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It's Star Wars day, so May the fourth be with that baby Yoda movie or whatever that's coming out soon because CO Bibble knows they're going to need it. GameStop has just put forward a $56 billion offer to buy eBay. The e-commerce giant was evidently caught off guard by the bid and responded with the energy of every girl I asked out in middle school, saying it received no communication from GameStop prior to the entirely unsolicited offer. Sounds like what happens on Snapchat these days. To give you a sense of scale, eBay has a market cap over four times the size of GameStop itself, making this a wild swing for the retailer. Again, much like my middle school attempts at romance.
It's funny because I really kept to myself. The funds for the proposal are evidently split 50/50 between cash and GameStop stock. Though it's unclear from the wording if they're referring to shares or $28 billion worth of scratched up trade-in crash bandicoot CDs. A middle schooler's fortune. According to CEO Ryan Cohen, it's part of a larger strategy to pivot into ecommerce, leveraging GameStop's retail locations as a fulfillment network. However, Cohen likely has a more personal motive as his incentive structure guarantees him $35 billion in stock if he can boost GameStop's market value to a hundred billion. God, that's that's a lot of Funko Pops. The FCC has unanimously
voted to advance a proposal banning all Chinese testing labs from certifying US-bound electronics with FCC chair and former witch king of Angmar Brendan Carr citing national security concerns before he screamed LIKE A BANSHEE. IT'S PART OF A wider crackdown that has already seen the agency ban the import of new Chinese-made consumer routers and drones. This move is expected to have a significant impact on consumer electronics since roughly 75% of US-bound devices are currently tested in Chinese labs, forcing manufacturers to reroute certification through labs in the US, Europe, or Taiwan. According to the new rule, existing devices can still be sold for up to 2 years after their
certification date, but the expectation is that older devices that have to be retested will probably just be pulled instead. It's unclear how manufacturers will deal with the drop in available testing facilities, but if the router ban is any indication, at least one random company will probably get a lastminute exemption, which is totally above board and unrelated to any kind of favors. Please don't sue us, Netgear. Uh, Toyota's woven city, the fully surveiled corporate utopia they use to test robotic stuff at the base of Mount Fuji. This is real. That's sick.
Wow. Sounds like a from a spy novel or something. Anyway, they just got a new AI overlord called the Woven City AI vision engine, which sounds totally believable and not weird. All hail AI overlord. You seek to enter the woven city. Anyway, this model ingests feeds from cameras, vehicles, traffic signals, and user inputs across the city to predict what residents are about to do, which is fine because the residents are all Toyota employees and their families who presumably sign something. About a 100 people currently live there in a city built for about 2,000. So, the cameras to civilian ratio is generous to say the least. Toyota also confirmed that
chairman Akio Toyota has been uploaded to the cloud as Akia Toyota AI, a chatbot trained on a decade of his speeches and writings so he can keep dispensing leadership and wisdom long after his meat form retires. Honestly, getting trapped in a panopticon run by a sentient AI CEO sounds stressful. At least we can blow off some steam with our sponsor, War Thunder. Do the everbeating war drums inside your head make you just want to drive a tank into another tank? Well, good news. War Thunder has 2500 of those, plus planes, helicopters, and ships from 10 major nations. All of them are available to drive, fly, and blow up. And all of them look and sound like the real thing.
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Storms are coming. a ship storm. That is from April 24th to May 7th. Get free shipping sitewide on ltstore.com on any order over $150 in the US and Canada or $225 worldwide. No codes, no fuss, just free shipping. And if you want an even lower threshold, you can sign up for our supporter plus t on float plane for an even better offer. We'll have that linked down below. Now, I know it would be probably really good to do the quick bits here, but what if instead we just had Darth Maul show up again? You guys like him, right? Darth Maul. Subscribe. Microsoft's April Windows 11 update keeps finding new ways to ruin your day. After triggering boot loops, besides, and boring Bit Locker, it's now
breaking third-party backup apps like Macrium and Acronis. This time on purpose, though. We're happy about this. Microsoft blacklisted the kernel driver that these apps use over a security flaw and is telling users not to uninstall the patch. So, your options are keep your backups or keep your PC from getting owned. Pick one, loser. Oh, you want to back up your PC? Get a grip. Maryland just became the first state to ban AIdriven surveillance pricing in grocery stores. Yay. Unfortunately, critics say the bill is riddled with carveouts and exemptions. Boohoo. What a wa what a roller coaster. Consumer
advocate and the internet's cool older brother who's looking out for you, Cory Doctoro, called the law all loophole. Anyway, Cory warned that lobbyists have drafted it to gut consumer protections. The criticism is welltimed as several other states are currently drafting similar bills. So, here's hoping this will let us take a bite out of grocery store surveillance pricing. A court in Hongghu, China, ruled that companies can't legally fire workers just because AI is cheaper after a tech firm tried to demote a quality assurance employee from 25,000 yuan a month to 15,000 and canned him when he refused. The court said adopting AI is a business choice, not an
unforeseeable disaster that voids your employment contract. A take so worker friendly, it probably won't survive the boat ride west. BlackBerry stock jumped over 10% today after a Wall Street Journal profile reminded everyone that the company didn't die, it just pivoted. QNX, their software division, makes the operating system running Lane Keep, adaptive cruise, and crash detection in 275 million cars. And it's now expanding into Nvidia robotics and German submarines, of course, which means the company that couldn't survive the iPhone is now keeping you alive at crush depth.
Sleep tight, sailors. And a Cleveland startup called Sonic Fire Tech is selling a fire suppression system that uses inaudible infrasound waves instead of water or chemicals. and they just demoed putting out a kitchen grease fire with sound alone, which everyone tries at first, but it doesn't do anything. A backpack version for wildland firefighters is also in testing, which I'm sure will go great until they find all the dead woodland creatures. Chipmunks are just not a thing anymore. Ah, the fire's out. Oh god, mama. and I'll be setting you on fire in a video game if you don't come back Wednesday for more tech news. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to
pretending Star Wars doesn't exist until the next Jedi Survivor sequel or they make something else as good as Andor because otherwise, what's the point? Okay, see you.
