Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs

by some_furry • 2 years ago

159 155 2 years ago

dang• 2 years ago

Url changed from https://www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/issue_117_smart_tvs_ar..., which points to this.

kibwen2• 2 years ago

A reminder that the existence of the advertising industry is a tax that drives up the cost of everything that you buy, because every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar that does not actually improve the product in any way, and yet must be recouped by increasing the price of the product.

So in addition to the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the panopticon, it's also making you materially poorer. But hey, at least ads are more relevant, sorta, almost, sometimes!

ethbr1• 2 years ago

Running targeted advertising on devices allows manufacturers to price devices lower by recouping lost sale revenue from the advertising stream.

In other words, an advertising dollar doesn't disappear: it's paid to someone.

czl7• 2 years ago

an advertising dollar doesn't disappear: it's paid to someone.

Window breaking gangs could make a similar same claim about their activity boosting GDP might they not?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

BLKNSLVR2• 2 years ago

to someone

... I'd rather not pay for the "service" they're providing.

czl7• 2 years ago

So in addition to the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the panopticon, it's also making you materially poorer. But hey, at least ads are more relevant, sorta, almost, sometimes!

Can a capitalist society operate without advertising? How are people to learn about products and services that are available? Yet today poorly targets ads waste the time of everyone involved. If ads could be made relevant without invading your privacy would you be against that?

emptybits2• 2 years ago

How are people to learn about products and services that are available?

Search. Easier said than done, thanks to SEO and business models like Google. So maybe I should say "paid search". We get what we pay for.

kibwen2• 2 years ago

I'll list three kinds of ethnical advertising:

1. If I have an interest in a field (say, electronics) and then I attend a conference or gathering that's relevant to that field (say, CES), and then you buy a booth at that conference in order to hawk your wares, that's A-OK. The crucial difference is that I willingly understand the context--I'm going to be going to a place that's all about having people sell me things--and that advertisers are not running roughshod over a space where they don't belong. Consider this "pull-based" advertising rather than the "push-based" advertising where ads get shoved in your face every second of the day everywhere you go, even when you're just trying to live your life.

2. Organic word-of-mouth referrals. In an online, AI-infested world, the "organic" part is increasingly hard to come by, but if someone that I trusts tells me that a product is good, that's great and welcome. Crucially, their reputation with me is on the line if they turn out to be wrong or financially compromised.

3. Simple indication of presence. If you have a shop, you're allowed to have a sign on the front with the name of your shop... within reason. Don't push it. Billboards should be banned.

bonoboTP2• 2 years ago

Do you mean when an entirely new product category is invented and I didn't even know it's useful to me? Because that's kinda rare.

In other cases such as buying a shoe or a can of beer or a fridge or a car, I just go to the website or the physical store that sells it and I compare the products and buy the most suitable one.

This way purchases would be prompted by an actual need, like when my shoes are worn out, I look to buy new ones instead of it being pushed on me through ads when I don't even need it.

Usually the existence of the ad doesn't mean that it's the best in its category. Why would it be in my interest to be following ads instead of my own research?

Also this gotcha is decades out of date. Today's ads are rarely about the features or suitability of the actual product. Instead they sell a vibe, a lifestyle feeling, they create positive emotional associations in ways orthogonal to the product's attributes. Think Coca Cola with celebrities etc. After all, how would I otherwise know I need a can of coke if the trendy singer didn't tell me about it, right?

amelius2• 2 years ago

How are people to learn about products and services that are available?

Remember Yellow Pages?

And if that is not good enough, perhaps you can opt in to an advertising service that shows you ads when you want to see them (as opposed to when they want to show them to you).

moandcompany3• 2 years ago

Also...

Some TV operating system manufacturers give away their OS to TV manufacturers, and in some cases they even pay TV manufacturers to use their software.

Some streaming service companies pay the TV manufacturers to have a shortcut/launch button on the physical remote.

cortesoft• 2 years ago

A reminder that the existence of the advertising industry is a tax that drives up the cost of everything that you buy, because every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar that does not actually improve the product in any way, and yet must be recouped by increasing the price of the product

I am not going to try to argue that advertising is good or anything, but I don't think your economic argument is accurate.

