A California Boy Was Kidnapped from a Park in 1951. He's Just Been Found Alive (sfgate.com) 104
An anonymous reader shared this story from SFGate:
A boy who was kidnapped from an Oakland playground in 1951 has been found alive on the East Coast, a remarkable resolution to a mystery that has haunted his family for over half a century.
On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched...
Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966...
Decades passed.
In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back.
Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.
In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple....
When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."
On February 21, 1951, 6-year-old Luis Armando Albino was playing with his older brother Roger at Jefferson Square Park. The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico... That afternoon, Luis and 10-year-old Roger walked down the block from their home at 730 Brush Street to play in the park. They were approached by a woman in her 30s, wearing a green bandana over her hair, who began chatting with Luis in Spanish. She promised she would buy him candy if he came along with her, and little Luis agreed to join her. Wary, Roger trailed the pair for a while before returning home to alert an adult to the strange encounter. Oakland police were called by frantic family members and a search was immediately launched...
Antonia [the boy's mother] was convinced her son was alive. "She came once a week, then once a month, then at least once a year, to see the shake of the head, to have the answer 'no' translated for her although she could read it in the officers' faces," the Oakland Tribune wrote in 1966...
Decades passed.
In 2020, Luis' niece, Alida Alequin, took a DNA test on a whim, the Mercury News reported. The service returned several possible family members to the Oakland woman. One of them was a man who Alequin had never met. After some internet sleuthing, she began to suspect this man might be the missing uncle she'd heard so much about. She reached out to the man but didn't hear back.
Earlier this year, Alequin tried again. Armed with photos, she took her evidence to the Oakland Police Department's missing persons unit. In short order, the FBI and California Department of Justice were also investigating Alequin's lead. They discovered the man was living on the East Coast, had worked as a firefighter and served two tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps. This week, the Mercury News first reported that a DNA test confirmed what Alequin suspected: This was Luis Albino.
In June, Luis flew to California to reunite with his family, among them his devoted brother Roger... For over 70 years, he lived on the East Coast believing he was the son of another couple....
When Luis met Alequin for the first time this summer, he held her in an embrace. "Thank you," he said, "for finding me."
no means no (Score:2)
Re: no means no (Score:1)
I really wish white people would abide by that.
You don't 'immigrate' from Puerto Rico to CA (Score:5, Informative)
Life is Stranger Than... (Score:2)
... [Spoiler Alert!] True Detective Season 3 [wikipedia.org] fiction.
Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
For sharing such a heart warming story in these miserable times. I don't care it is not about tech, we just dont get enough positive news these days.
Re: Thank you (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ironically, that link fails.
It seems to be good, just says it's redirecting improperly.
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Positive news doesn't sell. Negative news gets far more attention, clicks, ad revenue, and potential to motivate action. Making people good and mad is a very powerful political tool, as well.
There's no "these days" about it. The emphasis on negative news has been around ever since there was news.
Incidentally, too much of it absolutely does skew your perception of reality. It's normal for people to believe that their neighborhoods and the world in general is much more dangerous than it is. Every strange
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Shows itself with crime stats versus perception (Score:2)
This shows itself in the disconnect between crime rates and people's perceptions of crime. Quite a lot of people honestly believe things are more dangerous in terms of crime today than when they were kids when it is in fact significantly safer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] . Likewise people who watch certain news channels think migrant crime is a major problem for our country when migrants commit far less crime than native born Americans and always have https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.10... [pnas.org] , https://www.kp [kpbs.org]
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It is mostly a positive story. I feel bad for the mother. She died in 2005. Well before the lost son was found.
A 6 year old just shrugged and switched families? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A 6 year old just shrugged and switched familie (Score:5, Interesting)
Biographical memory is much more malleable than most people realize. Human memory is not like a hard drive where you put bits of data into it and then retrieve them later unchanged. Human biographical recall is more like reimagining of things that happened to you in the past. It's like your brain has a kind of schema for what happened, but your mind's eye fills in the details. That makes it very easy to add and delete details, and every time you recall a memory the schema changes a little bit. One neuroscientist I heard speak described it this way: the best way to preserve someone's memory of an event is to put them into a coma.
