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Links 2/3/2017: Systemd 233, GNOME 3.24 Beta 2





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • 4 open source tools for sharing files
    There comes a time in your life when you have to share one or more files with someone, whether that someone is a friend, a family member, a colleague or collaborator, or a client. Many people stay true to their open source convictions by doing the job using applications like ownCloud, Nextcloud, or SparkleShare.

    All three are solid and flexible, but they're not the only games in town. Maybe your needs lean towards a simpler application. Or maybe you just want a dedicated file sharing tool that puts the power and the data in your hands.

    You have a number of open source options which give you all of that and more. Let's look at four additional open source tools that can meet all of your file sharing needs.


  • 3 projects successfully using mesh network technology
    Hyperboria is an end-to-end encrypted mesh network that uses IPv6. The focus of Hyperboria is to create a large-scale neutral network with a security as a first priority. The technology uses CJDNS (no relation to DNS) for Layer 3 routing and employs a novel public key cryptosystem to establish connections and encrypt traffic. Austin, Texas currently boasts the largest segment of Hyperboria with a network size of around 500 nodes. Unlike most traditional networks, and similar to Bitcoin, it uses a public key as an address that data can be sent to.


  • Open Source Boosts Innovation in Software, Hardware and Beyond
    Many think the development of technology is reserved only for the super-intelligent, and that the average person cannot comprehend it.

    This particular view of technology is a product of a closed-type environment, which hides key information related to the development of technology behind patents, copyrights and trademarks. While it’s debatable how intellectual property rights of inventors must be saved from abuse, traditional modes of doing so can block the flow of information in society.

    This model is primarily driven by commercial interests— where key technological inventions sell at very high prices. But this model increases the divide between the ‘privileged’ class and the ‘under-privileged’ class. The division of the world between developed, developing and under-developed nations is primarily based on the level of technology they possess. This leads to prohibitively expensive technology and an increasing technological divide— we are producing a generation of technology users instead of technology developers.


  • Cloud Native Computing Foundation Adds Google gRPC Project
    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which itself is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is expanding its roster of supported projects today with the addition of the gRPC project.

    The gRPC project is an open source, high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework originally developed by Google. The gRPC project has already been used outside of Google, with CoreOS and Netflix among the technology's adopters.


  • EMC's Joshua Bernstein on When to Deploy Open Source [Ed: When someone who works for a proprietary company software and back doors facilitator tells you when to use FOSS]
    "A lot of people are a little shocked and confused to hear about how EMC is contributing to and supporting open source development," Joshua Bernstein said to open his keynote address at last year's MesosCon conference in Denver. "I think that while many of us already understand the benefit of that, convincing large companies to do this sort of thing is a challenge."

    Berstein became Dell EMC's vice president of technology in 2015, after a four year stint as manager of Siri development and architecture at Apple. At MesosCon, he talked about some of the things that DevOps should consider when deciding whether to deploy open source or proprietary solutions.


  • SDN, Blockchain and Beyond: The Spaces Where Open Source Is Thriving Today [Ed: Black Duck is a malicious firm whose goal is to sell proprietary software by attacking FOSS]
    What are the newest frontiers that open source software is conquering? Black Duck's latest open source "Rookies of the Year" report, which highlights areas like blockchain and SDN, provides some interesting insights.

    The report, which Black Duck published Monday, highlights what the company calls "the top new open source projects initiated in 2016." It's the ninth annual report of this type that Black Duck has issued.


  • Events



    • Embedded Linux Conference 2017 Videos Now Online
      If you are interested in embedded Linux development but missed out last week's Linux Foundation event in Portland, the videos are now available online.

      Last week was the Linux Foundation's annual Embedded Linux Conference with a wide-range of mobile and embedded talks. Details from the event are available here.




  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)



  • BSD



    • OpenBSD errata, Mar 1, 2017
      A man-in-the-middle vulnerability has been found in OpenBSD's wireless stack. A malicious access point can trick an OpenBSD client using WPA1 or WPA2 into connecting to this malicious AP instead of the desired AP. When this attack is used successfully the OpenBSD client will send and accept unencrypted frames.