If a company didn't have to spend anything on advertising, they wouldn't use that money to improve their product or to reduce the price; the money would go towards profit.

So many people seem to think that prices are set at "expense + fixed profit margin = price" but that is not how any company sets their prices. The ONLY reason a business is going to lower prices is because they think that is the way to increase their profit. They aren't going to lower prices just because some cost goes away.

bonoboTP2• 2 years ago

In an efficient market, competition would drive prices down to reach quite thin profit margins. Of course there is all sorts of friction, change in conditions, inertia, upfront costs, risk etc that reality isn't ideal.

idle_zealot• 2 years ago

The idea is that they would have to spend that money on improving the good/service or reducing the price in order to compete. Currently more money goes to competing for your attention than on competing on merit.

gljiva• 2 years ago

If advertising is giving an expected edge over competition bigger than price decrease, then the advertising will be used in sort of an arms race that could have been a competition in giving the best product for the least money instead.

Still, even if there is no immediate price decrease for the customer, I would be much more satisfied if all the money went to the maker(s) of the product and well-investing shareholders than someone who provides no value and could have been working on something productive instead.

CalRobert• 2 years ago

In addition to making everything you buy cost more, it also leads to lots of people buying a lot of things they don't really need (or want, after the rush of buying another piece of crap wears off)

amelius2• 2 years ago

Yes. Someone should research the effect of banning ads on the health of our planet.

moandcompany3• 2 years ago

In the case of television screens, the net profit margins on sales of these devices are in the single-digit percentages. Fairly thin, around 4-7%. Higher-end products, such as cutting-edge flagship products (e.g. 100"+ MicroLED television screens) will have higher margins, but lower production yields, and orders of magnitude lower sales volume. These products don't need to be replaced year after year, and most buyers are not selecting a product based on the technical specifications and performance, rather the screen-size per dollar (or whatever currency used) and other factors such as aesthetic appeal of the device in the home environment. The average lifetime, before replacement, of a television screen in North America is somewhere around 5-7 years, and you don't need one in every room of your home or living space.

The commodification of screens from both the production side (i.e. newer entrants to the market from Chinese manufacturers) and from the content portal side (i.e. Roku, Google TV, Fire TV, etc) is a major strategic problem for the television brands you are probably most familiar with. The forementioned examples of content portals are coming from companies that are fundamentally based around advertising, and the companies that were traditionally about manufacturing realized that the advertising revenue opportunity was too good to give up. They are trying to grow their revenue, and profitability, and see that they won't be able to do so from their original core businesses. This is also why you're seeing all of these "FAST" (Free, Ad-supported Streaming Television) services popping up from the tv manufacturers themselves.

Vizio, for example, was a value-oriented producer of televisions and related products. In 2021, as Vizio became a public company, they disclosed that they make more than twice the profit from their advertising/service business than their device sales (https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22773073/vizio-acr-adver...). Walmart is now acquiring Vizio for that business and the opportunity to collect customer data (https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/02/20/walmart-agrees...).

Roku is another good focused example because they are a publicly traded company and you can analyze their income statements and business model. Their hardware devices are basically being sold at cost or at a loss so they can seed the market and create an audience (i.e. their inventory) for their high-margin advertising services business.

Google and Amazon also want a large piece of this pie. Apple is starting to show that they want advertising money too.

We are also seeing cases where the television devices themselves can be produced cheap enough to be given away to users that opt into advertising (e.g. Telly: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/15/23721674/telly-free-tv-st...). When this dynamic is economically viable (i.e. give away the hardware, make the money via ads), you can see how big of a problem traditional television device manufacturers have.

navaed01• 2 years ago

I’ve worked extensively with ACR technology in an applied setting. Happy to answer any questions

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

How do I disable it and make sure it stays disabled?

buryat• 2 years ago

how much this data can sell for?

avidiax• 2 years ago

What types of titles can ACR match to?

Can it do foreign titles?

Adult titles?

Can it OCR onscreen text, e.g. a computer desktop?

Can it identify video conferences?

