Antiwar & The American Conservative

A screenshot of the main page from Antiwar.com

The political news website, Antiwar.com, considers itself as the, "best source for antiwar news, viewpoints, and activities." On their About Us page, they state that their news site is ready by various people across the political spectrum including, "libertarians, pacifists, leftists, greens, and independents alike, as well as many on the Right who agree with our opposition to imperialism." Judging by the site's homepage, many of the articles shown there are mainly on the topic of war, the U.S. Government, and anything else that's going on around the rest of the world that involves the United States. While some of the articles are written and published on the website, many of the articles shown on their homepage hyperlink to articles posted on other political news sites such as The Hill, LobeLog, and MSNBC.

https://www.antiwar.com/

A screenshot of the main page from The American Conservative

The other political news website, The American Conservative, seem to write about a variety of topics such as politics, world news, culture, events, and new urbanism. Unlike the other site, The American Conservative seems to have journalists or writers who write most of their own articles and publish them onto their site. Plus, the website seems to aim for an audience that shares their Conservative values and beliefs. The news site also prints and sell magazines to those who subscribe to them.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/

Facebook's Loophole Problem

After the 2016 presidential election, the social media site, Facebook, had been under fire for showing advertisements and the such that were eventually linked and proven to intentionally spread misinformation to users. Russia had been accused of buying up ad space and creating fake bot accounts to further spread misinformation and propaganda to 1.5 billion Facebook users. Since then, Facebook had promised to fight back against fake news on its website by removing the fake accounts and updating their policy to ensure that fake news couldn't be spread off the platform. Facebook has done a good job taking care of this issue, but it's still far from over. Recently, a glitch has been discovered on the site where users can edit a link preview of an article that you can share. The ability to edit a link preview allows you to edit the image, headline, and description of the article into whatever you want.

This image shows an article that has been shared on Facebook.

This image shows the same article except its headline has been changed with the glitch.

However, this glitch can only be done in Facebook Groups. Apparently, Facebook had already removed the ability to edit link previews in 2017, due to it being abused by people to spread fake news. As of September 9th, 2019, the glitch has not been fixed and people in a Facebook Group can still edit link previews.

https://mashable.com/article/facebook-loophole-fake-news-link-preview/

The Brief History and Workings of the U.S. Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court is one of the three branches of the U.S. Government and is known as the highest judicial court in the United States of America. The Supreme Court is considered by many to be the most powerful judicial system in the country and possibly the most powerful in the whole wide world. However, the Supreme Court was not always like this.

In 1789, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which officially established the judicial branch of the United States Government. In 1801, the Supreme Court moved to the nation's Capitol building in D.C. At the time, no one wanted to be in the judicial branch because the Supreme Court was considered a joke back then. When John Marshall was appointed as Chief Justice in 1801, he planned to elevate the power of the Supreme Court. Soon after, John Marshall and the court established the power of judicial review, which allowed them to dictate what things like regulations and treaties violate the U.S. Constitution. This change made the powers of each branch of government more balanced than before.

Today, there are now nine justices on the court instead of six like it was when it first began. The nine justices have the power to strike down a President's executive action, the power of judicial review, and have the highest jurisdiction over any cases on the state level and federal level. The only way to join the Supreme Court is for the President of the United States to appoint them. Surprisingly, there have only been about one hundred justices on the court in all of American history, as most of these members will stay on the court for about sixteen years or more. The Supreme Court receives almost 7,000 cases every year from people who appealed the lower courts ruling on a case. Due to the sheer amount of cases they receive every year, the Supreme Court can't accept all of them and will have to only allow to look over 100 cases a year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWRoXYRsaeo&feature=youtu.be

Google Stadia: A New Streaming Service For Video Games

With just a few months away from release, I thought it would be interesting to mention about Google Stadia, Google's new cloud streaming service for video games that may start a new era in the video game industry. As someone who is majoring in Game & Interactive Media Design and who has been an avid gamer for most of my life, I regularly check on recent news happening in the industry and Google's new streaming platform is very intriguing.

The basic idea of Google Stadia is that rather than paying for an expensive gaming console to play video games, you can instead stream video games at very high quality on either your smartphone, tablet, computer, or TV screen. In a way, Google Stadia is like Netflix for games. Currently, Google will be releasing Stadia in November for about $130, but sometime in 2020, they expect to make Stadia free with a subscription service as well. However, many people in the gaming community (including myself) worry that the biggest concern for Stadia is solving the latency issue so that games don't buffer when you play them. If Stadia does become a success, it could change how we play games in the future.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/21/googles-giant-leap-into-video-game-streaming.html

About Myself

My name is Christopher O'Brien, but many of my friends and family usually call me "CJ" instead. I am currently a sophomore at High Point University, and I'm majoring in Game & Interactive Media Design while also considering minoring in Computer Science as well. For now, I intend to graduate at HPU and hope to land a job in the growing video game industry as a game designer in the future. I enjoy hanging out with friends, watching movies, and, of course, playing video games!