Current robotic developments are impressive, but about 200 years ago, mechanical watches and clockwork mechanisms were at the height of miniaturized, complex technology. Watch complications (the functions other than the time in hours and minutes) have continued to grow in complexity with thousands of parts and dozens of time-related functions, but these features can't quite compare to the millions of "apps" that are available now. Check out a few of these clockwork examples and stop complaining about needing to recharge your battery every night.

• Parmigiani Fleurier is a watch making company with a 'Restauration' workshop -- restoring intriguing mechanical devices such as a singing bird pistol from 1815. If you don't know what a singing bird pistol is -- it's the most expensive gag gift ever. It looks like a gun, but when you pull the trigger, a little clockwork bird pops out and whistles at you. This particular pistol was restored in painstaking detail, and we're lucky there was no DRM to prevent anyone from taking these things apart and fixing them. [url]
• The Ethiopian Caterpillar is another automaton from 1820. Only six of them are known to exist, and if they weren't encrusted with jewels, they'd be even more creepy looking. [url]
• The only pair of singing bird pistols known to still exist in working condition were sold at auction a few years ago for nearly $6 million. And if you're wondering how the birds actually sing, there's a miniature system of bellows and whistles that are driven by clockwork to produce the sounds. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

You'll of course recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia's attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia has returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the frequently pricey wireless broadband industry. Kanojia's trying to do this via a new startup named "Starry," unveiled at a launch event this week in New York. Starry is promising to offer users uncapped, gigabit speeds at prices less than most people pay their incumbent broadband provider.

Kanojia claims that the service will deliver this ultra-fast connectivity via what it's calling the country's "first millimeter active phased array technology." FCC documents suggest that Starry will utilize spectrum in the 38 GHz band to deliver broadband to urban areas via hundreds of rooftop nodes scattered around the city. Users are given both a "Starry Point" antenna that sits outside their window, and need to buy a fancy $350 router called a "Starry Station" to connect to their various Wi-Fi devices. Kanojia tells TechCrunch that the technology will only cost around $25 per home to deploy:

"It costs the cable guys around $2,500 per home to deal with the construction costs of laying down cable,” said Kanojia on a phone call, setting the scene for his next big unveil. “And beyond cost, there are regulatory hurdles that slow down the process. We can deliver faster broadband with no regulatory wait time and it will cost us only $25 per home.” Kanojia won’t disclose pricing but says that the service will offer various tiers based on speed (up to 1GB up and down) and that it will be “orders of magnitude cheaper” than current broadband providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable."

The catch? One, nobody really knows specifically how well Starry's phased array technology is going to work (especially in regards to line of sight), and Starry isn't offering much hard technical detail right now beyond a YouTube video. If it does work, millimeter wave technology will still require the deployment of hundreds if not thousands of nodes across a city, distance limitations restricting its use to only denser urban areas. The broadband landscape is littered with the corpses of thousands of urban WISPs, which still rely on incumbent bandwidth, and still require slow, cumbersome deployment of a sizable amount of gear.

And while real-world disruption of national incumbents will probably be minimal, it's still refreshing and absolutely necessary to see somebody try (and fortunately there's spectrum available to try with). According to Starry, users can pre-order the self-install kits at the Starry website, after which they'll be made available at Amazon and other retailers. The service will launch first in Boston in March. Variety got wind of the fact that around fifteen cities should be unveiled as launch markets sometime this year, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington D.C., Seattle and Denver.

And while nobody actually knows whether Starry will really work, with no real regulatory or legal hurdles in its path, Kanojia's latest attempt at disruption -- at the very least -- shouldn't wind up face down and unconscious at the Supreme Court.

The FCC has formally declared war on the outdated, over-priced traditional cable box. The agency has put forth a new proposal (pdf) for guidelines intended to bring much-needed competition to the cable set top box market. As recently noted, data collected from the top ten biggest cable companies found that 99% of cable customers still rent a cable box, paying $231 in fees annually for often-outdated hardware that's frequently worth very little. This cozy little captive market nets the cable industry roughly $20 billion in rental fees every year.

