07.21.10
Posted in Europe, Microsoft, Patents, Security, Windows at 1:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Siemens gives another reason for its products and its policies to be distrusted as it gets “OWNED” by Windows Trojans
Siemens, the company partly responsible for pushing software patents into Germany (and the EU at large [1, 2], although Microsoft helped), has been close enough to Microsoft to lose its brains and put Windows in mission-critical settings. The result? Here is how Reuters put it:
Hackers have built a computer virus that attacks Siemens AG’s widely used industrial control systems, creating malicious software that analysts said can be used for espionage and sabotage.
The German company said the malware is a Trojan worm dubbed Stuxnet that spreads via infected USB thumb drives, exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system.
“Just viewing the contents of the USB stick can activate the Trojan,” said Siemens spokesman Alexander Machowetz. “Siemens recommends avoiding the use of a USB stick.”
Siemens first learned of the problem on July 14, he said.
Bonus points to Reuters for naming Windows as a culprit. More news networks ought to call Out Windows.
The moral of the story: Windows may be suitable for testing some things, not for final products. The LSE (London Stock Exchange) would know [1, 2, 3, 4]. It eventually GotTheFacts™. █
“Gates had never been involved in any of the architectural design of Windows, nor had he ever been personally involved in writing such large amounts of code. Now, very late in the game, he was throwing out knee-jerk requests based on the competition. And he seemed totally oblivious to the fact that every such feature change radically screwed up Windows’s stability, testing, and ship date.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Timely perspective on Apple, Microsoft, and the substitution of “Linux” with Android (Google’s trademark)
APPLE may be worth more than Microsoft (as measured in terms of market cap), but this is nothing to be celebrated. In many ways, Apple’s arrogance or Hubris exceeds that of Microsoft, even if Apple’s past hardly contains as much crime as Microsoft’s. It seems like Apple’s revenue may soon exceed Microsoft’s and Joe Wilcox wrote about this before. He does so again:
Today, Apple set the stage for a historical competitive upset: Exceeding Microsoft revenue during the same quarter. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple’s quarterly earnings again blew past Wall Street consensus, which already were $1.55 billion to $1.75 billion higher than company guidance. Apple also exceed quarterly revenue consensus estimates for Microsoft, which announces fiscal 2010 results on Thursday. I first posted about Apple revenue exceeding Microsoft revenue in April and again in June, not once but twice.
Maggie Shiels, often a booster/apologist for Microsoft at the MSBBC, takes her time across the Atlantic and helps show Apple’s arrogance complex [1, 2], which has turned rather outrageous and contagious. At London I saw many people with hypePhones, but none of them was used for something beyond a game of Tetris or some texting. As we showed here some days ago, the rising star in phones seems to be Linux, so it’s important to ensure that companies like Google keep Android freedom-respecting (which it's becoming less of as time goes by). OpenBytes has this new post titled “PhoneWars 2010 – Android / Apple / Microsoft”; well, actually, Android is not a company name and there are other players in this game (e.g. Nokia with MeeGo, RIM). It’s important never to oversimplify the market, e.g. “Mac versus PC”. Diversity is important and diversity without choice (in the freedom sense) is illusionary and worthless; it’s about selecting one’s masters, often based on brands (PR). █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Finance at 1:09 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Get me into that and goddam, we’ll make so much money!”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
Summary: Paul Allen follows the footsteps of Bill Gates, whose big investments in oil giants help fund disinformation (and sometimes prove profitable)
“Don’t know if you saw this,” said our reader Wayne, “Paul Allen is imitating Bill Gates.”
Wayne cited Kristi Heim, a longtime booster for Bill Gates and his foundation. So both founders of Microsoft have put wealth in a shelter from state tax:
Allen, who is 57, said today that he plans to leave the majority of his $13 billion estate to philanthropy to continue the work of his foundation and to fund scientific research.
Who benefits from this research, which often involves someone’s patents? We covered this subject many times before and provided countless examples. To be fair here, many rich families created this kind of loophole for themselves (taking from society while being portrayed mostly as givers), so the criticism applies more broadly.
Looking at Mr. Gates, the guy has massive investments in Exxon [1, 2], which has just been exposed for still spending millions lying about global warming.
ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million to climate deniers and industry front groups known for working to create doubt about global warming, attacking the integrity of climate scientists, and protecting the status quo for polluters, according to a front-page story in the Times of London today.
