By now you likely have caught wind of GameStop, the video game and collectables retailer, announcing a bid to buy eBay. Perhaps you heard of this, as I did, because of GameStop’s CEO, Ryan Cohen, showing up to CNBC’s Squawk Box program where he pulled off one of the strangest interviews about business I’ve ever seen.

In a six-minute interview with CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin, Cohen gave a series of mostly incoherent responses to the most basic questions, unable to provide any decipherable reasons why a flailing video game retail chain that’s relied on meme stocks and Pokémon cards for its recent survival would even think of trying to buy a massively larger, international e-commerce company. When asked by CNBC, “So you’ve built up a stake in this company already, you’ve had conversations with the company? You’ve tried? What’s happening here?” there’s a deeply awkward pause before Cohen, in his mid-life-crisis black leather jacket, says “…No.” Then after another glacial pause, “We’re just starting,” followed by a very peculiar smirk.

It got stranger and more passive aggressive from there. Cohen indicated that through a stock issuance the company would directly put up $20 billion for the purchase, along with another $20 billion from investors. The problem is that the eBay purchase would require roughly $56 billion. It doesn’t take a professor in advanced mathematics to see the issue here.

Cohen seemed to approach the entire interview with an affected air of disgust and disdain, as if it’s just so beneath him to even have to answer questions based on his announcements. The mini-Musk rolls his eyes and glibly dismisses reasonable questions, which was going badly enough until Sorkin asked the most obvious question of all: “How does the math math?” How does around $20 billion from GameStop and $20 billion from an investor get close to $56 billion? “Half cash, half stock” Cohen replies, after more eye rolling and disdain. And then he appears to get stuck in a loop, like a rubbish sleepy robot.

Watch the entire interview if you like, but it’s pretty hard to get through it, honestly.

Going along with that very bizarre interview was the sudden appearance of all kinds of video game memorabilia, with some of it appearing to come directly from the “vault” that had been kept by GameStop’s Game Informer magazine, before Cohen shuttered it.

The stunt follows criticisms that the executive doesn’t have enough cash to actually make that acquisition. But it appears that at least some of the items being auctioned could be remnants looted from the legendary Game Informer Vault, where the long-running publication housed decades of video game history before GameStop shut down the publication in 2024.

Sources close to the situation who spoke under the condition of anonymity told Kotaku that while some of the products in Cohen’s eBay listings, such as the baseball cards, weren’t from the Game Informer Vault, other items, including some rare retro games, likely were. Some details like the sticky tab on the front of the sealed copy of Dracula for the NES and the sealed casings on copies of Yoshi’s Cookie and F1 Pole Position match photos and descriptions from the Vault verified by Kotaku.

Now, the Kotaku article suggests that Cohen is selling these items as an effort to raise money for the eBay bid. That’s a very silly thing to suggest. We’re talking about a $16 billion shortfall, unless Cohen plans to seriously dilute the stock value of current shareholders. Historical gaming items like we’re talking about, while certainly of import and value, aren’t going to net you $16 billion.

But it’s worth noting how cavalier Cohen is being here with very real gaming history and culture. It’s not surprise that the Video Game History Foundation and others are pointing out how an eBay auction like this is going to scatter all of this cultural history to the wind, and what a shame that is.

Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi posted on Bluesky accusing Cohen of selling off items from the Vault. Though Game Informer has since returned as a print publication after the outlet was acquired and revived by Gunzilla Games in 2025, the Vault and all the contents found inside remained GameStop property.

“I’m very happy Game Informer is out from under GameStop, but choices like these remind people of the brutal closure of the magazine in 2024,” MinnMax founder and ex-Game Informer video producer Ben Hanson said in a statement to Kotaku. “Game Informer‘s history belongs in a museum, not some schmuck’s eBay listings. Show some love to the current Game Informer crew, subscribe to the physical magazine, and please try to ignore Ryan Cohen’s pleas for attention.”

Will GameStop actually buy eBay? I very much doubt it. I don’t think the company can pull off this kind of leverage while maintaining a credit rating post-acquisition that would satisfy the banking investment requirements as outlined in Cohen’s own financing letter. Moody’s doesn’t seem to think so, either.

