Alec Muffett
@alecmuffett.bsky.social
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everybody deserves good security.
https://alecmuffett.com/about
āIāve lost my friendsā: advocacy groups warn Australiaās social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardian
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144675
#SocialMediaBan
#australia
#censorship
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āIāve lost my friendsā: advocacy groups warn Australiaās social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardian
āitās okay, she should be outside playing sportsā ā no? āI have autism and mental health things, itās hard making friends in real life for me,ā she says. āMy online friends were eā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144675
about 17 hours ago
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Alec Muffett
The National
1 day ago
šØ This evening, a notice was circulated from representatives of Peter Mandelson, via press regulator IPSO and the Press Association news wire, to all media across the UK We believe it is strongly in the public interest to publish this memo. This is it in full š
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Peter Mandelson issues secret notice demanding press leave him alone ā read in full
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25834517.full-secret-notice-peter-mandelson-just-sent-uk-media/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Bluesky#Echobox=1770404545-2
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Alec Muffett
Laura Webster
1 day ago
BREAKING: Peter Mandelson just sent this secret notice to all UK media, demanding they leave him alone. He uses IPSO clauses designed to support grieving families in a bid to stop scrutiny of his relationship with Epstein We have published it in full.
www.thenational.scot/news/2583451...
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Peter Mandelson issues secret notice demanding press leave him alone ā read in full
LATE on Friday evening, this notice was circulated from representatives of Peter Mandelson, via press regulator IPSO and the Press Association newsā¦
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25834517.full-secret-notice-peter-mandelson-just-sent-uk-media/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Bluesky#Echobox=1770404545-2
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European Commission mandates Facebook (etc) must not take down right-wing hate content for 24h if posted on self-declared āeditorially independentā websites
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144608
#EuropeanCommission
#HateSpeech
#censorship
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European Commission mandates Facebook (etc) must not take down right-wing hate content for 24h if posted on self-declared āeditorially independentā websites
āwhat could possibly go wrongā? Presumably part of the point of this is also to get media outlets to sign up for regulatory oversight. Commission issues guidelines to protect media contā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144608
1 day ago
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Epstein file PDFs contain OCR texts of complete, *unredacted*, Base64-encoded email attachments; forensics geeks commence challenging reconstructionā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144542
#epstein
#redaction
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Epstein file PDFs contain OCR texts of complete, *unredacted*, Base64-encoded email attachments; forensics geeks commence challenging reconstructionā¦
āOh dear.ā Recreating uncensored Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments | The NeoSmart FilesThe NeoSmart Files
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144542
2 days ago
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Itās almost hard to work out which country this is meant to be aboutā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144415
#iran
#russia
#totalitarianism
#trump
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Itās almost hard to work out which country this is meant to be aboutā¦
If foreign intelligence controlled events, the mass killings across hundreds of cities would be impossible to explain. If such networks were real, a security state that tracks teachers and workers ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144415
3 days ago
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Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell | CIA
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144397
#cia
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Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell | CIA
Sad to lose one concrete positive: One of CIAās oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. The World Factbook served the Intelligence Community and the ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144397
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
There is no cavalry. There is no magic wand to wave. Privacy preserving age verification is just as much of a myth as "if only everybody would store food properly and maintain good kitchen hygiene, we would be free of salmonella" - it's true, but it's never going to happen.
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Similarly with "privacy preserving age verification" - it makes for a cute hack which works well in laboratories with metaphorical test tubes and nice clean infrastructure, but as soon as it meets the internet and timing attacks and log files and application installs & shoddy implementation⦠nope.
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
You can withdraw a statement in parliament or apologise for an insult, but you can't undo the fact that it actually happened. Speech can't be undone, and frameworks that insist it CAN essentially stand atop of coercion of everyone to behave in a particular way. WHICH DOESN'T WORK ON THE INTERNET.
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
The idea that age verification can be performed online with an information exchange that is unlinkable to an identity, is pretty much the same kind of architectural fallacy which leads parliamentarians, lawyers, etc to accept the fiction that you can "unsay" or "withdraw" an insult or statement.
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
In the hope that this may assist
@elaineburke.bsky.social
, although yes there are folk working on privacy preserving age verification, there are also inherent limits to the privacy benefits of such, which are exposed upon deployment. Good paper on this issue:
www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/...
3 days ago
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A major loss for sensible and informed tech coverage in the media:
add a skeleton here at some point
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
So the discussion around the table is that Apple & Google should be policing what people use general purpose Apps to generate and share on Twitter, and applying moral judgements to the entire app - even taking it down from app stores - if people do bad things with it, anywhere?
