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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘Doubleclick’
03.01.2023
Hat tip to Stefan Engeseth on this one: an excellent podcast with author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari.
Among the topics he covers, as detailed in the summary in Linkedinâs The Next Big Idea:
âą AI is the first technology that can take power away from us
âą if we are not careful, AI and bioengineering will be used to create the worst totalitarian regimes in history
âą Be skeptical of technological determinism
We should be wary nowânot after these technologies have been fully realized.
I also checked into Business Ethics today, a site linked from the Jack Yan & Associates links’ section (which dates back to the 1990s). The lead item, syndicated from ProPublica, is entitled, âPorn, Privacy Fraud: What Lurks Inside Googleâs Black Box Ad Empireâ, subtitled, âGoogleâs ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.â
This should be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog; indeed, this should be no surprise to anyone who has had their eyes open and breathes. This opaque black box is full of abuse, funds disinformation, endangers democracy, and exposes personal data to dodgy parties. As I outlined earlier, someone in the legal profession with cojones and a ton of funding and time could demonstrate that Googleâs entire business should be subject to a massive negligence lawsuit. The authors of the article present more evidence that Google is being up to no good.
An excerpt, without revealing too much:
Last year, a marketer working for a Fortune 500 company launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign âŠ
Over the next few months, Google placed more than 1.3 trillion of the companyâs ads on over 150,000 different websites and apps. The biggest recipient of ads â more than 49 million â was a website called PapayAds. The company was registered in Bulgaria less than two years ago and lists one employee, CEO Andrea De Donatis, on LinkedIn âŠ
It seems impossible that 49 million ads were legitimately placed and viewed on PapayAdsâ site over the span of several months ⊠âI donât have an explanation for this,â he said, adding that he does not recall receiving payment for such a large volume of ads.
I doubt this is isolated, and the story elaborates on how the scheme worked. And when Google realized its ads were winding up on inappropriate websites, the action it took was to keep doing it.

On a more positive note, I found out about Radio.garden in December on Mastodon (thank goodness for all the posts there these days, a far cry from when I joined in 2017) and have since been tuning in to RTHK Radio 1 in Hong Kong. I had no idea they even gave NZ dollarâUS dollar exchange rates as part of their business news! The interface is wonderful: just rotate the planet and place the city of your choice within the circular pointer. It works equally well on a cellphone, though only in portrait mode there. Youâd be amazed at what you can find, and I even listened to one of the pop stations in Jeddah.
My usual suspects are âfavouritedâ: KCSM in San Mateo, Sveriges Radio P1, and RNZ National here. I might add Rix FM from Stockholm but I seem to have grown up a little since the days when its music was targeted to me.
Itâs now been added to our company link list. Sadly, a few dead ones have had to be culled today. But I must say Radio.garden has been one of the best finds of 2022. Almost makes you want to surf to random sites again like we did in the 1990s.
Tags: 2022, 2023, advertising, AI, Doubleclick, ethics, fraud, Google, Hong Kong, Jack Yan & Associates, LinkedIn, online advertising, podcast, radio, Radio New Zealand, Stefan Engeseth, Stockholm, Sweden, technology, transparency Posted in business, culture, design, globalization, Hong Kong, internet, media, New Zealand, politics, Sweden, technology, USA | No Comments »
09.12.2022
Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a âfair priceâ for local news content under new legislation.
Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running âThe internet is scaryâ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech pay my firm? Any back pay? We have been in this game a long, long time. A lot longer than the newbies.
And what is the definition of âsharingâ?
Because Google could be in for a lot.
Think about it this way: Googleâs ad unit has enabled a lot of fake sites, scraped sites, spun sites, malware hosts, and the like, since anyone can sign up to be a publisher and start hosting their ads.
While Google will argue that they have nothing to do with the illegitimate usage of their services, some might look at it very differently.
Take the tort of negligence. To me this is classic Donahue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 territory and as we’re at 90 years since Lord Atkinsâ judgement, it offers us some useful pointers.