  • Public Services/Government



    • Government launches UK Digital Strategy to make Britain 'a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone'
      The UK government finally published its Digital Strategy today, outlining its plans for making the country a global capital of the digital economy.

      Culture Secretary Karen Bradley MP launched the strategy by laying out the government's vision of how to develop the requisite infrastructure, regulations and skills to make the UK the ideal place for digital businesses, new technology and advanced research.

      "The Digital Strategy will help to create a world-leading digital economy that works for everyone," she pledged at the Entrepreneur First startup accelerator. The London incubator is housed in a converted Biscuit Factory, a fitting example of the digital transformation the plans intend to support.




  • Licensing/Legal



    • How to Raise Awareness of Your Company’s Open Source License Compliance
      Communication is one of the seven essential elements to ensure the success of open source license compliance activities. And it’s not enough to communicate compliance policies and processes with executive leadership, managers, engineers, and other employees. Companies must also develop external messaging for the developer communities of the open source projects they use in their products.


    • removing everything from github
      Github recently drafted an update to their Terms Of Service. The new TOS is potentially very bad for copylefted Free Software. It potentially neuters it entirely, so GPL licensed software hosted on Github has an implicit BSD-like license. I'll leave the full analysis to the lawyers, but see Thorsten's analysis.

      I contacted Github about this weeks ago, and received only an anodyne response. The Free Software Foundation was also talking with them about it. It seems that Github doesn't care or has some reason to want to effectively neuter copyleft software licenses.




  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration





Leftovers



  • New route between Sweden and Denmark announced
    Good news for anyone in the Øresund region this summer: a new route between Sweden and Denmark is set to open, as a ferry designed to carry cyclists between the two bike-mad nations is trialled during the warmer months.

    The ferry will run across the Øresund strait between Dragør near Copenhagen to Limhamn, west of Malmö city centre.

    Dragør’s municipal council last week gave the green light to allow a shipping company to run the pilot project, which will ferry cyclists across the strait in the historic M/S Elephanten, a converted shipping boat built in 1940. It will hold 36 passengers, with the journey taking about one hour to complete.


  • Microsoft is adding Google Calendar support to Outlook on Mac
    Microsoft is adding Google Calendar and Contacts support to the Mac version of Outlook 2016, the company announced yesterday. The change means that Outlook users will be able to synchronize and track their Google Calendars across a range of devices, from Mac, to Android phone, to Windows PC.



  • Science



    • Is anything tough enough to survive on Mars?


      Two recent publications suggest that life, in the form of ancient, simple organisms called methanogens, could survive the harsh conditions found near the surface of Mars, and deep in its soils. Using methanogens to test for survivability is particularly relevant because scientists have detected their byproduct, methane, in the Martian atmosphere. On Earth, methane is strongly associated with organic matter, though there are non-organic sources of the gas, including volcanic eruptions.




  • Health/Nutrition



    • Michigan Ends Flint Water Credit Amid Disagreement on Recovery
      After weeks of meetings aimed at extending state-provided water relief credits, residents of Flint, Michigan, will resume paying the full price for water they still need to filter and have not been able to drink safely since April 2014.

      The credits, totaling roughly $40 million in aid, have covered 65 percent of residents' water usage since 2014 when the city's water crisis began. The credits have also covered 20 percent of city businesses' water use.

      The dangers of Flint's water drew national attention after an emergency manager answering to the state's governor, Rick Snyder, ordered the city's utility to switch water providers from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water to the Flint River. The move filled the city's water pipes and residents' taps with water contaminated by high levels of lead.




  • Security



    • Security updates for Thursday


    • Security updates for Wednesday


    • Researchers find “severe” flaw in WordPress plugin with 1 million installs
      More than 1 million websites running the WordPress content management system may be vulnerable to hacks that allow visitors to snatch password data and secret keys out of databases, at least under certain conditions.

      The vulnerability stems from a "severe" SQL injection bug in NextGEN Gallery, a WordPress plugin with more than 1 million installations. Until the flaw was recently fixed, NextGEN Gallery allowed input from untrusted visitors to be included in WordPress-prepared SQL queries. Under certain conditions, attackers can exploit the weakness to pipe powerful commands to a Web server's backend database.


