When your kids' school district mandates "cloud computing", they're mandating that your kids be tracked by a company that profits by exploiting people's data.

Roseville City School District Embraces Chromebooks, But At What Cost? (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Many people—including Jeff—assumed that the law would prevent Google from collecting data on his daughter for advertising purposes. But the truth is more complicated. While Google is legally forbidden from creating a profile on Katherine when she’s using the school-sanctioned Google Apps for Education tools (which include email and document sharing), it can collect data as soon as she uses other Google services that aren’t part of the student-specific suite—including YouTube.

It's an Illuminati plot, that's what it is.

Christian author claims Freemasons made him rob Hoover movie theater (AL.com)

A Christian author who writes about New World Order and spiritual enlightenment seemingly took a dark turn when he donned a mask and robbed a Hoover movie theater at gunpoint in broad daylight, police said today.

...Hoover police today announced a first-degree robbery charge against 33-year-old Britton Clayton Traylor, who drove to the theater in his Porsche 911 Carerra and claimed he committed the brazen crime as part of his initiation to earn a higher degree as a Freemason.

"We're not really buying that as we've never heard of Masons instructing members to commit criminal acts,'' said Hoover police spokesman Capt. Gregg Rector. "It's really one of the most ridiculous excuses that we've heard lately. He may have achieved a higher level of stupidity, but that's about it."

Cory Doctorow reports on Mozilla dropping/freeing/spitting off the Thunderbird e-mail client and explains why you should use a stand-alone mail client rather than webmail. (I use Sylpheed, myself, for its support of MH-style folders, I like my mail in a directory tree I can run find and grep over.)

Mozilla will let go of Thunderbird (Boing Boing)

Thunderbird -- which I use for my own email -- is creaky and poorly maintained, something that is tacitly admitted by Mozilla Foundation CEO Mitchell Baker in her memo, where she describes how trying to balance the needs of Thunderbird and those of Firefox often puts the two teams at cross-purposes. Baker doesn't describe exactly how Thunderbird will stand on its own, but I've heard reliable internal rumors that a new nonprofit entity is likely to be stood up to maintain and advance the project.

I live in my email (I hate instant messaging, and relying on platforms like Google or Facebook to maintain your messages is a terrible idea, since both are liable to squeeze their users if it is commercially expedient to do so). As a hardcore Thunderbird user, I'm glad to see something happening with the project. I would contribute to a nonprofit for maintenance and advancement of Thunderbird, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

There are many good reasons to use standalone email clients, but for Americans one of the most compelling is the absurdly outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, which treats any file left on a server for more than six months as "abandoned" and accessible to law enforcement without a warrant (no, really!).

Law professor David Kopel looks at the facts around "universal background checks" and bans on "assault weapons" and "high-capacity" magazines, and explains why these laws won't help prevent violence, only criminalize ordinary citizens.

Kopel is an analyst for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank that's quite right on some issues (the "war on drugs", mass incarceration) and quite wrong on others (capitalism). But even when it's wrong, its arguments are thoughtful and well-informed.

My favorite sentence from the paper rather sums up the problem with firearm prohibition laws: " If gangsters can obtain all the cocaine they want, despite a century of prohibition, they will be able to obtain 15-round magazines."

The Costs and Consequences of Gun Control (Cato Institute)

It is unfortunate that Obama chose to disparage those who disagree with him for their supposed fixation on grubby “politics” and indifference to murder victims. Whether Obama realizes it or not, there are good reasons to be skeptical of gun-control policies. This paper will scrutinize the three most common gun-control ideas that have been put forward in recent years: universal background checks, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and a ban on assault weapons. These proposals are misguided and will not prevent the crimes that typically prompt officials to make pleas for more gun control. Policymakers can take some steps to incapacitate certain mentally ill persons who are potentially violent. Yet, it would be wrong not to acknowledge that gun laws often cannot stop a person bent on murder. Policymakers should not pretend otherwise.

We recently linked to coverage of special treatment afforded to Georgia police accused of murder; Baltimore public defender (and candidate for judge) Todd Oppenheim has an NT op-ed about how the same idea is at work in the Freddie Gray murder trials:

Another Baltimore Injustice (www.nytimes.com)

The court has given extraordinary treatment to the accused officers, from their arrests up to their impending trials. But thousands of other defendants in Baltimore receive an inferior brand of justice.