01.10.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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MKXP is a fully open-source implementation of the Ruby Game Scripting System that’s used by the popular Windows-focused RPG Maker XP game creation software.
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Razer, the company known for their gaming peripherals, announced at CES today their “Christine” project that is a PCI Express modular design. All components are individually packaged and allows anyone to easily assemble a PC.
Razer calls Project Christine “the world’s most modular gaming system.” Razer explained in their Christine press release, “It will allow any user to build and customize his or her PC in any configuration without any prior technical knowledge. Further, as new upgrades come to the market, the same PC can be easily and quickly upgraded without additional technical assistance and without the fear of incompatibility or obsolescence.”
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The latest Humble Indie Bundle game collection where you can pay what you want for the next two weeks for the cross-platform, DRM-free titles is now available.
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 9:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Steam Machines are transforming the way GNU/Linux is viewed among game developers
TECHRIGHTS has written several articles to highlight the big impact that Valve has had on GNU/Linux as a gaming platform. Now we see another major milestone. A lot of hardware companies, from chipsets [1-2] to integration, make a lot of so-called Steam Machines these days [3-8], which can be seen in this new gallery [9] and specifications overview [10]. Some high-end ones dual-boot with Windows [11] (SteamOS is based on Debian, not Ubuntu, due to legal reasons [12]).
Among the major competitors there’s Sony and Microsoft. Xbox One is faulty [13] and it’s losing to Sony [14] (which uses BSD); for general-purpose boxes that run GNU/Linux one can go for Steam Machines, which prove that 2014 will undoubtedly be an exciting year for GNU/Linux [15]. █
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Valve has announced their first 12 partners that intend to bring Steam Machines to the marketplace this year.
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More than a dozen vendors have announced that they’ve joined forces with Valve to produce Linux SteamOS-powered PCs and gaming consoles. Here their first wave of devices.
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Valve’s Steam Machines are reinventing the game console by transforming daunting PCs into friendly boxes for the living room. But rather than make the machines all by itself, Valve has turned to hardware partners to create a whole lineup of them, from basic consoles priced like an Xbox all the way up to towers that just barely veil their gaming PC roots.
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Digital Storm was one of the first companies to reveal its Steam Machine — its own take on Valve’s formula for the perfect living room gaming PC. Today, the company’s getting the news out ahead of Valve’s announcement yet again, formally announcing that the new Digital Storm Bolt II will go on sale later this month for $1,899.
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Last month when SteamOS was publicly made available in beta form there were many surprised that Valve based their Linux distribution off Debian rather than Ubuntu, which they had been heavily promoting up to this point for Linux gaming. There was some speculation why Valve went with Debian, but Gabe Newell has now confirmed the reasoning for not basing their operating system off Ubuntu.
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An example of a buzz kill is waking up on Christmas morning to find an Xbox One sitting under the tree, only to later discover that it doesn’t work because of a disc drive malfunction. Gamers first started complaining about the issue in November, with several YouTube videos showing the disc drive making a grinding noise when popping in a game or movie. Now that more consoles have been opened up, the issue is again making headlines, and Microsoft’s response is the same.
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As we now know, Sony sold a massive 4.2M PS4s worldwide in 2013, which dwarfs Microsoft’s already impressive 3M number by quite a substantial sum. It’s particularly surprising given the fact that the console sales have been relatively close to date. Both systems sold 1M units within 24 hours of release. Microsoft hit 2M consoles sold about a week or so after Sony said they’d hit 2.1M. They were behind, but within striking distance.
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Linux won, the penguin has achieved world domination, and the usual commentarians completely missed it even after years of predicting it. Because it’s not something that happened in a single flashy event, but rather has been the product of years of hard work and steady improvement. 2014 is the year that Linux starts to win the desktop, which is the final Linux frontier. And it is the year of exponential growth in every arena.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Hardware at 9:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Major desktop chipmakers (Intel and AMD) as well as desktop OEMs (HP and Acer) turn to Android for desktops
THE PREVIOUS post explained how Chromebooks/Chrome OS make the long-dreamed-of goal of GNU/Linux on many desktops a reality. But several years ago Google explained how Chrome OS and Android are connected. In short, the main distinguisher is the screen or input methods (size, interface, etc.); Android is now overseen by the Chrome OS manager. The assumption at the time was that Android should target mobile/small devices, whereas the other should target systems like notebooks/laptops. Convergence of those two was not ruled out.
