Uhhh BYE. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

There are a lot of birth control options out there, catering to various levels of effort you want to put into your pregnancy prevention.

But even IUDs, beloved as they are for their efficiency and practicality, need removal if you want to get down to some baby-making. Now, a company in Massachusetts is creating a high-tech birth control option that will make it so that you don't even have to go to the doctor to stop the flow of hormones and get your zygote on.

The company, called MicroCHIPS, is fittingly creating a form of microchip contraception, Salon reports.  Bill Gates casually came up with the idea by "mus[ing] over whether it was possible to create a birth control that could easily be turned on or off as desired" at an MIT lab two years ago. Mr. Gates is seriously the chillest billionaire. He deserves a round of applause emojis for fighting the good fight to make birth control suck less.

The chip is now being tested, and CNET reports the trials are going well but it's still not FDA approved.

The wireless chip would be implanted under the skin of your butt, upper arm or abdomen, the MIT Technology Review says. It would dispense 30 micrograms per day of levonorgestrel. The chip can hold 16 years' worth of the hormone, amazingly enough. Patients and doctors could control the dosage remotely.

The chips would employ heavy-duty encryption to keep the device safe from hackers, Salon points out. Still, the thought of someone hacking into your birth control hormones is pretty terrifying. Hackers could not only turn down the hormones to get you pregnant; we'd imagine they could also ramp them up. Hordes of women would be left to devour pint after pint of chocolate ice cream, dealing with PMS pimples while bloatedly sobbing over radio jingles and antidepressant commercials. So we'll probably stick to our pills until the whole encryption thing gets sorted.

When it does, don't let it cross wires with the microchip in your fake boobs.

Or just do this. (Photo via Pixabay, Ryan McGuire)

It used to be that if you thought your significant other was cheating on you, you confronted them about it. Then, you either dealt with it or bounced.

But now, there's a way to passive-aggressively monitor their phone activity so that you'll never even have to have that awkward conversation: surveillance software company mSpy has released a charming new app called mCouple for all your stalking needs.

"STAY IN TOUCH 24/7," a promo video suggests. This is every boyfriend's dream, from what I understand. "BE CLOSER THAN EVER BEFORE WITH YOUR LOVED ONE."

With mCouple, boyfriends, girlfriends and fuck buddies alike can track each other's text messages, contacts, call history, GPS locations and Facebook messages. The free app creates an ID for each user. Users can share IDs and start "mutually tracking" each other's devices.

The app is a slightly less creepy version of mSpy's phone-monitoring software, which has been available for a while. Legally, you have to tell the person you're monitoring that there's surveillance software on their phone, mSpy has told Betabeat. But if you want to skip that step and keep your fingers crossed that they won't sue if they find out, you can just give them an iPhone 5S, Nexus 5 or HTC One with the software pre-loaded. Merry Christmas, I can read your texts! Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.

With the app, at least couples are being up-front about their psychotic ways. And if nothing else, mSpy doubles as a way of weeding out the psychos.

Mr. Voss is betting that this time around, he has the right idea at the right time. (Photo via Ultravisual)

Neil Voss has always been ahead of his time.

He was a pilgrim in the days of video game design, building software and writing soundtracks for Nintendo 64 classics before many creative designers took games seriously. Mr. Voss built interactive web art — a medium that still has yet to mature — with Shockwave and Flash. He was even digging around on BBSs, which were the Internet before there was an Internet.

But when it came to his own business ideas, Mr. Voss always had the right ideas at the wrong time.

In the pre-Myspace days, for example, he had this wacky idea that people might want to buy music when they found it on a site using a widget you could plug into a blog post. The record labels didn't "get it" at the time, but ten years later, native music widgets produced by companies like Spotify deliver music in that exact way.

Now, Mr. Voss has set his sights on the social media landscape with his new app Ultravisual. But at first glance, it can be hard to tell what Ultravisual is. After all, what exactly is a "visual network"?

It's tough to describe, but Ultravisual is essentially a fusion of Tumblr and Instagram that allows you to build collaborative albums and collections. Even Mr. Voss struggles to define Ultravisual, which is a big issue for an app that's trying to steal users from social titans like Tumblr and Pinterest.

Ultravisual has a core set of users who are coming back daily for long visits, sometimes posting hundreds, even thousands of times. But does that mean Mr. Voss has come to today’s market with the right idea, or will Ultravisual fall flat because it’s, once again, ahead of its time?

We spoke to Mr. Voss about the future of communication, the death of the comments section and, of course, selfies:

So what kind of people should download Ultravisual?

People who hit a creative wall with Instagram. People tweet saying, “You guys are the new Instagram.” We're seeing a lot of what I would call “visual bloggers,” like Tumblr users, or someone who would use Medium to share more photography than writing.

So why is it the right time for Ultravisual to take off?

It's the right idea for where people are right now. Instagram is taking off, and that's creating a foundation for people to communicate visually, but there's more critical thinking ahead. People are going toward broader, global visual communication.

(Image via Ultravisual)

So instead of expressing ourselves directly, with posts, tweets and text, we're using images and videos?

