February 2006 Archive

28 February 2006

Schools have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation's copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a web site. Teachers said students in rural areas would bear the brunt of cuts if the Copyright Agency was successful in adding internet browsing charges to the $31 million in photocopying fees it rakes in from schools. The agency calculates the total due by randomly sampling schools each year for materials they copy, and extrapolating the results

The contents of 800 Australian libraries have gone online, with the launch of a new free service by the National Library in Canberra. Libraries Australia has been used by professional librarians for 25 years. The National Library's Fran Wilson says from today that will extend to everyone

A new optical effect has been created in a London laboratory that means solid objects such as walls could one day be rendered transparent. Researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, have pioneered the technique which could be used to see through rubble at earthquake sites, or look at parts of the body obscured by bone. The effect is based on the development of a new material that exploits the way atoms in matter move, to make them interact with a laser beam in an entirely new way — via Warren Ellis

27 February 2006

Federal Agriculture Minister Peter McGauran has halted the export of Australian livestock to Egypt, amid allegations of animal mistreatment. Channel 9's 60 Minutes program has aired footage of cattle in an Egyptian abattoir, having their tendons slashed before slaughter. The 60 Minutes reporter believes the cattle are Australian, but Livecorp says that is unlikely

Google has announced their pilot program to digitise the entire video content of the National Archives and make it globally accessible for free on Google Video. The history of the world should be universally accessible and this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost, and that everyone has equal and easy access towards such information. Google has provided some sample videos from the National Archives, such as the 1969 moon landing

mPhase Technologies and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs have reported that their jointly developed nano-based smart battery prototype has proven it can store and convert energy on demand. This practical confirmation of the theory behind the technology is a major milestone in the product development process

26 February 2006

Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg raised eyebrows Thursday at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles with a proposal rarely heard from executives at large digital music services: Record labels should try selling music online without copy protection

A Trading Standards officer in a town in the UK contacted the Mozilla Foundation to assure it that she'd caught the pirates who were copying Firefox without permission. When it was explained that the software was free, the officer lost it — I can't believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case? If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation, as it is difficult for us to give general advice to businesses over what is/is not permitted — via Boing Boing

They move through seemingly solid ice with ease and are at their liveliest near the freezing point of water. Warm them up slightly and they dissolve into goo. Their life cycle remains a mystery. But ice worms are beginning to yield their secrets to a few hardy scientists who see broad applications from understanding one of the planet's oddest inhabitants

25 February 2006

An Amish teen was accused and cited for wiretapping a neighbour's phone line to call relatives in another state. The Amish tend to frown upon this sort of thing — via digg

Judge Punch, a strict Catholic and loony fundie, spat the dummy at a recent custody hearing. He screamed abuse Rachel Knight and ordered that she is to have absolutely no contact with her son, not even in writing, because of her membership of a satirical religious group — Church of the SubGenius — with very liberal views on sexuality — via Boing Boing

24 February 2006

The head of the US copyright office has accused Congress of making a mistake by extending the length of copyright in America, calling the term too long, and saying that Congress made a big mistake. The remarkable admission came at the tail end of an event held at the UNC Law School on 2 November 2005, when Mary-Beth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, and a panel of copyright scholars, lawyers and bureaucrats convened to deliberate copyright in public

Skype has come under scrutiny from the NSA and FBI since its PC-to-PC calls are encrypted using AES encryption. This is the same encryption used by the US Government for many things. So, why is it national security when the Government encrypts its communications and assumed criminal activity when private citizens follow suit? — via digg

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld is unhappy with the existing propaganda systems in place and insists that the US must create a more effective, 24-hour propaganda machine or risk losing the battle for the minds of Muslims

23 February 2006

It appears that one of the largest eDonkey2000 communities is no more. Often occupied by over 1 million eDonkey2000 users spread over several servers, Razorback2 is often regarded as the very lifeblood of this network. It is being reported the Federal Belgian Police have raided and seized Razorback2's servers. In addition, it is suspected the administrator of Razorback2 is currently in custody — via digg

Citing the Prevention of Terrorism act, British Police have arrested and interrogated three of the stars of the award-winning film The Road to Guantanamo, together with the three ex-Guantanomo detainees on whose story the film is based — via Feòrag

American hard rocker and political activist Henry Rollins says a fellow passenger on his flight out of Auckland reported him to Australian anti-terrorism authorities for reading a scholarly work on the rise of militant Islam. He said the official told him that though her department did good work, it also received a lot of letters submitted by lunatics. Rollins replied on his web site: Please tell your government and everyone in your office to go fuck themselves. Tell them twice. If your boss is looking for something to do, you can tell him I suggest he go fuck himself. Baghdad's safer than my hometown and your PM is a sissy — via Feòrag

