I’m sure that most people with even the slightest interested in technology have at least heard of Google’s ambitious cloud gaming project, Stadia. And as most of them know, Stadia really didn’t do anything it was supposed to at launch, and as such it is widely regarded as yet another bad attempt at breaking the video gaming market with cloud gaming. Let’s be honest, most of us were expecting this to happen; while Stadia was offering some promising improvements and advantages over standard consoles and computers, the lack of explanations of public concerns over the viability of Stadia led to most almost wanting Stadia to fail. But why is this? Why did people (rightfully) doubt Stadia’s capability to become a competitor in the console scene? Why did they want it to fail?

Imagine a perfect world, where Stadia functioned just as intended and succeded as a console. Suddenly, the cheaper and convenient option becomes a lot more attractive to new gamers, and companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have to begin focusing on cloud gaming as the new main form of video gaming entertainment. This radical shift in how videogames are enjoyed might cause problems in the form of the long development of consoles and the need to speed them up to compete with Stadia, which could end up in several rushed consoles that fail to compete with it, allowing Google to take control of yet another industry.

It’s also important to address the issues consumers will inevitably have with cloud gaming as a mainstream. For one, it is strictly online only, so those less fortunate that can’t afford a fast enough internet service to stream the games simply cannot play modern video games anymore. As such, they will have to rely on playing outdated games on outdated consoles instead of playing what they want whenever they want on their home consoles. This also eliminates the ability for consoles to be novelty pieces. Similar to how many enthusiasts today seek older consoles like the Nintendo 64 or Gamecube, in the future Stadia will likely not be supported anymore, and the worth of having them in your collection long after its prime is next to zero.

Another issue which is funnily enough one of the reasons Stadia failed is latency. Stadia works by streaming the game and taking your inputs but basically playing the game on a seperate computer. All of this takes time, and such creates a much noticeable input delay. This is especially terrible for fighting games, where frame perfect moves become absolutely impossible to execute. First person shooters also are affected, since the delay can put off aim significantly. Infact, basically any game, whether be fighting, shooter, or even just a platformer are all affected extremely by the introduction of input latency. A world where this is isn’t eliminated sufficiently is one that will see the overall degradation of the experience of playing games.

Simply put, the failure of Stadia was to be expected and the fact that it’s ambition never amounted to anything is just a sigh of relief to the industry. Had Stadia gone out differently, the world of video games could become something much different and something much worse.

Last monday at the Iowa caucuses, voting was done on an app developed by a tech firm by the name of Shadow. This was new for the caucuses, and it was tried out for the first time on that day. Almost spectacularly, it failed in the one purpose it was designed for, and caused a delay in the results of the voting. While a day’s worth delay doesn’t seem too important, the use and failure of an app in voting for an election represents a much larger problem that could at its worst threaten the democracy of the United States.

First, let’s look at the tech itself. According to the CEO of Shadow, it functioned well during testing. However, when it came to the day of voting, many people, who mind you might be tech illiterate, had trouble downloading the app and logging in and later found trouble sending the results in. All this and more caused a catastrophic failure in voting, forcing people to manually call in the results and delaying the full votes for several days.

So, why does this matter? It was just a fault in the system, correct it and we’re good to go, right? After all, the use of technology in voting is extremely convenient, requiring less work for both voters and vote counters. Well, it’s never that simple. Electronic voting should not be an option to vote with due its vulnerability.

It should be no surprise that almost anything on the internet can be broken into by hackers. Websites, servers, computer, tablets, phones, heck, even your printer can be cracked open by tech savvy hands. This is no different with apps for voting elections. Unless some military grade encryption gets put in place (which, mind you, is expensive to develop), anyone with the right skills can easily influence the results in their favor.

This is extremely important, especially when Russian hackers were suspected of rigging the election in Trump’s favor. Obviously, we do not want foreign influences in our elections, but the ability of technology to be hacked is practically inviting them to do so.

In the caucus, the results that were released a day after they were supposed to weren’t actually the full results. Instead, it was only a certain percentage of the total states votes. The results named Buttigieg as the first place winner by a small yet sizable margin, but later with 100 percent of precincts reporting, Sanders was right on his tail barely falling behind. This again, like last years caucus, put more distrust in the DNC’s lack of bias, which isn’t good for the party in general.

In conclusion, the Iowa caucus has always been a mess of sorts. However, the use of vulnerable technology puts more distrust in one of the most important elections before the presidential election.

Welcome to my first WordPress site. Here, you’ll find vague, misinformed, and probably horrifically boring commentary of the latest news in Technology that I find interesting. Though there really is not much else here, if I get motivated enough, I might just actually update this site regularly, starting with the first couple of blog posts. That’s just about it for the first post, go on to read whatever else you’d like.