Uruguay unveils plans to allow government to sell

Uruguay’s national government has said it plans to send a bill to Congress that would allow it to sell marijuana, making it the first country in the world to do so.

Under the plan, only the government would be allowed to sell marijuana and only to adults who register on a government database when buying the drug to keep track of their purchases over time.

Minister of Defence Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro told reporters at a press conference in Montevideo that the measure aims to weaken crime in the country by removing profits from drug dealers and diverting users from harder drugs.

He said the bill would be sent to Congress soon, but an exact date had not been set.

Uruguayan newspapers have reported that money from taxes on marijuana sold by the government would go towards rehabilitating drug addicts. The government did not provide details.

There are no laws against marijuana use in Uruguay. Possession of the drug for personal use has never been criminalised.

Media reports have said that people who use more than a limited number of marijuana cigarettes would have to undergo drug rehabilitation and that money from taxes on the cigarettes would go to rehabilitating addicts.

But some Uruguayans wondered how successful such a measure could be.

“People who consume are not going to buy it from the state,” said Natalia Pereira, 28, adding that she smokes marijuana occasionally. “They’re going to mistrust buying it from a place where you have to register and they can typecast you.”

A debate over the move lit up social media networks in the country, with some people worried about free sales of marijuana and others joking about it.

“Legalising marijuana is not a security measure,” one man in the capital of Uruguay wrote on his Twitter account.

“Ha, ha, ha!” joked another. “I can now imagine you going down to the kiosk to buy bread, milk and a little box of marijuana.”

The idea is to weaken crime by removing profits from drug dealers and diverting users from harder drugs.

“The main argument for this is to stop addicts from dealing and reaching (crack-like) substances” such as base paste, said Juan Carlos Redin, a psychologist who works with drug addicts in Montevideo.

“Some studies conclude that a large number of base paste consumers first looked for milder drugs like marijuana and ended with freebase.”

Mr Redin said Uruguayans should be allowed to grow their own marijuana because the government would run into trouble if it tries to sell it. The big question he said will be, “Who will provide the government (with marijuana)?”

“If they actually sell it themselves, and you have to go to the Uruguay government store to buy marijuana, then that would be a precedent for sure, but not so different than from the dispensaries in half the United States,” said Allen St.Pierre, executive director of US-based National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML.

Mr St Pierre said the move would make Uruguay the only national government in the world selling marijuana. Numerous dispensaries on the local level in the US are allowed to sell marijuana for medical use.

Source: Hang the Bankers

ACTA rejected by committee in crucial blow before final EU Parliament vote

The International Trade Committee (INTA) of the European Parliament recommends rejecting ACTA.

The committee rejected the controversial legislation 19 votes to 12. This is the fourth and final committee to deliver its report on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will likely affect the European Parliament’s vote early July.

MEP Marietje Schaake, a member of the INTA committee, shares her satisfaction about the vote on the “undesirable treaty.”

“With this vote my committee has given an important advice to the plenary vote in two weeks. The EU should reject ACTA,” says Schaake, who has opposed ACTA since the beginning.

“ACTA contains some troublesome provisions for policy areas such as internet freedom and access to medicines. By regulating several policy areas in one document, ACTA enforces laws in an undesirable and dangerous way,” she adds.

“The way is now paved for a quick and total rejection of ACTA by the European Parliament! With a political symbol of such a global scale, the way will be open for copyright to be reformed in a positive way, in order to encourage our cultural practices instead of blindly repressing them,” concludes Jeremie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net told RT.

ACTA is aimed at protecting copyright in many industries from software engineering to agriculture. Critics say the national governments would have to make a draconian attack on online privacy to implement provisions of the treaty on their soil.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has been in development since 2007. The purpose of the international document has been establishing international standards for intellectual property rights and creating a global framework for targeting counterfeit goods on the Internet.

ACTA supporters claim the treaty is the only way to respond to pirated copyright and global trade of counterfeit goods. Their opponents insist ACTA is an act of war, that would create a new governing body outside the existing World Trade Organization and United Nations.

In February, the EU suspended efforts to ratify the ACTA treaty due to a wave of protests from human rights activists and Internet users. Thousands rallied across the EU over the amount of power ACTA would give global corporations.

Source: RT

Malware Wars: Software Vendor Claims CIA and NSA Infiltrated Microsoft

According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of antivirus and security software vendor F-Secure, U.S. intelligence infiltrated Microsoft’s core Windows and application development programming teams in order to spread the Stuxnet, Dugu, and Flame viruses.

A screen capture of a Windows error message on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant’s map.

“The announcement that links Flame to Stuxnet and the conclusive proof that Stuxnet was a US tool means that Flame is also linked to the US government,” Hypponen told PC Pro last week.

“This makes you think that this breach of Microsoft’s update system was done by the Americans and most likely a US agency, someone like the NSA,” Hypponen said. “That must make Microsoft mad as hell that its most critical system, used by 900 million of its customers, was breached by fellow Americans.”

Although the NSA has worked with Microsoft in the past, Hypponen does not believe the software giant collaborated with the NSA and the CIA to exploit their own operating system.

“I don’t think Microsoft was in on it, that it was helping the US government and I don’t believe that because it looks very bad for Microsoft. I find it very hard to believe that Microsoft’s top management would have approved that,” he said.