Somewhat hilariously, Cohen’s own eBay account was also suspended shortly after he began auctioning these items off. But if he really wants to sell off the Game Informer vault, he’ll find a way. And that is a damned shame from a gaming preservation standpoint.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn. Together they discuss:

• Pennsylvania sues AI chatbot as state lawmakers wrestle with stricter regulations (Pennsylvania Capital-Star)
• Children are drawing moustaches on their faces to fool online age checks – and it’s working (Euronews)
• The Online Safety Act: Are children safer online? (Internet Matters)
• Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks (Tom’s Hardware)
• Three Justifications—and the AI Accelerant—of India’s Digital Censorship Infrastructure (Tech Policy Press)
• Did School Cellphone Bans Work? New Study Finds Mixed Results.(NY Times)

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Utah has a long track record of short-sighted internet policymaking, but the latest example really does take things to a new level of stupid. As of yesterday, Utah’s “Online Age Verification Amendments” bill, Senate Bill 73, has taken effect. It is a piece of legislation that effectively tries to ban VPNs as a desperate attempt to stop people from bypassing the state’s already problematic (and likely unconstitutional) age verification requirements.

Signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, the controversial law establishes that a user is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN or proxy to mask their IP address. It also prohibits covered websites from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass age checks.

We’ve been highlighting the various attempts to ban VPNs as short-sighted legislators fail to grasp how necessary they are for basic security. But, now, Utah has touched the stove and is going to find out what it feels like.

While an earlier version of the law would have simply held a provider liable for not doing age verification, the amended version says service providers have to determine whether the person is physically located in Utah — even if they’re using a VPN to appear to be from somewhere else:

An individual is considered to be accessing the website from this state if the individual is actually located in the state, regardless of whether the individual is using a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual’s geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state.

In short, the genius legislators in Utah have decided that websites should do the impossible: either block all access from VPNs or somehow magically “know” that users whose digital footprints suggest they’re connecting from outside Utah are actually lying about their location. That is, in any understanding of the law, an effective ban on VPNs, because the only way to deal with that would be to block off huge segments of IP addresses associated with known VPN servers.

Even worse, the law says it’s a violation to tell people how to protect themselves with a VPN, which seems like a First Amendment violation on its own (you can’t ban a service from telling users how to use another service):

A commercial entity that operates a website that contains a substantial portion of material harmful to minors may not facilitate or encourage the use of a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to circumvent age verification requirements, including by providing:

(a)instructions on how to use a virtual private network or proxy server to access the website; or

(b)means for individuals in this state to circumvent geofencing or blocking.

Lia Holland at Fight for the Future pointed out the absurdity of this in a statement, noting that the logic of the bill doesn’t even survive a basic reality check:

This is the sort of slop that if you asked the chatbot whether or not its previous statement was accurate, it would apologize profusely. Why? Because you cannot require a website doing age verification to determine where someone using a reputable VPN is browsing from—this feat is literally impossible by design for even the best hacker.

Such language and lack of logic begs the question—do Utah lawmakers actually understand what a VPN is? Let’s set the record straight: VPNs are an essential tool for online privacy, security, and liberty that everyone from abuse survivors to small businesses use to keep themselves safe. VPNs do this by totally hiding where a person is browsing the Internet from. Thus, when a person is using a VPN, the website they are browsing definitionally can’t tell whether or not they are in Utah.

It’s fairly astounding the level of technological ignorance legislators will openly admit in their efforts to demand technology do the impossible. Insisting that VPNs need to be banned should be a disqualifier from holding public office.

EFF’s Rindala Alajaji notes that what Utah is demanding here is technologically incomprehensible:

Blocking all known VPN and proxy IP addresses is a technical whack-a-mole that likely no company can win. Providers add new IP addresses constantly, and no comprehensive blocklist exists. Complying with Utah’s requirements would require impossible technical feats.

The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to non-commercial proxies, private tunnels through cloud services like AWS, or residential proxies that are virtually indistinguishable from standard home traffic. These workarounds will emerge within hours of the law taking effect. Meanwhile, the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.

Again, Fight for the Future explains the real impact of such a law:

Websites are left with three choices: either try to block everyone around the globe who’s using a VPN (which they can’t actually do), or require age verification for everybody in the world no matter if they’re in Utah, or censor all content that meets Utah’s nebulous “harmful to minors” standard for age verification.

Oh wait, there’s a fourth option: sue Utah.

Ignoring the law or suing the state appear to be the only rational responses.

Age verification already has a long list of well-known problems, many of which put users at risk. An effective ban on VPNs just makes it that much more dangerous for anyone in that state to use the internet. The fact that they’re doing all of this under the pretense of “protecting” children, when the actual impact will put everyone at greater risk, is just the icing on the cake — performative headline-chasing dressed up as policy.

The cops never change. Only the tech toys do.

That’s the upshot of this report from the Institute for Justice, which has been tracking what cops have been tracking now that they have always-on access to massive networks of security cameras, including Flock Safety’s controversial offerings, which also include automatic license plate readers (ALPR).

