An anonymous reader writes "The site 12 Angry Men recently published a discussion of a widely used but little-known online scam called 'cross-selling'. Essentially, after-sale shops cut deals with shady online retailers in an attempt to make a quick buck off of you after you've already bought something. 'What actually happens is that instead of linking to the site as a separate session, they link internally as another page in the same session. Why is this important? When you do a credit card transaction, any reputable company will attempt to protect your credit card data. They do this by establishing an SSL session to encrypt sensitive data on-line.' What makes everything even more interesting is that now the company has responded, with the usual white washing and meaningless statements."

aalobode writes "The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book by Alex Boase, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments. There they list the top science experiments — including the one from which the book gets its name — that were conducted by otherwise sane humans who tragically or otherwise ignored the effect of their research on the subjects themselves. Nowadays, most institutions have a review board for research on human subjects which would flag most proposals that could lead to harm for the subjects, but not so in the past. 'Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries. They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.'"

SoyChemist writes "Psychologists at the University of Nebraska have read 300 threatening letters and 99 angry emails to members of Congress. They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages show less signs of serious mental illness, but they are more profane and disorganized. The report was published in the September issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences."

Gamespot reports on the rumours swirling around the possibility of an Elder Scrolls Massively Multiplayer Online Game. They began when ZeniMax formed their very own Massive development company, ZeniMax Online. The company subsequently hired Matt Firor, formerly of EA Mythic, as its head. Now, the discussion online is centering on the registration of a URL that hints at big things to come for Bethesda's world. Pete Hines, spokesman for Bethesda, has a perfectly rational explanation: '"We are tired of people squatting on domains related to our games or simply not being able to get them if we needed them (note oblivion.com, fallout.com, and many others) and decided a while back we'd get these to keep it from happening again ... People are grabbing domains like these and trying to extract money from us for them, or using them for some other purpose.' Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus that the URL registration confirms the existence of an Elder Scrolls MMORPG. However, with others holding the Fallout and Star Trek MMORPG rights, the RPG franchise--famous for having MMORPG-size open worlds--is the only truly proven property in Bethesda's catalog."

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Geist posts to his site about a study commissioned by the Canadian government intended to look into the buying habits of music fans. What the study found is that 'there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.' The report is entitled The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada, and it was 'conducted collaboratively by two professors from the University of London, Industry Canada, and Decima Research, who surveyed over 2,000 Canadians on their music downloading and purchasing habits. The authors believe this is the first ever empirical study to employ representative microeconomic data.'"