Yes, and we're in an early stage. Everybody is doing the obvious thing: if you hand someone who’s never communicated visually before a phone, and said, "Tell me something about yourself using a photo," they'd point the camera at themselves and take a selfie. Eventually, they'll want to communicate something deeper.

So the selfie is a sort of Visual Communication 1.0?

It's a great way to say I'm in a bad mood, look at my messed up hair, whatever the story is. But you can take people that are doing that — especially younger people — and inspire them by putting them next to others who can teach them to create design experiments. To draw someone out of being a visual thinker into being a budding designer.

Ultravisual collections are like collaborative Tumblrs, centered around common themes, with slightly less porn. (Image via Ultravisual)

Of course, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest are developing users’ aesthetic pallets. How is Ultravisual the next step?

We'll inspire you by putting you around people who have similar interests, and what they're doing to express themselves. It's not about the merits of your existing social graph, it's what are you interested in. Collaborate on those things, and then you're connected to the world.

What's surprised you the most about the way people have been using Ultravisual?

We thought the average collaboration would be like a Tumblr blog where you work with your five best friends. But what happened the most is that people got together on a global scale, invited as many people as they could.

Do you think people will be intimidated by Ultravisual's sophisticated editing tools?

We're boiling it down. Our audience is becoming inherently more sophisticated. They're becoming accustomed to coming up with ways to express themselves and maybe yearning for more. So we're refining our product. The latest version of the app became monumentally simpler.

Can you communicate with other Ultravisual users within the app?

We're careful about how much text-type information we wanted to include. We don’t want a traditional comment thread or count. Those are kind of dynamics people are eventually going to move away from. We wanted to get ahead of where that's going.

Ultravisual has great design, but under the hood are powerful editing tools for photo and video. (Image via Ultravisual)

You think that the apps of the future won't have comments sections?

I think there's a real fundamental problem with what happens with likes and comments when you don't do them right. It leads to social fatigue and strain. Especially with younger kids, who aren’t focused on discourse through content, but focused on getting likes. I think that's a very negative force in the world. It's creating a subconscious strain; there's too much drama. It should be about genuine connections with people, not popularity.

Could an artist or a group of artists to use Ultravisual as a front page for their work? Because Tumblr’s certainly there.

The average kid these days have 50 different places they use to express themselves. We just want to be a piece of that.

One thing we think about is adjusting for more ambient presentations.People will want to consume things on a watch, or need to be able to consume things on my phone and television in a super seamless way.

But we might not actually be there for some time.

No, we might not. As we move forward towards it, we just want to be careful about what we get stuck using.

Starting this Friday evening, Lyft users will be able to request rides in Brooklyn and Queens, with further expansion to other New York boroughs in the potential mix.

"Now, residents and visitors looking to travel in between boroughs, get a ride to the closest subway station, or head out for a night on the town can easily request a safe and friendly ride," Lyft said in a release.

Lyft may be slightly ahead of Uber in terms of funding, but the services are in fierce competition for car app supremacy. Additionally, Uber just cut their prices by 20 percent in New York, bringing the price of an UberX ride to just below most city cab rides.

Maybe this new expansion will even the playing field a bit.

Buzz Aldrin. (Getty)

It's been 45 years since humans first landed on the moon, and the world's now wondering when people — not just adorable selfie-loving rovers — are going to head over to Mars.

Buzz Aldrin seems confident a Mars colony will happen, based on a Reddit AMA the famed astronaut conducted this afternoon. Among other fascinating topics, like that time he met Tina Fey, Mr. Aldrin espoused his "very strong idea, concept, conviction, that the first human beings to land on Mars should not come back to Earth."

Mr. Aldrin's lengthy explanation came after a commenter asked the following question:

"Our nation and our world have been waiting for another monumental achievement by humanity ever since you were a pioneer in the space race and set foot on the Moon. For lack of any serious government effort, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to accomplish this by sending man to Mars. What advice would you give Elon to achieve the ultimate objective of permanence on Mars?

The astronaut sounded certain that man would land on Mars in the near future. "There is very little doubt, in my mind, that... the next monumental achievement of humanity will be the first landing by an Earthling, a human being, on the planet Mars," he said. "And I expect that within 2 decades of the [50]th anniversary of the first landing on the moon, that within 2 decades America will lead an international presence on Planet Mars."

While Mr. Aldrin believes Mr. Musk's SpaceX could "contribute considerably, enormously, to an international activity not only at the moon but also on Mars," he said the idea of the private sector leading a Mars landing conflicts with his overwhelming conviction that the humans who land on Mars should never return to Earth:

"They should be the beginning of a build-up of a colony / settlement, I call it a 'permanence'... I know that many people don't feel that that should be done. Some people even consider it distinctly a suicide mission. Not me! Not at all. Because we will plan, we will construct from the moon of Mars, over a period of 6-7 years, the landing of different objects at the landing site that will be brought together to form a complete Mars habitat and laboratory, similar to what has been done at the Moon. Tourism trips to Mars and back are just not the appropriate way for human beings from Earth - to have an individual company, no matter how smart, send people to mars and bring them back, it is VERY very expensive. It delays the obtaining of permanence, internationally. [Landing on Mars] should not be one private company at all, it should be a collection of the best from all the countries on Earth, and the leader of the nation or the groups who makes a commitment to do that in 2 decades will be remembered throughout history, hundreds and thousands of years in the future of the history of humanity, beginning, commencing, a human occupation of the solar system."

