Linux fréttir

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

TheRegister - Sat, 2023-12-16 14:04
As world heads into 2024, scientists are asked: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Comment You surely noticed much of the world was on fire this year, especially if you were in the western United States, western or eastern Canada, Australia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Algeria, Tunisia... you get the idea.…

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Microsoft Releases Phi-2, a Small LLM That Outperforms Llama 2 and Mistral 7B

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 13:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from : Microsoft Research, the blue sky division of the software giant, [...] announced the release of its Phi-2 small language model (SML), a text-to-text AI program that is "small enough to run on a laptop or mobile device," according to a post on X. At the same time, Phi-2 with its 2.7 billion parameters (connections between artificial neurons) boasts performance that is comparable to other, much larger models including Meta's Llama 2-7B with its 7 billion parameters and even Mistral-7B, another 7 billion parameter model. Microsoft researchers also noted in their blog post on the Phi-2 release that it outperforms Google's brand new Gemini Nano 2 model despite it having half a billion more parameters, and delivers less "toxicity" and bias in its responses than Llama 2. Microsoft also couldn't resist taking a little dig at Google's now much-criticized, staged demo video for Gemini in which it showed off how its forthcoming largest and most powerful new AI model, Gemini Ultra, was able to solve fairly complex physics problems and even correct students' mistakes on them. As it turned out, even though it is likely a fraction of the size of Gemini Ultra, Phi-2 also was able to correctly answer the question and correct the student using the same prompts. However, despite these encouraging findings, there is a big limitation with Phi-2, at least for the time being: it is licensed only for "research purposes only," not commercial usage, under a custom Microsoft Research License, which further states Phi-2 may only be used for "non-commercial, non-revenue generating, research purposes." So, businesses looking to build products atop it are out of luck.

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Sales of Solana Phone Surge As Traders Chase BONK Arbitrage

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 10:00
Solana Saga smartphones sales are surging after arbitrage traders realized every phone comes with an airdrop of BONK meme coins valued at more than the cost of the hardware. "Saga sales have >10x'd in the past 48 hours, and are now on track to sell out before the new year," said Solana co-founder Raj Gokal in a post on X. As a result, Gokal's counterpart, Anatoly Yakovenko, said they'll need to raise the price. CoinDesk reports: The euphoria around BONK -- Solana's dog-themed equivalent to Dogecoin -- has led to a turnaround story for Saga, which just one week ago faced dimming prospects amid forgettable sales figures. Saga is a blockchain-enabled smartphone with special features for storing one's crypto securely on the phone's own hardware. The Saga Discord server exploded on Thursday with newcomers declaring they just bought the phone and wanted to get the airdrop. According to posts on the Discord server, the BONK airdrop is available to those who download the BONK app from Saga's crypto-forward custom app store. "When you physically have the phone you will be able to mint 'Genesis token' through the 'dApp store, [this] token is eligible to claim the bonk drop," said a user who identified themselves as an employee of Solana Mobile in the Discord server. "The bonk drop is NOT forever, at some point that promotion will end," the user, whose screen name was Jax, said in the Discord. "As of right now the claim is live and is up to the bonk team on when they'd want to close it. No end date yet."

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Researchers Develop World's First Antenna For Ultra-Secure 6G

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 07:00
Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have developed a special antenna that can control all five important aspects of electromagnetic waves using computer software. Interesting Engineering reports: The antenna, which they have named 'microwave universal metasurface antenna,' is capable of dynamically, simultaneously, independently, and precisely manipulating all the essential properties of electromagnetic waves through software control. [...] The antenna adjusts how strong the waves are, their timing, frequency, direction, and even the way they vibrate, all at the same time. It's the first time anyone has made an antenna that can do all these things simultaneously, marking a significant breakthrough in this field. The antenna is special because it can be used in advanced information systems, like the ones we might have in the future. It's great for handling a lot of data and keeping that data very safe. It can also transfer power wirelessly, meaning it can charge devices without physical connections. One cool thing about this antenna is that it can control the direction of its signals, adding an extra layer of privacy and security. This makes it a good choice for communication systems where we want to ensure nobody can eavesdrop or secretly listen in on our conversations. Although demonstrated in the microwave band, the UMA's concept can be expanded to terahertz frequencies using specific technologies, enabling applications in augmented reality, holography, integrated sensing and communications for 6G, quantum optics, and quantum information science, noted the researchers in their study. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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Biggest Solar Flare In Years Temporarily Disrupts Radio Signals On Earth