Contrary to its stated commitment to stop funding climate denier groups, the Exxon funding spigot remained as open as the BP gusher, continuing to pollute the media landscape with oil-soaked misinformation designed to cripple international action on climate change.
People ought to ask Gates, how does he feel about funding companies like these? He keeps pretending to care about global warming while investing in other oil companies like BP, whose offences are even more serious at the moment. As our reader Patrick put it earlier today, “BP shot a load of toxic chemicals into the Deepwater Horizon well to get around waste disposal laws” (and there is an article supporting the allegation).
In Kenner, La., a new round of hearings on the Deepwater Horizon explosion opened Monday with members of a government panel pressing the chief rig engineer to expand on an earlier statement describing the chaotic final moments on the burning rig.
This Story
In that statement, which has not been made public, Stephen Bertone said that the captain of the rig screamed at a crew member for pressing either a distress button or a disconnect button and, referring to an injured man on a stretcher, said, “Leave him.”
BP not only lies about global warming but it also produces fake pictures [1, 2] as part of its propaganda/disinformation campaign: [via]
Apparently BP is no more adept at doctoring photos than it is at plugging deep-sea oil leaks.
A blogger has noticed that the oil giant altered a photograph of its Houston crisis room, cutting and pasting three underwater images into a wall of video feeds from remotely operated undersea vehicles. The altered photo is displayed prominently on the company’s Web site.
And these are the sorts of companies that Gates’ so-called ‘charity’ puts his money in? For profit? As investment? Well, to be fair, it’s not as though BP is a good investment at the moment.
BP denied a report its embattled chief executive would leave soon, as it lined up $7 billion in asset sales to help pay for the worst oil spill in U.S. history, lifting its shares on Wednesday.
[...]
BP’s market value has fallen by around 40 percent since an explosion on an oil rig killed 11 people on April 20 and sent oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, soiling the coastline and devastating tourism and fishing industries in the region.
Gates lost money on this investment. Will Paul Allen have better luck after his previous massive investment ended up in bankruptcy? This is not philanthropy, it’s philanthrocapitalism. It looks like philanthropy, but it’s business as usual. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:05 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Less than three weeks after the Times paywall went up, data shows a massive decline in web traffic
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For quite some time now there have been reports about how carmakers have been forcing car owners to take cars to the dealers for (expensive) repairs, by using special software to diagnose problems in the computer system, and only giving the necessary software to dealers. This is actually one of many nasty consequences of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules (pay attention Canada), whereby it should be perfectly legal for anyone you ask to work on your car — but thanks to digital locks placed on your car’s computer by automakers, other mechanics would be breaking the law just to figure out how to get around the locks. Every year for the past decade, there are attempts to pass a national “right to repair” act at the federal level to take care of this, but it never goes anywhere.
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AFP reports that the US Senate has passed (by a ‘unanimous consent’ voice vote) a bill that prevents US federal courts from recognizing or enforcing a foreign judgment for defamation that is inconsistent with the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech. If the bill becomes law it will shield US journalists, authors, and publishers from ‘libel tourists’ who file suit in countries where they expect to get the most favorable ruling.
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Digital Politics
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A COUNCILLOR is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling the Church of Scientology “stupid” in a post on the Twitter website.
Wales’ public standards watchdog said John Dixon is likely to have breached the code of conduct for local authority members with his short message last year.
The Church of Scientology, whose followers include entertainers Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirsty Allie, made an official complaint after spotting the posting last year.
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It was a Wednesday night in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, and Jared Cohen, the youngest member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and Alec Ross, the first senior adviser for innovation to the secretary of state, were taking their tweeting very seriously. Cohen had spent the day in transit from D.C.; Ross hadn’t eaten anything besides a morning muffin. Yet they were in the mood to share, and dinner could wait. It wasn’t every day they got to tweet about visiting the headquarters of Twitter.
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It is quite obvious that the social networking boom of the recent years has resulted in abundance of social networks that probably cover all the niches of society. It is quite obvious that in some countries (like Russia where I live) this process is taking longer than it did in the US because all the trends arrive here with a noticeable delay. So while the US has social networks for everything already, in Russia we are now witnessing yet another novelty – a social network intended specifically for state officials.