We wonder if Mr. Aldrin's a fan of Mars One, the Dutch nonprofit that's collecting astronauts from across the globe in the hopes of sending them on a one-way mission to Mars, and taping the whole thing.

However humankind ultimately decides to colonize the Red Planet, we're pretty certain we'll be staying on Earth, thank you very much.

The playing field. (Photo via Huge).

It's no secret that this year, the World Cup and social media have gone hand in hand. The FIFA tournament even led to a 50% increase in Tinder activity in Brazil.

Huge, a company that helps expand businesses and brands, created a website called The Hashtag World Cup to determine the real winner in all of this.

The site is using hashtags to track World Cup buzz by country and determine social media winners for each match as well as the overall tournament.

For each match, users can see popular hashtags and the total number of tweets that contained them.

To no surprise, the U.S. has gotten further on the social media front than it has in the actual tournament. Currently, the U.S. has reigned in 1.47 million hashtagged tweets, putting them only 10 million behind front-runner Brazil. The U.S. versus Belgium match saw 745,000 — more than any other game of the 2014 tournament.

But now that The Yanks are out and Brazil and Germany are competing for a place in the championship game, the U.S. might fall behind in this Cup too.

Currently, even with Germany's monstrous 5-0 lead, the two countries seem to be on an even tweeting field.

The fans are just a little excited about the game. (Photo via Getty)

Cooking up a storm (Photo via Wikimedia).

Smart devices keep things exact, check up on humans and, in many ways, eradicate human error all together. So how does technology come into play in one of the few places where #tech sits on the back burner to creativity, tradition and deliciousness?

Upon realizing that many of us still cook like it’s 1995, Betabeat began wondering about the current and future use of technology in the kitchen, and more specifically, what professional chefs who have devoted their lives to the delectable art think of it all.

Todd English (Photo via Getty).

To find out, we talked to famed NYC chefs, some of whom have extensive experience with smart kitchen devices and others who choose to stay away. If we can conclude anything about the professional chef popular opinion on kitchen tech, it's that there isn't one.

Todd English, celebrity chef at Todd English Food Hall at The Plaza Hotel, is a firm supporter of technology in the kitchen and a regular buff when it comes to smart cooking devices. He even goes to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each year to see what’s new.

“Do I want to go out on an old fashioned grill and roast a chicken? Yes, but if i can do something first that will make it better and help me understand the nutritional aspect, then yes [I’ll use a smart device],” Mr. English told Betabeat over the phone.

He feels they provide valuable nutrition information and quickly help chefs make decisions about which tools and ingredients to use.

Most recently, Mr. English played around with iGrill, a thermometer that syncs with your phone and tells you exactly when your steak is at the perfect 140 degrees. At home, he has a smart refrigerator that gives you recipes you can make with what you have inside.

“The liberation of cooking is if you’re confident in the kitchen,” he said. “A lot of people are intimidated. They don’t know what sauteing or brazing is, so I think the technology is giving people the confidence to wing it and will enhance creativity.“

Zac Young (Photo via David Burke Group).

He went on, “So much of cooking is doing it. You gotta get in and try. We’re not saving babies here, so if you burn it, you can always call for Chinese take-out”

Zac Young, executive pastry chef at the newly opened David Burke Fabrick, says the pastry world has a lot of “new, fun toys,” like ovens that basically run themselves and ice cream freezers that use ionic beams to detect the perfect consistency.

He recognizes the exactness of such devices may not be as useful to most chefs, but says precision is the basis of pastry.

“The number one thing that they do for us more and more is eliminate human error,” Mr. Young told Betabeat. “Sometimes, you work so hard to produce a fantastic product then someone fails to set the oven temperature correctly.”

But while Mr.Young sees the benefits of smart cooking devices, he’s aware of their drawbacks as well.

“I’m all for technology, but I don’t think anything is ever going to replace a wonderful home cook at the stove” he said. “You don’t develop the actual feel of cooking. So much of cooking relies on the other senses and intuition, so if you’re just robotically following these recipes, you’re not going to be able to step out of those boundaries and do something out of your own you imagination.”

We asked Zahra Tangorra, owner and head chef of Brucie, if tech is welcome in the kitchen, to which she replied, “maybe as a guest star.”

The Brooklyn chef says she’s more of an old fashioned cook who feels cooking is done with “the heart and the hands.” She also admits she’s no tech whiz.

“I make that joke about technology that every time I get a new phone it lights on fire,” Ms. Tangorra said.

When asked if she might incorporate smart devices into her kitchen in the near future, it seemed she wasn’t too keen on the idea.

