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Xbox users who purchased training videos through the Xbox Fitness app probably thought they were buying a workout program they'd be able to use regularly for the life of the Xbox One, at the very least. Instead, those videos will soon be completely unavailable to those who paid for them up front, according to a "sunset" plan announced by Microsoft yesterday evening.

Xbox Fitness launched alongside the console in late 2013 as a unique, Kinect-powered health app, using the 3D camera to evaluate users' form as they followed along with on-screen streaming video trainers. The app provided 30 basic routines for free with an Xbox Live Gold account, but that subscriber benefit will end on December 15.

Xbox Fitness also included numerous branded training programs that cost real money up front, from $60/£40 P90X routines to Jillian Michaels videos that could run $12 each. That paid content is no longer available for purchase as of yesterday. Those who purchased it previously will be able to use it for just over one more year before the app becomes completely unavailable for download or use on July 1, 2017.

Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a series of new online surveillance measures as part of a wide-ranging anti-terrorism law. In a tweet, Edward Snowden, currently living in Russia, wrote: "Russia's new Big Brother law is an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed."

As well as being able to demand access to encrypted services, the authorities will require Russia's telecom companies to store not just metadata, but the actual content of messages too, for a period of six months. Metadata alone must then be held for a total of three years, according to a summary of the new law on the Meduza site. Authorities will be able to access the stored content and metadata information on demand.

Snowden pointed out the difficulties of implementing the new law: "'Store 6 months of content' is not just dangerous, it's impractical. What is that, ~100PB of storage for even a tiny 50Gbps ISP?" He added: "This bill will take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety."

They call it "mechanical doping," but the name simply doesn't do it justice. Cycling is not a sport celebrated for honesty amongst even its top riders, but following several very high-profile doping cases in recent years, it seems as though the cheats have been trying a different route: hiding motors in their seat posts that help push them to superhuman feats of endurance.

The technique has been known since at least 2010; commercial versions of the motors can put out 200 steady watts of power, nearly doubling a typical pro-cyclist's output. An onboard motor can help riders go faster, and can keep their pedalling cadence—the number of revolutions through the crank per minute—up while energy dips in endurance stages.

With the biggest cycling event in the world, the Tour de France, set to begin on July 2, mechanical doping is a serious concern—one that has moved France's sports minister Thierry Braillard to tell the French press: "This problem is worse than doping; this is the future of cycling that's at stake."

Until recently it was fairly easy to dismiss China’s space program. Yes, China is one of just three nations to launch humans into space, but its technology has always seemed highly derivative of Russian spaceflight architecture. And when a recent article raised the question of whether China might develop reusable rocket technology, one Ars reader offered an amusing yet perhaps not entirely untruthful response: “That depends on how good SpaceX's IT security is.”

After Saturday’s launch of the Long March 7 rocket from the new Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, however, such skepticism appears to be increasingly unwarranted. Although largely ignored by the Western world, the Chinese launch marks something of a defining moment for the giant of Asia, a moment when China firmly staked its position as one of the world’s great space-faring nations. More than that, it took a step toward equaling, or perhaps even surpassing, NASA one day.

The Long March 7 rocket does not immediately threaten NASA or the US launch industry, of course. With the capability to heft 13.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, it is roughly on par with the Falcon 9 and the Atlas V launch vehicles. And the Tiangong-2 space laboratory China intends to launch later this year is but a shadow of the International Space Station.

Since it popped up online last week, the trailer for HBO's new science fiction series Westworld has been viewed almost 2.5 million times. That's because it offers a raw, original vision of what a robot uprising might really be like in the twenty-first century. Of course, it starts with gaming.

Westworld has an interesting history. Written for the screen by Michael Crichton in 1973, the original movie was about a western theme park populated by robots who glitch out and go rogue. The robots are programmed to get shot in gunfights and to rent themselves out for sex in the downtown whorehouse, but suddenly they start killing their human customers. There are a few hints that the robots might be achieving a kind of sentience, but mostly we're meant to think that they've simply malfunctioned in a dangerous way. The original Westworld is ultimately about how amusement parks are disasters waiting to happen, a concern that showed up again in Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park (which became the basis for the eponymous blockbuster movie franchise). Crichton was preoccupied throughout his life with system failures, whether in science, business, or entertainment, and he viewed the park in Westworld as a flawed system because it had no safety measures.

The new Westworld series is helmed by Lisa Joy (a producer on the cracklingly fun Burn Notice) and Jonathan Nolan, who recently wrapped up his creator/producer duties on the final season of AI thriller Person of Interest. Both Joy and Nolan have experience with breakneck pacing and techno-thrillers, and their vision in Westworld takes the Crichton story to a very different place. As you can see in this trailer, they've preserved the basic premise, which is that people will pay to interact with robots in theme parks. Westworld is very much an adult theme park, with sex and violence serving as the primary lures for people bored with their high-tech lives. It's basically a game world writ large, with perfectly realistic robots called "hosts" replacing consoles and VR rigs. What's new in this version of the story is that it's very clear that the robots are developing human-equivalent consciousness. This isn't just a glitch in the machine; it's a robot uprising that happens to take place in a theme park.