The proliferation of police surveillance has led to repeated abuse. One shockingly common form: police officers using ALPR camera networks to keep tabs on their romantic interests, including current partners, exes, and even strangers who unwittingly caught their eye in public. 

An Institute for Justice review of media reports has identified at least 14 cases nationwide of officers allegedly abusing ALPR data this way, with the bulk of those incidents happening since 2024.

This is the same stuff that cops have been doing for years. Access to criminal databases, drivers license info, and anything else swept up by government entities has resulted in numerous cases of abuse.

A common thread that runs through most of these cases are the targets of this abusive surveillance, which are almost exclusively women. In some cases, officers are targeting random women to pursue as sexual conquests or, just as disturbingly, utilize a wealth of personal info to gain access to their online accounts for the sole purpose of obtaining sexually explicit content.

If there’s an upside, it’s this:

Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired. 

Now, if you’re the sort of person who sees a quarter-full glass and assumes it’s on its way to being half-full, you might come away with the impression that this is not only rare, but routinely punished when it’s discovered.

If you’ve read anything linked in the above paragraphs, the glass is still a quarter-full but is likely to continue evaporating as time goes on. There’s a reason most of these cases have surfaced during the last two years and it has everything to do with private surveillance tech companies like Ring and Flock aggressively courting cops and giving them easy access to recordings and live feeds generated by privately-owned cameras.

Even if the truth is somewhere in the middle of these two views, it’s not good news by any stretch of the imagination. As the Margaret Atwood quote goes: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Now, take that and add the massive power imbalance that increases as cops move past cops v. everyone to cops v. women.

And that’s all it is. Its law enforcement officers targeting women. They’re tracking their mistresses. They’re spying on their exes and their current partners. They’re using this tech to stalk women they’re interested in for reasons that have nothing to do with their law enforcement jobs.

Don’t believe me? You must be a cop.

• Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, 2021: Officer Michael McSherry pleaded guilty to stalking charges after using readers to track his estranged wife and other family members. 
• Kechi, Kansas, 2023: Kechi Lieutenant Victor Heiar pleaded guilty to computer crime and stalking after using Flock cameras to track his estranged wife. 
• Sedgwick, Kansas, 2023: Police Chief Lee Nygaard resigned after using Flock cameras to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend more than 200 times over several months. 
• Costa Mesa, California, 2023: Officer Robert Josett used a Flock camera system to track his mistress and her other romantic interests. Josett pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges in April 2026. 
• Riverside County, California, 2024: After being arrested for kidnapping his ex-fiancée, Deputy Alexander Vanny allegedly used the department’s Flock system to track one of her friends. In December 2025 he was convicted of multiple charges in a jury trial. 
• Orange City, Florida, 2024: Officer Jarmarus Brown allegedly used ALPRs to stalk his girlfriend and her family members more than 100 times over seven months. Brown was arrested and charged in 2025. 
• Shelby County, Tennessee, 2024: Deputy Thadius Gordon was relieved of duty after allegedly using an ALPR database to track his ex-wife’s location more than 100 times. 
• Louisville, Kentucky, 2025: Officer Roberto Cedeno was charged with multiple felonies after allegedly using the city’s ALPR system to track an ex-partner and her friends hundreds of times over two months. 
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2025: Officer Josue Ayala allegedly used the department’s network of Flock ALPRs to track a woman he was dating and her ex-partner nearly 180 times over a two-month period. Ayala resigned in 2026 after being charged with misconduct in public office. 
• Jerome County, Idaho, 2025: Sheriff George Oppedyk used a Flock system to search for his wife’s vehicle hundreds of times. Idaho’s Attorney General concluded that no crime was committed, but Oppedyk retired in April 2026, two years before his term of office ended. 
• Kenosha County, Wisconsin, 2025: Sheriff’s Deputy Frank McGrath resigned with severance pay after internal investigators found he used the department’s Flock system to keep tabs on another deputy with whom he was romantically involved. 
• Menasha, Wisconsin, 2025: Officer Cristian Morales was placed on leave and charged with misconduct in office after his ex-girlfriend filed a complaint alleging that he used a Flock system to track her. 
• Bonner Springs, Kansas, 2025: Detective Kyle Rector allegedly used license plate readers to track his estranged wife and two men he suspected were her new romantic partners. He was charged with multiple crimes in March 2026.
• Monroe County, Florida, 2026: Sheriff’s Deputy Lamar Roman allegedly used an ALPR system to track and eventually pull over a woman he had met while providing security on a TV set. Roman was arrested and charged with accessing a computer or electronic device without authorization.