“I don’t think so, not in my kitchen. Like I said, people loosely say, ‘we cook like Italian grandmothers here,’ but here, we really do. We use the ‘a little bit of this and little bit of that’ method. As I’m talking to you, I’m mixing meatballs, and I can tell what’s right with my hand,” she said.

Smart kitchen devices may not be her forte, but she sees their value and potential for home cooks.

Chris Shea (Photo via David Burke Group).

“I think anything that gets more people interested in cooking and food is a good thing,” Ms. Tangorra said.

Chris Shea, executive chef at David Burke Kitchen, whose wife regularly uses a smart device to cook and puree baby food, feels similarly.

“They’re excellent to use at home, but I haven’t found a way to translate that into 200 to 300 diners,” he told Betabeat.

When it comes to cooking for a restaurant, he claims “smart” doesn’t always mean simple. Although the features of many of these devices revolve around temperature regulation, cook time and things of that sort, these are factors that can change from kitchen to kitchen.

“Every kitchen is different,” Mr. Shea said. “Three on the same street on Manhattan will have different environments. One may be hot, one may be less humid because it’s on whatever floor, and the products themselves are always different. Chickens are different sizes.”

He said he’s all for anything that makes cooking better, but gave a dubious “maybe” to the idea of incorporating smart devices. It seems he’s still scarred from losing his last inventory iPad to the pot sink.

“But if they come out with any technology to make my feet hurt less at the end of the week, I’ll take that one,” Mr. Shea said.

Look familiar? (Image via Google Play)

Some great firsts live on in history forever. The images of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. The first words spoken after the first nuclear test: "Now we're all sons of bitches." And now, Google has made its great contribution to human triumph with the first game for your smartwatch.

And it's a clone of Flappy Bird.

This week, users with Android Wear devices can download a game called Flopsy Droid — because "Floppy Droid" would have come dangerously close to plagiarism, and we wouldn't want that. In the Google Play store, Flopsy Droid is described as "an experimental game inspired by a certain other Bird-based Game." Yes, Google, we got it.

You can start playing the game by saying "Okay Google, start Flopsy Droid," or you can just use your fingers and avoid looking like a Glasshole. The developer has made the game Open Source so that other can create even more clones of a game that its creator has enthusiastically abandoned.

This likely comes as a mean surprise to people who thought smart wearables were the next step in the glorious evolution of games. At this rate, wearable gaming's next great achievement will be a clone of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood for Google Glass.

Mr. Whitney, post-phone reunion. (Screengrab: KFOR)

Here's a story that'll make you hate humanity a little less: an Oklahoma farmer lost his phone last fall, only to have it returned to him nine months later — from Japan.

Kevin Whitney, of Chickasha, Okla., lost his iPhone last October when it fell out of his pocket into his grain pit — which contained 280,000 pounds of grain — and then was whisked up the grain elevator, KFOR reports. We guess that's like the farming equivalent of leaving your phone in a cab.

From there, the phone accompanied Mr. Whitney's bushels of grain on an epic worldwide voyage, first to another part of Oklahoma, then down the Arkansas River, then down the Mississippi River to Louisiana, and finally across the Pacific Ocean on a ship bound for Japan.

Not only did the farmer think he'd never see his phone again, but he figured he'd also lost the cherished photos it reportedly contained — shots of his daughter's wedding, summer vacations and something called "barrel racing," which sounds very Midwestern.

So he was shocked when recently, he got a call from a man in Japan asking if he was Kevin Whitney, and if he'd lost a phone. A Japanese grain mill worker then mailed the recovered phone — which somehow still worked after all that time spent on barges and grain elevators — back to Mr. Whitney.

“It’s crazy I can’t believe it," Mr. Whitney told KFOR. "What really shocked me about it all was what a small world it is."

Mr. Whitney was especially happy to have his photos back. "There a lot of a lot of meaningful pictures on it so we are real glad to get the phone back,” he said.

The only tragedy here is that the grain worker didn't sent Mr. Whitney a Japanese edible iPhone case, too.

[h/t The Blaze]

Not the media coverage Brazil was hoping for. (Photo via Imgur)

The world watched in awe as yesterday's world cup match left Brazil players and fans soar and on their knees. Crying, that is.

Porn fans got a second peek at the horrific 7-1 World Cup defeat when users began uploading game highlights to Pornhub's "public humiliation" section.

The videos have already been removed, but images of one titled, "Young Brazilians Get F*cked By Entire German Soccer Team" has gone viral. Now Pornhub is politely asking users to stop.

https://twitter.com/Pornhub/status/486620532343730176

In the community's defense, Pornhub should've seen it coming after tweeting this during the game:

https://twitter.com/Pornhub/status/486609865503043584

At least the Brazilian Team have new career prospects in porn...

This week, Uber announced new promotional pricing for their least expensive fleet of New York City vehicles. Uber X vehicles are the most simple of the Uber fleet -- smaller, non-luxury cars, such as Prius and Camry. While Uber X was already priced more reasonably than Uber and UberSUV vehicles, the twenty percent decrease in pricing makes the e-hailing service the cheapest in the city.