In a public sales pitch for the proposal over at Recode, FCC boss Tom Wheeler invokes the spirit of ma bell to highlight the absurdity of the cable industry's continued control over the set top box market:

"Decades ago, if you wanted to have a landline in your home, you had to lease your phone from Ma Bell. There was little choice in telephones, and prices were high. The FCC unlocked competition and empowered consumers with a simple but powerful rule: Consumers could connect the telephones and modems of their choice to the telephone network. Competition and game-changing innovation followed, from lower-priced phones to answering machines to technology that is the foundation of the Internet."

The FCC wants to design a software-based solution that lets consumers access cable content via the hardware of their choice. Hardware that, thanks to competition, would be better, cheaper and faster than the clunky old cable boxes we all know and love. The FCC's careful to state it's not mandating a specific standard by which cable operators have to provide programming data to these devices, stating they simply need to adhere to "any published, transparent format that conforms to specifications set by an independent, open standards body."

This isn't the FCC's first attempt to force competition on the set top box market. CableCARD was the agency's earlier, ineffective attempt to mandate a standardized card for use in third-party set tops. CableCARD regulations were well-intentioned but cumbersome, and frequently left unenforced. The cable industry also went out of its way to avoid pitching the cards to consumers, and often made the installation process as cumbersome and nightmarish as possible. When meager CableCARD stats were released annually, the cable industry would then collectively shrug and insist low adoption reflected a genuine lack of interest in the idea of better third-party devices.

With $20 billion in set top box revenues on the line, the cable industry has spent the better part of a decade fighting tooth and nail to kill this FCC proposal and anything like it. Opponents including AT&T, the MPAA, and the cable industry's biggest lobbying organization today formed what they're calling the "Future of TV Coalition," which argued in a release that greater set top box competition will kill diversity programming, hurt consumer privacy, embolden pirates, and generally just destroy the known universe:

"Many parties, including 30 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, have warned this would unravel the modern TV ecosystem, doing particular damage to small, independent, and diverse programmers and the communities they serve. AllVid would also undermine vital privacy and other consumer protections that apply to pay-TV providers but not the tech firms advocating adoption of AllVid. And it would erode protections against video piracy, rendering programming less secure."

Of course that's bullshit, and what the industry's really afraid of is seeing a cornerstone of its uncompetitive walled-garden empire demolished by real competition. Granted it's worth noting that the FCC's proposal doesn't prevent customers from keeping their existing cable boxes, nor does it stop cable providers from providing them. In other words, if the cable industry wants to retain customers on its systems, all it has to do is innovate and compete.

All of that said, you can't begrudge those who look at the CableCARD fracas of the last decade and legitimately wonder whether the FCC has the chops to actually implement and enforce such guidelines with an election (and potential FCC shuffle) looming. It's also worth asking if another multi-year enforcement fight is worth it with the cable industry on a collision course with Internet video and irrelevance anyway. Whatever happens, it's at the very least amusing to see a former cable lobbyist nobody expected much from plunge a dagger into one of the cable industry's largest and most sacred cash cows.

We've seen an increasing effort by governments around the globe to censor content they don't like. This takes many different forms, but one fairly typical one is for governments to send official looking documents to websites and webhosts demanding that certain content be taken down. Many smaller companies, often with no official policy in place on how to handle such requests, will cave and just take the content down to avoid the hassle. However, recently we've seen a growing number of sites reject such requests, unless they're accompanied by a valid court order. The latest is Medium, the increasingly popular content publishing platform.

In this case, the issue involves the government of Malaysia and the investigative journalism site Sarawak Report, which has been writing a bunch of stories, many based on apparently leaked documents, exposing corruption in Malaysia. Last summer, the website was blocked in Malaysia after a series of reports related to claims of $700 million magically appearing in the Malaysian Prime Minister's personal bank account. After having its own website blocked, Sarawak also started republishing all its articles on Medium.