    • cloudbleed hero graphics


    • Botnets


      Botnets have existed for at least a decade. As early as 2000, hackers were breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. Among other things, the hackers used the combined computing power of these botnets to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks, which flood websites with traffic to take them down.

      But now the problem is getting worse, thanks to a flood of cheap webcams, digital video recorders, and other gadgets in the "Internet of things." Because these devices typically have little or no security, hackers can take them over with little effort. And that makes it easier than ever to build huge botnets that take down much more than one site at a time.


    • Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer loses millions in bonuses over security lapses
      Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer will lose her annual bonus and the company’s top lawyer has been removed over their mishandling of security breaches that exposed the personal information of more than 1 billion users.

      Mayer’s cash bonus is worth about $2m a year and her personal cost from the security flaws increased when the board also accepted her offer to relinquish an annual stock award worth millions of dollars.

      Mayer, whose management team was found by an internal review to have reacted too slowly to one breach in 2014, said on Wednesday she wanted the board to distribute her bonus to Yahoo’s entire workforce of 8,500 employees. The board did not say if it would do so.


    • Unlimited randomness with the ChaosKey?
      A few days ago I ordered a small batch of the ChaosKey, a small USB dongle for generating entropy created by Bdale Garbee and Keith Packard. Yesterday it arrived, and I am very happy to report that it work great! According to its designers, to get it to work out of the box, you need the Linux kernel version 4.1 or later. I tested on a Debian Stretch machine (kernel version 4.9), and there it worked just fine, increasing the available entropy very quickly. I wrote a small test oneliner to test. It first print the current entropy level, drain /dev/random, and then print the entropy level for five seconds.


    • Startup Offers Free ‘Bug Bounty’ Help to Open Source Projects
      Many people don't realize much of the Internet is built on free software. Even giant companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon rely extensively on big libraries of code—known as "open source" software"—written by thousands of programmers, who share their work with everyone.

      But no software is perfect. Like the proprietary code developed by many companies, open source software contains flaws that hackers can exploit to steal information or spread viruses. That's why a new initiative to patch those holes is important.


    • 50 Google Engineers Volunteered to Patch Thousands of Java Open Source Projects
      A year ago, several Google engineers got together and lay the foundation of Operation Rosehub, a project during which Google employees used some of their official work time to patch thousands of open source projects against a severe and widespread Java vulnerability.

      Known internally at Google as the Mad Gadget vulnerability, the issue was discovered at the start of 2015 but came to everyone's attention in November 2015 after security researchers from Foxglove Security showcased how it could be used to steal data from WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, Jenkins, and OpenNMS Java applications.




  • Defence/Aggression



    • The New Yorker’s Big Cover Story Reveals Five Uncomfortable Truths About U.S. and Russia
      The New Yorker is aggressively touting its 13,000-word cover story on Russia and Trump that was bylined by three writers, including the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Beginning with its cover image menacingly featuring Putin, Trump and the magazine’s title in Cyrillic letters, along with its lead cartoon dystopically depicting a UFO-like Red Square hovering over and phallically invading the White House, a large bulk of the article is devoted to what has now become standard – and very profitable – fare among East Coast news magazines: feeding Democrats the often-xenophobic, hysterical Russia-phobia for which they have a seemingly insatiable craving. Democratic media outlets have thus predictably cheered this opus for exposing “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence on the presidential election.”


    • Sweden to reintroduce conscription amid rising Baltic tensions
      Sweden has voted to reintroduce military conscription by 1 July after struggling to fill army ranks on a voluntary basis, citing increased Russian military activity in the Baltics as one of the reasons for the policy U-turn.

      In 2010, Sweden’s centre-right government of the time abolished the draft after more than 100 years, arguing that targeted recruitment would increase the quality of a military that had shrunk by more than 90% since the end of the cold war.

      But with unemployment rates having returned to pre-2008 levels, the country has been struggling to meet its target of 4,000 new recruits per annum.


