Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: MSPoweruser)

For reasons that were never entirely clear, Microsoft released a book store for Windows 10 back in 2017. The Edge browser was given support for EPUB books, and the Microsoft Store had a book category, offering a range of free and non-free books. No longer: yesterday the company ended book sales entirely.

We can't imagine the book store was ever a major business. Combined with the decision to abandon its Edge browser and switch to Chromium, it's not altogether surprising that maintaining support for electronic books was more effort than Microsoft wanted to make.

Those scarce few of you who have bought books will have until July to read them, at which point you'll be given a full refund. All books ordered through the service are being destroyed, including free ones.

Enlarge / Roma Director Alfonso Cuaron after winning Oscars for Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Cinematography at the 91st Annual Academy Awards on February 24, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Dan MacMedan)

US antitrust regulators have warned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that banning Netflix and other streaming platforms from the Oscars may violate federal competition law.

Legendary filmmaker and multiple-Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg has backed an effort to ban films primarily distributed via streaming platforms from the Academy Awards. The effort gained steam after Netflix movie Roma won Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Cinematography and was nominated for other Academy Awards including Best Picture. Roma was shown in some theaters, but only for a few weeks.

The US Department of Justice's antitrust division learned of the anti-streaming proposal from news reports and decided to warn the Academy in a letter before the awards organization makes any decisions at a meeting later this month. Spielberg is a member of the Academy's Board of Governors and reportedly intends to push for a streaming ban at the upcoming meeting.

Enlarge / GM workers assembling a test car for Cruise. (credit: Cruise)

Three of the world's leading automakers are joining forces to develop safety standards for self-driving cars. The new consortium will be called the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC), and it will be affiliated with the prominent auto engineering group SAE International.

The founding members are Ford, GM, and Toyota. All three companies have invested heavily in self-driving technology, making self-driving safety much more than just a theoretical concern for them.

GM is the parent company of Cruise, a self-driving taxi startup that is currently testing dozens of autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. Ford has a similar effort called Argo that's testing in Miami and working to expand to Washington DC.

Enlarge / Not where you want a hidden camera. (credit: Getty | Brendan Hoffman)

A California hospital faces a lawsuit from 81 women who allege they were secretly filmed by hidden cameras in labor and delivery operating rooms while undergoing extremely intimate procedures, including Caesarean births, sterilizations, and operations to resolve miscarriages.

The women claim that their privacy was egregiously violated by the hospital, Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, California, which is run by Sharp HealthCare. The women say they did not consent to be filmed during the procedures—and would not have done so if given the choice.

Moreover, they allege that their sensitive videos were insecurely stored on various desktop computers, some of which were not even password protected, and that numerous non-medical staff members—including security guards and attorneys—were able to watch the videos. The lawsuit further alleges that the hospital made no effort to log or monitor who viewed the footage and did not ensure proper deletion of the data. In all, the lawsuit estimates that the hospital had secret recordings of around 1,800 procedures that took place in the women’s center.

First things first: No, you haven't been caught in a time warp and zapped six months into the future (at least, not that we know of). The subject of this "War Stories" episode is the unreleased MechWarrior 5, which is still on track for a September 2019 debut. This is the first time we've done a war story on a game that hasn't come out yet, but it also came with the opportunity to interview Jordan Weisman, the guy most directly responsible for the BattleTech universe and its giant stomping robots.

So we packed up our gear and flew off to beautiful Vancouver, where Mech5 developer Piranha Games is headquartered. Usually, pulling together a "War Stories" video involves a lot of brain-wracking and memory-hunting by the developers, especially for older games; this time, since we were interviewing developers still actively battling through the development process, all the wounds were still fresh and the memories vivid. We got to see a bit of the game in progress and hear some interesting tales about how one wrangles building-sized BattleMechs—and more interestingly, how one builds a world that can accommodate them.

The world’s the thing

MechWarrior 5 will see players hopping freely among a large number of planets in the Inner Sphere. As with many other games, developers at Piranha turned to automated tools in order to create those planets and populate them with realistic biomes and gameplay spaces. And, as with many other games, the quirks and features of those automated tools—and the levels they produced—ended up in turn defining a lot of the gameplay's shape and feel.