Another large study has found no link between autism and Tylenol use during pregnancy, refuting claims by President Trump and anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In September, Trump and Kennedy held a press conference in which they stated without clear evidence that the common fever and pain reducer acetaminophen—sold as Tylenol in the US and also known as paracetamol—causes autism in children if taken during pregnancy. Trump repeatedly warned pregnant people not to take Tylenol and instead "tough it out" with fever and/or pain.

Medical organizations decried Trump's message, emphasizing that acetaminophen is a safe pain and fever reliever during pregnancy and that untreated fever during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of autism in babies as well as other conditions, including miscarriage, birth defects, and premature birth. Still, the president's warning was effective. Texas sued the maker of Tylenol over the alleged connection. And a study in The Lancet in March found that use of acetaminophen in pregnant patients in emergency departments fell by 10 percent after Trump's press conference.

In the new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers analyzed electronic health records from 2001 to 2023 for more than 700,000 pairs of mothers and children in Hong Kong. Of those pairs, about 43 percent of children had exposure to acetaminophen in utero.

Sibling-matched design

The researchers then performed a sibling-matched analysis, comparing autism and ADHD cases among siblings, some of whom were exposed to acetaminophen in utero and some who weren't. This study design helps account for unmeasured family factors that influence the likelihood of the conditions, particularly genetics and shared environmental conditions. The autism analysis included over 124,000 sibling-matched children, and an analysis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) included a cohort of over 97,000 sibling-matched children.

The researchers saw no link between prenatal acetaminophen use and either condition. It didn't matter what dosage of acetaminophen was taken, when it was taken during the pregnancy (which trimester), how often it was taken, or how old the mother was at the time. There was simply no link between acetaminophen and autism or ADHD.

Interestingly, there was a link when the researchers dropped the sibling-matched design and instead compared acetaminophen-exposed with unexposed children, which is a finding that has come up in other studies. But when the researchers performed a "negative control" analysis and compared children whose mothers had taken acetaminophen before ever getting pregnant or after they had given birth compared to mothers who didn't use the painkiller, they also saw an association—one that is "biologically implausible."

"Collectively, these findings suggest that the positive signal observed in both conventional and negative control analyses reflect residual familial confounding, rather than a true pharmacologic effect of prenatal paracetamol exposure," the researchers concluded.

The finding of no association between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and neurodevelopmental conditions in children was also found in large sibling-matched studies in Sweden in 2024 and Japan in 2025.

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President Donald Trump’s plan to “fill the digital potholes” and use AI to quickly redesign every government website isn’t going very well.

Last August, Trump created the National Design Studio, or NDS, by executive order. A temporary DOGE-like entity that answers only to the president, NDS was tasked with creating new standards to update the US Web Design System (USWDS) and overhaul 27,000 dot-gov websites in just three years. At the end of this so-called “America by Design” initiative, the government’s “design language” would supposedly be more usable and beautiful, Trump expected.

However, that monumental task—assigned to a small team under a short timeframe—was seemingly made harder by DOGE's deep cuts to agencies previously responsible for improving government websites, including dismantling the 18F technology unit and restructuring the US Digital Service into DOGE.

Those teams knew exactly how hard it can be to get every government agency to adopt new web standards. They had spent years trying to push agencies to update their sites to comply with USWDS standards, yet “only 30 percent of government websites used them as of mid-2023,” NextGov reported. Notably, the USWDS team—which was created in 2015 to ensure government websites were accessible and mobile-friendly—was reduced to one full-time employee after Trump took office.

Most people agree that updating government websites is a worthwhile and necessary endeavor. But about a year into NDS’s existence, the team hasn’t accomplished much.

Its biggest achievement has been modernizing the federal retirement system. However, former government workers have accused the Trump administration of claiming “false victories and overstated credit,” noting that the project was underway before NDS was created.

The group's other output has been meager, with few launches and substantial backlash from design experts, who argue that the team relies too heavily on AI and has failed to test sites for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. As scrutiny of NDS has intensified, most agencies are now resisting connecting with the team about adopting new web standards, Ars has learned.

Single-page launches, odd redirects

Ars conducted a comprehensive review of launched sites to assess NDS's progress so far.

Most of the few dozen websites NDS has launched consist of a single page, where visitors can do little more than fill out a sign-up form. The most useful offering may be TrumpRX, which includes a search tool for comparing drug prices. For anything else, visitors must visit a legacy site.

