still concentrated in China, manufacturing capacity for solar modules grew a whopping 190 percent in the US last year, according to a separate report released this week by the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie. Texas saw the most growth in solar, according to both reports, and also has the most module manufacturing capacity — not bad for a state that’s historically been a hub for the oil and gas industry. 

Wind generation grew more modestly, but it is still about twice as big a source of electricity than solar, making up about 10 percent of the US electricity mix. Like solar, onshore wind is also generally a cheaper source of electricity than coal or gas.

All these trends could help insulate renewable energy companies from the Trump administration’s assault on anything to do with addressing the climate crisis. Federal agencies have attempted to claw back funding for renewable energy projects. Trump, who accepted tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, never misses an opportunity to trash talk solar and wind projects. He frequently spouts misinformation that falsely links whale deaths to offshore wind projects and signed an executive order to stop federal approvals and leases for wind farms on federal lands and waters. And his tariff threats on goods from Canada and China could raise costs for new energy projects. 

Nevertheless, electricity demand is climbing in the US after flatlining for 14 years with gains in energy efficiency. Electricity demand rose 3 percent last year, the fifth-highest jump this century, according to Ember. The rise of energy-hungry AI data centers, crypto mines, and electric vehicles and appliances has led to growing interest in developing more sources of energy across the board, from renewables to nuclear reactors and gas plants. 

Rising demand led to a 3.3 percent increase in electricity generated from gas-fired power plants last year. Coal generation peaked in 2007, outcompeted by a boom in fracked gas. And while gas produces less planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions than coal, it’s still a powerful source of the pollution that leads to climate change.

A third report on national power demand out this week — commissioned by a diverse range of trade groups including the American Clean Power Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Nuclear Energy Institute — says the nation’s power grids need to grow significantly. The US will need to install 900 gigawatts of renewable energy and batteries by 2040, it says. The report also advocates for up to 100 gigawatts of new gas capacity, even though that doesn’t jive with what researchers have found is necessary to prevent the climate crisis from getting much worse than it already is.

“Solar is winning,” Ember chief analyst Dave Jones said in a press release. “It added more generation than gas in 2024 and batteries will ensure that solar can grow more cheaply and quickly than gas.”

There’s plenty of room for growth, of course, considering around 60 percent of the nation’s electricity mix comes from fossil fuels. But renewables have come a long way since 2018, when coal still generated three times as much electricity as solar and wind combined, according to Ember.

With favorable weather forecast at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission was scheduled to launch at 7:49PM ET tonight, before NASA and SpaceX said they would stand down from a launch attempt. The next launch opportunity is March 13th at 7:26PM ET.

Once its there, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will finally get a safe ride back home to Earth after being stranded aboard the ISS for nine months. Their Boeing Starliner mission that launched to the ISS on June 5th, 2024, was supposed to be just an eight-day mission, but issues like thruster failures and helium leaks made it unsafe to return to Earth using Starliner. The astronauts will now return on the Crew-9 capsule, tentatively scheduled for March 16th, 2025, along with two astronauts from the mission that launched to the ISS on September 28th, 2024

The Crew-10 mission includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, as well as JAXA mission specialist Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The crew will spend several months aboard the ISS conducting experiments, research, and performing spacewalks..

Follow along here for all of the updates on the Crew-10 launch, as well as the return flight of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

• SpaceX is pausing Falcon 9 flights after issues following its Crew-9 launch.
• NASA’s Crew-9 mission that will bring the Starliner astronauts home launches today.
• NASA’s Starliner astronauts don’t feel ‘let down’ by Boeing’s spacecraft
• Boeing Starliner has completed its lonely return to Earth
• Boeing Starliner is finally on its way back.
• Boeing’s Starliner started making a repeating ‘pulsing’ sound Saturday
• NASA shuffles Crew-9 team that will bring Starliner crew home
• NASA will bring the Starliner astronauts home next year on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission
• Boeing Starliner astronauts might get a ride home from SpaceX — in 2025

Attorneys at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked a federal judge Wednesday to delay its consumer protection trial against Amazon by two months, saying that staffing losses and a possible office move could hinder its ability to prepare. 

“We have lost employees in the agency, in our division and on our case team,” FTC attorney Jonathan Cohen said at a status hearing in Washington, according to CNBC. Cohen also warned that a potential sudden office move for the agency could disrupt its preparation, CNBC reports. 