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Finance
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Congress gave final approval Thursday to the most ambitious overhaul of financial regulation in generations, ending more than a year of wrangling over the shape of the new rules and shifting the government’s focus to the monumental task of implementing them.
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In modern American life, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stands out as amazingly resilient and remarkably lucky – despite presiding over or being deeply involved in a series of political debacles, he has gone from strength to strength. After at least eight improbably bounce backs, he might seem unassailable. But his latest mistake – blocking Elizabeth Warren from heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – may well prove politically fatal.
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Stock futures are headed for a higher opening after Apple and Coca-Cola turned in stronger earnings results.
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Congress approved a sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation on Thursday, reflecting a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.
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Depending upon who you listened to, the financial reform bill that passed yesterday was lionized by some as the most awesome thing since condoms, or derided by others as totally insufficient to protect us from the indiscretions of happy-go-lucky banks.
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Congress on Thursday passed the stiffest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression, clamping down on lending practices and expanding consumer protections to prevent a repeat of the 2008 meltdown that knocked the economy to its knees.
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Banks had always coveted the exorbitant fees collected by their “cousins” in the investment banking industry, but the Glass-Steagall Act blocked access to this lucrative capital raising business. The Act, passed during the Great Depression, was created to prevent both styles of banking from destroying one another. Merchant banks, as they were called at the time, helped companies raise capital, but took no deposits. Traditional banks took deposits and made loans. In 1999, a Republican Congress removed the prohibitions of the Act altogether.
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Banks often try to emulate the success of Goldman Sachs. Now would be a good time to avoid one of its blunders.
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Brazil’s federal police are investigating Goldman Sachs Group Inc for the alleged use of insider information in the takeover of pulp company Ripasa by rival Suzano Celulose in 2004, Brazilian newspaper Valor Economico reported on Tuesday.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and dozens more bank and brokerages were sued by a Boston area-based fund seeking reimbursement for losses related to subprime loans.
Cambridge Place Investment Management Inc., founded by ex- Goldman Sachs Group bankers Martin Finegold and Robert Kramer, lost more than $1.2 billion as a result of the banks’ untrue statements, according to a copy of the complaint filed July 9 in state court in Massachusetts.
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Rosalyn Dalebout rents out space in her home to three tenants, has cut off her phone service and canceled her earthquake and life insurance – all to pay her mortgage every month.
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Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Thursday its second-quarter net income soared 77 percent to $4.8 billion as a slowdown in losses from failed loans helped offset a difficult spring in trading and investment banking.
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Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay $550 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the largest penalties ever paid by a Wall Street firm, to settle charges of securities fraud linked to mortgage investments.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and the Securities and Exchange Commission recently held discussions about a possible settlement to simultaneously resolve the fraud lawsuit against Goldman and some of the agency’s lower-profile probes of the Wall Street firm’s mortgage department, according to people familiar with the situation.
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LAST Wednesday at around 3 p.m., the Securities and Exchange Commission and Goldman Sachs settled an epic, seismic battle — one waged over whether the storied investment bank defrauded investors in a transaction that regulators said Goldman had built to self-destruct.
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Threadneedle Asset Management Ltd. said it hired Jim Cielinski as head of fixed income from Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
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As Goldman Sachs (GS) continues to seek a settlement with federal securities over probes into its business practice, people inside the company are bracing a significant change in senior management that goes beyond the possibility of CEO Lloyd Blankfein losing his job, FOX Business has learned.
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Fabrice Tourre was so loyal to Goldman Sachs. Why wouldn’t he have been? They had been good to him. After the subprime market tanked, his bosses had praised his creation of Abacus, a collection of crappy mortgage securities he had created so that hedge-funder John Paulson could short it, and cemented his status in the firm by giving him a promotion and a raise. So when the SEC sued Goldman for fraud over the deal, and certain embarrassing e-mails Fab had written about it came to light, he believed they would have his back, even after they put him on suspended leave.
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Investment giant Goldman Sachs on Tuesday said its profits fell 82 percent in the second quarter of the year against the same period last year.
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KUDOS to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the crippled mortgage finance giants. While some in Washington have continued to coddle the big banks even after they drove our economy into the ditch, this agency seems serious about recovering money for taxpayers by holding bad financial actors to account.