Well, it sure seems like Android and its apps pool are growing so mature and vast that there is now temptation to put Android on the desktop. It’s not a dumb idea anymore because the interfaces are rich (multiple virtual desktops, heavy apps with many hooks for hardware [1,2], extensive hardware support for peripherals) and security is earning reputation [3]. It’s not just about cost [4]. Android rose to dominance [5] owing to technical advantages which in due course made it preferable for heavier hardware like Intel motherboards [6] and cars [7].
HP [8], AMD [9], Intel [10] and Acer [11] now champion a fascinating new trend by demonstrating a strategy for Android on the desktop. Exciting times! █
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Google now has access to a tremendous cache of data and it can use that data in any number of ways to make money as part of its advertising model or separate from it.
The free OS opened up this tremendous opportunity for Google, one they might not have even realized at the time, thinking only they needed to get into mobile any way they can.
And today, with all that data, they have a tremendous market advantage if they can figure out how to monetize it. All because they gave away their phone OS for nothing.
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With Android landing on all-in-one computers and Windows extending its reach deeper into the mobile world, the platform world is tightening into three key teams: iOS and OS X, Windows, and Android.
Chrome OS, BlackBerry, and the other minor players have derivative unit volume, and can therefore be discounted in our larger image of the market.
To compare those three groups yields an irksome, yet interesting, picture. Gartner recently released a set of statistics and prognostications along those operating system niches, stacking the groups against one another. The fine folks over at Redmond Magazine did us the favor of graphing the results.
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The DreamTab is an edutainment collaboration between Fuhu, developers of the popular Nabi line of Android kids tablets, and both Intel and DreamWorks Animation. Designed for ages 5-7, the tablets will be available in 8- and 12-inch versions with full HD IPS resolution, and will ship with 16GB or 32GB of flash storage.
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Targeting the business community HP has unveiled the Slate 21 Pro AiO (All-in-One) desktop running on Android 4.3 at CES 2014. The desktop is aimed to find use in office, education and kiosk environments. Given that most businesses run Windows applications, the system will be capable of running these too.
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Intel didn’t make a big deal of it at its CES press conference, but the chip giant announced that, with the help its OEM partners, the company will soon release PCs that run both Android and Windows 8.1 at the same time. They weren’t the only ones with dual operating systems. AMD announced that with its partner BlueStacks, it will bring the complete Android experience to Windows- based tablets, 2-in-1s, notebooks and desktops.
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The $1,099 monitor packs in a quad-core processor and a 2,560×1,440 touch screen.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google at 8:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Chrome OS is starting to occupy a significant segment of the market long sought by GNU/Linux proponents
GOOGLE’S distribution of GNU/Linux rose to power in 2013. It is not so freedom-respecting, but it is a distro without a doubt. Christmas was a sign of strength for Chrome OS [1], which is becoming a major threat to both Apple and Microsoft [2] (some people buy Chromebooks just to install their favourite GNU/Linux distribution on them [3]). As quite a few schools turn to Chrome OS [4,5] it seems like major OEMs follow the trend and make Chromebooks [6-13] (CES 2014 gave many examples). It hurts Apple, not just Microsoft [14], because “Chromebook is giving Macbook a run for its money” [15] (just as Android did to iPhone and iPad). Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls Chromebook “The Windows killer” [16], citing numbers from Christmas [17], and reviews of GNU/Linux in 2013 focus a great deal on Chromebooks [18-20]. Looking ahead at this year (2014), CNET says that “[a]s Chromebooks catch on, 2014 promises more models” [21] and Carla, formerly the editor of Linux Today, says “Linux Wins the Desktop in 2014″ [22].
Isn’t it funny that given all that we still have trashy tabloids like ZDNet calling GNU/Linux a failure on the desktop, trying to resurrect this myth [23]? (rebuttal in [24])
One source says that Chrome OS “accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year.” [25] Another says “Chromebooks surge at business in 2013″ [26], so who is to say GNU/Linux failed on the desktop? People who say this are dishonest. They usually rely on the bogus claim that Chrome OS is not GNU/Linux when it fact it is. This distribution may not please everyone (especially the freedom-conscious), but that doesn’t make the truth of the matter any less true. Chrome OS/Chromebooks increasingly get recommended as an alternative to Windows XP [27], which is not surprising. Later this year many Windows XP users (who are left with no security patches) are likely to turn to GNU/Linux, not later versions of Windows (Vista or later, with all the nasty anti-features of Vista inherited). Using Microsoft-friendly data sources, some Microsoft-friendly news sources try to distract from this trend [28], perhaps realising the businesses, schools etc. are going to turn to GNU/Linux, eschewing proprietary software and selecting FOSS rather than the train wreck which is Vista 8. █
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GNU/Linux as itself and as Chrome OS is growing and Android/Linux is taking off like a rocket. It looks as if many could not wait for Christmas to buy something shiny and new.