We remain blocked in #Malaysia over our #1MDB investigations but Malaysians can access our latest story here - https://t.co/2jk9ZNyyKs

— Sarawak Report (@sarawak_report) October 29, 2015

That was last October. Apparently last week, Medium received an email from the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) demanding that one of the Sarawak stories be removed: Of course, as you hopefully already know, one of the clearest signs of censorious thuggery is to claim that an article is "false" or defamatory in some way without ever getting into the specifics of what is false. Medium, quite rightly, responded to the MCMC by asking for more detailed evidence, showing (1) what specific statements are untrue and (2) any official judicial findings about the story. The company received no response -- but late last week discovered that all of Medium is now blocked in Malaysia. If that's meant to intimidate the company into taking down the article, it's not working:

Medium’s in no position to evaluate the truth of the Sarawak Report’s Medium post. We’ve received no evidence that the post violates any of our Rules, or any law. We stand by investigative journalists who publish on Medium. Until we receive an order from a court of competent jurisdiction, the post stays up.

Kudos to Medium for taking such a stand.

The terrible tale of the missing comma and the damage done may soon come to an end. The EFF is calling on Congress to legislate this apparently missing punctuation back into its list of FOIA exemptions.

FOIA Exemption 7(E) reads as follows, in reference to the withholding of documents:

would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law

Some courts have read this paragraph as a continuation of a single thought.

The first interpretation, which EFF believes is the right one, reads the entire sentence as being subject to the last clause that states "if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law." In other words, records concerning both "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions" and "guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions" can only be withheld if "disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

This subjects FOIA rejections to a higher standard, requiring both sets of documents ("techniques and procedures," "guidelines") to be proven to be circumvention risks if released. The other reading of this sentence with the crucial missing comma affords the first set of documents ("techniques and procedures") blanket protection from FOIA requests.

The second interpretation, which the Ninth Circuit adopted in Hamdan, starts by noting that there is a comma between "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions" and "guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions." Because of that comma, the courts reason, the two categories of records are distinct. Next, the courts note that there is no comma between "guidelines for law enforcement investigation or prosecutions" and the phrase "if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

Under this interpretation, the Hamdan court reasoned that because there is no comma between the circumvention risk clause, and because Exemption 7(E) treats "techniques and procedures" and "guidelines" as two distinct categories of records, the circumvention risk clause applies only to the "guidelines" category of records. Or, to put it another way, the lack of a comma in the second half of the exemption means that "techniques and procedures" can be withheld without agencies having to show that "disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

The EFF's solution to the disparate interpretations is to hand the list of exemptions back to Congress and have it insert a comma, bringing both sets of records under the same standard for rejections.

would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions[,] if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law

Now is the time to do it. Congress is once again considering FOIA reform legislation. The EFF has sent a list of suggested fixes to the bill to Congressional representatives. FOIA reform is a yearly tradition, the EFF notes, but has generally resulted in yet another year of FOIA status quo, despite proposed legislation routinely arriving at the start of every new Congressional session with broad bipartisan support.

This particular version contains some much-needed alterations to the government's favorite exemption: b(5). If passed intact, the new law would forbid the use of this exemption on documents more than 25 years old and, more importantly, prohibit use on so-called "deliberative process" documents that, in reality, carry the force of law or otherwise affect the same public that isn't being allowed to see this information.

Considering the amount of work facing Congress in its reform efforts, asking for the addition of a comma seems like very little to ask. Of course, it will have to go up against foes of FOIA reform like the DOJ, which would likely very much prefer the exemption maintain its current level of punctuation.

Law enforcement agencies commit criminal acts while conducting criminal investigations. It happens all the time. With the blessing of their handlers, confidential informants routinely engage in criminal activity. Investigators act as co-conspirators in the planning of terrorist attacks and the robbing of imaginary "stash houses."