We begin to form long term biographical memories around age 4, although for the next four or five years most of what we remember is fragmentary and all of it is subject to manipulation. I suspect it's still possible to gaslight many six year-olds so that after several years they replace their actual parents in their sparse biographical memory with their kidnappers.
Of course you have to account for neurodiversity; at age six it wouldn't work with every child. I have a sister who has uncanny biographical recall. She can tell you stuff like Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile on a Wednesday because she remembers seeing it on the Thursday night news back in 1954. If you check up on her you'll find she's absolutely right. But I still wouldn't take her word for anything she says about what led up to her recent divorce, not because she's dishonest, but because memory f's with you.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:2)
Good answer, but that's not what gaslighting is. Extremely common mistake but it's making someone believe they're going crazy, not trying l tricking them or lying to them.
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It's exactly what gaslighting is. You make them think that their memories of another life are crazy. The term comes from a story where the husband does various things like turning down the gas lights so that the house is very dark, but pretending to his wife that it's just as bright as always to make her think she is going crazy. Telling a child that their memories of another family are false and probably filling their heads with fake memories is pretty much exactly the same concept. It's all about making t
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In 1951 phones would be a lot less common, his family might not have had one or access to one wherever he was taken to. Also having just moved countries, he might not remember their new address yet.
If the new family treated him especially well, he might not have wanted to return either. Kids are very easy to bribe, and as you get older your memory from such young ages fades and blurs.
The other question is what happened to the other family? Surely they should be arrested (if they're still alive) if they know
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The other family is long dead. If in 1951 they were in their thirties, now they would be over 100 years old.
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6 year old children definitely know who their parents are, where they live, a phone number or two, addresses, etc., so yes, that's a question.
My parents did not have a phone in 1951 - in the UK and not poor. Most people didn't at the time. When the first person in a street did eventually get one, the rest of the street expected to borrow it. I doubt that a single immigrant mother with 6 kids would have had one either.
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Or maybe he liked his new family better.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:3)
Kids dont forget that sort of thing. The details maybe, but not the main facts.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:5, Informative)
Kids kidnapped at age 8 or under stop trying to return home pretty quickly, coming to accept stories for their new living situation and losing details of their old one.
And memories are malleable. I have few memories before age 8, and the ones I do have e.g. older and more familiar versions of my parents copy-and-pasted in. I am often surprised looking at old photos.
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Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids dont forget that sort of thing. The details maybe, but not the main facts.
Uhmmm..No. No disrespect intended, but you are completely incorrect. My Mother left my Father when I was 7. She took all the kids except for me and left me with my Father. It was literally the most earth shattering thing that ever happened in my life and has always affected me. I have no memory of when she and my siblings left and the days that followed. My first memory afterwards is being in my Father's truck at night, listening to the radio as he and a friend worked on the mobile home trailer.
Children's brains are incredible pieces of engineering that works to protect the child from life threatening mental incidents and part of that defense mechanism is just making them forget. Which is what happened to me.
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Well I haven't forgotten any of my fathers alcoholic behaviour when I was 4 and 5 so perhaps I just have a better memory than most.
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Presumably because your father re-inforced that earlier memory over time. Now if your mother divorced at age 5 and a different father figure took his place I suspect you will have forgotten your father's alcohol abuse quite easily - or maybe you won't have forgotten the abuse, but incorrectly attributed it to the wrong "father".
Memory is fucked like that.
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There are so many psychology studies on the mutability of memory at this point that I don't need to point out how wrong you are.
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In the 1950s kids didn't have cell phones or the internet. He might not have known mother's telephone number or postal address.
When I was 6 years old, there also were no cell phones or the Internet. But I can still recite the number of my parent's land-line from back then (despite it having been obsolete for > 40 years), and of course I knew the name of the city and the name of the street and the number of the house we lived in, even the license-plate number of the car my father drove back then.