Why do advertisers care what I watch? If I watch PBS mystery theater do I get ads for rich people?

dewey3• 2 years ago

Why do advertisers care what I watch? If I watch PBS mystery theater do I get ads for rich people?

Thats precisely what’s happening and it’s nothing new. The only difference here is that the TV is the input vs your browsing habits.

card_zero6• 2 years ago

Why do they (LG and Samsung) not fingerprint things streamed from a phone, but do fingerprint anything coming over HDMI? And why do they fingerprint their own FAST services, don't they know what they showed already?

bottom999mottob2• 2 years ago

I'm trying to find more information about these 2 companies fingerprinting or hashing anything coming over HDMI. Do you have sources? I thought disconnecting my smart TV from internet to be enough to stop the transmission of any ACR data. My concern would be if they store any ACR data locally and queue it for data collection vs if they stream it.

NegativeLatency2• 2 years ago

Might be easier to aggregate data if it’s all coming in in a similar way?

bentley• 2 years ago

It’s often suggested in HN comments that keeping a TV disconnected from the LAN will soon be insufficient to prevent data transmission, because companies are on the cusp of including subsidized cell modems in the devices. Have you ever encountered this idea, and is it actually realistic?

arcrwlock• 2 years ago

How does this interact with DRM? Does ACR still work if HDCP is being used?

extraduder_ire• 2 years ago

HDCP is stripped when a stream comes into the device and readded when it leaves, you need to do this for anything more complicated than dumb passthrough. (unless you're using that Bunnie Huang trick to add encrypted data without decrypting for some reason)

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

How long until I get revenge on this world full of immoral people?

card_zero6• 2 years ago

What happened to stop you answering, were you kidnapped by LG?

xnx• 2 years ago

Could ACR be used against its creators by creating a tool to detect and automatically block-out advertisements? (e.g. via an HDMI pass-through) There should be enough tell-tale signals (text, sound, number of scene changes, etc.) to distinguish advertisements from non-ad content.

moandcompany3• 2 years ago

Aside from not having one of these devices at all, or disconnecting it from internet access, if you have one and want to opt-out of ACR (Automatic Content Recognition), you need to make sure that you did not select to 'opt-in' to "personalization" type features on the device.

ACR opt-ins are not presented to end-users with a clear statement of what the opt-in means or what will happen with your data from your device and are often presented as turning on "personalization" (generally, for advertising purposes).

The various TV or tv-related device manufacturers use different names for "ACR," so you'll need to decipher what your manufacturer calls this to disable the feature. Consumer Reports has a useful guide covering multiple brands on how to turn off ACR: https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-t...

If you find that your device has already been opted-in, you can disable the selection, and submit a request to have your device's information removed in some jurisdictions. You can also select to have your device's identifier id (e.g. "PSID" etc) reset from the device before performing a full factory/configuration reset of the device and setting it up again. If you fully reset the device, you'll want to watch out for the ways the manufacturer will try to get you to opt-in during the setup process. Many people have ACR-turned on without knowing.

Adding a few more opt-out guides:

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/stop-your-snooping-smart-tv...

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/how-to-disable-acr-and...

It's also worth firewalling, or at least using dns-based blocking, any "smart tv" type devices on your network. Some of them even do periodic scans of your network and send that information to the manufacturer when they "phone home."

jwr5• 2 years ago

On an LG TV, ACR tracking is deceptively called "Live Plus", and it is on by default. I was very careful not to opt in to anything, but they it was still on when I discovered it. Also, you apparently do not own your homescreen, it's their property to do with as they wish.

LegitShady• 2 years ago

I was looking at getting a TV and they all have garbage "smart" features I don't want. Someone told me to get a sceptre tv without any of that but I can't find them in my country and their actual panels don't seem that great.

So all thats left is looking for commercial panels but a lot of those have built in content management systems now too.

ipython• 2 years ago

Why not take advantage of the subsidized price of the “smart” model, never plug it into the internet or connect it to wifi, and just plug in your devices of choice? Best of both worlds.

keraf2• 2 years ago

I run AdGuard at my parent’s home and it’s crazy the amount of logs (blocked DNS queries) I get from the TVs alone. Before that Windows was the biggest offender but I switched them to Linux Mint since.