These are just the cases in which allegations were sustained or criminal charges were brought. In six of these 14 cases, officers resigned, retired or were simply taken off active duty, which means they’ve never faced justice for their actions. They’re probably not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. As the IJ points out, most incidents like these come to light due to complaints filed by victims, rather than by internal reviews of database/recording access by officers given access to these systems.

Any system like this will be abused. But this report shows few, if any, law enforcement agencies are willing to engage in the kind of rigorous oversight needed to deter this sort of behavior. This abuse is far more pervasive than this short list of 14 officers would seemingly indicate. The only thing separating these cops from the hundreds or thousands of others on that side of the Thin Blue Line is that they got caught.

To be sure, this list will get longer as time goes on. But until cop shops and the companies providing this tech actually care enough about anyone else to do literally anything to deter this, the people with the most power will continue to abuse their access to hunt and haunt the people they’re pretty sure they can get away with abusing.

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John Roberts has spent years whining about how totally unfair it is that people claim he and his colleagues rule based on partisan leanings. He did it in 2014. He did it in 2017. He did it in 2019. Hell, he did it a couple months ago too. So it’s little surprise that he’s out there whining about people calling the Court partisan yet again.

Speaking at a conference for lawyers and judges in Hershey, Roberts said the Supreme Court is required to make decisions that are not popular and bemoaned that there is not a better understanding among the public of how the court operates.

“I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.”

While he conceded that people have a right to criticize the court and its decisions, he added that there is a tendency to focus too much on politics.

“We’re not simply part of the political process, and there’s a reason for that, and I’m not sure people grasp that as much as is appropriate,” Roberts said.

The timing here is something else — a week after an obviously partisan ruling in Callais, which stripped away Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Notably, Roberts himself had pointed to Section 2’s existence back in 2013 as the reason that they could kill off Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (which required a pre-review of voting maps for racial bias). And now he helped kill Section 2.

If it were just about making decisions that are “not popular,” then… why are nearly all of his “unpopular” decisions quite clearly in support of one party’s goals and ideology? Any look at the details shows why people conclude that Roberts has a partisan bent to his rulings:

• In the 15 precedent-overturning cases with partisan implications, in other words, Justice Roberts voted for a conservative outcome 14 times (93%).
• Chief Justice Roberts is one of only two justices since 1946 to support 100% of decisions overturning precedent that led to conservative outcomes.
• Roberts’s record in precedent-overturning cases is the second-most conservative among 37 justices who have ruled in at least 5 precedent-overturning cases since 1946. With 84% conservative votes in precedent-overturning cases, Roberts only trails Justice Alito’s 88%.

Gee. I wonder why people think the Court is partisan, chief?

And, on Monday (as we pointed out) Roberts joined Alito and the conservatives on the bench to break standard practice and precedent, supporting Louisiana ripping up its election maps to favor more Republican seats — even as voting had already started — even though, just months ago, he and the conservatives had said that Texas’ map (deemed unconstitutionally based on race by a Trump-appointed judge) couldn’t be torn up because it was “too close” to an election and voters needed “certainty.” There is literally no explanation for December being too close to change the maps while May somehow required rushing a map change… in the same election… other than the partisan leaning of those two decisions.

Indeed, as Liz Dye points out, we have decades of the Supreme Court doing exactly this: it allows for election map changes when it will help Republicans, but says “no can do, too close to an election” whenever it’s expected to help Democrats:

The Court’s conservatives routinely scold lower court judges for changing voting rules too close to an election. This violates the Purcell principle, named for a 2006 case in which the Court rebuked the 9th Circuit for blocking Arizona’s voter ID law too close to an election and causing voter “confusion.” For 20 years, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have selectively invoked Purcell to allow elections to proceed using maps that courts have already deemed to be unlawful.

In 2022, after lower courts struck down Alabama’s electoral map for violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchising Black voters, the Supreme Court intervened to allow Alabama to use the unconstitutional map anyway in the midterms. In 2023, the Court agreed that the maps were illegal under the VRA — but only after they’d let Alabama Republicans use them to take back the House.

Just five months ago, the Court cited Purcell when it rebuked a federal district court for “improperly inserting itself into an active primary campaign” by blocking Texas’s unconstitutionally racial gerrymander.

But given the chance to insert themselves into an acting primary campaign, they regularly jump in with both feet. And in fact they’re equally happy to stomp into the primary itself.

So, chief, if you want people to stop thinking the Court is partisan, maybe stop making such obviously partisan decisions.