The FTC recently terminated around a dozen probationary staffers, The Verge first reported. It’s so far been spared from some of the wider cuts fueled by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which have occurred at agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education. FTC staff were recently told by DOGE they’d need to move to an office it cleared out from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the coming months, Bloomberg reported.

Responding to Judge John Chun’s question about how the FTC’s resource issue “will be different in two months,” Cohen acknowledged he “cannot guarantee if things won’t be even worse,” CNBC reports. “But there’s a lot of reason to believe … we may have been through the brunt of it, at least for a little while.”

The FTC filed suit against Amazon in June 2023, under the previous Democratic chair Lina Khan. The agency alleged that Amazon used design tricks known as dark patterns to deceive millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription, and made it difficult to unsubscribe. Under Khan, the FTC also separately filed an antitrust complaint against Amazon. Both those cases are now under the stewardship of the new Republican FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who’s signaled both loyalty toward President Trump and his policies, and combativeness toward Big Tech. Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has recently cozied up to Trump, attending his inauguration alongside other tech CEOs after Amazon gave $1 million to his inauguration fund.

The Amazon Prime trial was initially scheduled to begin on September 22nd. John Hueston, arguing on Amazon’s behalf, reportedly pushed back on the FTC’s attempt to delay the trial, saying that the government hasn’t shown that it doesn’t have the resources to proceed as scheduled. “What I heard is that they’ve got the whole trial team still intact. Maybe there’s going to be an office move,” Hueston said, as reported by CNBC. “And by the way, both in government and private sector, I’ve never heard of an office move being more than a few days disruptive.”

Snapchat Platinum subscribers will now be able to use video lenses featuring AI generated animals or flowers, Snap announced today. 

There will initially be three of the lenses, which Snap calls “AI Video Lenses.” The fox lens, for example, can have a fox snuggle on your shoulder, while the raccoon one can have raccoons scamper over your head. With the flower lens, flowers will appear in front of you and the camera will zoom out.

Snap says it will be adding new AI-powered lenses every week.

“These Lenses, powered by our in-house built generative video model, bring some of the most cutting edge AI tools available today to Snapchatters through a familiar Lens format,” Snap says in its blog post. “We have a long history of being first movers to bring advanced AR, ML and AI tools directly to our community, and we’re excited to see what Snapchatters create.”

Last year, Snap showed off an on-device AI model that can transform a user’s background and clothes in real time. 

A federal judge seems likely to temporarily block the Trump administration from dismantling a major consumer protection agency, fearing a delay could leave nothing for the court to save. 

This week, DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson sat through what she called an “illuminating two days” of witness testimony on the future of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), including plans for a mass reduction-in-force (RIF) of nearly 1,200 employees. The testimony came from a top agency executive and two additional CFPB employees, representing opposing viewpoints. The government tried to demonstrate that early chaos at the bureau had settled into tentative stability — but Jackson was clearly dubious. “A lot of evidence has been introduced that supports a decision that the same people who were sitting in a room and talking about RIFing are still sitting in a room and talking about RIFing,” she said.

Jackson has asked the government to extend an agreement to pause future terminations while she deliberates on a longer-term preliminary injunction, which she aims to decide on later this month. That could mean the difference between helping Americans in dire financial straits — or leaving them on their own for far longer than usual

Jackson cautioned that her thinking was not final. But a preliminary injunction would represent a significant blow to the Trump administration, which has tried to downsize, if not fully dismantle, the financial regulator. Whittling down the agency staff until there’s no one left “might be something that’s allowed to happen, but I don’t think it’s allowed to happen in the way it’s happening,” Jackson says.

The CFPB handles consumer complaints about both traditional financial institutions and other companies offering financial products, like the digital payments service Elon Musk’s X plans to offer. CFPB witnesses told the court that workers for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)  — the office that Musk has made himself the public face of — were intimately involved in plans to rapidly cut the agency’s staff, leaving major questions about whether the agency could carry out its statutorily required duties.