There are also many newly registered domains—like live.gov, onlyfarms.gov, aliens.gov, and why.gov—which currently redirect to legacy sites. Some of those old sites may be updated with NDS's signature flair, but the ones that don't look as pretty remain the primary resource for Americans seeking government information or assistance online.

At least one website, 250.gov, which celebrates 250 years of US history, curiously redirects to a dot-org rather than a dot-gov, which is unusual for a government site and could erode visitor trust.

Among the few larger sites that NDS has launched is its own, ndstudio.gov. Currently, that site catalogs the team’s launches, shares a brief timeline of US design achievements, discusses the team’s AI and accessibility efforts, and encourages talented designers to “apply now.”

It also briefly hosted a store marketing a $47 limited edition MAHA poster and a $400 “collector’s edition” with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s autograph, NextGov reported. The store disappeared after the White House faced questions about where the profits from sales would go. A White House spokesperson told NextGov that the posters were never “actually for sale,” as the store’s items did not include a “purchase button.”

The only other site of similar scope is merrychristmas.gov, which, beyond the homepage, includes one page for each of the 12 days of Christmas. An apparent vanity project rather than a government resource, the site is also a celebration of NDS designs and culminates on Christmas with a page praising the group for building sites reflecting “a belief that thoughtful design can strengthen democracy and improve civic life.”

These sites are supposed to “delight” Americans, Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb cofounder serving as Trump’s chief design officer, told NextGov in February. The next month, he told Fox News he wanted visiting government websites to feel like “an Apple Store-like experience.”

However, the rush to launch sites that look as slick as iPhone ads has not always gone smoothly.

On TrumpRX.gov, for example, NDS was mocked for using AI to generate an image that “showed a child with six toes running towards an American flag without any stars on it,” NextGov reported. (That seemingly contradicts a directive from former President Joe Biden that agencies should never update websites to “alarm or frighten your users in ways that erode trust.”)

A design for CIO.gov was abruptly pulled after critics on LinkedIn panned it as inaccessible and discovered that NDS had seemingly exposed its design system by accident. On X, an NDS staffer boasted that it was “one of our first deployment[s] that is almost entirely generated by our internal AI agent system” end to end.

But commenters pointed to odd coding choices, such as “inconsistent” color labels, as evidence of a rushed rollout, with one LinkedIn user writing, “it's as if they used an AI with a hangover to generate it!”

Another commenter lamented, “this is clearly a design system for AI agents to replicate the look of vs. for humans to implement or understand. It doesn't have to be this way though.”

Currently, that page redirects to councils.gov, but the Wayback Machine still has an archived screenshot of the yanked page as of this writing.

Commercial trackers, accessibility concerns

Perhaps even more concerning to the public are the projects NDS seemingly completes and never ships. The Drey Dossier, a YouTube investigative outlet, investigated whether the Trump administration may have ulterior motives with the redesign—like surveilling Americans, generating propaganda (most NDS sites explicitly praise Trump), or abusing data access. They have questioned the status of potentially sensitive but unlaunched domains, like vote.gov or passport.gov.

This weekend, the Guardian published an investigation corroborating some of the Drey Dossier findings, including that NDS had "built versions of services legally assigned to other agencies," including passport.gov and vote.gov. Regarding the latter, the Guardian reported that "under the studio’s design, voters would be required to verify their identity through Login.gov, the federal sign-in gateway, and to have their citizenship checked against a database run by the Department of Homeland Security."

Any plan for data retention policies remains troublingly unclear, and there's seemingly been no privacy impact assessment weighing the privacy implications of centralizing so much sensitive data in the White House, the Guardian reported. Notably, "the commission Congress put in charge of vote.gov has not decided to formally participate in the initiative," the Guardian reported.

The Guardian's reporting also confirmed that four federal sites built by NDS—ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov, and trumpaccounts.gov—run "commercial visitor-tracking software" that's "configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install."

None of those sites "carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002," the Guardian reported.

The trackers were apparently removed after the Guardian contacted the White House. Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told the Guardian that “all National Design Studio personnel comply with all legal requirements in their important work to improve how citizens interact with their government." But she did not comment on what happened with the data that "was collected from users of the government websites while the tools were live, whether it was retained, and who has custody of the data," the Guardian reported.

NDS has also seemingly abandoned projects, such as an unlaunched website for the FBI’s Charlie Kirk tipline.