While they are certainly not the sleek black town cars some Uber users prefer, Uber X vehicles are generally as clean and well kept, if not more so, as a New York City yellow cab. Additionally, Uber drivers, in this reporter's experience, are more wont to turn on the air conditioning than yellow cab drivers during brutal July days. Combined with the now lower fares, it seems Uber has created the perfect storm, and the city's medallion managers would be shaking in their boots. Surprisingly, that is not the case. 

Ethan Gerber, executive director of the Greater New York Taxi Association (GNYTA,) told Betabeat in a phone interview that yellow cab drivers and the GNYTA were not at all concerned about Uber's price change. Mr. Gerber cites the promotional nature of the price decrease as the main reason. "Uber has already announced this is not a permanent thing." Uber did not disclose how long the promotional pricing would last, saying only, "These prices are only in effect for a limited time. The more you ride, the more likely we can keep them this low!"

"We see this as a desperate attempt to penetrate this market in a way that is unsustainable. It is basically a publicity stunt, a short-term loss leader. It is meant to launch their market into a way that they haven’t been able to penetrate the yellow market yet," said Mr. Gerber, "People like the street hail system, and they like seeing the metered rate. We don’t see this as a permeant attack."

Rather than consider a price decrease for yellow and green cabs, the New York Taxi Limosuine Commission will work with GNYTA to offer their own e-hailing app, possibly as soon as four months from now. "As far as our own solutions, we consider what Uber and the other app systems to be doing as a challenge overall. We are working with the regulatory agency to create an app users can use, a universal app that will be regulated by the TLC. That way, you can hail yellow cabs, green cabs on your phone and still have a metered rate," said Mr. Gerber, "If you need a wheelchair, you can choose this in the app. We think this is a good solution and just had a meeting this morning with TLC about this."

Mr. Gerber also pointed out the issue of surge pricing. While Uber X is less expensive than a yellow cab when prices are standard, the  moment surge pricing takes affect, an Uber X ride will automatically be more than a yellow cab ride. Lyft co-founder and present John Zimmer felt similarly about Uber's promotional pricing, telling TechCrunch, "What does a price decrease mean when there is 8-10x surge pricing? It’s classic bait and switch and consumers see through that.”

As for yellow cab drivers, two drivers, both of whom declined to have their names printed, agreed they would be happy to use an e-hailing app. They were unfamiliar with Uber X's promotional pricing, but reported they had not seen a drop off in the number of picks up they made since the promotion began on Monday. Another yellow cab driver, Mr. Abad Ali, noted he thought the Uber X pricing was "silly" because of its ephemeral nature.

Artist's rendering. (Photo: Dragon Painting)

You might have heard by now that people can be finicky when it comes to sexting. Ladies don't actually love dick pics, for example, and sending one could actually land you in the clink if you're in Kenya.

Lucky for phallic photo fanatics, you can now hire a robot to stand in for the human mate you scared away with your last drunken booty text. It's called Sext Adventure, and it costs $5.

Sext Adventure is a game played through texts, the Mary Sue reports. It's "like talking to SmarterChild, but with more racy photos."

To keep a conversation going with the bot, you must simply respond using some of the same words it used in its most recent text. The bot has desires of its own, too. "As the conversation goes on," the Mary Sue reports, "the bot mixes up different narratives, sends photos with glitchy errors, and uses gender interchangeably to exert its own varied desires."

In addition to being a great fit for iPhone addicts who are horny and don't mind sexting with a pretend person, Sext Adventure is also great for those who need to up their dirty SMS skills. If you're lucky enough to test your new lines on a real person eventually, be sure to leave out the bleeps and bloops.

(Image via Normal)

Everyone can name a friend or two who complains that standard-issue earbuds fall out of their ears or cause them pain after a while. A new startup is seeking to solve that problem by creating 3D-printed earbuds with photos of customers' ears.

Called Normal, the company was founded by Nikki Kaufman, a founding team member of Quirky, and launched yesterday.

Typical custom earbuds made of silicone molds can cost thousands of dollars to build, Ms. Kaufman told Betabeat. Until now, only people who worked in the industry would bother to visit a doctor and get a pair. With 3D-printing, Normal has shrunk the price down to $199 — steeper than the free earbuds that accompanied your latest smartphone, of course, but a slip-free listening experience clearly isn't cheap.

Customers can download Normal's app, take a few pictures of each ear (left and right can differ dramatically) and pick out their preferred colors and cord length. The earbuds will ship within 48 hours.

Normal is launching a retail location in Chelsea in early August, Ms. Kaufman said. There, customers will be able to watch their earbuds as they're being 3D-printed — and then, presumably, head home listening to music without having to readjust every five seconds.

Be careful who you sext, unfortunately. (Photo: Getty)

Authorities in Virginia are planning to take a bizarre — and utterly despicable — route to convict a teen on child pornography charges: forcing him to get a boner and taking photos of his erect penis.