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I’ll be frank: the discussion of fiscal stimulus this past year and a half has filled me with despair over the state of the economics profession. If you believe stimulus is a bad idea, fine; but surely the least one could have expected is that opponents would listen, even a bit, to what proponents were saying. In particular, the case for stimulus has always been highly conditional. Fiscal stimulus is what you do only if two conditions are satisfied: high unemployment, so that the proximate risk is deflation, not inflation; and monetary policy constrained by the zero lower bound.
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With unemployment high and inflation low, a question is being asked more often and more loudly: Can and should the Federal Reserve do more to get the economy moving?
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Sometime next week, President Obama will finally sign a financial reform bill. Plenty of banks will have to deal with messy new rules, but one big winner in the “spare me from further regulation” sweepstakes was auto dealers.
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Some day growth will pickup again. The debt problems will be with us for some time, but one of the keys for more growth is absorption of excess capacity. New investment is already happening for semiconductor manufacturing (see AMAT and other semi-equipment manufactures, and the WSJ Applied Materials Boosts Revenue Forecast)
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“Another World Is Possible” is the slogan of the World Social Forum, an event first convened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a challenge to the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of the world’s political and corporate leaders in Davos, Switzerland.
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This post is going to be a bit different, at least for me. Generally I like to write things that are more data oriented, and that involve some pictures and figures. But this is a little story that happened to my wife and me, only a few weeks back, and I think it provides a bit of an illustration about how the economy works, or doesn’t, in these post-Housing Bubble days. Its an absurd story, it makes no sense whatsoever, it cannot possibly happen in a civilized country, much less one that calls itself capitalist, but every word is true. So here goes…
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Labor’s internet filtering policy isn’t being discussed in the run-up to the election but its impact on Australia is significant.
Championed by Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, the $30million+ filter is being sold by Labor as an internet block for child pornography, bestiality and extreme pornography with ‘wide ranging support from the Australian public’ and ‘only minimal opposition against’.
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We’ve covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin’s “Browse the Web without a Trace”, January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I’m justified in featuring it this month.
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The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who’s reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED’s Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished — and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.
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John Young was one of Wikileaks’ early founders. Now he’s one of the organization’s more prominent critics.
Young, a 74-year-old architect who lives in Manhattan, publishes a document-leaking Web site called Cryptome.org that predates Wikileaks by over a decade. He’s drawn fire from Microsoft after posting leaked internal documents about police requests, irked the U.K. government for disclosing the names of possible spies, and annoyed Homeland Security by disclosing a review of Democratic National Convention security measures.
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Policemen in Hubei have actually apologized for beating “a petitioner”… because it wasn’t a petitioner at all. Rather, poor Mrs. Chen Yulian, 58, was the wife of a Hubei provincial politics and law committee official who was walking to the gate of the provincial party committee’s office buildings on June 23.
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Anti-war protestor and near-permanent fixture across from the Commons, Brian Haw, will be subject to another attempted eviction when the Government rushes through special laws to oust him, according to the Standard.
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again Net Neutrality is a double edged sword. Sure I want the Internet to be free and return back to the good ‘ol days, no blocking of torrents or filtering my data.
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Digital Restrictions Management consumer control.
It goes around and around and around and spinning it — again — is Sony which, with BMG, its former partner, injected DRM and rootkit spyware into the computers of people who’d bought some of its music CDs. The software, equally dangerous to users and computers, was hidden on Sony BMG discs, secretly installing itself when buyers played the music.
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The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) is moving forward with a brand name and a beta test for its cloud-based “digital locker” system. The name for the technology will be UltraViolet and the beta test will begin this fall, while the specs and licensing details are expected to be ready by the end of 2010.
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Copyrights
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A few days ago, with no small amount of glee, Ray Beckerman from the Recording Industry vs The People blog suggested that $16m in legal fees had netted the Recording Industry Association of America less than $400,000 in court judgements against pirates in 2008. (You can see for yourself just how much glee Beckerman felt by reading his post title, which is: “Ha ha ha ha ha. RIAA paid its lawyers more than $16,000,000 in 2008 to recover only $391,000!!!”.)
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After months of waiting, it’s finally here. Streaming music service MOG has launched its mobile applications for Android and iPhone, giving subscribers unlimited access to its library of 8 million songs, which can be streamed or downloaded over both 3G and WiFi. If you listen to a lot of music, or just like being able to listen to music on-demand without having to sync to your PC, this is definitely worth checking out. Access to the mobile service costs $9.99 a month, but MOG is offering free 3-day trials when you download the apps (no credit card is required).