    • Conscription
      Canadian armed forces are barely enough to hold a single town together, let alone to fight a war. That’s not good enough. We should ramp up bodies, especially shooters, by at least a factor of five and we should procure vehicles and weapon-system in numbers sufficient for a general mobilization. Modern warfare is not like WWII where we had years to get ready. Things can get really bad in days with ICBMs, suicide bombers, chemical/biological weapons and many thousands of really insane people possessing them with evil intent. Conscription is fine to mobilize a population but we probably don’t need that if our reserves are much larger and our weapon-sytems more capable. We should aim to recruit ~10% of the population for military training and have 1% of the population ready to go instantly. That would give us flexibility similar to other countries who recognize the dangers around the world.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature



    • No Immediate Ruling Made on Dakota Access Pipeline Work
      A federal judge said Tuesday that he'll decide within a week whether to temporarily halt construction of the final section of the Dakota Access pipeline over claims that it violates the religious rights of two Indian tribes.

      U.S. District Judge James Boasberg told lawyers at a hearing that he wants to issue a ruling before oil begins flowing in the pipeline, which could be weeks away.


    • Swiss study: snow to largely disappear from Alps by 2100
      By the end of the century up to 70 percent of snow cover in the Alps will have melted and the ski season will be much shorter, Swiss researchers predict.

      If global warming is not halted, only ski areas above 2,500 metres will have enough snow for winter sports, said the scientists from the Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF) and the EPFL Lausanne.

      Writing in European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal The Cryosphere, they predicted that the amount and duration of snow cover in typical Alpine areas would have shrunk by the end of the century, even in best-case climate scenarios.






  • Finance



    • As Uber Melts Down, Its CEO Says He 'Must Fundamentally Change'
      It took eight years and at least as many back-to-back-to-back-to-back controversies to break Travis Kalanick.

      After a stunning month of scandals at Uber, Kalanick, its founder and CEO, sent an emotional and uncharacteristically apologetic memo to his employees Tuesday night. “This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help,” Kalanick wrote. “And I intend to get it.”




  • Censorship/Free Speech



    • Why some German politicians want Erdogan banned
      "German-Turkey relations are facing one of their greatest challenges of the modern era," German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said, a day after a German-Turkish journalist was formally charged in Turkey with producing terrorist propaganda and undermining the government.

      The detention of Deniz Yucel, who works for German newspaper Die Welt, has led to an outpouring of anger and frustration from German politicians and media figureheads alike.

      Some politicians have even called into question whether future visits to Germany by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as part of an upcoming election campaign should be allowed to go ahead.


    • Is it reasonable for a private industry to demand governmental censorship power over general communications?
      The copyright industry is trying – again – to forcefully conscript Internet Service Providers into doing their bidding. This time, the RIAA and other organizations are demanding “filtering”, which is a pretty word for censorship, of anything they don’t want people to send to each other privately.

      Ask yourself this one question: is it any shade of reasonable that a private industry gets a governmental mandate to silence our phonecalls when we talk about things that the private industry in question don’t want us to talk about? Because that’s exactly what the copyright industry is demanding here, exactly what they’re demanding, as applied to the Internet.


    • Twitter to get even harsher on trolls
      Twitter is cracking down even harder against trolls, including temporarily barring accounts that are harassing other users.

      In a blog posted Wednesday, Twitter's vice president of engineering, Ed Ho, announced more safety measures to stop abuse on its platform.

      One of the methods includes using the company's internal algorithms to identify problematic accounts and limiting certain account functions — such as only allowing the aggressor to see their followers — for a set period of time if they engaged in troublesome behavior.


    • Twitter will use algorithms to sniff out trolls
      SOCIAL NETWORK Twitter has announced that it's making more updates to its service that will help to silence trolls and better allow users to filter out abusive content.

      Last month, Twitter announced a 'three-step plan' to tackle trolls, which included an easier way for user filter "abusive and low-quality replies" from users' timelines by default, a ban on suspended users from creating new accounts, and a new 'safe search' feature which the firm claims will remove offensive tweets - along with tweets from blocked and muted accounts - from a users timeline.