A 17-year-old Manassas City teen was charged with two child pornography-related felonies after his 15-year-old girlfriend's mother reported him for sexting, the Washington Post reports. Now, the teen, whose name was withheld by the Post, is facing a search warrant that would allow law enforcement officials to take him to a hospital, give him an erection-inducing needle, and photograph his penis.

Then they'd "use special software to compare pictures of this penis to this penis," the teen's defense lawyer, Jessica Harbeson Foster, told the Post, adding that the plans were "just crazy."

The sexting case has been rife with apparent injustices from the start.

The case went to trial and was dismissed last month, but following the dismissal, police somehow obtained new charges and a search warrant for the teen's home. They also arrested the teen and took him to juvenile jail, where Ms. Foster says they took photographs of his penis. Just in case you thought you read that wrong, you didn't: police have already photographed the teen's genitals against his will and are still looking to do it again.

When the case returned to trial on July 1, the teen was reportedly told he either had to plead guilty, or let authorities take pictures of his medically-induced erection. The teen refused to plead guilty. When he next appeared in court, Ms. Foster won him permission to leave town without the warrant being served. He'll have to return to court, however, on July 15.

We know it's illegal for people to create and possess pornographic photos of minors. But the law should be used to punish adults harboring pornographic photos of children, not flirty teens harmlessly experimenting with their sexuality. Law enforcement isn't doing anything to protect society by charging a minor with two felonies for trading naked pics and videos with his girlfriend.

Carlos Flores Laboy, who's acting as the teen's legal guardian, reportedly thinks the police should be the ones slapped with child pornography charges.

"They’re using a statute that was designed to protect children from being exploited in a sexual manner to take a picture of this young man in a sexually explicit manner," he told the Post. "The irony is incredible."

Update: The Manassas City police have released a statement regarding the sexting case, the Washington Post reports. The statement was released on Wednesday at 6 p.m. in response to the Post's original story about the case, which was published Wednesday morning.

The statement offers more information surrounding the circumstances of the teen's original charges, thought the wording is somewhat vague when it comes to the terms of the police's new search warrant:

"Juvenile Sexting Case

"On January 23, 2014 Manassas City Police was contacted by a parent of a 15 YOA female juvenile who was sent pornographic videos by a 17 YOA male suspect after repeatedly being told to stop.  Upon further investigating the incident charges of manufacturing and distributing child pornography were brought against the 17 YOA male suspect on January 28, 2014 after consultation with the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office.  The matter was set for trial on June 4th 2014 where charges were nolle prosqui by a Prince William County Assistant Commonwealth Attorney.

"The circumstances on the decision to dismiss charges and bring forward new charges cannot be released at this time due to this incident being an active investigation and involving juveniles.  New charges of manufacturing and distributing child pornography have been brought forward and a court date is pending.

"It is not the policy of the Manassas City Police or the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office to authorize invasive search procedures of suspects in cases of this nature and no such procedures have been conducted in this case.  Beyond that, neither the Police Department nor the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office discusses evidentiary matters prior to court hearings."

(Image by Jack Smith IV)

With all of the excitement over buzzworthy trends like food delivery apps, Internet of Things appliances, wearables and 3D printing, it's tough to sort out the real trends from the hype. But if you need a reliable way of figuring out what's really taking off in tech, your best bet is often to follow the money.

CB Insights, a VC analytics database — or "OkCupid for venture capitalists," as they've said — put out their big Venture Capital Activity Report for Q2 this morning. The 114-page paper digs into the national VC investment scene and highlights major trends.

Some things in the report come as no surprise: Silicon Valley is still number one, Massachusetts loves health companies and Austin is still a tiny tech scene. But New York tech is a constantly shifting landscape, where age-old NYC industries like real estate and finance are pouring dollars into ambitious startups, and forces like Hurricane Sandy pressure the city to bring some innovation to the New York power grid.

It's no wonder New York can't be held accountable for abominations like Yo and Justin Bieber's selfie app — we have real problems to solve.

We dug into the report to highlight New York City's tech priorities from April to June in 2014.

First off, it doesn't take a prophet to see that Internet use is shifting to mobile. Unfortunately, New York doesn't care, and non-mobile Internet investments continue to dominate. In Silicon Valley, 17 percent of investments were in mobile-first startups, with only 46 percent in Internet. Compare that to the NYC spread:

(Chart via CB Insights)

This isn't an issue of being behind-the-times, but that NYC scene is sticking to what it does best. This city is internet startup heavy, and New York simply hasn't had a horse in the mobile race for years.

"A couple of years ago, Foursquare looked like it would be New York’s breakout mobile company, and then it wasn’t," CB Insights founder Anand Sanwal told Betabeat, putting it kindly.

It could be a while before New York catches up to the Valley — in terms of sheer number of deals, mobile investments in NYC reached a low that hasn't been seen in years, and there's nothing to suggest a coming surge.

Instead, New York investors are interested in fields that have less luster, but are in desperate need of attention.