But many people are taking issue with the FBI's decision to use seized servers loaded with child pornography as honeypots rather than immediately shut them down. For some, this is the one unforgivable criminal act -- the possession and distribution of child porn.

This is something the FBI has done twice (that we know of). The first time was back in 2012, when it seized a server in Bellevue, Nebraska linked to a website called "PedoBook." It ran the site for three weeks while it deployed a Network Investigative Tool to find out more info about its users.

It did it again in 2015. Joseph Cox of Motherboard was the first to cover it, detailing the FBI's two-week stint as the new hosts of "Playpen," another child porn site accessible only to users utilizing the Tor browser. Again, the FBI deployed its NIT to gather information on the site's visitors.

One of those caught in the latest sting is arguing the FBI participated in criminal activity, tainting the evidence it seized.

[T]he Government engaged in illegal conduct by aiding and abetting the distribution of child pornography; and, considering the Fourth Amendment’s core reasonableness requirements and the totality of the circumstances, it obtained an unprecedently overbroad general warrant.

This is one of several arguments Jay Michaud's attorney is raising. It's also being argued that the use of the NIT violated Rule 41, which governs the use of search warrants. Michaud claims the FBI violated Rule 41's territorial limits by using its control of a server in Virginia (where the NIT warrant was issued) to access Michaud's computer in Vancouver, Washington.

The defense has never questioned the Government’s authority to seize “mere evidence,” assuming that other requirements of Rule 41 and the Constitution are complied with. Rather, this case involves the territorial limitations of Rule 41, a matter completely unaffected by the enactment of § 3103(a).

Finally, it is important to note that the Government has not disputed that Rule 41 applies to the NIT warrant or argued that some other law alters or expands the Rule’s requirement. Instead, the Government has argued that the Rule is “flexible,” despite its plain language, and has proposed several novel and unpersuasive interpretations of the Rule that cannot be reconciled with that language.

In sum, nothing in either of these statutes in any way alters or undercuts the territorial limitations of Rule 41 and thus have no relevance when applied to the facts of this case.

The Rule 41 approach was also explored by Joshua Welch, who was swept up in the FBI's 2012 operation. It was of limited success. While the Eighth Circuit Appeals Court found the NIT warrant fell under Rule 41's time limit of notification of search warrant targets (30 days), it was not enough to offset other evidence gathered by the FBI.

We assume, without deciding, that Rule 41 applies to the NIT warrant. The statute authorizing the magistrate judge to delay notice is perfectly clear–the thirty day extension runs from the execution of the warrant. 18 U.S.C. § 3103a(b)(3). This occurred on November 19, 2012, meaning notice was to be provided within thirty days of that date. Moreover, the "notice" provided by the government was insufficient. The government points to a hearing Welch attended in which an agent testified about the NIT and to the entry of the residential search warrant into evidence as notice "provided during the discovery process." But under Rule 41 Welch should have been given a copy of the NIT warrant. Of course it is plainly true that if agents were required to send a copy of the warrant to the subscriber address they obtained before they could search the premises and identify the individual user, Welch would have had ample time to flee prosecution, destroy or tamper with evidence, and otherwise seriously jeopardize the investigation. But these special considerations would have allowed for the magistrate judge to either specify a later date certain, which he did not do, or for the government to return for extensions of time under § 3103a(c), which it did not do. Therefore, the notice given Welch failed to comport with Rule 41.

If the FBI's use of NITs, especially in conjunction with its decision to act as interim administrators for seized child porn websites, is going to be challenged, Rule 41 seems to be the angle to take. The other route -- challenging the FBI's forays into child porn distribution -- seems far less likely to succeed. The courts have granted a lot of leeway to law enforcement agencies who engage in illegal activities during the course of investigations, as USA Today's Brad Heath has been pointing out on Twitter.