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Here on OStatic, some readers have written in saying that they are buying Chromebooks simply to put their favorite Linux distros on the low cost devices. In other cases, there are lots of young people being introduced to Chromebooks and getting a taste of cloud-centric computing, storage and applications. Chromebooks are here to stay, but they are not crushing the overall portable computer market.
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Synnex is set to empower Google Chromebook resellers supporting North America K-12 schools and commercial customers. The strategic Google-Synnex relationship will help resellers to deploy and centrally manage fleets of Chromebooks within schools and vertical market settings. The move comes only a few weeks after the search giant further enhanced its Google Apps partner program for resellers.
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HP and Lenovo announced new Android all-in-one (AiO) PCs — the Slate21 Pro and N308 — while LG unveiled the Chromebase, the first AiO to run Chrome OS.
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Lenovo is reportedly planning to release a set of new Chromebooks this year. Jay Parker, president for Lenovo’s North American operations, told CNET at CES that “multiple Chromebook models” would see release by summer 2014, at various price points and configurations.
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Most of the new Chromebooks have the same display resolution, capabilities, and price. The Toshiba Chromebook’s 13.3 inch display fits in between the 11 inch HP, Acer, and Samsung and 14 inch HP models. Unfortunately, the display resolution remains the same at 1366 x 768, which is the one thing that really bothers me about this generation device.
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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) comes but once a year and can be regarded as Christmas for nerds the world over. This year, the show runs from January 7th to the 10th and we thought it best to give a preview of what to expect from the usual crowd pleasers. Throughout the years, CES has been a place where the most crazy of ideas and the wildest of dreams came to fruition. Before we move on to our predictions however, let us spend a moment reflecting on what transpired at 2013′s CES.
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Buoyed by itsrecent success in the notebook sector, Acer has released another version of its best selling C720 series. The C720P-2600 bears similar specifications to the original C720P, but this time, she’s an all white beauty. The new colour scheme coupled with the sleek design of its older brothers will sure make it a hit in the months to come.
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Acer, which is rapidly gaining popularity among hardware manufacturers, is placing some heavy bets on open source operating systems. The company now has a whopping nine computers based on Google’s Chrome OS, including an update to its popular C7 Chromebook. Acer’s latest Chromebook, the C720P-2600 (shown), has an 11.6-inch touchscreen and features Intel’s dual-core Celeron 2955U chip based on the cutting-edge Haswell architecture. At $299.99, the system will be available in January, and will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show.
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It seems Chromebooks were selling like hot cakes in 2013. The cheap, cloud-driven computers were flying off the shelves, but who those sales hurt is subject to debate.
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I’ve been a believer in Chromebooks for a long time. Now, everyone else is getting the religion.
NPD, a retail market analysis company, reports that sales of Chromebooks exploded from zilch in 2012 to more than 20% of the U.S. PC market in 2013. This helped push overall notebook PC growth up by 28.9%.
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2013 was a most interesting year in Linux all around. Most folks will cite the advancements in the gaming arena and in embedded and mobile devices. But 2013 was a great year in Linux distributions. The desktops and associated wars calmed down, some tricky technology got wrestled into submission, and stability seemed to be everyone’s watchword. Lots of folks are reminiscing about the year, so let’s take a look.
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Desktop hosted applications are no longer the only choice. Customers increasingly were happy with the applications and network access available from handheld devices and didn’t feel the need to also use a Windows-powered device. After all, Web-based tools, such as Web applications, email, collaborative software, and search, can be easily done from a lower cost device. An expensive laptop or desktop may not be needed at all.
Is this how Linux and Unix will win over the mighty Windows? If the current trends are considered, the answer appears to be yes.
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I’ve run into these Negative Ned stories about Linux failing on the desktop before, and they always seem fixated on the market share of Windows. I reject that kind of thinking as it was never necessary for Linux to “beat Windows” on the desktop to be successful.
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On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.
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If that isn’t proof enough of Chromebooks’ rise in popularity, Amazon said Thursday that among laptops, the Samsung Chromebook, Asus Transformer Book, and Acer Chromebook were “holiday best sellers.”
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Linux’s open source price tag may be attractive, and there are other benefits besides cost. For a start, Linux is less of a resource hog than other platforms, and it works well on older hardware, especially compared to Windows.