      On Wednesday, the firm announced it's expanding on these efforts, and will now look to algorithms to more actively identify accounts that spread abusive content.


    • Plymouth clerk's anti-Muslim post investigated, city manager says
      Longtime Plymouth City Clerk Linda Langmesser is the subject of an internal investigation after an anti-Muslim post she made on Facebook came to light, City Manager Paul Sincock confirmed Tuesday.

      "It's a matter of an internal investigation," Sincock said. "We have no further comment."

      According to Sincock, Langmesser's posting was a response to a story about a Muslim woman who'd lost her job at the White House; the story, headlined "I was a Muslim in Trump's White House for 8 Days," penned for The Atlantic by former White House staffer Rumana Ahmed, who hired into the White House during President Obama's first term.

      According to Sincock, Langmesser's post — which has since been removed — talked about how Ahmed wasn't telling the truth "because that's what they do in their culture" and that she should "be sent back to where she can worship the koran."


    • A positive step forward against the “censorship machine” in the Copyright Directive
      On 24 February 2017 the Rapporteur of the European Parliament (EP) Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), Catherine Stihler MEP, published her draft Opinion on the Copyright Directive. The Opinion sends a strong message against the most extremist parts of the European Commission’s proposal: the “censorship machine” (aka upload filter) proposal in Article 13 and the suggestion to expand the “ancillary copyright ” (aka “link tax”), that failed so miserably in Germany and Spain to every country of the EU.


    • We can't just blame the Left for student censorship – every side is at it now
      If you dare to walk onto a university campus, you better prepare yourself. Flags bearing the stern face of Lenin drape from windows. Reincarnated soldiers of the Red Army patrol the corridors. The harmonic chime of ‘The Red Flag’ hangs in the air.

      Yes, according to a ground-breaking study by the Adam Smith Institute, eight out of ten UK universities are ‘left-wing’.




  • Privacy/Surveillance



  • Civil Rights/Policing



    • 9-month probation for youth who used criminal force against blogger Amos Yee
      A youth who attacked blogger Amos Yee at a Jurong West mall in May last year was ordered to undergo nine months of probation on Wednesday (March 1).

      Bryon Loke Thong Ler, 19, who had confronted the 17-year-old for taking a video of him at Jurong Point, was also ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Loke's parents, who were in court, placed a $5,000 bond to ensure his compliance.

      Loke had earlier pleaded guilty to using criminal force on Amos between noon and 12.50pm on May 29 last year. The court had called for a probation report.


    • Body Worn Cameras Continue To Reduce Police Misconduct, Citizen Complaints In San Diego
      On the other hand, lower-level uses of force have increased 23.5% over the same period. What could be taken as an indication of a partial accountability favor is more likely just a statistical adjustment. For one, the increase in real numbers is only 71 more force deployments than last year, which isn't all that much when compared to the number of police interactions. According to SDPD numbers, officers responded to 520,000 incidents in 2016.

      As for the uptick in lower-level force deployment -- which is much more significant than the drop in higher-level force use -- this is little more than a reflection of a positive change in tactics. In most arrests, some level of force is deployed. If San Diego cops are aware they're being recorded, they're less likely to deploy high-level force techniques as quickly as they would in pre-camera days. These numbers show there's more de-escalation occurring, which naturally results in fewer deployments of high-level force. But since some force is still needed in many cases, the numbers have to go somewhere. And they've traveled from the high-level stats to the low-level.


    • Swedish medics need military equipment to enter certain areas – Ambulance Drivers Union
      Gordon Grattidge, chairman of the union, told DGS TV that medics need tactical units and special equipment in order to enter risky areas across Sweden.

      In 2016, more than 55 places were outlined as areas police were struggling to maintain law and order, as thugs attack officers and wreak havoc.

      The situation on Sweden came under scrutiny in February as US President Donald Trump suggested the Scandinavian country’s troubles was a result of its liberal refugee policy.


    • Police dispute US journalist's claim he was escorted out of Rinkeby
      Police have disputed American journalist Tim Pool's claim that he received an escort out of the Rinkeby suburb of Stockholm on Wednesday after he and his colleague were followed by masked men.