Sure the child may have been hindered to contact his family by the abductors for some time, but he certainly had plenty of opportunity
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The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico
So the numbers and address that he knew as a 6yo where most likely not the current one.
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Maybe you missed the part where it said they RECENTLY MOVED from Puerto Rico. Do you think they kept the same phone number and address?
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When I was 6 years old, there also were no cell phones or the Internet. But I can still recite the number of my parent's land-line from back then (despite it having been obsolete for > 40 years), and of course I knew the name of the city and the name of the street and the number of the house we lived in, even the license-plate number of the car my father drove back then.
You're confusing different kinds of memory. Remembering phone numbers and addresses long-term is semantic memory. The kind of memory in question here is biographical memory. They are different and develop differently at different ages. Imagine if you could remember those numbers and addresses, but had no context for them. That's what happens if your biographical memory is altered. The semantic memories effectively have no anchor point.
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In the 1950s a lot of people didn't even have a phone. In the 1970s a lot of people shared a single line and were supposed to pick up the receiver based on a morse-like ring pattern.
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It was 1951 and he was from Puerto Rico. Kids in 1951 were not as smart as the kids of today. It's thanks to technologies such as, radio, TV, telephone, computers, internet, mobile phone etc. that today's kids are much smarter than kids of the past. Luis probably never ever saw any of those devices before he was kidnapped.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:2)
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The progress was almost entirely in areas where poor nutrition and lack of education impacted scores in the 19th century. In fact, within the US there has been a decline since the 1990s so it's entirely possible that scores are similar or below what they were in the 1950s.
And on top of this, there have been changes over the years to "adjust" IQ scores according to meet other than strictly scientific goals. You can Google if you want to learn more about that, i'm not looking to start any food fights here.
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In the 90's, I was living in a rural area. I saw little girl walking down the street and I thought that odd. So I went to talk to her, I stooped so we were eye level, hopefully not to scare her. I asked her where she lived, it was right next door. I asked her what her phone number was so I could at least call them first. She didn't know. I finally wound up walking her back home but before we left the road, her mother pulled up. The kid had been left off the school bus and finding no one home decided to go w
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Or maybe even just telling him "Your parents were sadly killed in a car accident" right away.
I don't see that as a hole at all.
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I find it disturbing that people have that much unfounded confidence in the solidity of human memory that they think this is a hole in the story. This story, where an abducted child ends up accepting their situation and their old life just fades away has repeated so many times. It's inconceivable by now that anyone finds it surprising. Cases where young abducted children hang on to their old lives and escape back to it at the first opportunity are extremely rare. They also seem to only happen very early on
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Easier: I am your real mother and I love you very much, see all those candies?
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If he had been prepped with "we're going to have a new life after we move", and then the kidnappers are telling him "This is your home now, we're you're parents," and everyone new he meets is acting like that's the case (because they think it is), a
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in the linked news article:
The abducted boy "had some memories of the kidnapping and his trip across the country, but the adults in his life never answered his questions."
At that age, I'm not confident I could have done any better.
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People have way too much confidence in memory. How much do you honestly remember from when you were six? Also, a lot of memory is reconstruction. We don't remember what actually happened, we reconstruct it from cues and biases and remember what we think probably happened as what actually happened. Pretty much every experiment on eyewitnesses, for example, has demonstrated that eyewitness testimony is mostly useless. Too many people who weren't even there report having seen events because they heard about th
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A clever trick the Satanists know, involving a combination of drugs, hypnosis, and torture will wipe a child's mind fairly clean of any such impulses. After a dozen or so years, the lie becomes as real to them as the truth.
Re: A 6 year old just shrugged and switched famili (Score:1)
Which is pretty ironic, given the fact that more or less all accusations of Satanic ritual abuse themselves really are evidence of the suggestibility of young children to false memories.
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Trust me, they're out there brainwashing children and they've been doing it for at least decades, if not centuries, and I was one of their victims, as were a bunch of other children I knew at the time.