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 03:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A NASA telescope has captured the biggest solar flare in years, which temporarily knocked out radio communication on Earth. The sun spit out the huge flare on Thursday, resulting in two hours of radio interference in parts of the U.S. and other sunlit parts of the world. Scientists said it was the biggest flare since 2017. Multiple pilots reported communication disruptions, with the impact felt across the country, said the government's Space Weather Prediction Center. Scientists are now monitoring this sunspot region and analyzing for a possible outburst of plasma from the sun, also known as a coronal mass ejection, directed at Earth. The eruption occurred in the far northwest section of the sun, according to the center. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in extreme ultraviolet light, recording the powerful surge of energy as a huge, bright flash. Launched in 2010, the spacecraft is in an extremely high orbit around Earth, where it constantly monitors the sun. The sun is nearing the peak of its 11-year or so solar cycle. Maximum sunspot activity is predicted for 2025.

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Vera Molnar, Pioneer of Computer Art, Dies At 99

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 02:02
Alex Williams reports via The New York Times: Vera Molnar, a Hungarian-born artist who has been called the godmother of generative art for her pioneering digital work, which started with the hulking computers of the 1960s and evolved through the current age of NFTs, died on Dec. 7 in Paris. She was 99. Her death was announced on social media by the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is scheduled to present a major exhibition of her work in February. Ms. Molnar had lived in Paris since 1947. While her computer-aided paintings and drawings, which drew inspiration from geometric works by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, were eventually exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, her work was not always embraced early in her career. Ms. Molnar in fact began to employ the principles of computation in her work years before she gained access to an actual computer. In 1959, she began implementing a concept she called "Machine Imaginaire" -- imaginary machine. This analog approach involved using simple algorithms to guide the placement of lines and shapes for works that she produced by hand, on grid paper. She took her first step into the silicon age in 1968, when she got access to a computer at a university research laboratory in Paris. In the days when computers were generally reserved for scientific or military applications, it took a combination of gumption and '60s idealism for an artist to attempt to gain access to a machine that was "very complicated and expensive," she once said, adding, "They were selling calculation time in seconds." [...] Making art on Apollo-era computers was anything but intuitive. Ms. Molnar had to learn early computer languages like Basic and Fortran and enter her data with punch cards, and she had to wait several days for the results, which were transferred to paper with a plotter printer. One early series, "Interruptions," involved a vast sea of tiny lines on a white background. As ARTNews noted in a recent obituary: "She would set up a series of straight lines, then rotate some, causing her rigorous set of marks to be thrown out of alignment. Then, to inject further chaos, she would randomly erase certain portions, resulting in blank areas amid a sea of lines." Another series, "(Des)Ordres" (1974), involved seemingly orderly patterns of concentric squares, which she tweaked to make them appear slightly disordered, as if they were vibrating. Over the years, Ms. Molnar continued to explore the tensions between machine-like perfection and the chaos of life itself, as with her 1976 plotter drawing "1% of Disorder," another deconstructed pattern of concentric squares. "I love order, but I can't stand it," she told Mr. Obrist. "I make mistakes, I stutter, I mix up my words." And so, she concluded, "chaos, perhaps, came from this." [...] Her career continued to expand in scope in the 1970s. She began using computers with screens, which allowed her to instantly assess the results of her codes and adjust accordingly. With screens, it was "like a conversation, like a real pictorial process," she said in a recent interview with the generative art creator and entrepreneur Erick Calderon. "You move the 'brush' and you see immediately if it suits you or not." [...] Earlier this year, she cemented her legacy in the world of blockchain with "Themes and Variations," a generative art series of more than 500 works using NFT technology that was created in collaboration with the artist and designer Martin Grasser and sold through Sotheby's. The series fetched $1.2 million in sales.