A key allegation in the case — brought by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) and groups that rely on the CFPB’s work — is that CFPB acting director Russell Vought is violating constitutional separation of powers by trying to dismantle an agency created by Congress and keep it from doing work mandated by statute. Justice Department attorneys have defended the Trump administration’s actions, saying that it never meant to prevent work explicitly required by the law and that work could be preserved even if it’s under the umbrella of a different agency. But this hearing’s testimony left the impression that’s either a misrepresentation or an outright lie.

‘We were legitimately shutting down’

While March 10th saw several hours of testimony from CFPB chief operating officer Adam Martinez, the next day Jackson heard from witnesses who told a more harrowing version of Vought’s mid-February stop-work directive and DOGE’s push to eliminate the vast majority of staff within 30 days. Those witnesses included a direct report of Martinez’s, using the pseudonym Alex Doe due to fear of retaliation.

Doe alleges they were put in charge of the team organizing mass firings and described several meetings between the RIF team and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which advised on how to terminate roughly 1,200 of the agency’s 1,700-person workforce in short order. 

In a February 13th meeting Doe attended alongside Martinez, two DOGE staffers who had been detailed to the CFPB participated, Doe testified. One of those staffers, Jeremy Lewin, appeared on and off of the Teams meeting screen because he said he was consulting with Vought, according to Doe. The DOGE staffers and Vought pushed for RIF notices to be sent the next day, Doe testified, with no explanation for the haste.

At a meeting the following day between OPM and the CFPB RIF team, Martinez pulled a memo identifying divisions of the agency that would be effectively wiped out under the plan. Doe said they were advised by OPM that in order to pull off the RIF as quickly as possible, there couldn’t be a single job left in any particular unit, because otherwise, terminated employees would get the chance to compete for the position. “Seeing in black and white the number of people that were being fired, it was shocking and it was upsetting,” Doe testified.

When Doe learned of a hearing in this case on February 14th, while their team was working rapidly to meet the Trump administration’s self-imposed deadline for the RIF notices, they flagged the development to Martinez, expecting the work to be paused to see what the court had to say about it first. “The opposite occurred,” Doe testified. Martinez’s senior advisor told Doe to work faster.

After the government agreed in court to temporarily pause terminations, Doe said one of Martinez’s advisors said to keep working, because they hadn’t yet heard back from the agency’s top legal officer and DOGE was pushing for a time that the RIF notices could be sent. Doe told another advisor that ​​they hoped that if Martinez was going to tell his staff to violate a court order, he had the instruction in writing from DOGE. Then, Doe logged off.

Even after the agency told Jackson it would pause terminations, Doe testified that planning for the CFPB’s closure has continued. At a February 20th meeting, Martinez told staff, “We were legitimately shutting down” and “We would be wiped out in 30 days,” according to Doe. Martinez said at a February 27th meeting with OPM and the CFPB RIF team that he’d let them know if the RIF plan changed, Doe testified. “To this day, [that] has never happened,” they said.

Does stop work mean stop work?

Despite the allegedly ongoing effort to wind down the agency, Martinez testified on March 11th that the Trump administration seemingly didn’t expect employees to take Vought’s stop-work directive at face value. He claimed that Vought’s deputy — Mark Paoletta, the chief legal officer — “genuinely seemed surprised” when Martinez informed him that CFPB staff quite literally stopped working after Vought’s stop-work order was issued.

In a March 2nd email, Paoletta told CFPB staff that it had come to his attention “that some employees have not been performing statutorily required work.” He clarified that “employees should be performing work that is required by law and do not need to seek prior approval to do so.”

Jackson seemed deeply skeptical that Vought telling staff to “stand down from performing any work task” didn’t mean stopping all work. At one point, the Justice Department’s Brad Rosenberg referred to the February 10th email as something that “plaintiffs characterized as a stop work order.” 

“It is a stop work order,” Jackson said bluntly. “The way you want to read it is not true to the language here.”

Martinez claimed some of this messaging was typical of a presidential transition, though the judge also got him to acknowledge that much of it was not. The first week that DOGE came in was “frightening” and unlike anything he’d seen before in government, he conceded on Tuesday. “It just simply was not normal, and the rapidness with which it was occurring was overwhelming.” The experience made Martinez realize “how much damage can be done just within a couple days to an organization. And my concern was some of what we were directed to do by DOGE was essentially irreparable from an operational perspective.”

