Topic: DRUGS - on August 1, 2016 at 4:46:00 PM CEST
Is cannabis really getting stronger?
Cannabis continues to be the world’s favourite illicit drug with around 147m people using it annually. However, there are fears that the drug is becoming increasingly potent and that it could pose a public health risk. But how reliable is the evidence? And is it really getting stronger? The debate about cannabis potency and harm is long running. In the UK, where there are 2m annual users, it predates the 2004 downgrading of cannabis classification from class B to class C. But this episode demonstrated some of the issues with estimating the harms of the drug. Research conducted at the time highlighted how the relative harms of cannabis compared with other class B substances was one of the factors behind the decision to reclassify. However, critics accused the government of ignoring emerging evidence that cannabis was becoming more potent and that it represented a serious public health problem.
rawstory.com Achtung Canvas-Fingerprinting
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Topic: SECURITY - on August 1, 2016 at 4:45:00 PM CEST
Chaos Computer Club: "Das Darknet macht keine Waffen"
Nur eine Plattform für Kriminelle? Nach dem Amoklauf in München warnt der Chaos Computer Club vor der Verteufelung des anonymen Internets.
SZ: Der Amokläufer von München hat sich seine Waffe im Darknet besorgt. Warum warnt der Chaos Computer Club dennoch davor, den anonymen Bereich des Internets zu verteufeln?
Falk Garbsch: Ich bin mit dem Begriff Darknet nicht glücklich. Es geht um ein Tor-Netzwerk, über das sich ein User anonymisiert im Netz bewegen kann. Er kann sich damit vor der Totalüberwachung durch die NSA schützen. Bei der Revolutionsbewegung in Ägypten haben Tor-Netzwerke eine wichtige Rolle gespielt, damit die Menschen frei kommunizieren konnten.
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Topic: WEB - on August 1, 2016 at 4:42:00 PM CEST
When the Internet Came to Everest
It was morning on May 10. I was in a teahouse in Dingboche, a remote Nepalese village about a two-day trek from the Mt. Everest base camp, sipping instant coffee, watching the sun rise from behind snow-crested Himalayan peaks, and trawling my Facebook feed using the Everest Link Wi-Fi network.
My guide Bishnu checked the day’s weather forecast on his smartphone. Although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, he told me there was snow expected later in the afternoon. I was skeptical, but he said it would be best to leave sooner rather than later.
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Topic: AUSTRIA - on August 1, 2016 at 4:40:00 PM CEST
Austrian Mint sells 41 tonnes of gold coins and gold bars in 2015
Earlier this year, the director of marketing and sales at the Austrian Mint confirmed to Bloomberg in an interview that the Mint’s combined gold bar and gold coin sales in 2015 had totalled 1.32 million troy ounces, a 45% increase on 2014, while the Mint’s silver sales in 2015 had reached 7.3 million ounces, a figure 58% higher than in 2014. Since Münze Österreich, or the Austrian Mint in English, only publishes its annual report in July of each year, we had to wait a few months to see the granular details behind these sales numbers. Now that the Austrian Mint’s 2015 Annual Report has been published, the detailed sales figures are as follows.
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Topic: EU - on August 1, 2016 at 4:39:00 PM CEST
EU-US Privacy Shield open for sign ups from today
U.S. companies needing to transfer personal data of European customers across the Atlantic can now sign up to a new framework to govern such data transfers, with the so-called EU-US Privacy Shield up and running from today. The European Commission has also now published the legal texts associated with the Privacy Shield agreement, along with a citizens guide — which aims to provide information to EU consumers as to how they can go about making complaints about the handling of their data by US companies, should they feel the need to. The new data transfer deal was officially adopted by the EC last month, bringing to a close some nine months of limbo in the wake of the region’s Court of Justice decision to topple the predecessor framework last year (while failing entirely to end the uncertainty that the demise of Safe Harbor has wrought — given that critics continue to question Privacy Shield’s robustness to future legal challenge).
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Topic: EU - on August 1, 2016 at 4:37:00 PM CEST
Don't forget the role of the press in Brexit
They lied and they got away with it and that’s outrageous – since the referendum this sentiment has prompted hundreds of thousands of words of commentary, and rightly so. A crisis so grave and unexpected inevitably makes us suspect some underlying, fundamental shift that we must hurry to comprehend, and so ideas that were not previously at the centre of our thinking have arrived there, with a bang. We ask ourselves whether we have entered a post-factual society dominated by emotion, whether social media are killing the truth, whether society is fracturing in ways that traditional political discourse can’t express.
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Topic: POLITIK - on August 1, 2016 at 4:36:00 PM CEST
The Psychopathology of Donald Trump
Does Donald Trump only say crazy things, or does he say crazy things because he actually is crazy? In a speech delivered on the third day of the Democratic National Convention, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg openly questioned the GOP candidate’s sanity on prime-time television. More importantly, if less sensationally, the issue of Trump’s emotional stability has also been raised by a growing number of influential and highly respected mental-health practitioners. They have done so out of a sense of urgency, even in the face of a code of conduct promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association that cautions psychiatrists against making public statements about public figures whom they have not formally evaluated.
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