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration on Thursday to release documents about its warrantless surveillance programme or spell out what it is withholding, a setback to efforts to keep the programme under wraps — via digg

22 February 2006

A plague of identity theft is afflicting South Korea's online gamers, with almost a quarter of a million cases reported. Many of the stolen identities are being used in gaming farms in China as part of a $1 billion a year black market in cash and items from online games. In the farms, ranks of low-paid workers work 14-hour shifts performing repetitive tasks in online games in order to generate gold and other valuable items. These items can then be sold to players overseas

The cult television series Monkey is being remade in its home country Japan. If you know which TV character was born from an egg on a mountain top and the lead line of in the world before Monkey, primal chaos reigned, you probably have the ABC to blame. Parts of the series were shot in New South Wales at Stockton Desert near Port Stephens and the Blue Mountains last year

21 February 2006

Broadband customers of Australia's largest ISPs — Telstra, Optus and iiNet — can use peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as BitTorrent and Kazaa without being throttled by their ISP, at least for now

A group of New Zealand school children have found the remains of what is believed to be a 40 million-year-old giant penguin. The remains were found last month near Kawhia, on the west coast of the North Island, by children looking for fossils for a nearby natural history museum. Bones from the largest ancient giant penguin, found in New Zealand more than 130 years ago, indicate the bird stood about 1.5 metres tall and weighed more than 100 kilograms

20 February 2006

Google has formally rejected the US Justice Department's subpoena of data, arguing the demand violated the privacy of users' searches and its own trade secrets. Responding to a motion by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Google also said in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California the government demand to disclose web search data was impractical

Apple appears to have invoked the DMCA to stop the dissemination of methods allowing Mac OSX to run on chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The chatter at the OSx86 Project was stifled Friday after the forum was served with a notice under the DMCA and Win2osx.net, another web site that hosts discussions related to getting Mac OSX onto chips with the x86 instruction set, was also down

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world—and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs. To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages

The first experimental demonstration of quantum telecloning has been achieved by scientists at the University of Tokyo, the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and the University of York. Telecloning combines cloning (or copying) with teleportation; ie, disembodied transport. The scientists have succeeded in making the first remote copies of beams of laser light, by combining quantum cloning with quantum teleportation into a single experimental step. Telecloning is more efficient than any combination of teleportation and local cloning because it relies on a new form of quantum entanglement — multipartite entanglement — via Warren Ellis

19 February 2006

The City of Chicago wants to blanket its streets and neighbourhoods with a wireless Internet signal, granting residents and visitors access to the Web wherever they are — on streets, in homes, offices and shopping malls. Chicago's chief information officer said that the city will invite technology companies to submit proposals this spring on how to build and offer citywide wireless broadband [BugMeNot]

Houston's police chief is suggesting putting surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets and even private homes. Scott Henson with the American Civil Liberties Union calls Hurtt's proposal to require surveillance cameras as part of some building permits — radical and extreme

Paul Dell builds web sites. So, he has had a URL stating as much: dellwebsites.com. Somehow, Dell, the giant computer vendor thinks that people would be confused by that is and is suing for 100,000 Euros in damages — via digg

18 February 2006

Amazon is in advanced talks with the four global music companies about a digital-music service that could be launched as soon as this summer. It would feature Amazon-branded portable music players, designed and built for the retailer, and a subscription service that would deeply discount and preload those devices with songs

Telstra is likely to proceed with its next generation broadband network regardless of the regulatory outcome it receives, an analyst says. Goldman Sachs JBWere analyst Christian Guerra said broadband was critical to Telstra's future and Australia's largest telco could not afford to abandon the fibre to the node (FTTN) rollout altogether

Microsoft will close the book on its appallingly bad FrontPage web design programme with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year

17 February 2006

Noted physicist Dr Franklin Felber will present his new exact solution of Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation to the Space Technology and Applications International Forum in Albuquerque. The solution is the first that accounts for masses moving near the speed of light. Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during rapid acceleration — via Warren Ellis

The latest definitions file for Microsoft's Anti-Spyware beta flags Symantec's Norton Antivirus products as a password-stealing trojan and prompts users to delete portions of the programme. Users who follow the instructions lose their installation of Norton, requiring delicate Windows registry edits and a complete removal/reinstall of Norton. Microsoft's support forum is quickly filling up with complaints about this problem, many from businesses that have been pretty hard hit. This should be a cautionary tale about deploying beta products in production environments