The FBI "hired a heroin-addicted prostitute" to become intimate with a suspect and get him to sell drugs. Court: OK. pic.twitter.com/0MbaBJu3xn

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) January 21, 2016

The FBI "hired a heroin-addicted prostitute" to become intimate with a suspect and get him to sell drugs. Court: OK.

Federal courts have given the government wide latitude to break the law in pursuit of criminals. From a #DOJ brief: pic.twitter.com/pZ8WiNtqJm

— Brad Heath (@bradheath) January 21, 2016

The footnote pictured in the tweet reads:

E.g., United States v. Esch, 832 F.2d 531 (10th Cir. 1987)
(holding that it was not outrageous government conduct to create a pedophilic organization, advertise for members, and encourage those members to create child pornography).

The latter would seem to be even more reprehensible than simply running an existing child porn site and allowing users to upload and download child porn. In the 1987 case, the FBI actually encouraged the production of child pornography. Yet the court found no reason to question or discourage this behavior.

And there will always be other examples of highly-questionable activity engaged in by law enforcement during criminal investigations. An entire cottage industry of sting operations is predicated on pushing potential suspects towards committing criminal behavior and arresting them before the imaginary scheme can be carried out. In stash house robbery cases, the contents of the house to be robbed are limited only to creativity of the agents participating in the sting. Prison terms are predicated on these nonexistent items, allowing the government to send someone away for decades for almost robbing an empty house.

While it is undoubtedly true the FBI would not have been able to uncover the identities of these child porn site visitors without allowing the site to run, one has to question whether it was all worth it. In the two weeks it participated in the hosting and distribution of child porn, 100,000 visitors were logged. But so far, it has only resulted in 137 arrests and far fewer indictments. Its 2012 investigation led to far less: 25 criminal complaints -- nine of which are still only identified as "Doe."

Staying up to date with the latest IT security issues is important for any business or organization. With the $39 Cyber Security Hacker Training Bundle, you can learn how to safeguard against security threats. You'll need a basic knowledge of C and PHP to get started. The bundle includes 11 courses with over 13 hours of instruction on topics ranging from the Security Code Review Guidelines to Threat Modeling to SQL Injection and more. You'll receive a certificate of completion and new skills you can add to your resume.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

A person can undo the damage of a particularly stupid assertion by acting quickly and contritely. Too bad far too many people opt for making the situation much, much worse.

David Paxton included a screenshot of Forbes contributor Frances Coppola touting her own personal conspiracy theory about the rash of sexual assaults by immigrants in Cologne, Germany, in his article for Quillette.

According to Coppola's hot take, the assaults were apparently some sort of anti-immigration false flag operation.

"I suspect anti-immigration ppl of organising the Cologne sex crimes. Fastest way of getting borders closed."

Coppola has since deleted the tweet and apologized at length for it, but her first few responses were less useful. Paxton's blog post on the subject notes that his use of her tweet was met with a handful of increasingly dubious legal threats.

The first was to claim his direct quote (via screenshot) of her tweet was libelous.

remove the section about me or face libel charges.

This line of thinking continued for a few more tweets, with Coppola insisting that taking her tweet out of context (it really wasn't -- see here) was "defamatory," as was Paxton's opinion that the contents of the tweet were "stupid" and "insane."

She then claimed the tweet was "satire" and was being misread by everyone (except, apparently, the other party in the original Twitter conversation, who gave no indication that he felt her tweet was some sort of joke). She claimed this despite espousing similar sentiments throughout the rest of the conversation ("I think we will find indigenous people were paid to do it to stir up hatred of refugees").

With the vague threat of a libel lawsuit still hanging in the air, Coppola moved on to another popular "MUTE" button: IP law.

@aleprechaunist @CanYouFlyBobby has deliberately quoted a tweet screen scraped without my permission from my personal Twitter account +

There's nothing "personal" about a Twitter account. Any tweet viewable by the public can be screencapped or quoted without permission of the account owner. If a Twitter account holder doesn't care to have their tweets quoted or posted elsewhere in any form, they can always lock their account, making it only viewable by their followers. Coppola's account was public then and -- after briefly taking it private -- it is public once again.