Linux is also highly customizable, and users can choose from a multitude of desktop environments, such as KDE and GNOME. Going down the Linux route is however likely to involve a steep learning curve for non-techie users, who’ll also have to sort out apps and drivers for legacy peripherals (or replace them with Linux-compatible equivalents).
Then there’s support. It may be a non-issue if you manage to find replacement apps and drivers for peripherals. This said, almost that everything you’re ever likely to need to know about whatever flavour of Linux you decide on can be found online, but once again isn’t a terribly user friendly experience for Linux novices.
Another alternative is Chrome OS. Developed by Google, Chrome OS is web-centric operating system, which means that the browser becomes the operating system. Because of this there’s far fewer security issues than with Windows as Chrome OS doesn’t run locally installed software so there’s little to exploit.
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Posted in IBM, Office Suites, OpenDocument, OpenOffice at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Free/libre office suites LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are mostly ignored by the corporations-funded media, despite having new major developments such as Web-based versions
OBJECTIVE reporting is the key to fairness and justice. Without it, we are left with incitations, half-truths (censorship by omission), and agenda/indocrination disguised as ‘information’. Interestingly enough, IDG (paid by Microsoft) decided to pretty much ‘vanish’ Free software. LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org get no mention in an article about Microsoft Office alternatives [1]. Is the author dumb, misinformed (e.g. never heard of Free software), or is he driving some kind of Fog Computing agenda? Whatever is the case, we have to counter such deficient ‘reporting’. The consequences of such poorly-executed ‘journalism’ include states where Microsoft is found guilty of evading tax simply excluding non-Microsoft users from doing their taxes, as this new article reveals. Titled “Microsoft and your tax returns”, this article says that “The Excel “macro” feature used in tax forms released by the Income Tax department means that free software — such as OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc. that otherwise support Microsoft Excel files, not to mention cheaper alternatives from Microsoft itself, like MS Office Starter Edition — cannot be used on those forms.
“In short, any tax payer trying to file income tax online in India has a fairly expensive dependency on Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Windows.”
in Australia and elsewhere Windows may sometimes be required for tax purposes, but not Microsoft Office, which is a lot more expensive. So this is quite a scandal. Muktware, a news site run by quite a few writers from India, shows that there are many Free/libre alternatives to Microsoft Office [2].
There is a very disturbing trend where those who abandon Microsoft Office (which is a good thing in itself) move to other proprietary software with surveillance, for instance the City of Boston, which moves 76,000 city employees to Google Apps [3]. Why not choose or consider Free software, as the City of Largo apparently does [4]? Maybe bad reporting leads people to the wrong alternatives, or in other words to traps. It was the same with IBM’s proprietary traps (Lotus) half a decade or so ago.
Despite getting a cold shoulder from Novell/SUSE, LibreOffice is doing all right with a new board [5,6] and online version (comparable to the above) [7,8]. Apache OpenOffice is still very much alive, as IBM (main steward) claims [9] and there are new releases of LibreOffice coming [10]. Why is the corporate press mostly ignoring that? This may be a rhetorical question. █
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Word processing is an important part of work – and not just office work; everyone needs word processors at some point. This is the first article in the series ‘Best Open Source Apps’ and here I will talk about the most popular open source word processors for GNU/Linux: AbiWord, Calligra Words and LibreOffice Writer. I didn’t take OpenOffice Writer because it is not all that different from LibreOffice Writer.
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Every Boston city employee from police officers to public school teachers now have a Google Apps account.
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While the trolls here constantly tell us how essential that other OS is people in the real world keep rolling along comfortably with GNU/Linux, LibreOffice and making unfettered (by M$’s EULA) use of the hardware they own.
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I did a quick study of the 2013 mailing list traffic for the Apache OpenOffice project. I looked at all project mailing lists, including native language lists. I omitted the purely transactional mailing lists, the ones that merely echo code check-ins and bug reports. Altogether 14 mailing lists were included in this study.
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Posted in FUD, Microsoft at 6:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Example of media moles and how they warp the discussion about technology companies
SEVERAL years ago we criticised Sarah Perez for spreading FUD about Microsoft’s competitors, such as Firefox. It took a little effort to see that the publication she wrote for was pro-Microsoft by design. But there is a simple explanation for it. Sarah Perez continues to smear Microsoft’s competitors [1] and as she used to work for Microsoft (blogging for the company while on the payroll, as her LinkedIn account reveals) it all makes a lot of sense. The sad thing is, she now writes for AOL (TechCrunch), so unless we shine light on this bias, it is likely to continue silently, unchallenged.