16 February 2006

A blind UC Berkeley student is suing Target, saying the retailer is violating the civil rights of those who cannot see because its web site is inaccessible to them — via digg

The Firefox memory leak is not a bug. It's a feature. The feature is how the pages are cached in a tabbed environment. To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited less than 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last five session history entries for each tab. This is a lot of data. If you have a lot of tabs, Firefox's memory usage can climb dramatically. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web

Children at a Florida elementary school refused to sell lollies to raise money for a field trip, having just completed an educational unit on health and well-being. The widow of Dr Atkins was so moved by their commonsense that she donated $16,000 to their school so they could afford the trip without selling junk-food — Boing Boing

15 February 2006

Harry Whittington, 78, was alert and doing fine after US Vice President Dick Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas. Does this mean it's open season on lawyers? — via Boing Boing

Several companies are developing electronically controlled lenses to provide enhanced vision. Thanks to technologies created for astronomical telescopes and spy satellites, aberrometers can map a person's eye with extreme accuracy. Lasers bounce off the back of the eyeball, and structures in the eye scatter the resulting beam of light

A Staffordshire, England woman's garden drain was clogged with what may be a small dead octopus. Vicky Springitt thought it was an old banana skin until her 9-year-old son Isaac pulled it out with a pair of tongs. Nobody seems to know where the creature came from — Boing Boing

14 February 2006

A team of New York physicists has confirmed that a tabletop contraption made at UCLA does in fact generate nuclear fusion at room temperatures, using pairs of crystals and a small tank of deuterium. But unlike less reliable reports back in the 1980s, there's no talk this time of producing endless supplies of power. Rather, the technology could lead to ultra-portable x-ray machines and even a wearable device that could provide safe, continuous cancer treatment — via Science Blog

A former Australian city councillor has been charged with assault for shushing a woman who wouldn't stop talking on her phone at a screening of Brokeback Mountain. Pauline Clayton was on holidays in Texas, catching the movie in Texas cinema, when the woman's phone rang. After she ignored a shushing gesture, Clayton touched her lightly on the shoulder. After Clayton touched her a second time, the woman went berserk, screamed obscenities, and got two cops and swore out an assault complaint — via Boing Boing

It appears that Eddie, the retarded UFO navigator, wasn't allowed to play with the big boys. While his mates were off creating a rather nifty crop circle (KMZ) in Billingley, Yorkshire, Eddie was booted a couple of fields over and left to his own devices (KMZ). Feel free to make up your own wacky explanation

Two antibodies that enabled the severed spinal nerves of rats to be regenerated are to be tested in humans. The antibodies have helped rats with damaged spinal cords to walk again, by blocking the action of Nogo, a protein that stops nerve cells sprouting new connections. But there were concerns about whether blocking Nogo would lead to uncontrolled neuronal rewiring in the brain or spinal cord and it was also unclear how such a therapy could be given to humans

13 February 2006

The French courts have ruled that using peer-to-peer networks (P2P), providing you are doing so for personal rather than commercial reasons, is legal. The decision comes just as the French Parliament meets to discuss whether internet users should pay a voluntary tax or surcharge of €5 a month to use P2P networks. The decision was actually made back in December but has only just been made public

Authorities are seeking a burglar who allegedly took the time to make coffee, cook and eat meals, take showers, pick out a change of clothes, watch television and check his e-mail while inside three rural Washington County homes this month

Australian researchers are developing a new surface coating which has the potential to realise the utopian dream of a self-cleaning bathroom. Researchers at the University of NSW are currently testing out a number of properties that might help to create the new coating with the goal of rolling out test products within the next year or so. Their research is based on nanoparticles already being incorporated into self-cleaning glass which comprise a tiny coating of titanium dioxide. When the particles interact with natural light the electrons become activated and oxidate the surface, effectively cleaning it

12 February 2006

George Deutsch, the loony fundie who tried to muzzle top NASA climate scientist James Hansen and ordered NASA web designers to add the word theory to every mention of the Big Bang, has resigned. NASA has declined to discuss the reasons for his resignation, but it came the same day that Texas A&M University, from which Deutsch claimed on his resume to have graduated, revealed that he had attended the university but did not complete his degree

Egyptian authorities gave a peek Friday into the first tomb uncovered in the Valley of the Kings since 1922. US archaeologists said they discovered the tomb by accident while working on a nearby site. The tomb, believed to be some 3,000 years old and dating to the 18th Dynasty, does not appear to be that of a pharaoh

The US Justice Department asked a judge to approve Patriot Act e-mail monitoring without any evidence of criminal behaviour and now e-mail surveillance has been approved