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Roku, the set-top box known for streaming Netflix movies from the Web to users’ television sets, has teamed with MP3tunes.com to offer users the ability to stream their iTunes music libraries to their TVs.
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Two years ago, we wrote about how a court had ruled against a documentary filmmaker who was upset that the producers of the Hollywood film We Are Marshall hadn’t paid them for the story. The documentary filmmakers had made a (what else?) documentary about the story of the football team at Marshall, where a plane crash killed the team, and then the school rebuilt its football program. The Warner Bros. film was about the same story, but as we pointed out at the time, facts aren’t copyrightable, and anyone can make a film based on historical facts. It is true that Hollywood studios often will pay for the “rights” to a story from a newspaper or author, even though they don’t need to secure the “rights” that way. They do so for a variety of reasons, such as getting more in-depth access to the writers for accuracy purposes or just for general endorsement. But there’s no legal requirement to do so.
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The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country’s ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.
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Two administrators of Filesoup – the longest standing BitTorrent community – have been charged with conspiracy to infringe copyright for their involvement with the site. The case is the second against UK-based BitTorrent site operators. The first case was brought against the owner of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, who was later cleared of all charges.
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ACTA
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Canada is currently negotiating two major international trade agreements and my weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes that while it may seem hard to believe, their successful completion may ultimately depend on the level of protection provided to Parma ham. The Canada – European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) are both facing increasing opposition based on European demands to expand protection for “geographical indications.”
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Article 2.3 of the July 1, 2010 version of the ACTA text provides for “Other Remedies” for infringement. The Japan, Switzerland and EU versions of the text appear to be overreaching, including for example by directly conflicting with explicit TRIPS provisions and provisions in the laws of ACTA negotiating countries, including several European Countries.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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There are “continuing concerns” surrounding open Wi-Fi under the Digital Economy Act, according to Dr Damian Tambini, member of the Communications Consumer Panel and senior lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
“This is an area where there could be considerable consumer detriment over the next 12 months,” Dr Tambini said.
CLUG Talk – 08 Apr 2008 – DBus and other freedesktop stuff (introducing pyglue) (2008)
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup, OSI at 11:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: With people like Simon Phipps in its house, the OSI regains credibility
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Open core, Open core, more Open core… the debate goes on and on, with Monty the latest to weigh in.
When you get down to it this is a fight over branding – which is why the issue is so important to the OSI folks (who are all about the brand). I don’t actually care that much how SugarCRM, Jahia, Alfresco et al make the software they sell to their customers. As a customer I’m asking a whole different set of questions to “is this product open source?” I want to know how good the service and support is, how good the product is, and above all, does it solve the problem I have at a price point I’m comfortable with. The license doesn’t enter into consideration.
So if that’s the case (and I believe it is), why the fighting? Because of the Open Source brand, and all the warm-and-fuzzies that procures. “Open solutions” are the flavour of the decade, and as a small ISV building a global brand, being known as Open Source is a positive marketing attribute. The only problem is that the warm-and-fuzzies implied by Open source – freedom to change supplier or improve the software, freedom to try the software before purchasing, the existence of a diverse community of people with knowledge, skills and willingness to help a user in difficulty – don’s exist in the Open Core world. The problem is that for the most part, the Open Core which you can obtain under the OSI-approved license is not that useful.
Yesterday on Twitter, I said “Open Core is annoying because the “open core” bit is pretty much useless. It doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.”
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Recently, there has been debate in the press about “Open Core”. I don’t care to debate the minor points but make a simple declaration:
* “Open Core” has NOTHING to do with “Open Source”. Nearly all proprietary software, at this point, has various degrees of open source-licensed source code in its core.
* “Open Core” has none of the advantages of open source to the user and is merely a proprietary software company.
* “Open Core” puts the software user at a disadvantage in the same way that all proprietary software puts the user at a disadvantage.
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While their marketing guy may claim “that overall, Sugar 6 is an open source product from an open source company”, it’s hard to see how they are anything other than a proprietary software company who share some code with a related open source project. Claiming to be “an open source company” seems an unacceptable use of the open source brand to me.
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Once more there is a lot of heated discussion about what constitutes a “real” open source business model – that is, one that remains true to the spirit of open source, and doesn’t just use it as a trendy badge to attract customers. But such business models address only a tiny part of running a company – how it generates money. What about the many other aspects of a firm?