Lord Atkin stated, âYou must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour. Who, then, in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to beâpersons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.â
If you open up advertising to all actors (Google News also opens itself up to splogs), then is it foreseeable that unethical parties and bad faith actors will sign up? Yes. Is it foreseeable that they will host content illegally? Yes. Will this cause harm to the original copyright owner? Yes.
We also know a lot of these pirate sites are finding their content through Google News. Some have even told me so, since I tend to start with a softly, softly approach and send a polite request to a pirate.
Iâd say a case in negligence is already shaping up.
If Google didnât open up its advertising to all and sundry, then there would have been far fewer negative consequencesâletâs not even get into surveillance, which is also a direct consequence of their policy and conduct.
Do companies that are online owe a duty of care to internet users? Iâd say this is reasonable. I imagine some smaller firms might find it more difficult to get rid of a hacker, but overall, this seems reasonable.
Was this duty of care breached? Was there causation? By not vetting people signing up to the advertising programme, then yes. Pre-Google, ad networks were very careful, and I had the impression websites were approved on a case-by-case, manually reviewed basis. The mess the web is in, with people gaming search engines, with fake news sites (which really started as a way of making money), with advertising making pennies instead of dollars and scam artists all over the show, can all be traced to Google helping them monetize this conduct. There’s your obiter dicta right there. (Thanks to Amanda for remembering that term after all these years.)
Google hasnât taken reasonable care, by design. And itâs done this for decades. And damages must be in the milliards to all legitimate publishers out there who have lost traffic to these unethical websites, who have seen advertising revenue plummet because of how Google has depressed the prices and how it feeds advertising to cheap websites that have cost their owners virtually nothing to run.
Make of this what you will. Now that governments are waking up after almost two decades, maybe Big Tech is only agreeing because it fears the rest of us will figure out that they owe way, way more than the pittance theyâll pay out under these legislative schemes?
Anyone with enough legal nous to give this a bash on behalf of the millions of legitimate publishers, past and present, directly harmed by Google and other Big Tech companiesâ actions?
Tags: 1932, 2020s, 2022, advertising, Aotearoa, Big Tech, copyright, copyright law, Doubleclick, Facebook, Google, law, legislation, negligence, New Zealand, publishing, tort law, UK Posted in business, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
05.09.2017

My complaints about Google over the yearsâand the battles Iâve had with them between 2009 and 2014âare a matter of record on this blog. It appears that Google has been making enemies who are much more important than me, and in this blog post I donât mean the European Union, who found that the big G had been abusing its monopoly powers by giving its own properties priority placement in its own search results. (The EU, incidentally, had the balls to fine Google âŹ2,420 million, or 2·5 per cent of Googleâs revenues, unlike various US statesâ attorneys-general a few years ago, who hit them with a $17 million bill, or four hoursâ income for Google.)
Itâs Jon von Tetzchner, the co-founder and CEO of Vivaldi, who blogged on Monday how Google hasnât been able to âresist the misuse of power.â
Von Tetzchner was formerly at Opera, so he has had a lot of time in the tech world. Opera has been around longer than Google, and it was the first browser to incorporate Google search.
As youâve read over the years, Iâve reported on Googleâs privacy breaches, its false accusations of malware on our sites, its favouring big sites over little ones in News, and (second-hand) the hacking of Iphones to gather user data. Google tax-dodging, meanwhile, has been reported elsewhere.
It appears Google suspended Vivaldiâs Adwords campaigns without warning, and the timing is very suspicious.
Right after von Tetzchnerâs thoughts on Googleâs data-gathering were published in Wired, all of Vivaldiâs Google Adwords campaigns were suspended, and Googleâs explanations were vague, unreasonable and contradictory.
Recently there were also revelations that Google had pressured a think-tank to fire someone critical of the company, according to The New York Times. Barry Lynn, ousted from the New America Foundation for praising the EUâs fine, accused the Foundation for placing Googleâs money (it donates millions) ahead of its own integrity. Google denies the charge. Heâs since set up Citizens Against Monopoly.