3 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
3 days ago
Great read. An ICE attorney working for DOJ temporarily explains that ICE has no clue how all of this "federal court" stuff works and makes clear that both ICE and DOJ were totally unprepared for the flood of habeases that were the inevitable result of the Minneapolis raids.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Prediction: if it hasnāt happened already there will soon be a massive media story about āQuoted Printableā encoding, possibly including somebody getting shot because of it
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144352
#QuotedPrintable
#epstein
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Prediction: if it hasnāt happened already there will soon be a massive media story about āQuoted Printableā encoding, possibly including somebody getting shot because of it
There is just so much confusion and outrage as people who have never done computer forensics are suddenly faced with millions of corrupted PDF renditions of 7-bit text attempting to carry 8-bit &amā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/144352
4 days ago
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Alec Muffett
This does not surprise me in the slightest, I presume you know the history of Meta's internal analyses of reports to NCMEC? It's almost as if they benefit from publishing really huge mediatastic numbers that somehow misrepresent the reality and extent of challenges
alecmuffett.com/article/15902
7 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Jeremy Malcolm
7 days ago
Thereās been a lot of press about an explosion of AI generated content that resembles CSAM. But the thing is, none of that reporting was true. It was based on the misclassification of a large volume of reports of real CSAM.
cyberlaw.stanford.edu/letter-to-nc...
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Letter to NCMEC about AI-CSAM Report Statistics
Today, Bloomberg issued a jaw-dropping report about the hundreds of thousands of CyberTipline reports with a generative AI component that Amazon filed to the National Center for Missing and Exploited ...
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/letter-to-ncmec-about-ai-csam-report-statistics/
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The 3D printing community learns how to support protesters in its own quiet wayā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143987
#3DPrinting
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The 3D printing community learns how to support protesters in its own quiet wayā¦
Printer go brrrrrā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143987
6 days ago
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next, after age verification, will come āproof of humanityā ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143876
#EndToEndEncryption
#ai
#privacy
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next, after age verification, will come āproof of humanityā ā¦
ā¦which will likewise fail; not to mention that there is nothing in the supposed demand which cannot already be implemented using TLS āthe human-killing AI robots demand end-to-end encrypted pā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143876
8 days ago
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Introducing Encrypt It Already | Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143853
#EndToEndEncryption
#eff
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Introducing Encrypt It Already | Electronic Frontier Foundation
[EFF is] launching Encrypt It Already, our push to get companies to offer stronger privacy protections to our data and communications by implementing end-to-end encryption. If that name sounds a liā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143853
8 days ago
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Sometimes I think there are folk in liberal academia who are simply waiting for Chomsky to die so that they can usurp the throne
9 days ago
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Anna Riedl: āThe amount of prompt engineering needed to not make medical professionals have wild irrelevant hallucinations is truly extraordinaryā
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143779
#ai
#llm
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Anna Riedl: āThe amount of prompt engineering needed to not make medical professionals have wild irrelevant hallucinations is truly extraordinaryā
Sometimes I agree people are more like LLMs and less like what they imagine: āFor example, if you mention having had emotional stress they will entirely ignore the long list of physical symptā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143779
9 days ago
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James Ball: On almost everythingā¦evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagersā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143670
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#elderly
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James Ball: On almost everythingā¦evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagersā¦
āā¦But that issue gets zero political attentionā. Truth: Links to:
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143670
10 days ago
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Alec Muffett
James Ball
10 days ago
On almost everything ā fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation ā evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.
add a skeleton here at some point
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Oh, and if you suddenly accept that there is a burden of censorship on the long haul transatlantic bearers to prevent bad things coming into the United Kingdom, you are implicitly throwing away the notion of "net neutrality" which is popular consumer rights legislation.
10 days ago
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Alec Muffett
You *may* deny this observation & put all the blame on the website; but if you face complex questions of "why is it a burden on a foreign exporter to not export to Britons?" and "what content censorship *should* be applied by long-haul/transatlantic bearer ISPs, cf: shipping companies like DHL?"
10 days ago
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Alec Muffett
British jurisprudence already has a long established meme about this problem, attached: "If parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence" What we have here is crafty Britons hopping over the Channel/Atlantic for access to Gitanes/4chan. Ban *them*.
10 days ago
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State Department confirms: federal censorship shield law incoming | Preston Byrne
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143643
#AgeVerification
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#censorship
#ofcom
#surveillance
#vpns
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State Department confirms: federal censorship shield law incoming | Preston Byrne
:popcorn: Sarah Rogers, United States Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, confirmed that the US is poised to forever block foreign censorship of US citizens under laws like the UK Online ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143643
10 days ago
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Will Congress shield the US from foreign attacks on the First Amendment? | Spectator | Ofcom & British civil society does not understand the 1st amendment
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143572
#4chan
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#censorship
#surveillance
#vpns
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Will Congress shield the US from foreign attacks on the First Amendment? | Spectator | Ofcom & British civil society does not understand the 1st amendment
āThe only answer to the foreign censorship problem is law reform. Congress should make it clear that foreign censors cross our border at their peril. The only way to accomplish this is to enaā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143572
11 days ago
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Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance over Mar-a-Lago using AF2 ICAO identity
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143548
#adsb
#trump
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Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance over Mar-a-Lago using AF2 ICAO identity
This, if it is still visible: Via: Next up, age verification for ADSB?