Additionally, NDS has faced ethical questions about why it posted, and then removed, corporate logos and links to websites promoting companies like X and Cloudflare, NextGov reported. Unlike the 250.gov site, which permissibly highlights partners for a community event, displaying corporate logos on a government site “reeks of both corruption and incompetence,” Emily Peterson-Cassin, a policy director for the advocacy group Demand Progress, told NextGov.

Following its investigation, the Guardian concluded that questions remain about who oversees NDS and how it's funded, noting that "a search of USAspending returns no record of the National Design Studio either as a paying agency or as a recipient of funds."

However, while criticisms of NDS are widespread, many former government workers have maintained that the biggest concern is NDS sites that do not appear to comply with laws requiring usability and accessibility. The heavy load of some sites could make them harder to access on mobile, for example.

One former federal designer, Ethan Marcotte, criticized an NDS site as an “overbuilt, too-heavy website” that the design-focused Architect’s Newspaper reported “not only fails basic ADA web compliance but ships close to three megabytes of code to boot. For those unfamiliar with web design, this technical cost is comically outsized. Three MB is the kind of payload you’d expect from an image-heavy editorial feature or an interactive map, not from a single page featuring a single style of text.”

NDS’s standards matter, especially when it takes on bigger projects and websites. It’s suspected that NDS may be planning to redesign Recreation.gov, one of the most widely used government websites. And Barbaccia told NextGov that he plans to “build a ‘digital front door’ to the government for taxpayers, among other priorities.”

The design studio also reportedly plans to use Salesforce AI tools to personalize government websites by “creating tailored web experiences using real-time and historical data with AI-driven content and product recommendations.” Imagine veterans visiting VA.gov and the content dynamically adapting to their prior interactions.

Those plans may not offer the best usability, though, as it’s easy to imagine a user becoming frustrated if they can’t reliably pull up the same information.

NDS aims to use AI for everything

NDS did not make a spokesperson available to discuss their work with Ars. However, at a recent panel, Gregory Barbaccia, the federal chief information officer, said NDS is experimenting with AI to produce “complete website redesigns” using NDS guidelines in an effort to accelerate work on the tens of sites still to be updated in the next two years.

Former government workers told NextGov that using AI to launch sites could “theoretically” work, but only with “careful monitoring”—something the six-toed kid image on 250.gov calls into question. Without that oversight, government sites risk more than the embarrassment of publishing an obviously AI-generated image; sloppy AI code could also introduce cybersecurity risks.

It remains unclear if NDS could use AI to create more complex websites. The risk of disrupting critical government resources appears to already be stalling NDS efforts to prioritize “improving websites and physical sites that have a major impact on Americans’ everyday lives,” as Trump’s executive order directed.

For agencies, it's hard to trust NDS when it doesn't appear to follow any brand standards across its launched sites.

The purported aim of the “America By Design” initiative is to bring consistency to the government's online information ecosystem. Yet NDS sites vary radically in appearance. Compare moms.gov to nasaforce.gov or earlycareers.gov, and you’ll find wildly different fonts and font sizes. And while sites like realfood.gov and freedom.gov open with flashy animations, TrumpAccounts.gov and TrumpRX.gov look much more like traditional government sites.

Some critics suggest that any consistency in NDS designs could be an artifact of the group's reliance on AI. Add in concerns about usability and accessibility, and it's easy to understand why NDS appears to have no plans to update the USWDS standards any time soon.

Agencies resist working with NDS

NDS's unimpressive output has reportedly made agencies hesitant to work with the group. Trump gave agencies until July 4, 2026, to share the “initial results” of discussions with NDS to create new USWDS standards. Earlier this month, however, a GitHub page tracking USWDS noted that none of the agencies involved in implementing the standards had responded to repeated USWDS outreach about complying with Trump’s deadline.

Rather than quickly reaching a consensus on standards, the requirement that NDS work with agencies to revise the USWDS appears to have been dropped, at least temporarily, from Trump’s order.

Without those standards, it’s unclear how the sweeping redesign project, whose core goal is to unify the look and feel of government websites, will proceed.

A message posted in the USWDS public Slack channel and shared on the GitHub news page confirms that USWDS was “notified that there’s been a change in direction” and that the section of Trump’s order requiring updates to USWDS is “no longer a requirement.” The Slack message added that the team would work with Trump’s chief design officer to adapt if anything changes.