Other imaginary rights were touted during Coppola's dispute with Paxton.

@CanYouFlyBobby You didn't contact me, you didn't research context & provenance, you used derogatory terms and didn't offer right of reply.

In summation: my feelings were hurt by what you said, and you didn't give me a chance to head this off by giving me the "right" to forbid you from using my tweet in your Quillette post.

There is no "right of reply" and even if there was, she had plenty of chances to reply with comments on both Paxton's Quillette post and his blog, as well as in her own tweets and long explanatory post at her own site.

Her response to Paxton's "misuse" of her "out of context" tweet notes the tweet was stupid, as were her initial responses.

I have to straighten something out.

On 7th January, I made a remark on Twitter which with hindsight was - unwise. Well, ok, it was worse than unwise, it was stupid. I did not think about the consequences. It never occurred to me that issuing that tweet would lead to three weeks of sustained and vicious personal abuse.

[...]

He had used the tweet as an example of temporary "insanity" in a normally rational person caused by a highly emotive event. Had I been thinking straight, I would have seen that this was what he meant. But I'm not thinking straight. I took it as yet another personal attack - an attempt to stir up the whole tweetstorm all over again. I told him to take down the section referring to me or face libel charges.

That was both unfair to him and very foolish. There followed an unpleasant argument on Twitter in which I tried again to explain what the purpose of the original tweet was and he insisted that I did not mean that - all of it watched by a huge crowd who were mostly not on my side. It achieved precisely the opposite of what I wanted: not only did the blogger refuse to amend the piece, the piece ended up being circulated far more widely than it probably would have been, and a new tweetstorm developed, this time expressing outrage at my allegation of libel.

My attempt to resolve the situation by leaving a comment on his post and retweeting it myself also appears to have backfired, though it was intended as something of a climbdown. The blogger has now written a very angry post about me. I have to say that although the criticism he levels at me in this post is harsh, it is deserved. I have handled this very badly indeed and am genuinely sorry about the mess I have made. I have left a comment on that post apologising for accusing him of libel.

Had this been her response from the beginning, it never would have reached the point of her having to write a full blog post about the backlash she triggered. Apologies are nice but Coppola is now Yet Another Cautionary Tale about the right way to respond to criticism.The original post that set this all off (Coppola's tweet was preceded by Paxton stating she "writes cogently and intelligently about economics") was far from harsh.

Coppola's tweet was presented as short-term "insanity" -- the kind that blows over once someone starts thinking about issues, rather than simply reacting to them. Coppola's response to Paxton ignored all of the helpful context and focused on the word "insanity." Had she simply moved on, the "sustained abuse" would have been over in a matter of days, rather than "three weeks."

The problem with being Yet Another Cautionary Tale is that the internet is full of them. The foreseeable consequences of reacting to criticism (especially very mild criticism) with baseless legal threats and clueless assertions about nonexistent rights are exactly that: foreseeable. And yet, it's not as though the flow of cautionary tales has slowed. There's always another one right around the corner.

And it's not as though this is only perpetrated by "stupid" people. Intelligent people react badly to criticism as well and make situations exponentially worse by shouting "libel" or "copyright infringement" when they should -- and possibly do -- know better. Even worse are those who can afford to pay a lawyer to espouse their stupidity on scary-looking letterhead, leading to people who are wholly in the right backing down from the justified criticism.

Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to accept criticism. But, compared to the consequences of doubling down on stupid threats, accepting it is much less painful.

Edwin Guzman is currently facing charges of "annoying and accosting" a person of the opposite sex, as well as disseminating harmful material to a minor. That would be Officer Guzman -- and not just any officer -- but Sergeant Guzman, who was promoted around the same time he was sending naked pictures of himself to a 16-year-old girl. (Warning: AUTOPLAY)

“It started off we regularly chat and it's mostly about school and how life is,” the teenager who was 16 at the time told 5 Investigates’ Mike Beaudet.