      "Several men started masking up and following us. Police told us to leave and had to escort us to our car," he wrote in a Twitter post on Wednesday.


    • Danish prison more expensive than luxury hotel
      The list of dignitaries and stars who have pampered themselves in the luxurious settings at D’Angleterre Hotel in Copenhagen goes on into infinity.

      But really, if they’d wanted to spend the night at an even more expensive (though perhaps not as exclusive) establishment in Denmark, they should have booked themselves in at Vridsløselille Prison in the western Copenhagen suburb of Albertslund.


    • Murderer Tanveer Ahmed inspires Pakistani hardliners from Scottish jail
      When Tanveer Ahmed was sentenced to a minimum of 27 years in jail for murder last August, Judge Lady Rae said he had committed a "brutal, barbaric and horrific crime".

      Ahmed stabbed to death Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah - who belonged to the persecuted Ahmadi sect - because he believed he was committing blasphemy by uploading online videos in which he claimed to be a prophet.




  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • FCC Boss Calls Net Neutrality A 'Mistake,' Repeats Debunked Claim It Stifled Broadband Investment
      So for several years now, the broadband industry (and the politicians, think tankers, and policy folk paid to love them) has desperately tried to claim that the FCC's net neutrality rules killed investment in broadband networks, clouding the entire telecom market in a dark shroud of "regulatory uncertainty." And it doesn't matter how many times we (and others) debunk this claim, it just keeps popping up like an undead groundhog. The reality is this: net neutrality had zero negative impact on the CAPEX, growth, or financials of major broadband providers. It simply isn't true.


    • Can YouTube TV Get You to Cut the Cord for $35 a Month?
      For years, YouTube has served up almost every imaginable kind of video.

      The site’s top trending attractions on a recent afternoon included clips of a gymnasium roof collapsing in the Czech Republic, a colossal alligator lumbering across a footpath in Florida, some North Korean refugees digging into American barbecue for the first time, and a guy demonstrating how to wash a car with a baby. (Step one: Hand the baby the hose.) Now, a dozen years after its creation and about a decade after its absorption into Google Inc., YouTube is on the verge of adding yet one more genre—a category of programming that has long eluded it. YouTube is finally getting regular TV.




  • DRM



    • Xbox Games Pass: Microsoft launches $10 monthly subscription for over 100 titles [Ed: Microsoft wants you to stop owning games and just rent them instead]
      Microsoft is launching the Netflix of games, letting people play as many as they want for just $10 a month.

      The Xbox Games Pass will be a monthly subscription service that gives access to 100 games, Microsoft has said. As such, it works like Netflix or similar to the PlayStation Now service that Sony has offered for years.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • USTR Issues 2017 Trade Policy Review, Listing IPR Priorities [Ed: USTR is a front group for large US corporations that smear, attack and shame poor countries to get their way]
      The Office of the United States Trade Representative today released its 2017 trade policy agenda. The report includes numerous references to intellectual property rights, mainly focused on enforcement, plans for multilateral discussions on IPR and trade, and promises of an aggressive stance on geographical indications. But overall it is short on overall details about what’s to come with the new administration.


    • Text Protecting Indigenous Cultural Expressions Streamlined At WIPO, But Divergence Persists
      Renewed discussions on the protection of traditional cultural expressions at the World Intellectual Property Organization have produced a new draft text that provides a clearer view of the different ways in which countries see a that treaty could help against misappropriation of indigenous cultural heritage. Divergences remain on core questions such as what and who should benefit from the protection of an international treaty, in which terms, and to what extent.


    • Indigenous Peoples At WIPO Call For Respect Of Their Sovereign Rights, Prevention Of Cultural Genocide
      A panel of indigenous peoples speaking at the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization on a potential treaty protecting their folklore from misappropriation asked that indigenous culture be recognised as unique, and not unduly considered as belonging to the whole of mankind. The keynote speaker chastised the United States position in the committee, criticised a US recent document equating the cultural significance of Santa Claus, pizza and sand paintings, and called for the respect of indigenous peoples’ sovereign rights over their cultural expressions.


    • Copyrights







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