The White House declined to comment on the update to Trump’s executive order reported on the USWDS GitHub. Instead, a spokesperson shared a statement praising NDS for “doing outstanding work modernizing federal digital and physical services, improving both usability and design across platforms like the Trump Rx, Eat Real Food, and Trump Accounts websites. President Trump has consistently prioritized innovation and efficiency, and he will continue to ensure federal services deliver results and meet the needs of the American people.”

It seems likely that the July 4 deadline will pass without any major launches or announcements, apart from the official July 4th rollout of Trump Accounts, including an app which has already generated complaints from users. Those wanting to monitor NDS’s output can always follow this Bluesky account, which posts an update any time a federal domain is registered or removed.

NDS can’t force agencies to update sites

Unlike DOGE, which seemed unstoppable as it wreaked havoc across the federal government before disbanding, NDS appears largely powerless to direct agencies to update their sites.

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act and a Biden administration memo are perhaps the only tools NDS has to get agencies on board with “America By Design.”

The law doesn’t mention NDS, of course, instead directing agencies to coordinate with the director of the Office of Management and Budget to assess digital needs and costs and standardize government websites only to the extent practicable. The Biden memo also encourages agencies to use the USWDS standards, which NDS hasn’t appeared to rely on. Most glaringly, the standards the law requires have not taken effect, so agencies do not yet have to comply with them, especially if they don't have the budget or resources after DOGE's cuts.

It's possible that NDS could finish drafting new standards and begin phasing out old systems sometime in the next two years. But even if AI could simplify that transition, migrating thousands of websites from different teams and managers would likely be like herding cats. NDS might need substantial follow-through to get every agency on board once new standards are required, and the design team’s siloed way of working and failure to collaborate with the one staffer left at USWDS don’t inspire confidence that NDS would put in that kind of grunt work.

Right now, NDS’s top priority appears to be recruiting, with a Tech Force site advertising efforts to build "a two-year, White House–backed engineering corps." Former government workers still bruised from sudden cuts likely aren’t rushing to join NDS or Tech Force, which both dissolve in two years.

In a blog post, the former administrator of the US Digital Service mocked Tech Force as seeking "a silver-bullet solution to all the government’s technology problems."

Some former staffers who formed a group called We the Builders have warned that anyone looking to rejoin the government should prepare for potential ethical dilemmas, such as projects that may be co-opted for surveillance, invade Americans’ privacy, or extract data without oversight.

“Tremendous amounts of institutional knowledge and work has disappeared, meaning less opportunities to learn from and with seasoned leaders,” We the Builders further warned. And “the environment may be hostile to civic tech values, as we’ve seen decimation of the ideologies behind best practice around user experience, specifically accessibility, language access, and well-researched design systems.”

There’s also uncertainty about what will happen if NDS goes away, as there appears to be no plan to continue updating what, optimistically speaking, could be thousands of websites subject to AI-driven redesigns.

If USWDS survives NDS, that gutted team could be rebuilt under a future administration to continuously evolve the federal web design system. Unlike NDS, that team had been prioritizing updates on the most-visited government sites, and many former government workers have defended the USWDS as a system that deserves to be maintained. On its website, the USWDS stated its primary objective was to use “human-centered design to support human-centered design teams.”

Tossing USWDS would be a waste of taxpayer funds, some critics have said, achieving the opposite of what the Trump administration claimed its goals were when rebranding the USDS as DOGE.

"USWDS is solid," Charles Hall, an accessibility expert, wrote on LinkedIn. "It represents a significant investment and was created by top talent in 18F and contributed to by top talent via open source. Not using it is already a waste. Making something else is exponential waste."

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One way Donald Trump plans to celebrate July 4th is by rolling out children’s savings accounts, known as Trump Accounts, and apparently, he’s been angling to get a big donation from SpaceX as part of that push.

A person familiar with talks involving the Trump administration told Semafor that SpaceX has spoken with US officials about donating stock to Trump Accounts. At this stage, however, it remains unclear if a donation will be made or what impact a SpaceX donation might have on the value of the accounts, which Trump hopes will be a defining part of his legacy.

So far, 6 million children have been signed up for Trump Accounts, which officially launch next week on Independence Day. Trump accounts are a new type of individual retirement account available to any child under 18 with a Social Security number, and parents can sign up their kids through a Trump Accounts app that's already available for download. As an extra perk, any child born between 2025 and 2028 can receive a one-time $1,000 contribution from the government.