The ironic thing is, Sarah Perez once worked for the company that provides video/audio snoops without warrants, doing so liberally to the point where the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) takes revenge [2-6] and seemingly accuses Microsoft of aiding NSA surveillance. To quote one article, “Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has struck at Microsoft’s voice, video and chat network Skype and posted to its Twitter feed and blog.”
Keep a close eye on Sarah Perez, just as we should keep an eye on other Microsoft moles (some current Microsoft staff also works for tech tabloid ZDNet at the moment). If they know they are being watched it limits their ability to smear the competition (without adding disclosures or making the editors unhappy for reducing the platform’s credibility). ZDNet (CBS) will continue to spread GNU/Linux FUD (latest example in [7,8]) because it has no credibility to maintain; it’s the Pravda is the tech world. Remember when TechCrunch was actually a seemingly reliable site (before AOL took over)? Well, to be fair, TechCrunch too accepted Microsoft bribes in order to embed Microsoft messages into the content of articles (this scandal goes years back), so Microsoft’s corruption of bloggers is a tradition and an official strategy, not a side effect. █
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Posted in Action at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The past week’s news about the NSA, its partners, and corporate spying
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After the Snowden revelations interest in privacy services including VPNs has skyrocketed. This hasn’t gone unnoticed to HideMyAss, one of the largest VPN providers, who are now using Snowden’s name to promote their product. Some may think that’s a clever move, but it is rather ironic since HideMyAss previously handed over personal details of a Lulzsec member to the U.S. Government.
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Former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano flatly rejected the idea of clemency for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whom the Obama administration has charged with theft of government property and unauthorized disclosure of defense secrets.
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These aren’t just three categories of leaks; they’re three different ways to think about Snowden. People who care a lot about U.S. foreign policy are going to give more weight to Singer’s first category: leaks revealing espionage against U.S. adversaries and rival. They’re going to be more likely to view Snowden through that lens and to judge him harshly for, as they see it, carelessly and needlessly setting back the United States. The constituency of people who follow U.S. foreign policy closely is relatively small, but it also tends to be deeply passionate not to mention disproportionately represented in Washington, D.C.
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Security is a word often used but rarely defined. Does it mean to be protected by others? Does it mean personal freedom and autonomy? Or something else, like being free from fear or worry, or having food and shelter? Sadly, in public discourse the term has become jingoistic, used more to instill fear and establish control than to promote actual security. Consider NSA surveillance.
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Quantum computing gets brought up in all kinds of conversations, usually when it does it is for causes like weather, medical, research – things like that. The NSA however looks at the technology as an opportunity to defeat almost every form of encryption possible. It’s an interesting application of the technology because of the overwhelming computational capacity that quantum computing introduces and as most people know, there is comfort in most encryption methods that is based on the notion that it would take x years to compute and crack the safeguards put in place with certain standards. If the NSA’s $79.7 million research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets” has its way, then that statistical assurance is decimated.
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The National Security Agency (NSA) has received a lot of publicity recently. News just broke that the NSA has been privately funding research in order to build a quantum computer of its own. This is all well and good but why would they want to build such a computer? The answer lies in their desire to be able to crack the codes of banking, medical, business and government codes around the world.
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We’ve already seen one reaction to the New York Times’ call for clemency for whistleblower Ed Snowden. That one came courtesy of the terminally-perturbed Rep. Peter King, a man who cares so much for this country that he believes Snowden should be imprisoned for “appeasing terrorists.” Calling Snowden a traitor only gains you so much political traction these days, but King’s in no hurry to give up his antagonistic calls for Snowden’s head, even when his assertions of “terrorist appeasement” clash with his own background as a terrorist appeaser.
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The U.S. Department of Justice will appeal a district judge’s opinion saying a phone records collection program at the National Security Agency likely violates the U.S. Constitution.
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The US Justice Department appealed Friday a federal judge’s December ruling that advanced a legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records.
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The U.S. Department of Justice will appeal a district judge’s opinion saying a phone records collection program at the National Security Agency likely violates the U.S. Constitution.
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The US government said Friday it has lodged an appeal against a judge’s ruling that the National Security Agency’s “almost Orwellian” bulk collection of telephone records is illegal.
Separately, spy chief James Clapper revealed that a secret court had renewed the NSA’s authority to gather call “metadata,” despite the controversy triggered when the program came to light.
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House Judiciary Committee Member Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) recently pressed Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate National Intelligence Director James Clapper for allegedly lying to Congress while testifying before a committee.