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Imagine a world where code used by the biggest clouds is freely available to any developer, anywhere. A world where that code was a standard used to build private clouds as well as a variety of new service offers. In this world, workloads could be moved around these clouds easily – you could fire your cloud provider for bad service or lack of features, but not have to rewrite the software to do it. Imagine an open source cloud operating system that lifts IT to the next level of innovation, just as Linux drove the web to new heights.
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Free whitepaper – 10 top tips for getting IT into your CMO’s good books
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can’t achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn’t entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform’s code is open and some isn’t. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project’s founders.
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I was surprised to see that Larry Augustin had posted to his blog, since he does that pretty infrequently, so I assume all of the questioning about whether or not SugarCRM is open source is hitting close to home. Not as bad as a flawed cell phone antenna design, but I guess bad enough.
While his post is very heartfelt, it is full of misdirection about the meaning of the term “open source”. He refers to the word “open” a lot, but “open” and “open source” are two different things. Heck, one of the most popular network management product suites of all time was called OpenView, but the “open” in the name had nothing to do with open source software.
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I’ve been staying out of the recent resurgence in the “open core” debate (check out the 451 Group for a summary). If these fauxpen source vendors would simply call their product “open core” versus “open source” there wouldn’t be anything to talk about, but they need to market themselves as “open source” as opposed to “just another commercial software company with a great API” to get any traction.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Grouping of recent news on Free software, including the hotly-debated WordPress controversy
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Project London movie is the triumph of community spirit, togetherness or whatever you call it over money. A team of online volunteers using free software, created the movie, Project London, with as many as 650 VFX shots! Isn’t that awesome?
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While thinking of the next article for the Open Sound Series, I was listening to some music via Ampache. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ampache, it is simply a piece of software that allows you to upload, download, and stream music (and now videos) from a collection of media residing on a server. It features the ability to have multiple catalogs, ratings of songs and videos, playlist creation (including “democratic playlists” that users vote for), tag editing, album art and streaming various formats of music. While most software designed to listen to music does many of the same things, Ampache is then able to take it a step further by adding the idea of concurrent users of a single instance of the software.
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Canonical has gathered open source enthusiasts to help Ubuntu make its mark on the business landscape in the UK.
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Mozilla
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For the last couple of years I’ve been responsible for our wonderful Evangelism group at Mozilla. We’ve been responsible for a combination of developer relations, standards work and outbound developer-focused communications. If you’ve followed our work on hacks and devmo, especially around the release of 3.5 and 3.6 then you’ve familiar with the pretty amazing work of this team.
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Licensing
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If there is any failing on the part of the GPL here, it is not in the eyes of the second party – that person doesn’t want to share his code anyway. If there is a failing it is that the GPL has failed to enforce the terms that the first party expected – which I think are in line with the expectations of Free Software.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The new coalition government’s commitment to transparency heralds an exciting time for the possibilities of open data. The data release movement is relatively new and it’s difficult to predict its full economic impact in advance.
The US leads the way in encouraging and financially incentivising the software community to develop new apps based on publicly available data. The first round of the Apps for Democracy competition in Washington DC saw 50 new apps created in 30 days. The city gained $2.5m in development work outlaying just $50,000 in prize money for the winner. The Californian government introduced a transparency website costing $21k with $40k annual operational costs. As a result of citizens reporting on unnecessary spending the state saved a whopping $20m in a few short months. A similar website in Texas saw $5m savings, again within a few months of operation according to an EU e-gov survey.
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Technology has placed vast amounts of medical information literally a mouse click away. Yet what often may be central – a doctor’s notes about a patient visit – has traditionally not been part of the discussion. In effect, such records have long been out of bounds.
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Apparently, when it’s been released under a freedom of information (FOI) request!
This is not, I imagine, the answer you, gentle reader, expected:)
Pangloss was recently asked by an acquantance, X, if he ran any legal risk by publishing on a website some emails he had obtained from the local council, as part of a local campaign against certain alleged illicit acts by that council. According to X, the emails could destroy the reputation of certain local councillors involved, and that they had had great difficulty extracting the emails, but finally succeeded. Obviously the value to the public in terms of access to the facts – surely the whole point of FOI legislation – would be massively enhanced if the obtained emails could be put on the campaign website.