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Firefox's Android Browser Adds 450+ New Extensions

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 01:25
Firefox's Android browser now has over 450 new extensions available on Mozilla's Firefox Browser Add-ons page. "These extensions allow users to customize the mobile browser to their needs, whether that involves adding anti-tracking privacy tools, content blockers, productivity tools or other features that introduce new experiences, like streaming music, or those that allow users to personalize the browser's user interface -- like switching all websites to a dark mode or offering a better way to manage tabs," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The lack of extensions has been an issue for Firefox for Android users for years following the 2020 launch of a rebuilt version of the mobile browser that replaced the app's previous codebase with "GeckoView," a new, faster and more customizable browser engine. At the time, the company said it made a decision to limit the supported extensions to only those within the "Recommended Extensions" program -- meaning those that were commonly installed by end users. This choice allowed Mozilla to quickly get the new browser into consumers' hands, but squashed the long tail of extension development -- and opportunity for software developers focused on this market. While Firefox's nightly builds later enabled more extensions, the publicly available Firefox for Android browser did not have access to these hundreds of extensions, meaning most of Firefox's mainstream users were also without. In August of this year, Mozilla said it had finally completed the infrastructure needed to bring the open extension ecosystem back to Firefox for Android. It then began to test and make hundreds more extensions available to Firefox for Android users, culminating in today's news that there are now 450+ extensions available.

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OpenAI Suspends ByteDance's Account After It Used GPT To Train Its Own AI Model

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 00:45
TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has been secretly using OpenAI's technology to develop its own competing large language model (LLM). "This practice is generally considered a faux pas in the AI world," writes The Verge's Alex Heath. "It's also in direct violation of OpenAI's terms of service, which state that its model output can't be used 'to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services.'" From the report: Nevertheless, internal ByteDance documents shared with me confirm that the OpenAI API has been relied on to develop its foundational LLM, codenamed Project Seed, during nearly every phase of development, including for training and evaluating the model. Employees involved are well aware of the implications; I've seen conversations on Lark, ByteDance's internal communication platform for employees, about how to "whitewash" the evidence through "data desensitization." The misuse is so rampant that Project Seed employees regularly hit their max allowance for API access. Most of the company's GPT usage has been done through Microsoft's Azure program, which has the same policy as OpenAI. In response, OpenAI said that it has suspended ByteDance's account: "All API customers must adhere to our usage policies to ensure that our technology is used for good. While ByteDance's use of our API was minimal, we have suspended their account while we further investigate. If we discover that their usage doesn't follow these policies, we will ask them to make necessary changes or terminate their account."

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Hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto stolen after Ledger code poisoned

TheRegister - Sat, 2023-12-16 00:13
Former worker phished then NPM repo hijacked

Cryptocurrency wallet maker Ledger says someone slipped malicious code into one of its JavaScript libraries to steal more than half a million dollars from victims.…

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McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the 'Smoking Gun' That Killed Their Startup

Slashdot - Sat, 2023-12-16 00:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over three years have passed since McDonald's sent out an email to thousands of its restaurant owners around the world that abruptly cut short the future ofa three-person startup called Kytch -- and with it, perhaps one of McDonald's best chances for fixing its famously out-of-order ice cream machines. Until then, Kytch had been selling McDonald's restaurant owners a popular internet-connected gadget designed to attach to their notoriously fragile and often broken soft-serve McFlurry dispensers, manufactured by McDonalds equipment partner Taylor. The Kytch device would essentially hack into the ice cream machine's internals, monitor its operations, and send diagnostic data over the internet to an owner or manager to help keep it running. But despite Kytch's efforts to solve the Golden Arches' intractable ice cream problems, a McDonald's email in November 2020 warned its franchisees not to use Kytch, stating that it represented a safety hazard for staff. Kytch says its sales dried up practically overnight. Now, after years of litigation, the ice-cream-hacking entrepreneurs have unearthed evidence that they say shows that Taylor, the soft-serve machine maker, helped engineer McDonald's Kytch-killing email -- kneecapping the startup not because of any safety concern, but in a coordinated effort to undermine a potential competitor. And Taylor's alleged order, as Kytch now describes it, came all the way from the top. On Wednesday, Kytch filed a newly unredacted motion for summary adjudication in its lawsuit against Taylor for alleged trade libel, tortious interference, and other claims. The new motion, which replaces a redacted version from August, refers to internal emails Taylor released in the discovery phase of the lawsuit, which were quietly unsealed over the summer. The motion focuses in particular on one email from Timothy FitzGerald, the CEO of Taylor parent company Middleby, that appears to suggest that either Middleby or McDonald's send a communication to McDonald's franchise owners to dissuade them from using Kytch's device. "Not sure if there is anything we can do to slow up the franchise community on the other solution," FitzGerald wrote on October 17, 2020. "Not sure what communication from either McD or Midd can or will go out." In their legal filing, the Kytch cofounders, of course, interpret "the other solution" to mean their product. In fact, FitzGerald's message was sent in an email thread that included Middleby's then COO, David Brewer, who had wondered earlier whether Middleby could instead acquire Kytch. Another Middleby executive responded to FitzGerald on October 17 to write that Taylor and McDonald's had already met the previous day to discuss sending out a message to franchisees about McDonald's lack of support for Kytch. But Jeremy O'Sullivan, a Kytch cofounder, claims -- and Kytch argues in its legal motion -- that FitzGerald's email nonetheless proves Taylor's intent to hamstring a potential rival. "It's the smoking gun," O'Sullivan says of the email. "He's plotting our demise."

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Ubiquiti blunder let some folks view others' security cameras, accounts

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-15 23:25
Cloud misconfig blamed and now fixed

Ubiquiti says it fixed a bug that allowed some of its customers to glimpse strangers' security camera footage and access accounts and devices that didn't belong to them.…

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Delta Dental of California Data Breach Exposed Info of 7 Million People

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 23:20
Delta Dental of California announced that they've suffered a data breach that exposed the personal data of almost seven million patients. BleepingComputer reports: Delta Dental of California is a dental insurance provider that covers 45 million people across 15 states and is part of the Delta Dental Plans Association. According to a Delta Dental of California data breach notification (PDF), the company suffered unauthorized access by threat actors through the MOVEit file transfer software application. The software was vulnerable to a zero-day SQL injection flaw leading to remote code execution, tracked as CVE-2023-34362, which the Clop ransomware gang leveraged to breach thousands of organizations worldwide. Delta Dental of California learned about the compromise on June 1, 2023, and five days later, following an internal investigation, it confirmed that unauthorized actors had accessed and stolen data from its systems between May 27 and May 30, 2023. The second, more lengthy investigation to determine the exact impact of the security incident was completed on November 27, 2023. Based on this, the data breach has so far impacted 6,928,932 customers of Delta Dental of California, who had their names, financial account numbers, and credit/debit card numbers, including security codes, exposed. Delta Dental of California provides 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services to impacted patients to mitigate the risk of their exposed data. Details on enrolling in the program are enclosed in the personal notices.

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Twitch Rescinds Policy That Allowed 'Artistic Nudity'

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 22:40
Malak Saleh reports via Engadget: Twitch has quickly taken back its policy update that permitted users to post sexual content as long as it was labeled. In another update, the company said it is not going to allow any depictions of real or fictional nudity on its streaming platform. After giving users the green light to post "artistic nudity," Twitch says some streamers created content that violated policy. The media streamed in response to the initial approval of sexually explicit content on Twitch was "met with community concern," according to the update. The company said, "We have decided that we went too far with this change." While a huge part of the initial decision was to allow for the "digital depiction" of artistic nudity, the company clarified that digital depictions of sexual content is a concern when artificial intelligence can be used to develop realistic images and that it can be difficult to discern between what's been digitally produced and real photography.

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TikTok Requires Users To 'Forever Waive' Rights To Sue Over Past Harms

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 22:02
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some TikTok users may have skipped reviewing an update to TikTok's terms of service this summer that shakes up the process for filing a legal dispute against the app. According to The New York Times, changes that TikTok "quietly" made to its terms suggest that the popular app has spent the back half of 2023 preparing for a wave of legal battles. In July, TikTok overhauled its rules for dispute resolution, pivoting from requiring private arbitration to insisting that legal complaints be filed in either the US District Court for the Central District of California or the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles. Legal experts told the Times this could be a way for TikTok to dodge arbitration claims filed en masse that can cost companies millions more in fees than they expected to pay through individual arbitration. Perhaps most significantly, TikTok also added a section to its terms that mandates that all legal complaints be filed within one year of any alleged harm caused by using the app. The terms now say that TikTok users "forever waive" rights to pursue any older claims. And unlike a prior version of TikTok's terms of service archived in May 2023, users do not seem to have any options to opt out of waiving their rights. Lawyers told the Times that these changes could make it more challenging for TikTok users to pursue legal action at a time when federal agencies are heavily scrutinizing the app and complaints about certain TikTok features allegedly harming kids are mounting.