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143548
11 days ago
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Alec Muffett
11 days ago
Few know that the Trump name was originally Merkwürdigliebe before immigrating to the US.
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"Wait, I've seen this movieā¦"
youtu.be/gP2L2L-Ebec
#DrStrangetrump
11 days ago
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WhatsAppās new āStrict Account Settingsā Adds Lockdown-Style Protection Against Spyware |CyberScoop
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143457
#EndToEndEncryption
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#encryption
#whatsapp
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WhatsAppās new āStrict Account Settingsā Adds Lockdown-Style Protection Against Spyware |CyberScoop
While safety activists are still whining about 2 billion people in the world getting communications privacy: The āStrict Account Settingsā feature will roll out in the coming weeks and once enabledā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143457
11 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Aaron Rupar
11 days ago
Trump: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."
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#Trump
Against
#2ndAmendment
: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."
#2a
www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/...
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From the Fauxmoi community on Reddit: Trump Against 2nd Amendment: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do th...
Explore this post and more from the Fauxmoi community
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/XYn6EGPjiy
11 days ago
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One-Ended Encryption / OEE | JP Aumasson
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143356
#encryption
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One-Ended Encryption / OEE | JP Aumasson
Bravo, this is a very necessary tool for certain people: Youād have to be braindead to believe AES is secure in 2026. When we analyzed how AES implemented its āencryptionā, we found multiple attackā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143356
12 days ago
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āThe UK war on VPNs is an embarrassmentā | Jimmy Wales
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143312
#AgeVerification
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#vpns
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āThe UK war on VPNs is an embarrassmentā | Jimmy Wales
Quote: The UK war on VPNs is an embarassment.Ā For child safety, we should be teaching children about Internet safety ā including why you should use a VPN to protect your privacy, block ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143312
12 days ago
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āMuch of what people want to solve with the [online safety act] is actually [better] solved with a search warrant and an arrestā | Preston Byrne
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143205
#AgeVerification
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#censorship
#surveillance
#vpns
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āMuch of what people want to solve with the [online safety act] is actually [better] solved with a search warrant and an arrestā | Preston Byrne
Truth; see also embedded commentary from Graham Smith: Much of what people want to solve with the OSA is actually solved with a search warrant and an arrest. Because the OSA is the flagship online ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143205
12 days ago
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Alec Muffett
"I have no idea what is going on amongst my friends nor in my local country's politics, but Uganda just woke up and you would not believe what's going on over there"
13 days ago
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Alec Muffett
It would be interesting to have an outright ban on anything other than "reverse chronological" iff we could engineer it to also ban "geographic proximity". The result would be: users seeing nothing but the global chronological firehose a-la Twitter in 2007 & the death of all political content.
13 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Meantime, over on Reddit, "Why don't Bluesky trending topics reflect breaking news?" It turns out that chronological vs ranking is a design choice which has consequential impact on global awareness.
www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySoc...
13 days ago
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Content Moderation History: do we all remember 2013-19 when online sociology pundits were everywhere expounding the need to block streaming/sharing of video of people being murdered?
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143092
#ContentModeration
#OnlineSafety
#OnlineSafetyAct
#censorship
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Content Moderation History: do we all remember 2013-19 when online sociology pundits were everywhere expounding the need to block streaming/sharing of video of people being murdered?
It began in the wake of various atrocities (civil unrest, government oppression, rioting, live streamed mass shootings) and over generalisations which tended to cite Facebook as at least the “ā¦
https://alecmuffett.com/article/143092
13 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Cathy Gellis
14 days ago
Bondi is such a bad lawyer. Because with this single move she tanks legal arguments in support of trying to get the voter roles and also for ICE enforcement. "We're coming for your elections with the use of force," and "Forget immigrants, we're using this force only to screw with your elections."
add a skeleton here at some point
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If you are not on X you are missing content like this:
14 days ago
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Some interesting hypothetical content on Tiktok, today:
www.tiktok.com/@oddpride/vi...
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Inspired (with permission) by @mellythesciencegeek ās wonderful video on the same topic. She knows way more about chemistry than I do and you should check out her stuff :) š¤š¤ā¤ļøš¤ #science #mindblown #c...
TikTok video by OddPride
https://www.tiktok.com/@oddpride/video/7598697633984662798
14 days ago
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"ā¦but at least
#AgeVerification
will ensure that no *young* people get angry about this."
add a skeleton here at some point
14 days ago
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Alec Muffett
Dimitri Drekonja, MD, MS
14 days ago
Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.
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Mueller, She Wrote
14 days ago
To those blaming Walz for not mobilizing the Guard, he did that six days ago. I have to say it's disturbing to see people angry at Walz instead of the government agents that just executed a man. As though we should all be experts about what to do when a secret police force invades an American city.
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14 days ago
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