This tech news would sound a little better if it had been open a few hours ago, but uh...
I think it still passes the smell test. Microsoft has finally completed their 69 billion dollar acquisition of Activision Blizzard King
after a year and a half of being grilled and harassed by the government to make sure they won't
set every Xbox to self-destruct. Uh, exhausting.
The biggest buyout in gaming history went ahead right after the UK's Competition and
Markets Authority approved an altered deal that will see Ubisoft holding the cloud gaming rights
to current and future Activision Blizzard games outside of the European Economic Area.
And if you think that sounds confusing, yeah, basically if you purchase an Activision Blizzard
game and you live in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, or Norway, you'll have a license to
stream that game from any cloud gaming streaming service of your choice, assuming they have the
game on that service available to stream. But if you live anywhere else, it'll be up to Ubisoft
to grant licenses for Activision Blizzard games to cloud gaming services, meaning Microsoft will
have to license the games owned by the companies it now owns if it wants those games to be streamable
on Game Pass Ultimate outside of Europe. Okay, and you might be saying, Riley, can you shut up
about cloud gaming? No one cares about that, to which I'd say everyone said the same about
mobile games, and now those make the most money in the gaming industry. But hey, it was all worth
it for Xbox to own Call of Duty and more importantly, Crash Bandicoot. Meanwhile, the FTC says they're
still focused on stopping the deal and are preparing an argument to submit to an appeals court in
December. Bit harder to stop something from happening after it's already happened, but hey,
you know, best of luck. We have to go back in time. We have to go back, Marty. Best Buy will no
longer sell movies in their physical form starting in 2024, meaning you'll have to buy your DVDs or
4K Blu-rays from the trunk of Paulie's car just like in the good old days. The news was initially
reported by The Digital Bits and later confirmed by Best Buy, who told Variety in a statement
that the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago,
to state the obvious. Unless I'm mistaken, I'm not looping film reels over top of my
television and using the light to try and see the pictures in there, okay? We have computers now.
Of course, while the move is bad news for preservationists, it's somewhat unsurprising.
It's been five years since Best Buy stopped selling music CDs, and according to Josh
Fairhurst, CEO of Limited Run Games, there are rumblings of Walmart's dropping sales of physical
games soon. However, while retailers are retreating from the physical world, Netflix is looking to
enter it. CEO Ted Sarandos announced plans to open something called a Netflix house in two locations,
and I don't know what that sounds like except something I wouldn't let my daughter visit.
The houses will have merch, food, and fan experiences, but unlike Disneyland, Sarando says
you might visit a couple times a month, not just once every couple of years. You know,
like getting beers with the boys, but instead of wings, you order the Demogorgon roast? I have no
context for what this place is going to be. I just, what is it? And the CEO of Risk Five
International, which oversees the open source chip architecture, has written in opposition to the
idea that the US should block China's access to technology based on Risk Five because it's an
open source standard. And that's not how they work. Last week, a group of US lawmakers petitioned
the Biden administration to cut China off from Risk Five, an idea that, I mean, doesn't seem
particularly concerning to the Chinese members of Risk Five International, including Alibaba Cloud,
Huawei, ZTE, and Tencent, who haven't commented one way or the other, the CEO of a leading Chinese
Risk Five chip company told the South China Morning Post that since Risk Five is, again,
an open standard, the US could only block exports from US companies to China, but they wouldn't be
able to block China from building their own products with Risk Five, which they have been doing
already for quite a while. I don't know, maybe the US government should be worried less about
China and more about the chair of Risk Five International, who recently said he wanted
every chip in the world to be Risk Five, showing a slide titled, all your cores are belong to us.
Terrifying. Arrest this man. Quick bits aren't what you think they are. Wait,
what do you think they are? No, you're way off. Oneplus will be launching its first foldable,
the Oneplus Open, on October 19th. It's not clear yet how much the phone will cost,
but Oneplus is offering $200 off for pre-orders and up to $1,000 in trade and credit, so it's
definitely way more than that. Despite the air of mystery, the device is essentially a rebadged
version of the Find N3 from Oppo, who have already allowed YouTuber Jagat Review to post a hands-on
with the device, where he compares it to the Galaxy Z Fold 5. The Open seems to have a wider
inside and outside display, and a far more subtle hinge crease in the screen, like somebody
airbrushed a butt crack, leaving only a single, shiny, mono cheek. What a glorious image.
A judge has thrown out a 2022 decision that found Google had infringed five of Sonos' patents,
because two out of five were filed in 2019, not 2006, as Sonos claimed. Bad billion-dollar company,
BAD. The original decision granted Sonos $32.5 million in damages, but rather than pay
licensing fees for the features, Google pushed a software update that removed the group speaker
features from devices that paying customers had already bought. Consumers are basically babies,
they lack object permanence. Google, of course, celebrated the recent decision by immediately
pushing another software update, restoring the features they had previously taken away,
presumably causing users to clap their hands and drool into light like a game of peek-a-boo.
There's the features! It's the features! It's back!
In videos, Jensen Huang has topped a recent most popular CEO survey, no doubt due to that
sexy leather jacket. Can't stay mad at him.
Based on a survey conducted by the professional social network Blind,
over 96% of the 13,000 verified NVIDIA employees there said they approved of Wong's leadership,
numbers rarely seen outside of North Korea. Tim Apple, CEO of Cook, also came in the top five
with 83%, while the average was only 32%, with at least two CEOs landing at zero.
I don't know exactly what's going on at Western Digital and Nordstrom,
but it's not good. It involves lying, I think. Speaking of CEOs, Google's current leader Sundar
Pichai had a fairly reasonable take on the issue of the search engine being set as the default in
Safari back in 2007, according to emails revealed during the ongoing USV Google trial. Pichai,
who was part of the search team back then, thought that Apple's idea of offering two
separate versions of Safari, one for Google and one for Yahoo, was maybe not as good as just
adding a drop-down menu allowing users to switch search engines. It's nice to see a tech executive
thinking about the end user experience while coordinating massive payments to have their
product presented as the default. And after many Counter-Strike 2 players were inexplicably banned,
Valve has warned anyone playing on AMD GPUs to switch off Team Red's anti-leg plus feature,
which arrived earlier this week in a driver update until Valve can fix the issue. The feature
minimizes input lag, but it does so by injecting itself into the game's code, making it look
like unauthorized tampering is occurring and leading to a vac ban. You can hardly blame players
for trying to make the game smoother, although along with the lag issues, it's also brought
some hidden treasures. I mean, T-Bagging's got nothing on T-Twerking. And I would certainly
be reading a segue about Twerking if Jacob was here, but he's off today. So I'll simply tell
you to please return on Monday for more tech news, please. Thank you!