Martinez testified that “a lot has changed” since Vought and Paoletta — whose main posts are at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — became involved at the CFPB. Still, Martinez said, “I have absolutely no clue what the end result is for the bureau,” which essentially means whether and how it will continue to exist.

A third witness, chief of staff for the CFPB’s Office of Consumer Response Matthew Pfaff, testified that work was clearly not getting done, and the chaos has already left a backlog of consumer complaints, company support tickets, and other work that will take “weeks if not months” to work through.

Alongside other chaos like canceled contracts, Pfaff said, no one in his division was monitoring or investigating consumer complaints after the stop-work order was issued. The damage for ordinary citizens was tangible. Pfaff testified that the agency had a backlog of over 16,000 consumer complaints about scams and other financial harms, which will now face delayed responses. At least 75 complaints, he said, could be devastatingly high stakes — they came from people facing imminent foreclosure, but after Vought’s directive, they “had not been touched.” 

A temporary injunction may not restore the agency to where it was prior to DOGE’s arrival. But until Jackson is able to rule on the case’s merits, she says, it could mean it’s able to “limp along.”

Taking a page from Costco’s playbook, Samsung has announced a new Buzzer Beater Bundle that includes eight TVs sold together at a significant discount, as spotted by SamMobile. The bundle is aimed at college football fans looking to maximize their March Madness intake given the tournament’s busy schedule and overlapping games.

The bundle includes a 98-inch 4K Crystal UHD TV, a 65-inch 8K Neo QLED TV, three 65-inch 4K Neo QLED TVs, and three 55-inch 4K QLED TVs, but no OLEDs. The bundle is only available until March 22nd, 2025, and is priced at $10,307.42. Samsung says all those screens are valued closer to $16,000, which will save you around six grand by buying in bulk.

That’s money you can put to good use buying eight TV mounts and hiring a contractor to cut open your living room wall in order to route eight power and HDMI cables out of sight. You’ll probably also want to budget well over a $1,000 for a decent matrix switcher that can easily route signals to each of the sets.

Samsung also points out that all of the TVs included in this bundle feature the company’s Multi View feature allowing you to split the screen and watch multiple things at once. So while you’ve got eyes on all the games and highlights, you can probably dedicate at least half a screen so the kids can watch Bluey.  Even people with a wall of TVs in their living rooms need to make sacrifices.

Sonos is abandoning far-along plans to release a streaming video player this year, The Verge has learned. The news was announced by the company’s leadership during an all-hands call today. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos’ next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and has spent months in beta testing. But now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects as interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company’s future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024. He told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table “for now.”

The abrupt cancellation of Pinewood leaves Sonos without a significant new product to ship in the second half of 2025. The company most recently released the Arc Ultra soundbar and Sub 4 at the end of last year. Internally, some employees were concerned that Pinewood would ultimately become a repeat of the Sonos Ace headphones and see the company trying to take on well-established players in a new product category. When it comes to streaming hardware, Roku, Amazon, Apple, and Google dominate the field.

Instead, at least for now, Sonos will continue i …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr is asking the public to help him identify “unnecessary” regulations created by the agency so that he can eliminate them.

Carr announced “In re: Delete, Delete, Delete” on Wednesday, in response to President Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to remove regulations across the government. One order that the FCC cited in its announcement calls for agencies to identify 10 regulations to repeal for every one they propose. Carr has so far made himself one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, taking up his preferred policies and investigating media and tech companies Trump has long battled. 

“For too long, administrative agencies have added new regulatory requirements in excess of their authority or kept lawful regulations in place long after their shelf life had expired,” Carr says in a statement. “This only creates headwinds and slows down our country’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and small businesses. The FCC is committed to ending all of the rules and regulations that are no longer necessary. And we welcome the public’s participation and feedback throughout this process.”

The FCC is asking for comments that identify rules and regulations that are outdated, create barriers to entry or “unfairly disadvantage American-owned businesses,” or have greater costs than benefits, according to the agency’s public notice. Anyone wishing to comment on the initiative can do so on the FCC’s website for the next 30 days.

On February 11th, as thousands of civil servants wondered whether they’d have a job — or whether their federal agencies would exist at all, as President Donald Trump and Elon Musk took a wrecking ball to the federal government — McLaurine Pinover had other things on her mind. Pinover, a political appointee of the Trump administration and the communications director at the Office of Personnel Management, was uploading her outfit to Instagram.