11 February 2006

Last month, Johannas Pope, 61, was found dead, wearing a white gown, and propped up in her chair in front of the television. She had been placed there way back in 2004 by her caretaker. After a long investigation, the coroner announced yesterday that Johannas had died naturally of heart disease. Pope told her caretaker, Kathy Painter, she didn't want to be buried because she believed she would come back to life — via Boing Boing

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said Friday the Bush administration's domestic spying is within the retarded monkey boy's inherent power under the Constitution

A team of British scientists investigating whether a tiny tropical hookworm could provide a cure for asthma and hay fever have committed the ultimate act of bravery by infecting themselves with the parasite to observe the effects. It was fairly itchy when they first go through the skin, he admitted — via digg

10 February 2006

Senators have voted in favour of a bill removing control over the abortion drug RU486 from the federal health minister, a noted loonie fundie. Senators were given a rare conscience vote on the bill, with 45 voting in favour of the change and 28 voting against. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives and if passed will end the Health Minister's power to ban RU486 and allow the Therapeutic Goods Administration to make a decision on the drug. It is the first conscience vote since 2002

Alexander Franklin Mayer, a physicist at Stanford, has just recently published a peer review website for several physics lectures focusing on a single underlying idea that time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime. The science is presented quite clearly and originally uses GPS systems as a point of focus — via Slashdot

Andrew Carol has built a version of the Babbage Difference Engine No 2 out of Lego — via digg

09 February 2006

In an effort to crack down on search engine abuse, Google has eliminated the German site of BMW from its index, charging the company with violating webmaster guidelines. Office equipment giant Ricoh has also now found itself on the end of Google's search sanctions in Germany but some critics of Google's death penalty say companies are being punished unfairly for having the savvy to make Google's system work for them. Others joining the debate however have praised Google for keeping large multinational companies in check

Google is tightening the link between Gmail and Google Talk by allowing users to conduct instant messaging text chat sessions from within the Web mail service's interface. To use Google Talk from within Gmail, users don't need to download any additional software nor a separate application

The US military is considering testing the principle behind a type of space drive which holds the promise of reaching Mars in just three hours. The problem is it's entirely theoretical and many physicists admit they don't understand the science behind it — via digg

Fluorinex Active has developed a new technology that can protect the tooth from cavities for five years with one simple electrical treatment. The company is currently working on a small device which, together with a gel, will impose an efficient ion exchange process through an electro-chemical reaction in which fluor ions displace the Hydroxide ions at the outer layer of the tooth. This is intended to produce a new mineral layer with significantly improved chemical and physical resistance to the aggressive bacteria and the resulting acidic environment in the mouth

08 February 2006

An astonishing mist-shrouded lost world of previously unknown and rare animals and plants high in the mountain rainforests of New Guinea has been uncovered by an international team of scientists — via digg

iiNet is investigating problems with its popular Internet telephony service which have seen some customers lose signal in mid-call

Carbon nanotubes being used to make memory chips. As the name suggests, carbon nanotubes are extremely small cylinders of carbon, and they have some similar properties to the extremely fine hairs on the feet of Geckos that enable the lizards to climb walls and hang from ceilings. The new chips work faster than current technologies, and hold their data without needing a power source

Alon Bodner has developed an underwater breathing system, called LikeAFish, that literally squeezes oxygen directly from seawater, doing away with the need for compressed air tanks — via digg

07 February 2006

Minnesotans buying mail-order prescription drugs from Canada are having medications confiscated by US Customs in escalating numbers, a step that has some worried that life-saving supplies may not reach customers on time

Scientists at the University of Kentucky have built tiny pipes that move water 10,000 times as fast as the conventional laws of fluid flow allow, mimicking for the first time the seamless way fluids progress through our cells — via digg

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. On the company's web site, if you click on Telegrams in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible: Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage — via digg

06 February 2006

AOL and Yahoo have proposed a system to charge senders a quarter of a cent for guaranteed delivery on each e-mail sent to their customers. They justify this as an anti-spam measure, but of course it could make them billions, is unlikely to eliminate spam, and will undermine the ability of activist groups like MoveOn and others to correspond with their supporters. The justification AOL offers for this is that it could make e-mail just as good as postal mail — via Boing Boing

The British Library is concerned about DRM's effect on its ability to make materials available to the public. Libraries have a legal right to distribute materials under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright law, but DRM systems may block this. Furthermore, they point out that DRM systems don't automatically switch themselves off when a work goes out of copyright. DRM systems may allow copyright holders to retain control over their material longer than they are legally entitled to. Worse yet, if the software no longer exists to unlock a DRM-protected file, its contents may be lost forever — exactly the thing libraries are intended to prevent