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(By the way, I know you're just another Satanist astroturfer in full damage control mode here, I guess because you guys must have run out of sock puppet mod points for the day or something? Yea, anyway. You and I, we'll meet again, I promise.)
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Why would a 6 year old child not attempt to contact or return to his former family? It seems highly unlikely that he just "forgot" he had a different family before the "candy"-incident. Either the story is complete BS or there was good reason for the child to not miss his original family
I challenge you to distinctly remember times from that age. Actively challenge you. Of course they will try and contact or return to the former family... for a while. But after a while you give up. As an adult you've got fuck all chance of distinctly remembering before the age of 6 wildly different details under from your "normal" upbringing.
The third option you are missing: You have not idea how brains develop, how children learn behaviours, and at what point they develop strong willpower and resistance to
No explanation what the woman did with him? (Score:3)
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Re: No explanation what the woman did with him? (Score:2)
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There are so many studies on the ease of creating false memory that belief has nothing to do with it.
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The guy was found after his mom died, but just before his brother died, so I guess that's good. But he's lived the majority of his life without his blood family and seemingly had a decent life and there's no way to get that back which is a mix of good and bad.
You know what pisses me off? Somebody took somebody else's 6 year old and we have absolutely no indication that the law is coming down on them in any way. Or that they're dead and the law can't. This is a huge, huge missing part of the story and t
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Well there's a massive reading fail for me; I had it in my head he was in his late 50s. The 'retired' part didn't click because his career as a firefighter often comes with an early retirement.
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The chance is not 0. It is very low, but not 0.
Also, life expectancy at birth is not life expectancy at 30. When you reach 30, you have a lot bigger change to live to 100 than when you're just born.
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age 6 isnt so young he wouldn't have any memory
Of course he would have memory. But what do you actually remember? Only things re-enforced repeatedly over time. What starts of as a kidnapping over time changes to an encounter with a stranger culminating in returning home to the family with a vague memory of different people before then. Over time further your memory of those people change, you remember doing things with your family before the kidnapping, but can't remember they were different from the family you know.
My earliest childhood memory that I c
He didnâ(TM)t immigrate (Score:2)
Not tech, so it does not belong on Slashdot. (Score:2, Informative)
Turning Slashdot into a tabloid is contemptible. Yet another calculated step in wrecking the site the "editors" will never admit taking for that reason.
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I'd argue that DNA analysis indeed qualifies as "tech."
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You can't keep your DNA secret. There's enough DNA from both the microbiome and skin cells being put into the air that you can actually genetically fingerprint a person as they walk through a doorway.
A few loose hairs, and an isotope ratio check will show the general regions they've been in over the past few months.
Psychological studies have shown that the people who generally succeed in politics and business management are sociopaths, and you can't expect sociopaths to go easy on you. I'd suggest working t
"Immigrated" is definitely the wrong word (Score:2)
The boys had recently immigrated with their mother and four other siblings from Puerto Rico.
You don't say people "immigrate" to California from Arizona, or Virginia, or Alsaka, or Puerto Rico, or any other part of the US.
They just move there.
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M-W: to enter and usually become established
AH: To enter and settle in a country or region to which one is not native.
So M-W uses it in the most vague of terms and AH uses region in addition to country. There's tons of usage of the term immigrate to discuss the Western migration of people from the East Coast of the US as well as the post Civil War migrations of people from the Southern US to the Northern US. It
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Great job being an annoying pedant in service to racism. You manage to be insufferably annoying while defending bigotry, two strikes for the price of one! Perfect hill for someone like you to die on.
to have the answer 'no' translated (Score:2)
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The word "no" might be the same, but the translator had to say it with a Puerto-Rican accent.
How did he get a new Identity? (Score:2)
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Back in those days, kids didn't get SSNs. Birth certificates were not carefully tracked either. So obtaining one from a kid that died young would not have been a major problem. "Recently immigrated from Puerto Rico" would have made tracking even more difficult.
