Month: August 2016

(credit: Comcast)

Comcast should discontinue its claim that Xfinity service "delivers the fastest Internet in America," the National Advertising Division (NAD) recommended today. Comcast should also discontinue certain ads where it claims to have the "fastest in-home Wi-Fi," the group said.

For its fastest Internet claim, Comcast relied on crowdsourced data from the Ookla Speedtest application. An "award" provided by Ookla to Comcast relied only on the top 10 percent of each ISP's download results.

"Although Xfinity offers a variety of speeds at a range of prices and tiers, Comcast’s advertising does not limit its claims to a particular tier," the NAD's announcement said. "NAD determined that the claims at issue in both print and broadcast advertising reasonably conveyed a message of overall superiority—that regardless of which speed tier purchased by a consumer, in a head-to-head comparison, Xfinity would deliver faster speeds."

(credit: Deep Space Industries)

Asteroid mining is the ultimate high-risk, high-reward business. While there are undoubtedly billions—some argue trillions—of dollars' worth of valuable minerals and metals in near-Earth asteroids, a host of questions remain about the practicality of harvesting them. How much technology is required to identify asteroids and extract the materials? How difficult will it be to return them to Earth or other desired destinations? And how much will the upfront costs be?

A few companies, such as Planetary Resources, have begun to try to answer these questions, and it seems the initial responses aren't entirely positive. The venture has decided to put its initial focus on Earth observation rather than deep space asteroid mining. But another asteroid company, Deep Space Industries, appears to be pressing ahead. On Tuesday, that company announced its intent to fly the world’s first commercial interplanetary mining mission, Prospector-1.

Under the company's new timeline, Deep Space Industries plans to launch the Prospector-X mission in 2017 into low-Earth orbit as a technology test bed for further development of low-cost exploration spacecraft. Then, "before the end of this decade," the company would launch Prospector-1 to rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid and investigate its value as a source of mineral resources.

(credit: Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO—FBI Director James Comey has some phones—650 of them, to be exact—that he'd really, really like to take a look at.

Right now, the FBI can't read the data on those phones, because it's encrypted. For Comey, that's a problem. In remarks to the American Bar Association on Friday, he made it clear this is an issue he intends to bring up before Congress next year.

While nothing other than the election will get politicians' attention during the next few months, Comey told the audience that he intends to gather data about how the problem of encryption, which he calls "going dark," is affecting his agents' work. Then, he'll present the findings to Congress.

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It’s been two years since we took our first sip of Soylent (which means it’s been two years since a few thousand people started following me on Twitter because I talked about farts). The liquid food product has been through a bunch of iterations since, including a premixed variant, but it’s remained essentially the same product: a beige liquid of indeterminate taste that purports to give your body everything it needs to survive. But today, Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart announced that the company is moving in a new direction: breakfast.

This morning’s announcement marks the release of Coffiest, Soylent’s first spin-off product. The new offering has the same ingredient makeup, nutritional mix, and 47/33/20 percent fat/carb/protein calorie distribution as the 2.0 premixed version, but it also adds coffee flavoring, 150mg of caffeine per serving, and 75mg of the nootropic L-theanine. According to Rhinehart, a bottle of Coffiest supplies the drinker with about 400 kilocalories and about 20 percent of the daily recommended values for "all essential vitamins and minerals." Soylent provided us with a copy of the drink's nutritional information sheet for folks who want to take a peek.

"A lot of people are skipping breakfast," Rhinehart told Ars in a phone interview. "We wanted to provide a convenient and also really tasty option for them to enjoy in the morning."