Talynebear

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BlueOak Resources, a Burlingame, California-based startup, plans to mine for and refine gold, silver, copper, and other precious metals in the US. But before you call your local chapter of the Natural Resources Defense Council to organize a protest in anticipation of environmental calamity, consider the source from which the company plans to “mine” such valuable materials: our old electronics gadgets.

According to BlueOak’s cofounders Priv Bradoo and Bryce Goodman, instead of partaking in such environmentally destructive, dangerous, and carbon-intensive activities as strip-mining, open-pit mining, and mountaintop removal and extraction to bring the precious metals and rare earth elements necessary to power our electronics gadgets to market, the company instead aims to focus on “above the ground recovery.”

“BlueOak’s goal is to provide a distributed and domestic solution for e-waste recycling. We aim to enable circular integration in the technology supply chain, converting the e-waste of today into a sustainable source of metals and rare earths for the technologies of tomorrow,” according to the company’s website.

How long, exactly, do SSDs last? It’s a difficult question to answer because estimating an SSD’s life requires taking a whole lot of factors into consideration—type and amount of NAND used in the drive, overall write amplification, read/write cycle, and more. When we did our in-depth examination of how SSDs work a couple of years back, we looked a bit at how those factors affect drive life, but TechReport is going even further than that and has been subjecting six drives to a long-term torture test to actually measure, rather than estimate, the drives’ service life.

The results are impressive: the consumer-grade SSDs tested all made it to at least 700TB of writes before failing. Three of the drives have written 1PB (that’s a thousand terabytes, by TechReport’s decimal reckoning, not 1024TB). That’s a hell of a lot more writes than the manufacturers’ stated drive lifetimes, and that’s good news for SSD-buying consumers.

Performing that many writes takes time—in fact, TechReport has been torturing the drives to death since last August. The six drives chosen to die for science are Corsair’s 240GB Neutron GTX (with 19nm MLC NAND), Intel’s 240GB 335 (with 20nm MLC NAND), two of Kingston’s 240GB HyperX 3K drives (with older 25nm MLC NAND), and two Samsung drives—one 256GB 840 Pro (with 21nm MLC NAND) and one 250GB 840 (with 21nm TLC NAND). The Intel and Kingston drives use SandForce controllers, the two Samsung drives use Samsung's own controllers, and the Corsair drive uses a controller from Link_A_Media Devices.

There are plenty of varied characters to choose from in the Wildstar universe.

Carbine Studios/NCSOFT

Chad Moore is the Creative Director at Carbine Studios, developers of the upcoming massively multiplayer RPG Wildstar. Moore speaks to Wired.co.uk about lengthy development cycles, the benefits and perils of free-to-play vs subscriptions, and shaking up the MMO experience for players.

Wired.co.uk: Wildstar was originally announced back in 2011. Where's it been since then?

Chad Moore: 2011 was basically the first time we ever showed the game. We announced and let people play it, all at the same time. Generally that's not how people do things. You get an announcement and then a few months later you get screenshots, and at some point people play. We came right out of the gate and said "Hey, check us out! Come play the game!" What we've been doing is, for one, creating content and finishing the game. But the bigger part of that is that almost as soon as we were able to, we started to open up our game to players. We went through a closed beta and an open beta, but even before the closed beta we were in a pseudo-beta with super-hardcore fans, friends, and family, where we were letting people play and test the system and hardware. For the most part, since 2011 we've been adjusting our game based on feedback from players.

Aurich Lawson

AT&T recently named 100 municipalities in 21 metropolitan areas where it might bring its fiber-to-the-home network, without actually saying how many customers would get the GigaPower service, which offers up to 1Gbps download speeds. AT&T said the expansion "is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014," further muddying the picture.

That fiber announcement came a few weeks before AT&T announced a deal to buy satellite provider DirecTV for $48.5 billion. Yet it seems the two are intertwined: AT&T told the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that it needs approval of the DirecTV merger in order to bring fiber to 2 million locations.

"The economics of this transaction will allow the combined company to upgrade 2 million additional locations to high speed broadband with GigaPower FTTP (fiber to the premise) and expand our high speed broadband footprint to an additional 13 million locations where AT&T will be able to offer a pay TV and high speed broadband bundle," AT&T said in an SEC filing.

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Lots of people are angry about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's Internet "fast lane" proposal that would let Internet service providers charge Web services for priority access to consumers. But one Web hosting service called NeoCities isn't just writing letters to the FCC. Instead, the company found the FCC's internal IP address range and throttled all connections to 28.8Kbps speeds.

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's internet slow and expensive forever' lobby," NeoCities creator Kyle Drake wrote yesterday.

NeoCities

NeoCities offers free and paid Web hosting. As Drake noted, FCC access to NeoCities is being throttled on the home page only, and not on websites created by NeoCities users.

Aurich Lawson

Update: A few hours after this article went live, Google engineer Adam Langley published a blog post taking issue with the GRC characterization that Chrome's CRLSet is "completely broken." In the post, Langley said he has always been clear that the measure isn't perfect, but in any event, it's more effective than the revocation checks on by default in other browsers. "And yet, GRC managed to write pages (including cartoons!) exposing the fact that it doesn't cover many revocations and attacking Chrome for it." In fairness to Google a test performed after this article was published showed Chrome blacklisted the TLS certificate Ars revoked three weeks ago. The text of the article as it originally ran follows:

The ability of Google Chrome to block secure website connections compromised by the Heartbleed bug is "completely broken" because the browser by default detects less than three percent of the underlying digital certificates that have been revoked, according to a detailed analysis recently posted online.

The charge was leveled against CRLSet, a regularly updated list in Chrome that catalogs website encryption certificates that have been revoked recently. Last week, noted cryptography engineer and Google employee Adam Langley promoted CRLSet as an improvement over the online certificate status protocol turned on by default in most other browsers. Langley blasted OCSP as "useless" because he said it was trivial to bypass and threatened to harm the performance and stability of the overall Internet.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Computer History Museum

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler told the cable industry today that he will "preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband."

Speaking at the Cable Show industry conference, Wheeler discussed how state governments have protected Internet providers from competing against cities and towns that build their own broadband networks.

According to a transcript of his speech provided by the FCC, Wheeler said: