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(credit: Pro Juventute)

Try to follow along. In Texas, it's legal to have sex with somebody as young as 17 years old. But it's considered child pornography to have nude pictures of somebody under 18, even if he or she is 17.

Aldo Leiva, 51. (credit: Harris County Sheriff's Office)

This means a 51-year-old Houston math tutor is facing 20 years in prison and may have to register as a sex offender for life in connection to accusations that his mobile phone contained child pornography—which were the nude photos that his 17-year-old student-girlfriend had texted him. The case against Aldo Leiva came to light after the girl's mother found explicit pictures on her daughter's mobile phone. The Houston Independent School District Police Department opened an investigation, which led to the charges against the Houston High tutor, according to court records.

Leiva posted $20,000 bond last week, and a local judge issued a no-contact order between the girl and the tutor. According to court records (PDF), the tutor gave police his phone and unlocked it for them, and nude images of the girl were allegedly recovered.

For decades, PC gaming elitists have lorded their ability to download imaginative game mods over their dirty console gaming peasant cousins. That advantage goes away today... at least for one major recent release. Bethesda just launched an update that allows Xbox One players to download and run Fallout 4 mods (though the Bethesda mod servers seem to be melting under the strain at the moment). A similar update for the PS4 is promised for later in June.

There are a few caveats to consider before exploring the freewheeling modding scene, as Bethesda discussed in a livestream last week. All mods have to be downloaded to the console through the in-game interface (which requires a BethesdaNet account), and there's a 2GB limit to total mod storage per system. While loading the wrong mods (or loading them in the wrong order) could make the game temporarily unplayable, you don't have to worry about screwing up your save game while playing with mods loaded—a separate "modded save" will be stored alongside the standard version. Achievements and Trophies can't be earned while using mods.

Bethesda says it will be cracking down on nudity and the use of outside copyrighted content in the console mods it hosts, so forget about your dreams of running a naked Master Chief through the post-apocalyptic wasteland. As of now, 888 of the 1375 PC mods listed on the Bethesda Workshop for the game have been approved for the Xbox One, and that ratio will likely go up as Bethesda does more testing.

Artist's rendition of some random Internet user reacting to a two-month game delay. (credit: Flickr / Thoth, God of Knowledge)

As someone who has been immersed in gaming and Internet culture for decades, I'm no stranger to how fans with enflamed passions can spew some heated and at times hateful rhetoric about their favorite properties online. Random Internet users can and do generate huge volumes of uncivil discussion, harassment, and sometimes even threats over everything from Mass Effect 3's ending to arguments over review scores.

Still, a portion of the reaction to news of the No Man's Sky delay in recent days seems fundamentally different in a way that has been troubling me.

The basic news being discussed here is pretty boring by game industry standards. No Man's Sky, which developer Hello Games has been targeting for a June 2016 release since last October, was first rumored and then confirmed to be delayed to early August over the past week.

(credit: Julian Carvajal)

A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days' worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for two criminal suspects.

In the Tuesday en banc decision, the Fourth Circuit relied heavily upon the third-party doctrine, the 1970s-era Supreme Court case holding that there is no privacy interest in data voluntarily given up to a third party like a cell phone provider. That case, known as Smith v. Maryland, is what has provided the legal underpinning for lots of surveillance programs, ranging from local police all the way up to the National Security Agency.

The Fourth Circuit concluded in US v. Graham: