Hacking, Tracking, and Phishing – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 372

Posted on November 28th, 2024 by Kirk McElhearn

The Bluesky social media platform’s burst in popularity has begun to attract the scammers. The US Department of Justice wants Google to sell its Chrome browser. You’ll be amazed by the number of fraud apps researchers are finding every day on your favorite app stores. And we’ve got a few very last minute tips for shopping Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Is it time to upgrade your Wi-Fi router? Security should be a top priority
Don’t buy these tech products this Black Friday
8 essential tips for safe holiday shopping online
OG HomePods Fail, and Apple Won’t Fix Them
Apple supports World Aids Day, donating $5 per qualifying purchase, Nov 29–Dec 8
Apple’s (PRODUCT)RED page
Apple share buybacks
Independent researcher “Babu” has helped Apple and Google remove 7K fraud apps
Fake Apps in iOS App Store
Now BlueSky hit with crypto scams as it crosses 20 million users
Follow Intego on Bluesky
Google Rebrands Switcher App to Lure iPhone Users to Android
Meanwhile, Apple’s “Move to iOS” has over 100 million downloads on Google Play
U.S. DoJ Wants Google to Sell Chrome Browser
Anyone Can Buy Data Tracking US Soldiers and Spies to Nuclear Vaults and Brothels
Spies hack Wi-Fi networks in far-off land to launch attack on target next door

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Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 372

Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, November 28 2024. This week’s Intego Mac podcast security headlines include: The Bluesky social media platform’s burst in popularity has begun to attract the scammers. The US Department of Justice wants Google to sell its Chrome browser, likely far easier said than done. You’ll be amazed by the number of fraud apps researchers are finding every day on your favorite app stores. And we’ve got a few very last minute tips for shopping Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast. Veteran Mac journalist, Kirk McElhearn. And Intego’s. Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.

Kirk McElhearn 0:51
Good morning, Josh. How are you today?

Josh Long 0:53
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?

Kirk McElhearn 0:54
I’m doing well. For you it’s Thanksgiving. Well, through the miracle of time travel, it’s Thanksgiving if you’re listening to it when this podcast is released, but actually record the day before, so you don’t have your hands in the turkey today yet.

Josh Long 1:07
Not just yet, no, but I will probably be enjoying a nice turkey dinner sometime around when people are listening to this tomorrow.

Last minute shopping thoughts for Black Friday/Cyber Monday

Kirk McElhearn 1:16
Okay, so along with turkey, we have Black Friday, and last week we did a sort of pre Black Friday show, particularly we’re talking about, is it time to upgrade your Wi Fi router? Now? Since then, the Black Friday sales have begun. It’s no longer Black Friday as a day, it’s Black Friday as a week, as a fortnight, as a long event. I noticed that there were a number of sales on routers here in the UK, some of the ones that we talked about last week. Did you buy a new Wi Fi router or not?

Josh Long 1:41
I have not yet, because, again, as when we’re recording this, it’s not actually Black Friday yet. So I’m kind of waiting to see if I can get a good deal. By the way, pro tip Sometimes adding things to a cart or to a list on Amazon will help you get one of those notifications when something goes on a sale. So I do have it in my shopping cart, in the save for later. So hopefully the ones that we were talking about last week are the kind of the ones that I’m I’m looking to see if there is going to be a sale on but we’ll see.

Kirk McElhearn 2:12
The prices didn’t really don’t change if they start the sale price on Monday or even last Friday that they started it. These prices are going to go through the end, maybe at the very end of Cyber Monday, near the end of the day, they’ll drop the price. But even then, I don’t think they will. I think it’s kind of important for Amazon to not make people think they have to wait until Friday or Monday to buy things they want them to buy them throughout this entire sale period.

Josh Long 2:38
Right. And what Amazon does is interesting because they have all these flash sales, which, by the way, is something they do all year round, but they emphasize it a lot more during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend. To try to make you think that this is some original thing that they’re only doing, you know, this special weekend, but they do these kind of sales all the time. And so if you really, you know, are a deal Hunter, you can potentially find some good deals on these kind of things year round. But it also really requires kind of sitting by your Amazon app or or your web browser to monitor these things. And it’s, it’s a little too much, I think. But if there are particular things that you’re looking for, you know, again, I would suggest adding them to your save for later or to a list, and at least then you should get some kind of notification also. We’ve mentioned this in the past, camelcamelcamel.com is a site that you can put in any Amazon product and get an email notification as soon as it goes on sale. So that’s another option as well.

Kirk McElhearn 3:42
They call them flash sales in the US here, they call them Lightning Deals. Same idea. Here’s something where they’ve only got a certain number of units of each thing, and I’m looking through now. Here is a waterproof garden outdoor storage box for 190 liters of water I’ve just what I’ve always been waiting for, right? Or this, you know, this wonderful airbrush kit, or these women’s cat dog socks, cute animal socks, gifts, et cetera. It’s like, I go through these things and I scroll about two windows and I give up. The one thing that I do buy regularly, and I’ve mentioned this every time, is about cat food, because it’s cheaper on Black Friday or any of the sale days. And I buy cat food on Amazon. What if I bought some Kindle books? They have a lot of Kindle books on sale, but that’s about it. I bought some kitchen utensils, but not because they were on sale, because I needed them. A couple of stainless steel, you know, large spoons for cooking, but nothing specific to Black Friday. So I will mention again, we’re going to put some links in the show notes. One article, don’t buy these tech products this Black Friday, which are the things you shouldn’t buy because they’re old or refurbished, don’t get security updates. And then eight essential tips for safe holiday shopping online, which we’ve been talking about for years. These are these tips never change, right? How to tell if a site’s reliable. You know how to not get scammed, etc.

Josh Long 4:54
And if, in case you missed it, last week, we we have an article on the Mac security blog we did. Whole episode about it last week. Is it time to upgrade your Wi Fi router? And so if that’s one of the things that you’re thinking about, or if you’ve never really thought about that, make sure to check out that link as well, because we’ve got some good tips, and this could be a really good time to find deals on Wi Fi routers.

Apple offering fewer (PRODUCT)RED products

Kirk McElhearn 5:14
Now, Apple runs their Black Friday sale from Friday, they don’t do it for a whole week. I think to do from Friday through Monday, they give gift cards. It’s not very impressive. I’m looking on the UK site, you can get a 40 pound gift card if you buy an Apple Watch se, which is what, three years old. You can get an 80 pound gift card if you buy a new iPad Pro. So if you’ve been waiting to buy an iPad Pro, that’s about 12% of the price of the iPad Pro. But other things, it’s not very good, 40 pounds if you buy an Apple TV, 4K or a HomePod. I want to briefly mention in passing about HomePods. I bought two original HomePods When they came out many years ago. I bought one, and then several months later, bought the second, and they both died. The second one died a couple weeks ago. I went to turn it on, I went to play some music, and it didn’t show up. I looked in the Home app, it said it had been updated to version 18.0 of the software. So that’s the latest big version. I think what happened is it got bricked at some point, with maybe a dot one, the previous one had gotten bricked, I think under 16.1 or three or four, and that one, I don’t have an Apple store nearby, and I had to go to an Apple store at some point a couple years ago, so I took that with me, and the guy looked at me said, we can’t fix this. So what’s really disappointing is I think you pay $349 now for a HomePod, the original ones, there is no repair path, even if they’re only a few years old, you can’t repair them. You can service a second generation HomePod, and by service, they mean there’s something wrong. You pay for it, unless you have Apple Care, and we just give you a replacement, right? They don’t actually repair it. And same with HomePod Mini, but the original ones, they’re all dead, so I wouldn’t recommend buying HomePods anymore if you can’t repair them. So one other thing Apple is doing is they’re supporting World AIDS Day, and they’re donating $5 per qualifying purchase from November 29 to December 8. It’s interesting, because if you go to the Apple (PRODUCT)RED page, and they’ve had (PRODUCT)RED for many, many years, you scroll down and you look at all the products, and wow, none of these were available. None of these were available. There’s a couple of iPhone models available, a couple of iPhone cases. There’s no beats, headphones, there’s hardly anything. And Apple was really promoting this for quite a while, and now they’re just offering a couple of bucks for qualifying purchases. I want to point out that Apple, in any given year, for the past eight years or so, has been buying back shares for anywhere from 80 billion to $110 billion per year. It’s not like they don’t have enough money. They’ve been buying back their shares to keep the value propped up and then giving five bucks per qualifying purchase on World AIDS Day. They kind of dropped the ball on this, because Apple really was at the forefront of the (PRODUCT)RED. And I bought, I have a (PRODUCT)RED iPod Touch. I had a (PRODUCT)RED Apple watch band. You know? I thought it was always a nice thing for them to do.

Josh Long 7:58
Yeah, I do find this curious, too. But at least Apple is supporting the cause and and they will be donating $5 per qualifying purchase again, from this Friday, which is Black Friday, through December 8, which is a Sunday. So you’ve got a little bit of time in that time window.

Kirk McElhearn 8:13
But only if you pay through Apple Pay. (Oh, interesting caveat.) See, this isn’t really charity. This isn’t charity. Here, we’re going to link to an article in nine to five Mac, and it points out that (PRODUCT)RED has dispersed over $65 billion to countries since 2002 so it’s more than 20 years, whereas Apple’s share buybacks are well above that every year. So, you know, lip service for something they used to actually promote a lot. The first one was the red iPod Nano. Remember when it was the tall, thin Nano? I probably still have one of those. It was a nice color too. But now you gotta use their payment system where they’re making money on it to pay a little bit to go crumbs. I mean, maybe find other companies that do (PRODUCT)RED sales. Anyway, we’ve got a bunch of scam and malware stories this week. Where should we start? Your friend Babu, who’s the one who’s been tracking fraud apps, mostly in India and other countries in Asia, right?

Large numbers of fraud apps are always present on app stores

Josh Long 9:07
Yeah, so he recently crossed a pretty big milestone over the last year and change, he’s been working on just completely independently, on his own, not getting paid to do this research. He’s looking into fraud apps that are in the Apple App Store as well as the Google Play Store for Android, and he hit a pretty big milestone. He’s been responsible for the removal of 7000 fraud apps across these two big stores. That’s a really big number. Does he get paid for this at all? Not at all. This is 100% just independent research and Google and Apple do not pay him for any of this. He doesn’t work directly with either of these companies. Either there’s usually what happens is he’ll make a bunch of noise on social media and hoping that somebody will pick this up as a story, or that somebody. Apple will come across his list, because he has this massive list right now. There’s somewhere around, I think, 250 apps in the Apple App Store that he says are fraudulent. And again, he does a lot of research into this, so he knows what he’s talking about. These are apps that mimic real companies but are not actually distributed by those companies. There’s a number of other indicators that he looks for, but he knows kind of all of the red flags to look for, and so he maintains this massive list. And again, that’s 250 apps in the App Store today. This is not past ones that have been removed, and this is only the ones he’s found.

Kirk McElhearn 10:34
There’s probably others that he hasn’t spotted, but he’s looking at the top of the best seller list to find the ones that are most popular and that are downloaded the most.

Josh Long 10:43
That’s exactly right. Yeah. In fact, I know of other researchers, independent researchers, who look into the app store all the time and are finding other things that are like, you know, maybe not fraudulent loan app or a cryptocurrency app or something like that, but things that have, for example, icons that look like their Google Apps, but are clearly not actually distributed by Google, and these things are pretty sketchy sometimes because they encourage you to log into your Google account. But how do you know that it’s not doing something malicious, right? It’s hooking into your Google account, because you’re definitely logging in and giving it access to your for example, your Google account. These things are really sketchy, and you’ve got to be really careful about just about anything that you’re downloading from the App Store. Make sure, if you can, you know, do your own research and ensure that it’s really from the company that it supposedly is from.

Kirk McElhearn 11:37
There’s something that’s always worried me about that when you log in with another service, I believe it’s called OAuth, the system that they use which logs in you as your user, with your account name, but not your credentials. But you don’t know if actually, someone has manipulated a website to get into your account and to record your credentials. Somehow, you can’t really be sure. Now, I know we have log in with Apple, or sign in with Apple, is what they call it, and I use that particularly with hide my email with a lot of services, but I’ve always wondered if that can be hacked.

Josh Long 12:13
I would say it’s probably generally safer if you have the option to sign up for a site again, if you know the app or site is legitimate and that it’s really using sign in with Apple, then I would say that that’s a safe way to sign up for an account with a website. But again, like, how do you really know? Like, if it’s some random app that you’re coming across and you’re signing up for an account, how do you know that it’s actually going to use sign in with Apple? It’s it’s one of these things that, like Apple, unfortunately, doesn’t vet apps as well as we would assume that they do, and there are a lot of things that get into the App Store that really should never have gotten past the review process. So do be very, very careful. Okay,

Kirk McElhearn 12:53
We’re going to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about some more scams and malware, and we have a few Google stories today,

Voice Over 13:01
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Bluesky becomes victim of success as the scammers have arrived

Kirk McElhearn 14:13
Okay, so Bluesky is really popular. You can find Josh and I on Bluesky. You search for Josh or I, you’ll find us there. Intego’s on Bluesky. Bluesky’s crossed 20 million users, and it was a real huge influx over the past few weeks, but all of a sudden they’re hit with crypto scams. I mean, are we surprised that a popular social media service is hit with crypto scams?

Josh Long 14:33
Well, it shouldn’t be too big of a surprise, of course, anytime that some new social network starts to take off this, we’ve seen this happen with threads and others as well, and once they start to reach a certain level of popularity that they hit a threshold where the scammers start to realize, Oh, hey, maybe there’s not really good moderation, and maybe I can get away with putting some scams on this site too, and maybe I’ll be a little more successful. This is. Something that people should be aware of, regardless of what social network you’re on, whether it’s a well established, long standing social network like Facebook or x, and maybe a little bit less regulated service, like, for example, Bluesky. Now Mastodon is a whole other thing, because, again, this is everybody runs their own Mastodon server, so there’s not a single body that’s doing any kind of moderation and making sure that the scams stay off the platform. So with any kind of social network, you do have to be really, really careful and watch out for scams.

Phishing emails attempt to look like legitimate bills or invoices

Kirk McElhearn 15:32
I got an interesting phishing email. It’s the first time I’ve seen this one. It was sent through DocuSign. Now you may be familiar with DocuSign. People use this to well, as his name suggests. Have you electronically signed documents? I’ve had this with contracts for companies. I’ve worked for NDAs, things like that, and it’s a relatively common service, and you get a link, usually it’s from someone you know. But in this case, it wasn’t. It was not very creative here, Joe Paul sent you a document to review and sign, and it was talking about a Bitcoin purchase through PayPal that was completed successfully for $329.11 now, we’ve talked about a number of these scams recently that use other services, such as accounting programs to send invoices, and that kind of invoice could be tricky. There was the one for the Best Buy geek squad that was for a few $100 for a subscription, kind of similar to Apple Care, something like that. So if you’d bought something from Best Buy, you would react thinking, Well, did they try to sell me a subscription that I don’t want? I’m going to call the phone number and sort it out here. If you didn’t buy bitcoin through PayPal, why would you even react and click the link in this email? Now, if you do click the link right now, the review document link, the document’s been taken down, but there’s a phone number for support, and if you call the phone number, you can talk to the it says the PayPal billing team.

Josh Long 16:52
Yeah, that sounds a little bit suspicious. We’ve seen a lot of these kind of call center things where they want you to call a phone number, and then you end up talking with a scammer. And in some cases, these are even automated. Now, if you can believe that, you could end up talking with a virtual agent, but in any case, you end up talking with somebody. And the next step in the process is they, they get you to, for example, download an app that allows them to get remote access to your computer, and then they go through this process, and at the end of this all, they’re either trying to steal money from your actual bank account, or they might be installing malware on your system. In any case, they’re getting some temporary or potentially semi permanent foothold into your system so that they can do bad things. So always be really, really careful with any of these kind of things, and remember that even legitimate services like PayPal and DocuSign and others can be used to send fake invoices. So be very, very careful because these things, because they’re coming from a legitimate invoicing service, they will very likely go to your inbox and not to your spam folder.

Google rebrands its switching app

Kirk McElhearn 18:04
Okay, we’ve got some Google stories, and we’re going to start with a simple one, that Google is rebranding their switcher app to lure iPhone users to Android. I like this lore iPhone users to Android. This reminds me that scam where someone puts a wallet on the street and has some fishing line on it, and you go to pick up the wallet and moves away and you chase it, and they wore you into the alley to rob you, right? This is what it feels like. I guess it’s fair game, because Apple’s got a switch to iPhone app, and Android wants people to switch in their direction. I don’t know why they need to rebrand it. Maybe because people couldn’t find it or didn’t. I don’t know what it was called before. It’s called Android switch now, but the article we’re looking at here on Mac groomers doesn’t say what it was before. I guess this is a good thing if you want to move from iPhone to Android, it’s Google’s official Transfer app, is what it says in the app store, right?

Josh Long 18:50
Right. So if, for some reason, you want to switch to Android from iOS, you have an official app to do that. Now, I do want to point out that if you’re coming the other direction, if you currently have an Android device and you want to switch to iOS, Kirk mentioned, there is an app in the Google Play Store as well. Now that app has, according to the Google Play Store, over 100 million downloads. Now there’s, there’s certain thresholds. So for example, this may have significantly more than 100 million downloads at this point, and it seems like at certain thresholds, then they bump it up to something else, like the YouTube app says it has 10 billion plus downloads. So I don’t know what those markers are, but that means that Apple’s move to iOS app has well over 100 million downloads at this point, which means it’s quite popular.

Kirk McElhearn 19:40
I wonder if you went into an Apple store to buy an iPhone, if someone would help you do the transfer there.

Josh Long 19:47
That’s a good question.

DOJ asserts that Google should spin off its Chrome project

Kirk McElhearn 19:49
Yeah, I wonder if that’s something that Apple. I wonder if that’s something Apple. Do you know when you buy a new Apple device? Well, I when I buy something online, I always get an email to set up a one to one conversation with some. Want to help me set up the device. And I think they view a 30 minute talk. And I got my new iMac m4 recently, and here’s the email, set up a you know, someone can help you. Set it up. I don’t need it. But I wonder if Apple will walk people through that, because that would probably be the best way to convince people that it’s not difficult. Because if you look in the Google Play store and you see some of the reviews, it looks like it is difficult. So meanwhile, we’re back in the browser wars. Remember the browser wars back in Windows 95 and back in the day? So the United States Department of Justice wants Google to sell off the Chrome browser. When you think about it, it kind of makes sense, because Google makes their money from advertisements, and they funnel people to Google through their browser, which is free, they have a quasi monopoly on search. They have, I don’t know, 90% of search traffic, and this is too much, and antitrust laws in the United States, they’ve been like this since the 19th century, that if you get too much, we got to split you up. I don’t know if getting Google to sell Chrome is the ideal way to do it? I think having Google stop giving Apple 14 to $15 billion a year for Google to be the default search engine might be a way to do that as well. There’s another, you know, Apples got all that money and they’re not given then they give them five bucks to (PRODUCT)RED, if you paid through Apple, pay, when you think about it. But could they get Google to spin off Chrome and who would buy it anyway?

Josh Long 21:23
Yeah, I’m not really sure exactly how that would work. I think what’s interesting about this, of course, is that the Chromium project, which is an open source project, is the basis for basically every browser, every major browser, except for Safari and Firefox. Basically everything else is all based on that chromium code base. So Microsoft Edge, even that’s one of the big ones, because it’s included with Windows all the brand new browsers that are trying to get a foothold in the market. You know, you like arc, for example, and then you’ve got some old players, like brave and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has been around a really long time, and they’ve switched engines. Opera is another one of those, and they’re all based on Chromium. So I’m curious about what exactly this could potentially mean if Chrome were to be spun off, either into its own company, or if someone else were to buy Chrome. I don’t know first of all how exactly that would work, but presumably there would be the same developers working on Chrome who continue to contribute to the open source chromium project, but yeah, what would Google look like if it didn’t have Chrome anymore, if it weren’t in control of the Chrome browser?

Kirk McElhearn 22:33
What would at&t look like if they didn’t have a monopoly on long distance phone calls in the United States? It would be a bunch of different companies, in that case, regional companies, right? What they called the baby bells. But here it’s not only talking about Chrome. You’re also talking about unbundling Android from Google Play. So the operating system and the store that sells the operating system is there another company that does that? They have the operating system and they run the store as well. I can’t think of the name of the company.