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Google hopes to end tsunami of data dragnet warrants with Location History shakeup

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-15 21:23
Android giant follows Apple's lead, will store whereabouts on device and delete info earlier by default

Google has announced changes to its handling of Location History data that are expected to limit the internet giant's ability to respond to so-called geofence warrants.…

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SEC Denies Coinbase Petition for New Crypto Rules

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 21:20
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday denied a petition by the country's largest crypto exchange, Coinbase Global, seeking new rules from the agency for the digital asset sector. From a report: The five-member body, in a 3-2 vote, said it would not propose new rules because it fundamentally disagreed that current regulations are "unworkable" for the crypto sphere, as Coinbase has argued. The letter marked the latest in a broader tug-of-war between the crypto sector and the top U.S. markets regulator, which has repeatedly said most crypto tokens are securities and subject to its jurisdiction. The agency has sued several crypto companies, including Coinbase, for listing and trading crypto tokens which it says should be registered as securities. "Existing laws and regulations apply to the crypto securities markets," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a separate statement supporting the decision. In 2022, the company pressed the SEC to create a bespoke set of rules for the crypto sector, arguing that existing U.S. securities laws are inadequate. In April, Coinbase appealed to a judge to force the SEC to respond to the petition.

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Marketing Company Claims That It Actually Is Listening To Phone and Smart Speakers To Target Ads

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 20:41
A marketing team within media giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims it has the capability to listen to ambient conversations of consumers through embedded microphones in smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices to gather data and use it to target ads, according to a review of CMG marketing materials by 404 Media and details from a pitch given to an outside marketing professional. From a report: Called "Active Listening," CMG claims the capability can identify potential customers "based on casual conversations in real time." The news signals that what a huge swath of the public has believed for years -- that smartphones are listening to people in order to deliver ads -- may finally be a reality in certain situations. Until now, there was no evidence that such a capability actually existed, but its myth permeated due to how sophisticated other ad tracking methods have become. It is not immediately clear if the capability CMG is advertising and claims works is being used on devices in the market today, but the company notes it is "a marketing technique fit for the future. Available today." 404 Media also found a representative of the company on LinkedIn explicitly asking interested parties to contact them about the product. One marketing professional pitched by CMG on the tech said a CMG representative explained the prices of the service to them. "What would it mean for your business if you could target potential clients who are actively discussing their need for your services in their day-to-day conversations? No, it's not a Black Mirror episode -- it's Voice Data, and CMG has the capabilities to use it to your business advantage," CMG's website reads.

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China Issues Draft Contingency Plan for Data Security Incidents

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 20:00
China on Friday proposed a four-tier classification to help it respond to data security incidents, highlighting Beijing's concern with large-scale data leaks and hacking within its borders. From a report: The plan, which is currently soliciting opinions from the public, proposes a four-tier, colour-coded system depending on the degree of harm inflicted upon national security, a company's online and information network, or the running of the economy. According to the plan, incidents that involve losses surpassing 1 billion yuan ($141 million) and affect the personal information of over 100 million people, or the "sensitive" information of over 10 million people, will be classed as "especially grave," to which a red warning must be issued. The plan demands that in response to red and orange warnings, the involved companies and relevant local regulatory authorities must establish a 24-hour work rota to address the incident and MIIT must be notified of the data breach within ten minutes of the incident happening, among other measures.

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Kraft Heinz suggests we simmer down about those Snatch ransomware claims

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-15 19:59
Ah, beans

The Kraft Heinz Company says its systems are all up and running as usual as it probes claims that some of its data was stolen by ransomware crooks.…

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Intelligence Researchers To Study Computer Code for Clues To Hackers' Identities

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-15 19:20
Government researchers in the U.S. are studying methods to help identify hackers based on the code they use to carry out cyberattacks. From a report: The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the lead federal research agency for the intelligence community, plans to develop technologies that could speed up investigations for identifying perpetrators of cyberattacks. "The number of attacks is increasing far more than the number of forensic experts that are available to go after these attacks," said Kristopher Reese, who is managing the research program at IARPA and holds a doctorate in computer science and engineering. The lack of forensic resources means hackers who target small organizations or companies that don't fall under critical infrastructure sectors often escape identification, he said. Tools that are developed as part of the planned 30-month research project won't replace human analysts, who are crucial for identifying social and political dynamics that might explain why a particular hacking group targeted a victim, Reese said. But using artificial intelligence to analyze code used in cyberattacks will make investigations more efficient, he said. IARPA is accepting pitches from researchers until next month and plans to begin research next summer. [...] There hasn't been enough research into how analyzing code can reveal a hacker's identity, Reese said. Behavioral traits evident in code can reveal specific countries where hackers might be from or even the university where they were trained, he said. Some companies also have style guides outlining how employees should program, which could leave traces that indicate a person worked there, he said.

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