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Yesterday I was invited to a meeting at the Department for Communities and Local Government with the key players in the local spending/Spikes Cavell issue that I’ve written about previous (see The open data that isn’t and Update on the local spending data scandal… the empire strikes back).
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The following guest post is from Katleen Janssen, researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Groups on EU Open Data and Open Government Data.
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Open Access/Content
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The MIX website has been up for a few months now, and it looks like there are 2-3 new hacks being put up each day. What’s more, all of the work on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons license, which is awesome (although they chose the “no derivatives” version, which is less awesome, and perhaps a bit misaligned with the vision of the project to me).
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Open Hardware
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There are 13 million-dollar open-source hardware companies, but there have been no standards governing what defines the still nascent field.
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Programming
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Today SourceForge is announcing an open beta period for a new set of tools for developers. Specifically, our engineers have begun work on new and better tools for project members who want to use our tracker, wiki, and source code management. We also have a new open source project management environment. And there’s more to come.
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Python developers have their choice of shells – command-line interpreters that let you write Python code and execute it immediately. Israeli developer Noam Yorav-Raphael used IDLE, the graphical shell shipped with Python, for many years, and even contributed to its code. But IDLE was originally created to run as a single process, so the client-server model was “quite hacky,” he says, and it was written using the outdated TkInter GUI toolkit. Yorav-Raphael decided that writing a new shell was the way to go.
“I started to gather ideas for a new shell in the summer of 2007, started writing it in the summer of 2008 (so I had a working but not really usable shell), worked on it again in the summer of 2009 (which made it actually usable), and added some cool features in the end of 2009. I released the first public version of DreamPie in February 2010.” Today he released the latest version.
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Open source software development in Mexico.
Guest: Guillermo Amaral
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HTML5
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If you want to watch Internet-delivered video on your PC, the vast majority of Web sites have settled on a single, consistent way to do that. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this single, consistent delivery system is Adobe Flash, with all its security and stability issues.
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Aloha Editor is an easy to use WYSIWYG HTML editor, featuring fast editing, floating menu, and support for HTML5 ContentEditable. It provides WYSIWYG editor to any website content instantaneously, enabling content editors to see the changes the moment they type.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, News Roundup at 11:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Android grows not just in phones anymore
Nokia/MeeGo
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If indeed Nokia is interviewing for a new CEO, it should hire the candidate who tells the mobile giant this:
“I don’t want the job unless Nokia is going with Android.”
Tablets
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Android tablets are making their way way into the world and what we’ve seen so far hasn’t been so impressive. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is by far the most appealing. Lenovo is planning on launching their own Android tablet this year. According to Liu Jun, the Senior vice president for Lenovo’s Consumer Business Group, has announced that they will be bringing the Lenovo LePad to compete directly with Apple’s iPad. While the LePad will first be available in their home market of China before they reach out to other markets. Below is an image of their Lenovo LePhone just to give you an idea of what they are capable of.
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HP is postponing, if not cancelling, its Android-powered version of its Slate tablet, says All Things Digital. Meanwhile, DigiTimes says Acer will launch both seven-inch and ten-inch ARM-based Android tablets in the fourth quarter.
Hewlett Packard (HP) is working on a variety of tablet PCs, including WebOS, Windows, and Android, reports All Things Digital. However, citing “sources in position to know,” the story says that an Android tablet originally rumored to be due in the fourth quarter will be delayed until next year.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, News Roundup at 11:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Accumulation of Linux and GNU news including a Zenwalk 6.4 review
Graphics Stack
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Last month we reported on the status of kernel mode-setting with the Glint driver that’s being done as a Google Summer of Code project to provide KMS support for the ancient 3Dlabs Permedia 3 and Permedia 4 graphics cards and to better document the Linux KMS/DRM driver writing process. As part of the Glint KMS discussion, it emerged that an independent developer (James Simmons) happened to hack together a 3dfx DRM driver. This was interesting as the work was never published or accepted into the mainline kernel, but today we finally are able to lay our eyes on this open-source 3dfx driver for the Banshee, Voodoo 3, and Voodoo 5 graphics cards.
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Userspace file systems are one of the coolest storage options in Linux. They allow really creative file systems to be developed without having to go through the kernel gauntlet. This article presents one of them, SSHFS, that allows you to remotely mount a file system using ssh (sftp).