Josh Long 22:59
Might be Apple.

Kirk McElhearn 23:03
Yeah, okay, yeah. I think, I think it’s interesting, because we’ve seen all this, what’s going on in the EU we’re seeing what’s going on in the US with Google. And I think we’ve gotten to a critical mass when a lot of these things are going to change. And if I could predict how this going to be, I would be rich by investing in the right places, right and I don’t think anyone can predict. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a lot of breakup of different tech companies in the coming years, maybe not under the incoming administration, who seems to be more about removing regulations than adding them. But if the rest of the world is going to force this to happen, as we’ve seen with Apple in the European Union, it’s going to eventually happen in the US.

Josh Long 23:41
Well, this is certainly interesting, and that’s actually you make a really good point there about this is something that the US Department of Justice is talking about. So this is different from changes that have happened in, for example, the EU where there have been moves to sort of break up some of these monopolies in other countries and regions of the world, but not so much in the US so far. And that’s one of the reasons, for example, why we have the ability to have third party app stores in regions like the EU but we don’t yet in the US. So I’m sure there are a lot of people who are really hoping that someday they’ll be able to play Fortnite again on their iPhone, for example, outside of the EU and right now, if you’re in the United States, well, you can’t get the epic game store, and that’s the only place that, of course, Fortnite is being distributed right now because Epic Games does not want to play in Apple’s playground.

Kirk McElhearn 24:36
I always wanted to play Fortnite, and I can’t play it on my iPhone or iPad, so I guess I won’t play it. We have an interesting story. And we started discussing this. Josh was like, wow, this is a long headline, but this to me, this, this headline is poetry. I would love to have worked on a newspaper and been a copy editor and write things like this. It’s an article in the wired anyone can buy data tracking US soldiers and spies to nuclear vaults and brothels in Germany. We talked about this a couple years ago with Strava, where heat maps, in other words, maps showing how many people were running in a certain area, would let anyone know where there were military bases in certain countries, where you wouldn’t expect to have hundreds of people running every day. And this is kind of similar. There’s data from different apps that people can buy, and they are in places where there aren’t humans. Like, I don’t know if you go to area 51 right, you’re not going to have anything but an army base, a military base. And if you find everyone going to a certain place from a certain place, this kind of data is actually quite dangerous, right?

Josh Long 25:36
And remember, with Strava, that was revealing the location of US military bases that were not known to the public, and this is another one of those type of things. Now, instead of this being a running tracking app, this data is ad analytics and things like that. So this is, again, it’s aggregated data, so it’s not necessarily revealing information about an individual, but again, because it’s linked to a location, this is also potentially problematic in certain scenarios, especially when you’re talking about somebody who works for intelligence agencies or the military or different things like that.

Kirk McElhearn 26:17
Okay, quickly, an article in Ars Technica, another great headline, spies hack Wi Fi networks in far off land to launch attack on target next door. I love this kind of Tom Cruise stuff, like you see them going through multiple servers, right and you see on someone’s computer as the dotted line is going across the world from one server to the other, and they’re really just hacking the next door neighbor.

Josh Long 26:39
Right. Now, penetration testers who who sort of tried to break into companies. Companies will pay them, pay a kind of a team of hackers to try to break into their company. Have been using similar techniques for probably decades at this point, but it’s really interesting to see nation state level threat actors who are using these sorts of techniques now against their targets. So if you can’t easily hack into that individual’s computer or network, then maybe just hack their neighbor. And then maybe you can move from there, pivot and right and gets get some more information about the neighbor that you’re actually targeting.

Kirk McElhearn 27:16
There really are no borders are there?

Josh Long 27:18
Nope. Not when it comes to the digital world, you can hack anybody from anywhere in the world it seems like this these days.

Kirk McElhearn 27:23
Okay, that’s enough for this week. I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving. I don’t really celebrate here because, well, they don’t have turkey in this country, but until next week, stay secure.

Josh Long 27:31
All right, stay secure.

Voice Over 27:34
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