“Me and my emotional support shoulder sweater,” Pinover captioned a video (along with the hashtags #cozy, #petiteoutfitinspo, #dcstyle, and #classicwithatwist) as she posed for the camera. In another clip, uploaded January 29th, 2025, Pinover models a brown skirt and top, hands on hips. “New office, new office look,” she writes. “I’ve been sick + started a new job but excited to share my looks on this new adventure!” Here’s a quick reminder of what was happening that day in Washington, DC.

Pinover’s Instagram is long gone, deleted minutes after CNN reporters contacted her for a story revealing her side hustle, where she was also trying to monetize her content. But I was able to find a few of the cached pages on Google:

The OPM has played a central role in the Trump administration’s search-and-destroy tactic — it’s the OPM that is acting as Musk’s right hand in gutting the federal workforce; the “Fork in the Road” email encouraging civil servants to resign came from the OPM; and it was the OPM that demanded federal employees summarize what they do each week to prove they’re actually working. Along with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk’s pseudo agency, OPM has been hellbent on identifying (and punishing) “waste, fraud, and abuse,” however they choose to define that.

Luckily, I have an idea of where the OPM can start. Many of Pinover’s videos are filmed in a nondescript but tidy office. CNN, which broke the story, includes an incredible quote from a former OPM communications official: “I saw it, and I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, that’s my office.’” CNN also reports that Pinover’s Sears catalog-esque outfits were shared during working hours — seems wasteful to me! Pinover’s fashion account, @getdressedwithmc, only had around 800 followers, with some videos getting just a few dozen likes, which is not very efficient or effective. If you are going to use your government office on taxpayers’ dimes to film milquetoast outfit videos, at least have the decency to be good at it.

It is one thing to share your very normal and average outfits on a private account — still kind of cringe, but probably not worthy of news coverage. But according to CNN, Pinover was also trying to monetize her content via affiliate links. For actual influencers, affiliate links can be incredibly lucrative: they make a commission every time someone purchases a product using their link. But with 800 followers, it’s unclear if Pinover was making any money. She was trying, though, with CNN reporting she was hawking products like a $475 skirt. Government watchdog groups told CNN that Pinover’s actions appear to run afoul of rules against using government resources for a private business and other unauthorized purposes.

“Content creation” as a job has become more financially and socially viable in the last decade, and many people with day jobs dabble in making Reels or TikToks or YouTube vlogs. In 2022, I wrote about the trend of big tech employees going viral on the clock, recording footage in the offices of companies like Apple, Google, and Discord and discussing their careers and lifestyle. In this world, your day job is part of your content niche, blurring the lines between the role that pays your bills and your social media platform that you clearly want to bolster. While Pinover didn’t identify herself as a member of the Trump administration, her willingness to unabashedly promote her ShopMy affiliate links signals two things to me: these are not serious people; and also, this is what’s happening in workplaces across America, conflicts of interest and professional reputation be damned.

Then again, we have plenty of evidence that many connected to this administration think of themselves as influencers first and public servants second. The White House is but a backdrop for a pop-up Tesla dealership as Musk’s business flounders. Over on X, disgraced former member of the House of Representatives Matt Gaetz is busy being a shill for a random precious metals investment firm (seemingly without proper disclosures, I might add).

Reached for comment, the OPM press line responded with a statement attributed to Pinover: “While I was battling breast cancer as a new mom, I felt so unlike myself. Shortly after, I turned to social media as a personal outlet. I never made any income and with only about 800 followers, I’m surprised this is newsworthy. My focus remains on serving the American people at OPM.”

The OPM and Pinover did not respond to my questions about whether her actions constitute waste, fraud, or abuse — but I am not holding my breath, given what her bosses are up to. What’s that saying about when in Rome?

Update March 12th: Added comment from the OPM and Pinover.

Moft has announced a new folio-style cover case for iPads that could improve the tablet’s ergonomics for anyone working with the Apple Pencil or simply watching videos. The Moft Dynamic Folio uses an origami approach to transform into a stand that can elevate the tablet by up to three inches, while other configurations let you support a smartphone at the same time. The flexibility lets Moft’s case go above and beyond the limited folding functionality of Apple’s own Smart Folio iPad cases.