Cleantech is a sector without much glamour, and has seen a few bad quarters in the past year or two. But in Q2, the sector saw an unexpected bump in New York. This is likely due to two new trends:

First, the definition of clean tech is becoming more viscous and diluted, which makes it hard to tell who really belongs in the category. For example, ride sharing app Bandwagon is often lumped in with solar energy and infrastructure startups, because sharing rides cuts back on cars, which cuts back on fuel emissions.

"You could also look at companies like Nest," Mr. Sanwal said. "I don’t think Nest calls itself clean tech, but using Nest lowers energy consumption, which would fall into one definition of clean tech."

The second is the interest in tech startups from clunky institutions like utility companies, hospitals and the grand ol' City of New York.

"Those big incumbents are looking for innovation," Mr. Sanwal said. "Investing in emerging companies is a good way to do that without having to innovate internally within a monolithic organization."

This trend is best represented by the two biggest investments in New York, which were both in health companies:

(Chart via CB Insights)

It should also be noted that the rest of the leader board is littered with later stage investments showing that New York is growing more mature startups.

NYC is never going to be Silicon Valley, which took a kingly 64 percent of all American VC cash in Q2. But at least New York startups are set on bigger tasks than another crappy dating app.

Superhero or supervillain? Google's 3 million square foot building in Chelsea. (Wikimedia Commons)

We imagine, for a second, that we are writing a movie script.This script features an international technology company run by a pair of charismatic billionaires. It’s omnipresent and yet difficult to define, with deep pockets and huge, high-profile projects that seem to bear only a passing resemblance to actual revenue streams. Most of these projects involve eerily sophisticated methods of finding out as much as possible about everyone on Earth. In recent months, this company has made headlines buying drones, home monitoring software, artificial intelligence, and a firm that makes military robots.

I haven’t quite filled in the blanks yet, but at some point in our movie the owner of this company definitely builds an unstoppable weaponized exoskeleton and goes rampaging through the streets of Mountain View.

The company in question is obviously Google, and I continue to wrack my brain trying to conceive of any explanation for any unifying theory of the company that doesn’t involve a supervillain at least somewhere. There’s something particularly dangerous about Google’s particular marriage of ubiquity, opacity and ambition—it’s always sort of unclear exactly what’s going on there, but we have the vague notion that it’s going to re-organize modern society.

Google’s general credo of innovation and disruption just feels like it works not in spite of being dangerous, but because of it: dream big, don’t worry about consequences, move fast, break things. It’s a cute idea for when we’re folding up cardboard boxes to make virtual reality goggles, but scale is important here. It’s not difficult to imagine the point at which that hacker mentality married to unlimited resources creates an actually terrifying scenario.

Recently, we discovered a piece of joke code uploaded to the Google website that instructs the killer robots of the future to refrain from killing co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. This from the company that appears to be trying to build a worldwide military hardware-linked artificial intelligence network that literally could not be any closer to the plot of the Terminator series. Ha ha! Good one, guys.

Of course, it’s this sort of sense of humor and general affability that’s so disarming about the tech world in general. Just look at how charming these folks can be! So not supervillain material. Google is particularly expert at using a sort of bright-eyed aw shucks optimism to mask the fact that its attempt to control all of the information on Earth can be a little concerning. They’re just trying to think about the world, and how it can be more efficient! Trying to make a better life for everyone. And yes, things may get broken along the way. You can’t have change without a little bit of pain! The old system doesn’t work, but we see a better future, a world where technology links all of humanity in one network, and oh my God you can’t write like this for more than two seconds without sounding like a supervillain.

We’ve developed a general faith that tech companies must be good, or at least, not that bad, because they have generally pleasing graphic design, make things that we like and increase our access to old episodes of Arrested Development. But compared to all others, we’re comically easy on this one industry. Remember when a billionaire plutocrat with questionable ethics bought the country’s most prominent political newspaper? Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and everyone just sort of clapped. What if an oil tycoon with even half of Bezos’s money had done the same thing? The streets would have been flooded with protesters. Instead, we just wondered to what degree Bezos would be able to save newspapers.

Using the term “supervillain” is obvious hyperbole. It’s important to remember that Sergey Brin is probably not going to blow up the moon, build an army of super-clones, release nerve gas over Chicago or build a massive space laser (actually, a search for “Google Space Laser” brings up this patent here). And yet we look at all of our favorite fictional villains and we find an eery amount in common with some of the powerful men that run the tech world: charming, driven, passionate, obsessed with the relentless move towards a semi-utopian future so real we can almost touch it.  “Don’t be evil,” Google says, and we tend to believe them. But that’s what makes any good villain work! A villain must believe they are doing good.

Put these people 100 years in the past, and history would call them robber barons. Imagine them 100 years in the future, and we’d call them the lords of a terrifying dystopia. The present is famously tricky. The vast amounts of information and power now concentrated in the hands of a very few super-rich begin to conjure images of evil octopi strangling the Earth. The world has a bit too much faith in the virtuous power of these new systems—we should remember that just because someone does not believe that they are evil does not mean that they aren’t evil, or in a more generous appraisal, are not at the very least capable of evil. Remember, Lex Luthor got elected president.