Applications
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Most Linux users are familiar with the top command. Top shows you a list of processes on your system and provides a ton of useful information such as their CPU usage and owner. Unfortunately, this isn’t always enough data and many people don’t know where to turn next. This article covers three performance monitoring applications that show information top doesn’t tell you, and can greatly help in troubleshooting bottlenecks or just finding out more about your system. These utilities are iftop, iotop, and pv.
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digiKam is undoubtedly a powerful application for processing and managing your photos, but there are situations when you need something lighter. For example, I use my netbook when I’m on the move to off load photos from my camera and quickly go through them. For this, I use Geeqie, a lightweight image viewer that offers a slew of nifty features that make it an indispensable tool in my arsenal.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Earlier this month the developers behind the Unigine Engine shared their latest update on this advanced 3D engine that’s fully supported under Linux. With the latest work on this game engine, there are significant performance optimizations to UnigineScript (the developers say these optimizations are “HUGE”), volumetric light shafts, optimized rendering of meshes in non-instanced mode, optimizations of the Unigine math library, and a note there is a new terrain system on the way, among other changes. Unigine Corp also dropped their first public confirmation of a new strategy game they are developing.
Desktop Environments/WMs
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This time around, in our Alternative desktops series, we’re going seriously old-school Linux with Fvwm. Although using Fvwm will make you feel like you’ve gone back in time, it still has it’s place in today’s world. Where speed and simplicity are the single most important desire on a desktop, you really can’t go wrong with Fvwm. The only problem with this wonderful little desktop is getting used to the configuration.
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K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)
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Most of you probably haven’t heard about Clementine before. But every linux music enthusiast must be aware of Amarok 1.4, which for many like me, was the best open source music player for Linux. Even though it was KDE app, I used it as my default music player in Ubuntu Gnome. It was that good. But everything changed once KDE developers decided to rewrite Amarok.
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GNOME Desktop
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I can’t stand the default menu Ubuntu comes with and I only keep it because I have to know under which submenu the user can find an installed application when posting on WebUpd8. This wouldn’t be needed if people used a menu with a search function but anyway. Also, since I install quite a few applications, half of it requires scrolling and makes it almost unusable.
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There are gazillions of people on this planet right now. Not all of them will ever care to build their own flavor of Linux. But Linux gives you the ability to choose how YOU want things, and then share it with the world. I’ve talked before about where you can go to build your own version of Linux. It’s not as difficult as you might think it is… so what are you waiting for?
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Reviews
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It’s been a long time since I last took a look at Zenwalk. I’ve always had a sweet spot for it, though I haven’t had a chance to really give it a full spin in quite some time. Although I am primarily a KDE user, there’s something about Zenwalk that always keeps my attention: It’s simple, fast, and gets the job done. Not only that, but its one of the best lightweight distros around.
Zenwalk uses XFCE as it’s desktop of choice (though other versions are available) and from the past times I’ve used it, it appears to be focused on allowing your system to run free, rather than bog it down with unnecessary eye candy and bloat. Zenwalk manages to pack a punch with a large variety of useful applications preinstalled, without slowing you down in the process.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux now comes with built-in virtualization (KVM) but is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) about to go to the virtual mat with VMware? If you look at their RHEL video, you’ll come away with a resounding ‘Yes’ to that question.
Red Hat purchased Qumranet in 2008 to acquire their KVM-based virtualization solution and SolidICE product based on the SPICE protocol.
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Fedora
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As Ian and Ryan already blogged, the Fedora Design Team is evaluating new branding fonts: Comfortaa for headings and either Cantarell or Droid Sans for body text.
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Debian Family
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After ten editions in nine countries spanning four continents, and for the first time in the US, the Debian project is holding the annual Debian Developer conference, DebConf, at Columbia University in New York City on August 1.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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I believe such a philosophy, like Ubuntu’s code of conduct, is important and every project should have one.
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Flavours and Variants
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Huzzah! So, the official (and huge) ISO for the second release of Netrunner is up, out and available right now! (torrent)
Here’s the distrowatch announcement.
Moving to KDE
The biggest change in this version is moving to KDE for the desktop.
Something important to understand about that: when I say “KDE for the desktop”, that doesn’t mean Netrunner is running all KDE apps. There are a lot of GNOME (and other) apps in there, because we are trying to present the best selection of applications and for some reason some people like some of the non-KDE apps better.
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