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“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower” (editorial, Jan. 2) repeats the allegation that James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, “lied” to Congress about the collection of bulk telephony metadata. As a witness to the relevant events and a participant in them, I know that allegation is not true.
Senator Ron Wyden asked about collection of information on Americans during a lengthy and wide-ranging hearing on an entirely different subject. While his staff provided the question the day before, Mr. Clapper had not seen it. As a result, as Mr. Clapper has explained, he was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications. In that context, his answer was and is accurate.
When we pointed out Mr. Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed. I spoke with a staffer for Senator Wyden several days later and told him that although Mr. Clapper recognized that his testimony was inaccurate, it could not be corrected publicly because the program involved was classified.
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As the World Privacy Forum just told Congress, the bottom feeders of the data brokerage world are making big money selling lists of everything from rape victims and AIDS patients to alcoholics, giving marketers the power to hit those folks with emails, phone calls, and ads — and much of this data is coming from the net. In a report of its own, Senator John Rockefeller and his senate investigation committee highlight the massive amounts of consumer data that brokers collect online and off, starkly criticizing how little we know about how this data is collected and used.
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is leading a class-action lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of Americans against President Barack Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) over its spying on the American people, Breitbart News has learned.
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A US senator has bluntly asked the National Security Agency if it spies on Congress, raising the stakes for the surveillance agency’s legislative fight to preserve its broad surveillance powers.
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“Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked in a letter to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander released from the senator’s office.
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Edward Snowden (shown) isn’t finished exposing damning details of the federal government’s unconstitutional surveillance programs.
In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Benjamin Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer working with the whistleblower, reveals that in 2014 the world “can expect to see [Snowden] engage a little more in the public debate.”
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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government agreed Friday to a public inquiry into surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), but it was unclear if the panel would invite testimony from Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the snooping.
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Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government agreed Friday to a public inquiry into surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), but it was unclear if the panel would invite testimony from Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the snooping.
Merkel had tried to head off a parliamentary inquiry, conscious of the tension it would cause with Germany’s most powerful ally. But her top parliamentary aide yielded Friday to pressure from opposition parties to appoint a commission.
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Rafael Correa is one of those Latin American presidents which ruling circles in the U.S. consider uncontrollable and thus especially dangerous. To get rid of such politicians, Washington makes use of a wide arsenal of means, from interfering in election processes to physical elimination. After the strange death of Hugo Chavez, who led Latin America’s resistance against the Empire, it is Correa who is increasingly seen as his successor, the leader of the «populist forces» on the continent… – See more at: http://www.ingeniouspress.com/2013/12/29/u-s-intelligence-planning-oust-president-ecuador/#sthash.qnLgw3y1.dpuf
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If you’re sending encrypted e-mail with the default Mail app on OS X Mavericks, your setup may be saving plaintext messages on the mail server. Mac-based users of the GPG encryption app began noticing this unfortunate behavior in October when using Gmail. Even after unchecking the “Store draft messages on the server” and “Store sent messages on the server” checkboxes, the changes would mysteriously vanish.
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The National Security Agency on Saturday released a statement in answer to questions from a senator about whether it “has spied, or is … currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials”, in which it did not deny collecting communications from legislators of the US Congress to whom it says it is accountable.
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Robert Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has written to the New York Times to deny the allegation that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress about the collection of bulk phone records by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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The founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. It was expressed at the time that there might be possible conflicts of interest between Bezos’ business at Amazon and the Post’s coverage of commerce and politics.
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This is fully 17 years before Edward Snowden purloined the NSA’s Crown Jewels from the NSA’s Hawaii RSOC.
Remarkably, the article’s author also later describes a 1994 incident at an NSA RSOC when a contractor employee was caught accessing restricted files on a classified system!
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Because of the scope of the NSA’s activities, Paul added, “every person in America who has a cell phone would be eligible for this suit.”
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Paul said he is urging all US citizens with mobile phones to join a group action aimed at preventing Obama from “snooping on the American people”.
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While we were just suggesting that there are ways that NSA employees who believe the organization has gone too far can make a difference without also leaking documents, some are beginning to suspect that Snowden’s activities may be creating at least some copycats — and the interesting tidbit is that they may be less likely to get caught, because everyone assumes any new leaks are from Snowden. Matt Blaze recently noted that the most recent bombshell concerning the NSA’s catalog of exploits, didn’t actually name a source. And Glenn Greenwald has hinted strongly that the information is not from Snowden.