Although these accounts are subject to more restrictions and penalties than other kinds of IRAs, the Trump administration has hyped the creation of Trump Accounts as “the most historic policy for American families in decades.” The key benefit is the opportunity to receive more contributions beyond what families can afford to set aside, the Trump Accounts page said, explaining that families can contribute up to $5,000 annually, which can then “automatically be invested in American companies” that the government deems “proven winners.”

“The app lets you see exactly what stocks they own and how they're performing,” the Trump Accounts page said, while playing on parents’ heartstrings by promising that “big things start with small steps.”

There have been some donations already, including $6.25 billion from billionaire Michael Dell and his wife Susan. And Semafor reported that companies including BlackRock and Bank of America have agreed to match employee donations.

But the long-term outlook is murky, as insiders suggest that Trump is exploring public-benefit initiatives to combat growing anti-AI sentiment. As one option, sources told Semafor that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has favored creating a sovereign wealth fund seeded by leading AI firms. Bernie Sanders has suggested that move could give Americans more control over the AI industry.

Another option, sources told Semafor, is for the US to take equity stakes in AI firms, an idea Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly floated. Earlier this month, three sources told the news outlet NOTUS that senior US officials had already discussed “the potential for the federal government to acquire some shares in their firms.”

Those “discussions have centered on having the firms voluntarily cede the shares to the government,” NOTUS’s sources said, with any returns on investments then distributed to public purposes. That could look like “a dividend payment to all American households,” NOTUS suggested, or it could be invested to increase the value of Trump Accounts.

NOTUS's sources did not reveal which AI firms were involved in discussions of voluntarily ceding equity stakes, but NOTUS confirmed that Anthropic was not among them.

SpaceX did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment on Semafor's report.

Obstacles to SpaceX donation

Whether Trump can convince SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to donate to Trump Accounts remains to be seen. But Musk's space technology company is intent on driving the kind of AI innovation that Trump himself has claimed could generate wealth for all Americans, starting at birth. This month, SpaceX completed its record-setting IPO and is now valued at $2.2 trillion due to its AI potential.

If SpaceX made a substantial donation to Trump Accounts, the gesture (and the dollar amount) could signal how far Musk is willing to go to win back Trump’s goodwill after a falling-out last year.

However, Musk may not be looking to play into the narrative that the public deserves to benefit from the success of leading technology firms. In a report on a brief dip in SpaceX’s stock amid rumors of an impending Trump Accounts donation, Yahoo Finance noted that Musk recently “pushed back against claims that government support helped build Tesla and SpaceX,” calling them “totally false.”

According to Musk, “every government incentive his companies ever received amounted to ‘less than 2 percent’ of the value of Tesla and SpaceX,” Yahoo Finance reported.

The Trump administration could also face obstacles beyond companies' resistance to striking stock deals for public benefit. No one is sure what complications may arise from “the US trying to effectively regulate something it partially owns,” NOTUS reported, and such deals could “arguably” increase “incentives for a federal bailout.”

There may also be no legal mechanism yet “for any AI firm to turn over equity to the government,” NOTUS reported.

Nat Purser, a senior policy advocate for AI policy at Public Knowledge, told NOTUS that the public should be cautious in embracing policies that create “a situation where the government becomes less willing to impose, or enforce, safety rules because doing so could reduce the value of its own investment.”

“The problem is that the government would be a shareholder and a regulator at the same time, which creates substantial conflicts of interest,” Purser said.

Meanwhile, some parents have reported issues with using the Trump Accounts app. Several reviews in the Apple App Store complained that there is "no customer support" to help after errors blocked signups. One reviewer claimed the text message verification was broken. Others reached tech support but still became frustrated and felt they had to solve their own issues. One reviewer complained about the app crashing after "a clerical error when my IRS form was transcribed by the app, which I had to figure out without the assistance of tech support, which was polite but incompetent."

While millions have enrolled their kids, not everyone is convinced that Trump Accounts will be “accessible for every household, ensuring that even our youngest shareholders can monitor their path to prosperity,” as the US Treasury has promised.

On Reddit, reactions to news of a potential Trump Accounts donation skewed negative, with hundreds of critical comments in a SpaceX thread. One commenter suggested that Trump Accounts “overwhelmingly” benefit “the wealthiest households,” by giving “free money” to kids whose parents already have the means to invest in IRAs.