But she says the conversations kept escalating from there.

“If I gave him like pleasure and let him do things to me, he'd be willing to buy me things,” she said. “He took a picture of his penis and he sent it to me.”

Please note that if a classmate had sent a photo of his penis to this 16-year-old girl, he might be facing child pornography charges and a lifetime on the sex offender registry, rather than "annoying and accosting," which would net Guzman a maximum $200 fine and 6 months in jail.

That an officer -- and a family friend -- would use both of these positions to attempt to coerce a minor into sexual activity is disturbing enough. But what's more disturbing is his lawyer's dismissiveness of the teen's response to the unwanted explicit pictures. (h/t Chris Soghoian)

Afterward, his lawyer, Kenneth Anderson, said there are discussions with prosecutors to resolve 
the case.

“I really can’t go into detail given the nature of things. They’re serious charges,” Anderson said.

But he disputed the charges that Guzman sent a 16-year-old girl harmful pictures and said even if the allegation were true, he doesn’t believe the material would have been that shocking.

“You can’t tell me someone her age has never seen a picture of a penis on the Internet,” Anderson said.

So, by this rationale, the teen shouldn't be upset if an older relative, politician, church leader, trusted community figure, random neighbor or anyone else that shouldn't be sending dick pics to minor sent her explicit photos. After all, spend enough time on the internet and you're bound to see a penis. Perhaps Anderson could help her get over her fear of penis pictures by sending a few of his own her way.

This argument never should have been stated out loud. Hopefully, he won't be raising this in court. There's a huge difference between being sent an unwanted explicit photo and just coming across one while surfing the web. Add to this the fact that the person sending them was not only a family friend, but also in a position of power, and the disparity between "random internet dick pic" and what actually happened here becomes even greater. Even if the unnamed minor went searching for penis photos on the web, it would have been a consensual act. But there's nothing consensual about being sent explicit photos by a person in a position of power and trust -- one obviously willing to abuse both -- and arguing that just because someone has seen a penis before means they have no right to be upset about being sent unwanted photos is the lowest (in all senses of the word) form of rhetoric.

A growing number of articles on Techdirt attests to the fact that the use of DNA is becoming commonplace in many fields, thanks to the continuing drop in the costs of gathering and analyzing genetic material. As those costs fall, of course, so the temptation to roll out the use of DNA more widely increases. It looks like Kuwait has the dubious honor of being the first nation to require everyone's DNA -- including that of visitors to the country. The Kuwait Times has a frighteningly matter-of-fact article about the plan, which is currently being put into operation. Here's how the DNA will be gathered:

Collecting samples from citizens will be done by various mobile centers that will be moved according to a special plan amongst government establishments and bodies to collect samples from citizens in the offices they work in. In addition, fixed centers will be established at the interior ministry and citizen services centers to allow citizens give samples while doing various transactions.

Those who are not citizens of Kuwait will be sampled when they apply for residence permits:

Collection will done on issuing or renewing residency visas through medical examinations done by the health ministry for new residency visas and through the criminal evidence department on renewing them.

As for common-or-garden visitors to the country:

Collection will be done at a special center at Kuwait International Airport, where in collaboration with the Civil Aviation Department, airlines and embassies, visitors will be advised on their rights and duties towards the DNA law.

"Rights and duties" basically means: "no DNA, no way Kuwait", since the article says elsewhere:

the test will be mandatory for visitors

The DNA will not be used for medical purposes, such as checking for genetic markers of disease, which will avoid issues of whether people should be told about their predisposition to possibly serious illnesses. Nor will the DNA database be used for "lineage or genealogical reasons." That's an important point: a complete nation's DNA would throw up many unexpected paternity and maternity results, which could have massive negative effects on the families concerned. It's precisely those kinds of practical and ethical issues that advocates of wider DNA sampling and testing need to address, but rarely do.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+