“It’s plausible that if there is an operation under way and being run by a US intelligence agency it would make perfect sense for them to plant moles inside Microsoft to assist in pulling it off, just as they would in any other undercover operation. It’s not certain, but it would be common sense to expect they would do that.”

In 2003, it was speculated that the CIA had worked with Microsoft to build a backdoor for intelligence purposes in its software. In 2009, the NSA and the Defense Department worked with Microsoft on Windows 7 security measures.

“The key problem is that NSA has a dual mission,” Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronics Privacy Information Center, said at the time.

Following the revelation that the NSA was illegally collecting vast amounts of data on American citizens via the internet, Michael McConnell, then Director of National Intelligence, said the U.S. government should have unlimited and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private emails and file transfers.

Earlier this week it was reported that the U.S. and Israel collaborated on the sophisticated Flame virus which they unleashed on Iran’s oil industry and its nuclear program. Experts now believe Flame was built by the “same nation-state responsible for the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iran’s nuclear power plant in 2010. Many suspect Stuxnet was the work of Israeli intelligence,” Fox News reported.

The CIA, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as well as the Israeli Embassy in Washington, declined to comment.

Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered a link between the two viruses earlier this month. Both take advantage of infected machines by exploiting a Windows flaw to launch the “autorun” feature.

Source: Infowars

Even bigger Big Brother: Facebook purchases Israeli facial recognition company Face.com

Facebook has purchased the facial recognition startup Face.com since Facebook has come under fire from European regulators for revealing a massive facial recognition database and been busted for spying on the text messages of smartphone users, showing a complete disregard for privacy.

If you continue to use Facebook in a state of ignorant bliss, hopefully this will help you wake up to the reality of what this internet giant is really up to.

A Facebook spokesperson put it, this acquisition seems purely logical and perfectly in line with their business model.

“People who use Facebook enjoy sharing photos and memories with their friends, and Face.com’s technology has helped to provide the best photo experience,” said the Facebook spokesperson to VentureBeat. “This transaction simply brings a world-class team and a long-time technology vendor in house.”

It also greatly enhances their facial recognition capabilities which Facebook will also most likely be applying to all photos captured by the other company recently purchased by Facebook: Instagram.

The privacy issues inherent in Faceboook’s move to snatch up Face.com are so blatant and impossible to ignore that even InformationWeek has raised the issue in an article entitled, “Facebook Buys Face.com: At What Privacy Cost?”

The actual terms of the deal between Facebook and Face.com have yet to be disclosed to the public but the previous reports released on the subject have placed the purchase price somewhere in the neighborhood of $80-100 million.

The pending deal is expected to come to be closed at some point in the next few weeks.

Face.com, which is a relatively new company founded in and based out of Israel, boasts some of the most cutting-edge consumer facial recognition technology which can not only identify people but also guess the age of a person in the photo.

One of their products is a camera application for iOS (which runs on iPhones and iPads) called KLIK which uses Face.com’s facial recognition technology to automatically tag their Facebook friends in photographs.

Reuters reports that a third-party Facebook application tracking service called AppData has reported that KLIK boasts 40,000 monthly active Facebook users.

“We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people’s lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph,” said Face.com CEO Gil Hirsch.

“By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we’ll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers — that’s all we’ve ever wanted to do,” he added.

Reuters also reports that Facebook has quickly acted in an attempt to improve their image after the somewhat failed public launch by making some well thought out purchases and hires.

Facebook recently purchased Karma, a mobile “gifting” application, as well as iOS developers Pieceable Software and there have also been reports of Facebook investigating acquiring Opera for their mobile browser.

While all of this might sound fine and dandy, I would encourage my readers to consider the privacy implications as well.

Source: End te Lie

Monsanto Faced with Paying 7.5 Billion Back to Farmers

Monsanto may soon be forced to pay as much as 7.5 billion dollars back to the farmers who say that the mega corporation took their rightfully earned income and taxed their small businesses to financial shambles.

It all started with a monumental lawsuit launched by over 5 million farmers against Monsanto looking to recover financial losses from ridiculous seed taxes that bankrupted many families.

Back in April, a Brazilian court ruled that Monsanto absolutely was responsible for paying back the exorbitant amounts of cash to the farmers, ordering the company to issue back all of the taxes collected since 2004 — a minimum of 2 billion dollars. Afterwards, Monsanto appealed the decision and the case is now suspended until a further hearing is initiated by the Justice Tribune of the local court stationed in Rio Grande do Sul.

Recently, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared that any decision reached in a local court case should apply nationally. The result? Monsanto now faces even larger charges, due to the larger legal application on a national level. Now, the charges total or exceed 7.5 billion dollars.

“The values involved could total 15 billion reais ($7.5bn),” said the Superior Tribunal of Justice on its website.

Lawsuits and criminal charges continue to hit Monsanto, scratching away at the financial foundation of the agricultural behemoth.

Monsanto has been found guilty of chemical poisoning in France after their weedkiller product led to neurological problems, and the company has even dished out 93 million to victims of toxic dioxin.

As Monsanto continues to be slammed with lawsuits, many of which are from multitudes of affected farmers and individuals, awareness spreads among the general public regarding the corporation’s true acts.

It was this same corporation that was caught running what has been labeled slave rings, in which workers were forced to work for 14 hours or more per day cultivating the fields, and were not permitted to leave. Monsanto’s crimes are slowly coming to light, and the public is demanding action.

Source: Activist Post