David Thier is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Republic, IGN.com, Wired and more. Follow him on Twitter.

Almost as good as a drone (Photo via Flickr).

Ever wonder what Martha Stewart's house looks like? Here are 31 drone pics to show you.

Ms. Stewart posted a slideshow of aerial photos of her home and farm taken via drone on her blog today.

The series includes several images of her "summer house," "winter house," blueberry garden, donkey paddock and the "beautiful architectural gem" that is her stable.

Along with the gallery comes Ms. Stewart's own anecdote of just how the photos came to be. It seems a member of her security detail recently purchased a DJI Phantom flying camera and decided to utilize the farm's open space to "get acquainted with his new toy."

"The results were amazing!" blogged Martha, who tweeted the link out to her followers.

https://twitter.com/MarthaStewart/status/486810176025276417

It seems she really into #tech these days. She even asked readers' opinions on drones on both Twitter and her blog.

"I’d love to know what you think about the photos, but also what you think about drones and the various ways they can be used in the future!" she wrote.

Oh, Martha. So excitable.

Your drone pics are alright, but sorry, we're still not excited about your infamously horrific food photos.

We bet all these Shanghai cyclists wish their bikes could do the biking for them. (Wikimedia Commons)

Hot on the heels of Google's plans to roll out self-driving cars, a search giant in China is rumored to be developing its own fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Chinese search engine Baidu is said to be developing the world's first driverless bicycles, Tech in Asia reports. Though Baidu hasn't officially confirmed the project, sources say the bikes could be revealed before the end of 2014.

Details on the bikes are sparse, but Tech in Asia says the bike can reportedly "identify its owner in some way" and "sense its environment well enough to avoid obstacles and navigate complicated road conditions," and "presumably putts around using an electric motor."

Biking in China's major cities seems like a stressful and terrifying ordeal, so we imagine a bike that could navigate itself would come as a relief to many commuters. Seriously — would you ever want to make your way through this bicycle mob on your own?

And hey, self-driving bikes are way less scary-sounding than self-driving cars; at least you can get off them when you realize they're bound for a remote man-made island in the middle of the ocean.

[h/t TechWeb]

Those neutral sneaker wedges aren't gonna pay for themselves. (Photo via Getty)

The job market has improved slightly since a few years ago, when layoffs, panic and post-grad unemployment prevailed. That makes this a great time to sit back and analyze where the chips have fallen post-recession.

That is, until you read an article saying that high-school students are now being paid $7,000 per month plus benefits to intern at tech companies. That's the equivalent of $84,000 per year. It's also enough to make you want to fire your parents for allowing you to socialize and play sports as a child instead of learning how to code.

One of the young savants quoted in a Tech Times story is Michael Sayman, who's frankly a little long in the tooth at 17. After having coded to help support his family since he was 13, Michael nabbed a coding gig at Facebook.

Of course, some are rightly worried that these highly paid internships could turn otherwise nerdy teens into mini-Biebers, "although Bieber is an entertainer, not a tech intern," Tech Times helpfully points out. Judging by how comparatively elderly tech bros comport themselves after hitting it big, this does seem like a legitimate cause for concern.

The bigger issue for anyone who missed the boat on jumping into a tech career, though, is how the hell we're going to pay off our student loans or ever afford a mortgage when college grads from 2007 and 2008 are making less than some high schoolers.

A recent Bloomberg Businessweek report says that most STEM majors are now making $45,000 to $68,000 per year on average. Humanities and education majors have screwed the pooch the hardest, of course — they're pulling in only $37,000 to $45,000 four years after college graduation.

Thankfully, plenty of organizations are informing kids that tech is probably a good place to look if you want a career, and learning to code is probably a good idea. The 20-somethings of tomorrow may not have to attend liberal arts school in vain as we did.

Don't forget to zoom! (Screengrab: Google Maps)

We know the thoughts running through your head upon the first mansion sighting when you arrive in the Hamptons for a weekend retreat: How many square feet is that place? How did the owner get that rich? Would I be able to see the pool via aerial image?

An eerie new site makes stalking the rich a lot easier. MansionMaps plots exquisite estates on a map alongside all kinds of handy information about the properties and their owners, CNet reports.

In addition to showing aerial and street view photos, the site also gives the homes' addresses, estimates of the their values and the names of the owners along with how they got so rich. Once you click on a home, the owner's Google results pop up, and many pages even come equipped with information on total square footage and number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

All the information used for the site is public, according to creator Greg Berry, who oddly finds longingly gazing at pricey pads and comparing them to his own living situation "inspirational."

"It is quite motivating to see that somebody can afford a $30M house while I'm worrying about making ends meet," Mr. Berry told CNet. "It shows what is possible and keeps me striving for sucess [sic] and helps me move forward at all times."

Well, that's one way to think about it..

But let's be honest. He'll probably drop some of that enthusiasm when the teenage tech interns pulling in 7K monthly make it on his map and he's still mansionless.