Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

California lawmakers plan to introduce a new bill to protect children’s data online this Thursday, mirroring the UK’s recently introduced children’s code, as part of growing momentum globally for stricter regulation on Big Tech.

The California age-appropriate design-code bill will require many of the world’s biggest tech platforms headquartered in the state—such as social media group Meta and Google’s YouTube—to limit the amount of data they collect from young users and the location tracking of children in the state.

If passed into law, it will also place restrictions on profiling younger users for targeted advertising, mandate the introduction of “age-appropriate” content policies, and ban serving up behavioral nudges that might trick them into weakening their privacy protections.

Enlarge / Traffic jam forms on Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. (credit: Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News)

The Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of restoring California’s ability to set strict tailpipe emissions limits, according to news reports, while at the same time looking at adopting a version of the state’s stringent rules for heavy-duty trucks in an effort to cut smog-forming pollution.

The EPA’s restoration of California’s Clean Air Act waiver reverses the Trump administration’s revocation, and the new truck rule aims to drastically reduce nitrogen dioxide emissions from trucks.

Nitrogen dioxide pollution can cause and aggravate respiratory diseases, including asthma and certain kinds of cancer. It can also react with water and oxygen in the atmosphere to form acid rain. The last time the EPA updated emissions limits for heavy-duty trucks, in 2001, it cut nitrogen dioxide by 95 percent over 10 years. That caused nitrogen dioxide pollution to fall 40 percent nationwide.

The Wii U eShop as it looked just after launch in 2013.

Nintendo has announced plans to sunset the sale of downloadable games and paid DLC on the Wii U and 3DS platforms early next year.

Players will have until “late March 2023” to purchase any of the hundreds of games available on those eShops. But customers will have to add funds to their shop accounts well before that full shutdown—by May 23 for credit card funding and August 29 for redeeming physical eShop cards. A shared balance with a Nintendo Account wallet (as used on the Switch) will also work on the older platforms up through the March 2023 shutdown.

While new purchases will be cut off, Nintendo writes that players will be able to redownload previous purchases on these platforms “for the foreseeable future.” Online services and software updates will still be supported as well, but free demos and “free-to-start” games will no longer be downloadable on either platform. Switch services will not be affected.