Suwan Jayasinghe of University College London and colleagues at Kings College London has used a form of ink-jet printing to create jets of living cells. The biophysicists say their technique, which does not destroy the cells, could be used to grow biological tissue or even human organs — via digg

Hundreds of thousand of people could die in a nuclear attack, but hundreds of thousands of others could be saved. That's because the Pentagon — after decades of searching — believes it has found a drug to treat radiation exposure. Why isn't that drug available? Because bureaucratic red tape is blocking the availability of Neumune, a drug developed by San Diego biotech firm Hollis Eden to treat Acute Radiation Syndrome — via Boing Boing

05 February 2006

Bug reports are already flooding in for Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview. Specific issues include the possibility of arbitrary code execution as well as incompatibilities with McAfee Security Center, anti-spyware programmes and online banking sites

Unwired is expanding its wireless broadband network to Melbourne as the first step beyond its Sydney base, but will not say when its service will be available in the Victorian capital. The move was made possible by the formalisation of the WiMax wireless broadband standard late last year

Google is working on a project to create its own global internet protocol network, a private alternative to the internet controlled by the search giant, according to sources who are in commercial negotiation with the company. Should Google successfully launch an alternative internet, it is theoretically possible for them to block out competitor websites and only allow users to access websites that have paid Google to be shown to their users. You think they'd learn from AOL on this issue

04 February 2006

Cory Doctorow, a former EFF staff member, dared to criticise as malware an anti-copying technology used in many video games and created by a company called StarForce. Now StarForce's PR Manager Dennis Zhidkov, who lives in Moscow, is making spurious legal threats. Zhidkov claimed, variously, that StarForce will press charges, that the published criticism violates 11 international laws, and that he has contacted the FBI to protest harassment — via Politech

An Adelaide software startup is spoiling for a brawl with Google as it prepares for the launch of a technology that allows internet users to click on any phone number to set up an instant call. Pep-Talk International has patented on-the-fly conversion of phone numbers into telephone calls, allowing it to sell the service to companies that want to receive instant feedback from customers

John Kiel Patterson, a Louisiana man too stupid to turn the volume down, is suing Apple, claiming that the iPod can cause hearing loss for those who use it. The suit, which Patterson wants certified as a class-action, seeks compensation for unspecified damages and upgrades that will make iPods safer

03 February 2006

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications — via digg

An FCC mandate will require that all hardware and software have a wiretap backdoor that allows the government to tap into all your communications — via digg

A guy was selling his used video camera on Amazon, and a Nigerian scammer sent the seller a bogus sale confirmation e-mail that appeared to originate from amazon.com. Instead of receiving a valuable video camera, the scammer ended up paying shipping charges to Nigeria for a box of dog shit — via Boing Boing

Paper made from kangaroo and wallaby dung has shot an Australian paper company into the global spotlight. Joanna Gair, manager of handmade paper company Creative Paper Tasmania, says production of roo poo paper only started in the past two weeks but she has been thinking about the idea for some time. I've been inspired by the African paper makers who've created an enormous industry out of elephant dung paper, she says. I thought we needed an Australian version — via Improbable Research

02 February 2006

A librarian at Brandeis University forced the FBI to obtain a warrant to seize computers used to send threats. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents tried to seize 30 of the library's computers without a warrant, saying someone had used the library's Internet connection to send the threat to Brandeis. But the library director, Kathy Glick-Weil, told the agents they could not take the machines unless they got a warrant first. Newton's mayor, David Cohen, backed Ms Glick-Weil up. After a brief standoff, FBI officials relented and sought a warrant from a judge

Funded by Google and Sun the Stop Badware project will expose the hidden extras that popular software, such as file-sharing programs, often has inside it and will also identify companies that develop the programs and distribute them on the Internet — via digg

Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows results — via digg

01 February 2006

Microsoft has taken the wraps off Internet Explorer 7, releasing the new beta version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. Of interest to web monkeys, they've killed off the CSS star hack without fixing the problems it was used to workaround

A former postal worker who had been put on medical leave for psychological problems shot five people to death at a huge mail-processing centre and then killed herself. The attack Monday night in Santa Barbara, California was also the biggest bloodbath at a US postal installation since a massacre 20 years ago helped give rise to the term going postal — via Warren Ellis

Five current and former National Security Agency employees have said that the agency frequently retaliates against whistleblowers by falsely labeling them delusional, paranoid or psychotic

A study was done where people put on glasses which inverted the image. They saw everything upside-down, but after wearing them constantly for a few days, their brains were retrained to flip the image right-side-up again. When they took the glasses off, the image was upside-down again — via digg

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