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> "Recently immigrated from Puerto Rico" would have made tracking even more difficult.
I mean... even today lots of Americans don't realize Puerto Ricans are Americans and can't actually 'immigrate'. Movement within the US is 'migrating' and to the average Joe, 'moving'.
So back in the day, I can't imagine it was better.
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Right. But the issue is less the immigration or migration and more the state of record keeping in Puerto Rico. In 1945, there were backwater places in the continental USA that didn't keep good birth records.
Just Wait... (Score:1)
...for the California State Board of Equalization (their form of IRS) gets their hands on this guy and sends him a BIGLY bill for all the back taxes he owes the State.
After all, it is California, and they are having budgetary shortfall problem again, and they are never ones to overlook an opportunity to tax you coming & going.
Just wait for the entry & exit barriers to be erected at all California airports, complete with armed guards, and a sign saying:
Pay Your State Taxes Here ... Even If You Are '
So much fear about DNA tests (Score:2)
But this story illustrates an important *positive* use case for DNA testing. This was a consumer-grade test that led to solving a decades-old kidnapping. All indications are that DNA is far more often used for *good* purposes than bad.
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>"But this story illustrates an important *positive* use case for DNA testing. This was a consumer-grade test that led to solving a decades-old kidnapping. All indications are that DNA is far more often used for *good* purposes than bad."
There is a huge incentive not to disclose or share what might be done that is bad. Plus, one of the most major bad things is that this data hangs around FOREVER once it is taken, and can be used for bad things way into the future.
Like most technological advancements, th
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All the "bad" things I've heard or read about related to DNA profiles, have been theoretical dystopian horror daydreams, not reality. Laws have already banned things like insurance use of DNA for purposes of setting premiums or denying coverage. Police have to get a warrant to collect DNA for suspect who has not already been arrested.
If you're worried about your DNA being used to track you, it's already too late. They don't need *your* DNA to find you, they just need DNA from a relative as distant as a thir
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FTDNA is pretty anonymous, and they're one of the older companies.
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My observation is that the good tends to come from the tech, the bad (eg: uBiome committing forgery and theft, 23&Me security failings) is attitude, negligence, and incompetence.
Simply enforce minimum standards in tech, from the ground up, and the companies should never get to the point of their failings resulting in unmitigated disaster.
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I agree with your observations.
It's significant that the uBiome incident was not targeted at individuals who had taken DNA tests, but rather, the company had committed securities fraud in a scheme to make money.
In the 23andMe case, hackers weren't interested in the DNA per se, but in the metadata held in 23andMe records. Though it's true that some of that stolen metadata was derived from DNA tests, it's the kind of metadata that can be obtained through other types of breaches not involving DNA tests.
The poi
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Propaganda for DNA? DNA exists!
DNA Aren't Real!
Re: I'm glad this boy was found. (Score:1)
Agree. but the important point (Score:1)
>they were approached by a woman in her 30s,
The general public based on media reporting mistakenly assumes that men commit more crimes. Women commit more crimes against children, especially against their own children.
More than half of child abuse https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Mothers kill their own children at far higher rates than fathers
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Is this subtle propaganda for DNA after negative publicity lately?
Fight Big DNA and its propaganda! Join the 80% of Americans who support mandatory labeling [washingtonpost.com] on foods containing DNA!
Re:Slow news day? (Score:5, Funny)
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Sounds like the push to ban dihydrogen monoxide.
And also explains a lot of the pushback against GMO.
It isn't that GMO is dangerous, it's that people have convinced others, into a circular feeding frenzy, that it is, with basically zero evidence. It's mostly distrust of the corporations these days.
Me, I realize that just analyzing the food for dangerous substances would be easier, and they already just spray most of them on. GMO tends to reduce the need for those sprays.
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Is this subtle propaganda for DNA after negative publicity lately [slashdot.org]?
Probably. Although I would not call it "subtle".
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23&Me was not a story about DNA, it was a story about sloppy security practices.