Submission + - FBI data-mines grocery stores. Did Visa/MC help? (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Recent media reports indicate that in 2005-06, the FBI went trawling through grocery store records in order to track down Iranian terror cells. They hoped to be able to locate Iranians through the purchase of specific food items. The problem with this, of course, is that most Iranians buy their middle eastern food at small ethnic markets, and not the big supermarket chains — for the simple reason that muslims are required to eat halal meat, which is not sold in most places.
The majority of mom and pop ethnic markets do not have the detailed computer purchase histories that Safeway or Whole Foods have. Thus, what is more likely is that the FBI simply put together a list of everyone who had purchased anything at a middle eastern food market. As this "CNET article discusses, all signs point to the credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, Amex) providing this data, and not the individual stores. This could be the tip of a (potentially illegal) data-mining iceberg.
http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9812473-46.html
Submission + - School shooting at .fi after YouTube videos
An anonymous reader writes: Today a school shooting took place in Finnish school of Jokela, Tuusula. My big condolences to all families and friends of its victims. :(
A student with obvious mental problems took lives of seven people (status at 15:51 +2UTC, one critical with head wound in hospital) with .22 caliber pistol. His is now in police custody. According to his now closed youtube account his previous account got removed: YouTube suspended my previous account but I am back now :) My new account name is German and means "Stormspirit" in English. — reasons that it was full of similar videos showing that he is planning this massacre. People at Youtube and its users surely think that they should have done more than close his account. The question is, how many others are out there, and will we learn something about this? How this will change our access to online services like youtube and goverment reactions to such cases in the future? Finnish PM Matti Vanhanen already stated that it's extremely difficult to prepare to such incidents but I don't fully agree with him as there were clear evident in youtube days before and lot of people saw it.
A really sad story indeed. :(
A student with obvious mental problems took lives of seven people (status at 15:51 +2UTC, one critical with head wound in hospital) with
A really sad story indeed.
Submission + - Your Brain Knows More than You Do
Hugh Pickens writes: "Have you even "known" something was true that later turned out to be mistaken? Our memories are not always trustworthy but recent research shows that vivid false memories that may seem indistinguishable from true memories may be processed by different parts of the brain. Using an MRI, the study showed (pdf) that when participants had confidence in their answer and they were correct, blood flow increased to the medial temporal lobes containing the hippocampus, important for memory. When subjects had confidence in their answer but were wrong, the frontoparietal region lit up, a region of the brain associated with a "sense of familiarity." The research could one day be used to devise an early test for Alzheimer's disease, or to assess the accuracy of witness testimony and underscores the fact that judges and juries should not use a witness's confidence in their own answers as a signal that the answers are more likely to be true. "It is really surprising, but there is a very weak relation between accuracy and confidence," says Valerie Reyna, a cognitive neuroscientist at Cornell University."