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Here is my recent talk at the CCC in Hamburg, discussing the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war in the internet and the war on whistleblowers…
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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stirred a new controversy this week when he denounced the Catholic Church’s confessional system as a means to spy on its congregants for the sake of power.
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Yesterday Kossack Mike Stark posted this diary about Stratfor emails posted by Wikileaks.
Stratfor is a Texas-based global intelligence firm whose list of clients includes Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
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Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact by convincing advertisers on this show to withdraw their ads–and with your help we can do even more. Just a few emails, tweets, or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.
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Google Glass has a rival: Nano-tech contact lenses that work with a pair of glasses and provide wearers with a virtual canvas on which any media can be viewed or application run, projected onto human eyes, are set to be unveiled in the US.
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In our country suspicion is now our way of life.
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A column on why former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should not be granted clemency—and will not be given clemency—was written by Slate’s Fred Kaplan on January 3. It quickly became regarded as a sharp well-argued rebuttal to The New York Times’ editorial, which labeled Snowden a whistleblower and urged President Barack Obama to show him leniency so he could come back to the United States.
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In June 2013, the American public learned conclusively about the wholesale surveillance of virtually all Americans through secretive programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) that continue to be implemented today. These programs collect the phone records, email exchanges, and internet histories of people all over the world who would have no knowledge of this were it not for the disclosures of former federal contractor Edward Snowden.
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On April 22, 2013, Miles J. Stark of Clay County, West Virginia made a bad decision. Stark was going through a divorce at the time and had grown concerned about his wife’s relationship with an “unnamed individual.” So he entered his wife’s workplace after normal business hours, located her PC, and installed a tiny keylogger between her keyboard cable and her computer. The keylogger would record his wife’s e-mails and her instant messaging chats as she typed them out letter by letter, along with the usernames and passwords she used for various online services. Stark left the office without getting caught.
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This is an odd and flawed argument—logically and legally…
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Former NSA and CIA leader Michael Hayden is indicative of the horrors of the coming American authoritarian state. He is a bookish, cherubic, nondescript, avuncular man who nonetheless has contributed greatly to those programs of such a degree of enormous potential for evil are only waiting for the correct political climate and leadership to trigger a reign of darkness and terror unique to this country’s history.
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Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sharpened his rhetoric against the National Security Agency’s snooping on American citizens Sunday, comparing the agency’s programs to the British actions that provoked the American Revolution 230 years ago.
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2013 has certainly been a watershed year for information security. But to understand how things might subsequently unfold in 2014, it’s worth remembering that each and every revelation of 2013 will be processed and acted upon by humans. Humans with their unchanging human nature, and organisations created by us humans, with their similarly unchanging nature.
Centre stage must of course go to Edward Snowden and the ongoing revelations about comprehensive surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
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Combine that with the fact that even a headline in conservative US magazine “Foreign Policy” described NSA chief General Keith Alexander as a “cowboy”.
Combine all that, and I think we’re looking at a groundswell of opposition to what some have called the “surveillance state” at a level seen in Western nations only once a generation — like the Vietnam Moratorium or, in Australia and especially New Zealand, opposition to French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa.
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Obama and Congress should rein in this government surveillance program.
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The UK government’s former chief information officer has defended the rights of nations to gather data and spy on citizens, although warned that there must be clear oversight into these practices.
John Suffolk, who left a post in the UK government in 2011 to become global cyber security officer for Chinese vendor Huawei, wrote in a blog post that nations must have the ability to scan data and try to protect citizens from any threats.
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The catalogue further says that Mobile phone SIM cards can also be easily hacked using a tool dubbed MONKEYCALANDER. This exploits a flaw, only recently spotted by security researchers but used by the NSA since 2007, that allows code to be installed on a SIM card that will track and monitor an individual user’s calls and location.
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Schneier, who previously had served on Co3 Systems’ advisory board and has helped shape the look and feel of the software-as-a-service firm’s architecture, says the time had come for him to make a change and leave BT. He had been the security futurologist for BT since it purchased his network monitoring services firm Counterpane Internet Security in October of 2006.
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The battle to beat back the NSA – and restore our old republic
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After Edward Snowden spilled the National Security Agency’s beans three months later, Mr. Clapper retreated to his Ministry of Truth persona when asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on June 10 why he lied to Mr. Wyden: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘no.’”
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Although weaknesses in one pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) at the heart of a US National Security Agency (NSA) scandal have been known for years, recent media attention has given light to proof-of-concept code.