“Most people don't even have excess cash to set aside for their own future, let alone their children's,” the Redditor said.

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The Trump administration has lifted export restrictions that forced Anthropic to shut off public access to its Mythos and Fable models. After weeks of talks, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Anthropic "has agreed to proactively detect and address security risks associated with the models; to work diligently with the U.S. government on protocols and standards and releases for Mythos, Fable and future models; and to inform the US government of any malicious activity." Access is set to begin returning July 1. TechCrunch reports: Anthropic had already publicly pledged to do much of this voluntarily, months before the export rule existed. That's part of why cybersecurity experts were skeptical of the restrictions in the first place. To them, the ban looked less like a security fix and more like leverage, a way for the Trump administration to punish Anthropic for its executives' public criticism of how the government, and the president's political opponents, might use the technology. Mythos was originally made available to a select group of organizations beginning in April to allay concerns about its ability to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in software, while a version called Fable was released to the public in June with additional security guardrails. However, with Asian AI companies beginning to release their own AI models approaching Mythos-level capabilities -- among them Fugu and Tulonfeng -- the US government was under pressure to ease its restrictions on Anthropic to ensure that American AI could compete globally. Last week, Lutnick cleared Mythos to be released to select customers approved by the White House. OpenAI's latest models were also released to a group of organizations approved by the Trump team, instead of the public. The Trump administration's erratic approach to AI policymaking has left companies across the industry with little clarity about what will govern future model releases. An executive order issued in June that signaled a desire to review models ahead of release was criticized by influential analysts like Dean W. Ball, who recently started a policy position at OpenAI.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inside Climate News: A new state law limits Florida communities' aims to offset greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the global climate and intensifying disasters such as hurricanes. Specifically, HB 1217 prohibits local governments from pursuing net-zero emissions goals. At least 10 cities and counties have implemented such policies, including Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Orlando and Leon County, where Tallahassee, the state capital, is located. But the new law will not necessarily upend these policies, said Bradley Marshall, senior attorney at Earthjustice, an advocacy group. "It's certainly meant to scare municipalities and local governments from trying to do things to further net-zero policies," he said. "Now, its exact impact and what it exactly prohibits is probably up for some debate. Things that are adjacent to it -- emissions reductions and even climate change reduction policies -- on their face will not run afoul at all of a ban on adopting a net zero policy." The measure requires local governments to submit an affidavit annually to the state Department of Revenue verifying compliance. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the measure on April 22, Earth Day, and the law will take effect July 1. It states that "net zero policies, carbon taxes and assessments, and emission trading programs are detrimental to this state's energy security and economic interests and inconsistent with the energy policy and the environmental policy of this state." [...] HB 1217 also prevents local governments from purchasing items such as vehicles or appliances based on the fuels they use or production of the items. Local governments may not participate in carbon-trading programs or use public funds to support other organizations with net-zero policies. Cities and counties also may not charge a tax or fee tied with carbon emissions. "This bill is definitely part of a larger coordinated push by the political enablers of the fossil fuel industry to obstruct any tools -- legal or legislative tools -- to hold the industry accountable for its contributions to climate change," said Laura Peterson, senior analyst at the Union for Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. "Florida is really on the front lines. So I imagine the governor is taking this step because he sees what's coming down the pike. It's not getting better. So I can only assume that this is an effort to satisfy some of the pressures that he's getting from donors and from his party to protect the industry. And he's doing it at the expense of his constituents."

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During my discussion of the evolution of system-windows window and class extra bytes, I noted that even though IDs are typically small integers, people liked to stash pointers there, so we had to expand the ID field to a pointer-sized integer.

One thing I’ve learned is that anywhere it’s possible to hide a pointer, people will hide a pointer there. This is true even for small integers.

As I was digging up the history of the extra bytes, I saw a special note in the 16-bit code for Set­Class­Word: It says that there’s an app that expects to be able to modify the value of GWW_CB­CLS­EXTRA.

Now, modifying this value has no practical effect because the memory for the class was allocated when you called Register­Class. You can’t go back in time and change the allocation size.

But one program realized that it could use this value as a place to store some private data, so they did. Sure, that’s not the purpose of the GWW_CB­CLS­EXTRA, but that never stopped them.

For compatibility, Windows lets 16-bit programs modify GWW_CB­CLS­EXTRA. But at least it blocks it for 32-bit and 64-bit programs. One loophole closed. Countless more to go.

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