The company is making its new Dynamic Folio available to consumers through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign that has already surpassed its $10,000 funding goal. The case will be available in three sizes and support the iPad Mini as well as 11 and 13-inch versions of the iPad, Pro, and Air. Early backers can preorder the Mini case for $34, the 11-inch version for $45, or the 13-inch for $55, while full pricing is expected to be closer to $39, $49, and $69, respectively. Shipping is expected to start as early as May 2025.

Made from fiberglass covered in Moft’s own scratch-resistant vegan leather alternative called MOVAS, the largest version of the Dynamic Folio adds 292 grams of weight to an iPad, so it’s also lighter than Apple’s iPad cases. It attaches magnetically so you can easily pop it off when you want to use your iPad without a case, but its design doesn’t completely protect the tablet on all sides like many silicone cases do. When attached, the Dynamic Folio will help protect the screen and back of the iPad from scratches, but it leaves several sides exposed. If you happen to drop it, there’s a chance the iPad could still get dinged and dented depending how it lands.

The primary use cases include two floating modes. One elevates the iPad two-inches at a lower 30-degree angle that’s useful for working, playing games, or browsing the web, while the other positions the iPad at a 60-degree angle three-inches above a desk or table for reading or watching videos.

Moft’s case can be folded in several other ways to support the tablet in portrait and landscape modes, to add an additional support for a smartphone, or to make it easier to balance the tablet on your knee when you don’t have access to a work surface. Moft also offers an optional Apple Pencil holder that magnetically attaches to the case and adds a bit more protection for the pricy stylus.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer warned in November that the mythical Xbox handheld is a few years away and only at the prototype stage right now. But if you read the headlines this week, you might think it’s actually arriving later this year.

A new report from Windows Central claims that “Xbox’s new hardware plans begin with a gaming handheld set for later this year, with full next-gen consoles targeting 2027” and that Microsoft is working on a “Project Keenan” handheld in partnership with an unnamed OEM. The report has generated plenty of headlines about an Xbox handheld arriving in 2025, but the reality is a little more complicated and related to Microsoft’s Xbox platform work to compete with SteamOS.

Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell me the company’s Xbox platform plans for this year and beyond are centered on one big goal: the unification of Windows and Xbox. Jason Ronald, VP of Xbox gaming devices and ecosystem, revealed to The Verge in January that the company is combining “the best of Xbox and Windows together” and that we’d start to see changes later in 2025.

I understand the Xbox work that has hit the headlines this week is actually c …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Poker Face’s first season was one of the best arguments to sign up for a Peacock subscription, and the show’s upcoming second season looks like it’s going to be even more of a blast.

Poker Face season 2 brings Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) back for another round of Columbo-esque murder mystery solving, and a new trailer for the series teases how she’s once again going to be putting her unusual ability to tell when people are lying to good use. Like the last season, the next batch of Poker Face’s episodes will feature a cavalcade of celebrity guest stars like Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Giancarlo Esposito, Method Man, and John Mulaney — who seems to be playing an FBI agent.

The trailer doesn’t really give you all that many clues as to which of its new characters might be killers Charlie has to sniff out. But it does let us know that Poker Face will be making its triumphant return on May 8th.

Google is emailing Chromecast users today to apologize for an issue that’s been causing certain Chromecast models to fail when people try to cast to them. The company says that it’s working on a fix.

Below is the text from the email, which some Verge staffers received, titled, “Important information about your Chromecast.”

We’re contacting you because of a disruption affecting Chromecast (2nd gen) and Chromecast Audio devices. We apologize for the issue and understand your frustration. We are working to roll out a fix as soon as possible and will share updates and guidance on the Nest Community page. We appreciate your patience as we resolve this issue.

Chromecasts started failing over the weekend, giving “Untrusted device” errors on the devices that users were trying to cast with. When The Verge reached out, Google acknowledged that it was aware of the issue and said it would share more information as it was available.

Yesterday, a Google Nest Community Manager said that the team has “identified the cause of the issue” and that it was working on a fix.

Google hasn’t said what caused the issue, but one Reddit user claimed that it was “most definitely due to the certificate baked into the Chromecast having expired.” The user said that the certificate specified that it was no longer valid after March 9th, 2025, which was the day before the Chromecast models started failing.