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While mega IT behemoths including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, Juniper, et al, may, or may not deny any knowledge of, or cooperation with, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its international counterparts, or nemeses, the fact is that near ubiquitous, secret backdoor access to networks and computing and communications devices has been gained.
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How a teenage misfit became the keeper of Julian Assange’s deepest secrets – only to betray him
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A schoolboy trying to save his youth club was hauled from class after his plan to protest outside David Cameron’s constituency office was spotted – by anti-terror police.
In an astonishing over-reaction, 12-year-old Nicky Wishart was warned he faced ARREST.
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Today’s dose of paranoia and confusion comes to us courtesy of RyanNerd. We’ve seen schools react badly to perceived threats before, but the lack of a single crucial detail makes it impossible to determine whether this incident is one of those cases. What we do know is that three New Jersey schools were locked down and swarmed by police officers as the result of a single text from a student to a parent.
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Our choice isn’t between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.
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AN EX-UK GOVERNMENT CIO has waded into the security debate about NSA and GCHQ surveillance of the internet and told everyone to chill out.
John Suffolk, the global head of Cyber Security for Huawei and a former UK government CIO and CISO, penned his thoughts in a blog post with the title, ‘Let’s get real about the NSA. Not all technology and data is born equal.’
Suffolk said that he has followed the debate about government surveillance and can see why some people might have some concerns. His concern is that people are worrying about the wrong thing, adding that he can’t see a problem with a data-hungry government that won’t stop eating.
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Government-trained security company Morta Security has been snapped up by Palo Alto Networks for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition was announced on Monday and arms Palo Alto Networks with a company whose staff hail from the National Security Agency, US Army, US Air Force, and others.
“The Morta team brings additional valuable threat intelligence experience and capabilities to Palo Alto Networks,” Palo Alto Networks chief Mark McLaughlin said in a canned statement.
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The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations show there’s a way to be safe and get good intelligence without mass surveillance
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“I hope that with Microsoft’s collusion with government agencies now public knowledge, businesses will start to look at alternative options,” suggested blogger Mike Stone. Indeed, “I would like more transparency from those IT giants,” echoed Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. “They are dealing with our lives, and there’s not much we can do to protect ourselves.”
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Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.
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Bipartisan duo wants to cut NSA’s utilities, ban research at state schools and impose sanctions on contractors
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Access to that telephone metadata would be extremely useful for manipulating the legislature. So is it wise to collect it and make it accessible to a secretive executive-branch agency? Even if the NSA has never abused the temptation, will they resist it forever? Operating on that assumption seems both reckless and needless, given the scant evidence that the Section 215 program is necessary and the significant public interest in maintaining the integrity and legitimacy of the legislature.
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See, there’s a problem when you lie: you always forget how to keep your story straight. You may remember, for example, that Senator Dianne Feinstein, at the end of October, released a bill that pretended to be about reforming the NSA and its surveillance programs. The bill was spun in a way that was designed to make people think it was creating real reforms, with a fact sheet claiming that it “prohibited” certain actions around bulk data collection, but which actually codified them in the law, by including massive loopholes. It was an incredibly cynical move by Feinstein and her staff, pretending that their bill to actually give the NSA even greater power and to legalize its abuses, was about scaling back the NSA. But that’s the spin they put on it — which almost no one bought.
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Tomorrow MEPs on the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee will present their draft report on the Internet surveillance of the UK and USA as well as other EU states. Its recommendations are damning and the UK Government comes in for particularly strong criticism.
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The White House is holding a number of meetings on possible National Security Agency reforms. President Barack Obama reportedly met with staffers for intelligence officials on January 8 in a meeting that was classified “top secret.”
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The president sat down with a small group of lawmakers Thursday to discuss NSA surveillance. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
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A classified Pentagon report concludes that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden downloaded 1.7 million intelligence files from U.S. agencies in the single largest theft of secrets in the history of the United States, according to lawmakers.
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Civil liberties committee report demands end to indiscriminate collection of personal data by British and US agencies
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The leaders of the US intelligence agencies were holding talks at the White House on Wednesday as US president Barack Obama neared a decision on curbing the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk surveillance powers.
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National Security Agency employee Kevin Igoe is to keep his position on the panel of an influential internet standards working group, the powers-that-be decided last weekend.
Igoe, who co-chairs the Internet Research Task Force’s Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG), had been accused by those campaigning for his removal of pushing for the adoption of a weakened version of the “Dragonfly” key exchange protocol.
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Four men who were part of a group that wrote mobile history tell for the first time how strong protection against eavesdropping of cell phones was weakened.
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