Itâs taken over half a decade for certain quarters to wake up to some of the things Iâve been warning people about. Not that long ago, the press was still praising Google Plus as a Facebook-killer, something I noted from the beginning would be a bad idea. It seems the EUâs courage in fining Google has been the turning point in forcing some to open their eyes. Until then, people were all too willing to drink the Google Kool-Aid.
And we should be aware of what powerful companies like Google are doing.
Two decades ago, my colleague Wally Olins wrote Trading Identities: Why Countries and Companies Are Taking on Each Otherâs Roles. There, he noted that corporations were adopting behaviours of nations and vice versa. Companies needed to get more involved in social responsibility as they became more powerful. We are in an era where there are powerful companies that exert massive influences over our lives, yet they are so dominant that they donât really care whether they are seen as a caring player or not. Google clearly doesnât in its pettiness over allegedly targeting Vivaldi, and Facebook doesnât as it gathers data and falsely accuses its own users of having malware on their machines.
On September 1, my colleague Euan Semple wrote, âAs tools and services provided by companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon become key parts of the infrastructure of our lives they, and their respective Chief Executives, exert increasing influence on society.
âHow we see ourselves individually and collectively is shaped by their products. Our ability to do things is in our hands but their control. How we educate ourselves and understand the world is steered by them. How we stay healthy, get from one place to another, and even feed and clothe ourselves is each day more dependent on them.
âWe used to rely on our governments to ensure the provision of these critical aspects of our lives. Our governments are out of their depth and floundering.
âAre we transitioning from the nation state to some other way of maintaining and supporting our societies? How do we feel about this? Is it inevitable? Could we stop it even if we wanted?â
The last paragraph takes us beyond the scope of this blog post, but we should be as critical of these companies as we are of our (and othersâ) governments, and, the European Commission excepting, I donât think weâre taking their actions quite seriously enough.
Tags: 2017, advertising, branding, corporate citizen, Doubleclick, EU, Euan Semple, Google, law, media, monopoly, nation branding, privacy, Vivaldi, Wally Olins Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, media, social responsibility, technology, USA | 3 Comments »
03.07.2014

Consistently, for the last several weeks, the ads I would see on YouTube have been for Hyundai. I didnât think much of it, other than Hyundai going through an advertising blitz.
After uncovering Googleâs outright deceptions regarding its former Ads Preferences Manager, where the company promised not to track people when they opted outâbut began tracking people within 24 hours after they opted outâI have been careful about the cookies on my system, especially from Googleâs subsidiary, Doubleclick. Not only did I opt out of Google ads, after opting out, I blocked the Doubleclick cookie, which, logically, should mean that Google should not know my advertising preferences. All googleadservices.com cookies are also blocked. The fact that car advertising was creeping in was coincidental, I thought.
Today, Holden advertised its Colorado on my YouTube visit, and I got suspicious.
I know Google Plus tracks usâopting out of having your searches monitored also does nothing, incidentallyâand the minute I removed all Google cookies, my automotive advertising on YouTube ceased. The first ad was Corona beer, and the second and third were Air New Zealand. Other videosâand I watched 10 to testâhad no ads. No more Hyundais.
So Google, despite all the opt-out mechanisms, and despite my being very careful about what cookies are being allowed on my system, may still be tracking my advertising preferences. It wouldnât be the first time Google has been caught illegally and deceptively monitoring users after opt-outs or who have tighter browser privacy settings (using the Google Plus One button, which is how I suspect they are doing it). As I uncover more, Iâll update this blog.
Tags: cars, Doubleclick, ethics, Google, internet, law, privacy, technology, USA, YouTube Posted in cars, internet, technology, USA | No Comments »
13.04.2013
The Google experience over the last weekâand I can say ‘week’ because there were still a few browsers showing blocks yesterdayâreminds me of how brands can be resilient.
First, I know it’s hard for most people to believe that Google is so incompetentâor even downright corrupt, when it came to its bypassing Safari users’ preferences and using Doubleclick to do it (but we already know how Doubleclick bypassed every browser a couple of years ago). People rely on Google, Google Docs, Google Image Search, or any of its other products. But there’s something to be said for a well communicated slogan, ‘Don’t be evil.’ Those who work in computing, or those who have experienced the negative side of the company, know otherwise. But, to most people, guys like me documenting the bad side are shit-stirrersâuntil they begin experiencing the same.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s OK for a small publication to get blacklisted, or people tracked on the internet despite their requests not to be. But I don’t think we can let these companies off quite so easily, because there is something rotten in a lot of its conduct.
By the same token, maybe it doesn’t matter that we can’t easily buy a regularly priced orange juice from a New Zealand-owned company in our own supermarkets. Most, if not all, of that sector is owned by the Japanese or the Americans. We haven’t encouraged domestic enterprises to be global players, excepting the obvious ones such as Fonterra.
However, most people don’t notice it, because brands have shielded it. The ones we buy most started in this country, by the Apple and Pear Marketing Board.
And like the National Bank, which hasn’t been New Zealand-owned for decades, people are happy to believe they are local. It was only when the National Bank changed its name to ANZ, the parent company, that some consumers balked and leftâeven though it was owned and run by ANZ for the good part of the past decade.
Or we like to think that Holden is Australian when a good part of the range is designed and built in Korea by what used to be Daewooâand brand that died out here in 2003. Holden hasn’t been Australian since the 1930s, when it became part of GMâan American company. However, for years it had the slogan, ‘Australia’s own car,’ but even the 48-215, the ur-Holden, was American-financed and developed along Oldsmobile lines.
Similarly, Lemon & Paeroa has been, for a generation, American.
Maybe it’s my own biases here, but I like seeing a strong New Zealand, with strong, Kiwi-owned firms having the nous and the strength to take on the big players at a global level.
We can out-think the competition, so while we might not have the finances, we often have the know-how, that can grow if we are given the right opportunities and the right exposure. And, as we’ve seen, the right brands that can enter other markets and be aspirational, whether they play on their country of origin or not.
Stripping away one of the layers when it comes to ownership might get us thinking about which are the locally owned firmsâand which ones we want to support if we, too, agree that our own lot are better and should be stronger.
And when it came to Google, it’s important to know that it has it in for the little guy. It’s less responsive, and it will fence with you until you can bring a bigger party to the table who might risk damaging its informal, well maintained and largely illusionary corporate motto.
We only had Blogger doing the right thing when we piggy-backed off John Hempton having his blog unjustifiably deleted by Google, and the bad press it got via Reuter’s Felix Salmon on that occasion.
We only had Google’s Ads Preferences Manager doing the right thing when we had the Network Advertising Initiative involved.
Google only stopped tracking Iphone users using a hack via Doubleclick (I would classify it malware, thank you) on Safari when the Murdoch Press busted it.
That’s the hat-trick right there. Something about the culture needs to change. It’s obviously not transparent.
I don’t know what had Google lift the boycott after six days but we know it cleans itself up considerably more quickly when it has accidentally blacklisted The New York Times or its own YouTube. One thought I had is that the notion that Google re-evaluates your site in five hours is false. Even on the last analysis it did after I resubmitted Lucire took at least 16 hours, and that the whole matter took six days.
But it should be a matter of concern for small businesses, especially in a country with a lot of SMEs, because Google will ride rough-shod over them based on its own faulty analyses. Reality shows that it happens, and when it does happen, you haven’t much recourseâunless you can find a lever to give it really bad publicity.
We weren’t far off from issuing a press statement, and the one-week mark was the trigger. Others might not be so patient.
If we had done that, I wonder if it would help people see more of the reality.
Or should we support other search engines such as Duck Duck Go instead, and help the little guy out-think the big guys? Should there be a Kiwi search engine that actually doesn’t do evil?
Or do we need to grow or work with some bigger firms here to prevent us being bullied by Google’s, and others’, incompetence?
Tags: advertising, Apple, Australia, business, country of origin, Daewoo, Doubleclick, entrepreneurship, foreign ownership, GM, Google, hacking, Holden, Korea, law, Lucire, marketing, media, Murdoch Press, nation branding, New Zealand, privacy, publishing, Reuter, slogan, tagline, The New York Times, transparency, USA, YouTube Posted in branding, business, culture, internet, marketing, media, New Zealand, publishing, USA | 5 Comments »
11.04.2013
In all my recent posts, I’ve stopped short of saying that Google hacked us, but that the code inserted had Google’s name all over it.
But if Google was party to or had profited from hacking, then it wouldn’t be the first time, right?
Remember when Google hacked the Safari browser to track Iphone users?
That time, it used a trick inside its Doubleclick ad code to fool the Safari browser, so that it provided tracking data back to Google and related ad networks, even when users had opted out of being tracked.
But we all know about how opting out does not mean opting out when it comes to Google. We know how Google did not respect your privacy when it came to advertising in the case that was exposed on this blog in 2011, and lied about what its Ads Preferences Manager’s opt-out feature did.
The warning signs were all there in the early 2010s, and if any code should be classed as malicious, it’s Doubleclick’s. I bet Google’s malware bots never picked up those as being malicious in 2012 when they were sending Apple Iphone data back to the company.
Despite all this, a lot of people still believe that Google’s culture is ‘Don’t be evil.’ The way I see it: it takes quite a bit of effort to engage in these techniques.
Tags: advertising, Apple, Doubleclick, Google, law, Murdoch Press, privacy, USA Posted in business, culture, internet, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
08.04.2013
Google continues to throw up big red flags to anyone visiting Lucireâs website today, although its own Webmaster Tools page reveals that it has not found any problems since Saturday:

Given that we had sewn up the server on Saturday, and deleted every instance of the hack, then Webmaster Tools’ inability to find dodgy pages is no surprise.
However, Google’s continued insistence that something is wrong is damaging to our reputation, and it’s now affecting the sites of some of the team who linked to us. Those using its Chrome browser are getting the biggest warnings of all, if our feedback is accurate.
It’s not the first time we’ve had to battle Google over things like this: as those of you who remember the battle with Blogger know, Google people can be very stubborn. That last time, we gave a link proving the Google support guy was wrong and his solution was just to refuse to look at it.
But even this time, the code that Google identifies as being problematic is not: it’s straight OpenX code, which they have had no trouble with in the past. I’ve gone and replaced some of it with regenerated OpenX code that differs only with the random number being generated, which in theory should make no difference. You never know, and it’s better than sitting around and doing nothing.
And since Google has cleared the ad server where the hack took place, it’s crazy that it continues to block sites that simply have links to a clean server.
With Autocade, it now just says we have problems but refuses to identify just what they are.
The greatest irony is that our ad code often links to a Google Doubleclick ad, although, as revealed yesterday, Google’s not too fussed if third-party advertisers using Doubleclick host malware. They make money, the third party makes money, and the only people who lose are the honest folks like us.
It’ll be Monday 9 a.m. on the US west coast soon, so let’s hope things get back to normal.
Tags: advertising, bugs, Doubleclick, ethics, Google, hacking, Jack Yan, law, Lucire, OpenX, publishing Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, USA | 3 Comments »
06.04.2013
All of the sites that carry advertising from our ad server (ads.jyanet.com) were blacklisted by Google yesterday, including this one. In fact, Google still blacklists them, despite Google and Stop Badware clearing the server of any problems.
Here’s the kicker: the code that was injected by hackers appears to be Google Adsense code. If true, this means that Google provides hackers with code, hackers use the code, Google blacklists the sites. Have a look below to see if that’s the case.
I remember that any schmuck can get a Google Adsense account, so they aren’t choosy. (I applied for one many years ago, which I had for six months. Believe me, it was really easy.)
If it is Google Adsense, it wouldn’t be the first time their own code was dodgy. There had been instances where McAfee, on my computer, blocked ads on one of our sites and, when investigated, those ads turned out to be Doubleclick ones, i.e. they were from Google’s own ad network. Very big sites get targetedâunfortunately, very big sites appear to get all-clears from big companies like Google rapidly (because they affect their bottom line more?).
Whatever the source, the hackers used their code and decided to piggyback off legitimate ad-serving websites, including ours. We fixed the vulnerability that led to this within hours of learning about it, but, as usual, we’re disappointed that Google and Stop Badware haven’t caught up after over 24 hours that things are sorted.
I’ve pasted the warning from Google below, a shot of our OpenX installation describing the code (it looks like Google Adsense to meâis it? Or is it just based on parameters of their code so the hackers’ Adsense account profits from the activity?) and a screen shot of where the dodgy stuff Google believes it came from, namely a domain owned by one William Oster in New York. (These are from my Tumblog.) [Note: Mr Oster might not even know about this and that his OpenX installation was the victim of the same hack. The hackers could well have placed the malware on his server and spread things from there.]



I’d like the solution to be tougher guidelines on everyday users getting Adsense accounts. Let’s hope things are harder today than they were in the 2000s. There are a lot of honest people using Adsense, so it’s fine to argue that it’s unfair to affect everyone because of a few bad eggs. Every ad network needs to be more stringent on who can advertise, too.
Most of the larger, legitimate ad networks that I know of make things stricter, and your site has to have proven traffic and a decent track record before they’ll let their ads be shown on them.
My guess is that Google isn’t about to change its policies because it does very well from casting its net far and wide. The last I looked, the ad business was worth US$3,600 million to them.
Tags: advertising, corruption, crime, Doubleclick, Google, internet, law, New York, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, publishing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
01.04.2011
The troubles with Google that I’ve facedâprivacy breaches, Ads Preferences Manager not honouring its claims, fighting for six months on behalf of a friend over a deleted Blogger blog, Chrome being buggy (but not nearly as badly as IE9), phantom entries in my Google dashboard, unanswered messagesâwould suggest, to anyone studying business or a graduate from B-school, that there is something very, very rotten inside the company. It’s being evil.
Judging by an article I linked yesterday from Techcrunch, there probably is something rotten.
It’s sad to see that Techcrunch didn’t have the ethics to keep an off-the-record comment off the recordâit even plays an answerphone message on its site, which I am sure its speaker never intended for broadcastâbut it does make an interesting guess of the company’s internal problems.
I’ve heard of similar things second-hand and, in at least one case, first-hand, but this one illustrates that the problems could be at quite a senior level.
With all the internal politicking going on, a few people are doing their jobs correctly, and honouring Google’s commitment to its users. In 2010, I named Rick Klau at Blogger as being one of them. I reckon the other has to be Matt Cutts, whose initiative to cut down content mills and Google-spam I applauded some weeks ago as being one of the company’s right moves.
Matt has done his job so well that it has cut down even Google’s own content mill, the Google Places site.
He deserves even more applause because he’s not singling out his own employers for special treatment, which means, as far as the rest of us are concerned, we face a level playing field getting on the site.
He’s even stated, ‘Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google.’
What is interesting is that it has pissed off certain people inside Google, who have become accustomed to the search engine biasing results toward itselfâsomething it has admitted on some occasions, contradicting its stated policy on other occasions. Ălitism much?
Among the content mills Matt’s team has targeted includes the sites of Demand Media, who I had a run-in with as well over contradictory terms and conditions and the company’s refusal to respond. (In fact, it continued to pester me to integrate an account I had with a firm it had acquired even though, legally, under its own terms, I could not.)
Reading the Techcrunch piece, Matt Cutts is a hero for fairness and for running things exactly the way netizens expect. Some commenters agree. He might even be the guy who saves Google from being an Ă©litist, unethical monster. He’s done exactly what he set out to do, and Google needs to realize that if it is to recover any mana for its misdeeds of the past few years, it has to clean its own doorstep first.
If the article is correct, other Google senior staffâNikesh Arora, Marissa Mayer (who has already revealed that Google publishes biased results)âare part of the problem, and why Google is so desperate to violate its own stated policies repeatedly.
And if that off-the-record comment on Techcrunch is accurate, then Marissa Mayer probably believes that users are stupid. Way to earn that goodwill, Marissa.
Tags: advertising, business, California, deceit, Doubleclick, Ă©litism, ethics, Google, hypocrisy, privacy, publishing, search engines, spam, USA Posted in business, culture, internet, leadership, politics, publishing, technology, USA | 4 Comments »
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