Oh, and also maybe talk to your colleagues. After all, at the very moment you were whining about people thinking the court was partisan, your colleague Justice Neil Gorsuch was appearing on a famously rightwing podcast to talk about why “young conservatives must have courage to stand by their beliefs.” Sounds kinda partisan.

And just a few weeks ago, your colleague Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech arguing that progressives were an existential threat to America.

Gosh. Why would the public think some of you are partisan. I wonder!

And, let’s not forget that Thomas’s wife was supportive of the attempt to steal an election from the rightfully elected Joe Biden in support of the failed Republican campaign of Donald Trump. And then there’s Justice Alito’s wife who, somewhat infamously, flew political flags outside their home, including one in support of the January 6th insurrection.

A real mystery, truly. Who could possibly think that there might be partisan bias? How unfair.

But you keep saying how unfair this is. Year after year, conference after conference, the same complaint: people just don’t understand us.

At some point, Chief Justice, the more productive question isn’t why the public doesn’t grasp your supposed non-partisanship. It’s why — after decades of rulings that break almost exclusively in one direction, colleagues who deliver speeches about the courage of young conservatives, and the existential threat of progressivism, and spouses flying insurrection flags — you’re still surprised that they don’t.

Maybe the problem isn’t the public’s understanding. Maybe it’s the Court’s behavior.

Anna Gomez, the FCC’s lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to seat the second one) is calling for a rigorous review of Paramount and the Ellison family’s planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. As Paramount recently revealed, 49.5 percent of the deal’s funding comes from Middle East and Chinese government-linked sources; just the sort of thing Republicans pretend to get mad about when engaged in stuff like, say, offloading TikTok to the POTUS’s rich friends.

The FCC doesn’t have much of a role in the giant media merger approval process because public license transfers aren’t involved. But it does (in a theoretical country that respects the law) have a role to play in enforcing Communications Act restrictions that restrict foreign entities from holding more than a 25% indirect equity or voting interest in a U.S. company that holds broadcast licenses. 

Carr and the Ellisons have spent months publicly insisting the law doesn’t matter because the countries won’t have a meaningful management and board presence. It doesn’t matter, it’s still technically illegal.

But Carr is eager to ignore the law because the merger is of benefit to a rich Republican looking to gift his nepobaby two major Hollywood studies and turn what’s left of corporate news media (both CNN and CBS News) into an even-friendlier safe space for rich Republicans and global autocrats.

While Gomez’ actual power here is negligible, her call for a meaningful review is a useful reminder of Trump-era Republican hypocrisy and the importance of functional media ownership regulation (which the U.S. hasn’t had in a very long time). From Gomez’ statement:

“The American public deserves to know who owns the airwaves that carry their news. I
am alarmed by what appears to be an effort to rubber stamp a financial structure that
places nearly half of one of America’s largest broadcast and media companies into the
hands of foreign governments with documented records of press suppression and a
troubling willingness to silence journalists.

There are serious, unresolved questions about how this foreign investment may jeopardize national security, and this Commission has a legal obligation to answer them before handing
wealthy friends of this Administration yet another Billionaire Buddy Bypass on a
transaction that strikes at the heart of American journalism.”

Again, recall how Chinese private ownership of a social media company doing business in the United States caused a four year embolism by FCC boss Brendan Carr and other Trump loyal Republicans. Here you have a billionaire right wing Trump friend ignoring the law and gobbling up whatever’s left of U.S. media with the help of several autocratic buddies and there’s curiously no problem.

It’s almost as if Trump Republicans don’t have any coherent ideology beyond propping up their own wealth and power. If only the United States had a diverse and healthy news media capable of explaining that.

With Gomez in the minority there’s virtually no chance of a meaningful FCC review. Still, it’s nice to see a Democrat at least get the messaging on this right. Dem media reform policies have historically ranged from highly performative to nonexistent in a country increasingly too corrupt to care about meaningful antitrust reform (recall how Democratic leadership abandoned popular media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC after a baseless Republican and telecom/media sector smear campaign).

Ellison’s effort to dominate media, and the authoritarian threat more broadly, is so ham-fisted and dire it’s been hard for Democrats to ignore this one. Carr has unsurprisingly ignored other Democrat lawmakers’ call for meaningful inquiry.

A potential lawsuit by a coalition of state attorneys general remains the best path for blocking the deal, though their focus will obviously be on the inevitable mass layoffs, price hikes, and shittier overall service that arrive every single time giant media mergers (especially involving Warner Brothers) get rubber stamped by our pay-to-play federal government.