Egypt confirms death sentences for 183 people →

The men were convicted of playing a role in the killings of policemen in the town of Kardasa in August 2013, during the upheaval that followed the army's toppling of Egypt's former President Mohamed Morsi.

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The attack took place on the same day security forces violently dismantled two massive protest camps supporting Morsi in Cairo, killing hundreds of protesters in clashes.

The December verdict was the third mass death sentence of 2014, and was roundly condemned by rights groups.

"Mass death sentences are fast losing Egypt's judiciary whatever reputation for independence it once had," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch, said at the time.

"Instead of weighing the evidence against each person, judges are convicting defendants en masse without regard for fair trial standards," she said.

In April 2014, Egyptians were shocked when a court passed down 683 death sentences in one trial.

A Texas Law Would Let Teachers Shoot Students Who "Threaten" School Property. Guess Which Students Would Suffer Most? →

...The bill, nicknamed the “Teacher’s Protection Act”, would create “a defense to prosecution for and civil liability of an educator who uses force or deadly force to protect the educator's person, students of the school, or property of the school, and suspension of a student who assaults an employee of a school.” Proposed by Rep. Dan Flynn, the bill is unlikely to become law—but it indicates a twisted pathology in the way we think of schools and students.

The bill is the logical conclusion of a diverse set of American pathologies, including the tendency to classify the protection of property as tantamountto the protection of life, and the use of zero tolerance policies in schools to make them precursors to prison, especially for black students. This law expresses both disturbing habits in two distinct ways.

We Should All Step Back from Security Journalism →

...While it’s not been key to my reporting for the last 18 months, much of my career as a journalist has involved reported pieces on legal and illegal hacking, activist and otherwise.

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Part of Barrett Brown’s 63 month sentence, issued yesterday, is a 12 month sentence for a count of Accessory After the Fact, of the crime of hacking Stratfor. This sentence was enhanced by Brown’s posting a link in chat and possessing credit card data. This, and a broad pattern of misunderstanding and criminalizing normal behavior online, has lead me to feel that the situation for journalists and security researchers is murky and dangerous.

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Barrett Brown crossed lines that journalists shouldn’t cross, and when he threatened the family of a man whom he hated, he crossed a line humans shouldn’t cross. But in holding that he had done something potentially criminally wrong in posting a link, the government has also crossed a line. They threatened a behavior basic to the operation of the net, by conflating pointing at data and examining it, with using that data for fraudulent purposes.

In seeking to punish people who find themselves in receipt of information such as credit card data, or perhaps hack logs and vulnerability information, with charges as if they’d broken in and gotten the information themselves, the government chills the basic techniques used every day to keep us safer and more informed.

As the legal system drifts further out of sync with reality, the danger slowly but surely grows. When many journalists working on national and commercial cyber and security issues, and just about everyone working in security is an unindicted felon, such indictments will drift into the area of political suppression and corporate backlash. This is a process well under way in the American system.

God and the G.O.P. →

A look into the religious feuds within the GOP, e.g.:

If voters didn’t know this side of [Mitt Romney], it was largely because he and his advisers had treated his Mormon faith as a liability, hardly to be spoken of, in part out of fear that it would alienate evangelicals in the Party’s base.

or

...There has never been a Catholic Republican nominee for the White House (the Mormons, interestingly, got there first), although there may be one this year, with a field that includes Rick Santorum, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush, who converted to Catholicism, his wife’s faith, some twenty years ago. For them, the issue is not one of religious bigotry, such as John F. Kennedy faced in his 1960 campaign, with insinuations of adherence to secret Papist instructions. In a way, it’s the opposite: the very public agenda of the all too authentic Pope Francis.

How big banks turn prisons into profit centers →

...Cavaluzzi's meal cost about $10. Or as Cavaluzzi puts it: "Everything. It was everything. I was used to making $10 a month."

He made that money as a librarian in prison, where wages start at 11 cents an hour. But those hard-earned dollars disappeared faster than he expected, and when he called Chase, he found out the reason was fees.

"It just seemed a little..." Cavaluzzi trails off. "It was sketchy."

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"There's this split mentality – on the one hand, we are saying we would like to re-integrate people, and on the other hand, we are having lots of policies that undermine their ability to reintegrate," she says.

Still, contracting with private companies that charge inmates for their services is hardly exceptional.

The Activity Gap: Access to after-school programs is growing more unequal, and that's pushing disadvantaged kids further behind →

Though their names are pseudonyms, Ethan and Nicole are real people who were interviewed as part of a national study recently featured in Voices in Urban Education, a publication out of Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. The objective of the study was to examine trends in extracurricular participation among kids in the U.S. from the 1970s until today through long-term data and conversations with 120 young adults across the country.

What the researchers found is, as they note in the article, "alarming." Income-based differences in extracurricular participation are on the rise, and these differences greatly affect later outcomes. This disparity exacerbates the already-growing income achievement gap that has kept poor children behind in school and later in life. While upper- and middle-class students have become more active in school clubs and sports teams over the past four decades, their working-class peers "have become increasingly disengaged and disconnected," particularly since their participation rates started plummeting in the '90s, the study found.

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Indeed, the benefits of extracurricular activities—from chess club to the yearbook committee—appear to be far-reaching. Research shows that the skills, habits, connections, and knowledge that kids develop in these activities help them gain self-esteem and resilience and reduce the likelihood that they’ll engage in risky behavior such as drug use, delinquency, and sexual activity. They could even lead to higher wages and more opportunities for career advancement, as well as increase the likelihood of voting and engaging in politics.

The FCC has changed the definition of broadband →

Internet speeds aren't just a luxury. Any number of businesses rely heavily on quick communications. It also matters in the aggregate: how fast does the U.S. as a whole communicate? Even small bumps in speed can mean substantial savings. This is important:

As part of its 2015 Broadband Progress Report, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to change the definition of broadband by raising the minimum download speeds needed from 4Mbps to 25Mbps, and the minimum upload speed from 1Mbps to 3Mbps, which effectively triples the number of US households without broadband access. Currently, 6.3 percent of US households don’t have access to broadband under the previous 4Mpbs/1Mbps threshold, while another 13.1 percent don't have access to broadband under the new 25Mbps downstream threshold.

The U.S. is well behind most of the rest of the first world on internet speeds thanks to our increasingly anti-competitive industry, and a Congress that doesn't understand or care:

...With the US currently ranked 25th in the world in broadband speeds, the FCC's decision will force cable providers to step up speeds for everyone, something that probably would have happened with even a little competition in the broadband market.

When Women Stopped Coding →

Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way.

A lot of computing pioneers — the people who programmed the first digital computers — were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men. But in 1984, something changed. The percentage of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged, even as the share of women in other technical and professional fields kept rising.

What happened?