Groxx• 2 years ago

Mint has been by far the most stable / least "requires CLI fix on a weekly basis" distro I've used so far, but I gotta ask: how's that working out?

I like it a fair bit, but I've still had to figure out weirdly broken things like "captive portals always look like the wifi didn't connect at all, but `nmcli c up` fixes that" which I can't imagine most non-computer-oriented-Windows-haters in my life would be able to manage...

teekert• 2 years ago

How long until these companies start hardcoding dns providers?

djhworld• 2 years ago

Just taken a look at my Adguard Home query log for my TV, it seems to try and make hundreds of requests to "logs.netflix.com" for some reason - I'm not a subscriber to Netflix, I've never opened the Netflix app, I just turned on the TV and it's sitting on a HDMI source that's turned off so it isn't even doing anything

...and yet it keeps trying to connect to "logs.netflix.com" for reasons I do not understand. Granted, it could be just crappy retry logic, but still, why ping this endpoint when I'm not even using netflix!

cebert• 2 years ago

Are there any brands that are known for respecting privacy more than others?

quink• 2 years ago

Anime doesn't come in 4K, I have no real reason not to get an early 2010s TV before all this garbage, Sony, LG, Samsung, etc. All for about 100 USD, 200 USD for near enough whatever screen size I'd want for a device right at the bottom of the bathtub curve.

Pair with a Chromecast with Google TV or a PC for best results.

jwr5• 2 years ago

Pair with a Chromecast with Google TV

How does that square with "privacy"? Google is an adtech company that makes money on tracking our usage patterns, Chromecast requires logging in, there is no "privacy" around these devices at all.

dewey3• 2 years ago

Pair with a Chromecast with Google TV or a PC for best results.

If you already want an off the shelf solution at least get an Apple TV instead of a Google product? At least it’s not an advertising company then.

Nzen• 2 years ago

When this conversation has come up in the past, I've seen people recommend [0] business displays [1]. They are more expensive, of course, given that they are not subsidized by advertising.

[0] ex https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24666968

[1] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/tvs/commercial-tvs/pcmcat160199...

meowster3• 2 years ago

There are dumb TVs that are cheaper than business displays. Business Displays are not more expensive due to a lack of subsidization, they are expensive because they are built to be more durable (left on longer or continuously) and because businesses generally have a larger budget than consumers.

ls612• 2 years ago

Any brand works if you hook it up to an Apple TV and don't allow the TV itself to connect to the internet (outside of first time setup for software updates I guess).

bschwindHN• 2 years ago

So much engineering effort wasted with zero benefit to society.

mway• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, benefit to society seems to very rarely be the goal anymore.

Cynically, as time goes on, it feels more and more as though we exist to be maximally extracted from, rather than to enjoy any intended benefit (where the benefit is not a happy byproduct that exists only because it is massively subsidized by aforementioned extraction).

gary_02• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, benefit to society seems to very rarely be the goal anymore.

If it ever was. Most of these businesses are still owned by the same people--the Sam Altmans, the Brins and Pages, the Elon Musks, the Steve Huffmans--who started out with the "not in it for the money" and "do no evil" rhetoric, and now their actions show that all that was just a lie from the start.

immibis• 2 years ago

This has been the norm for most of human history, except for brief periods of time after the people being extracted from organised themselves enough to kill the people doing the extracting.

HeavenFox• 2 years ago

I would argue that aggregated, anonymous viewership data is a net positive to society, as it helps content creators better cater to demand

chimpansteve2• 2 years ago

And I would argue that this very quickly becomes a race to the bottom, where the viewing of mass produced trash accelerates because "that's what people want to watch" becomes "we'll flood the market with cheap mass produced bullshit" which immediately becomes "people love watching bullshit and our stats say so!"

I also don't believe for a single second, based on their past records, that Sony, or LG, or whoever, are actually properly anonymising this data

NegativeLatency2• 2 years ago

https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/newton-minow-discusses...

djaychela• 2 years ago

No,it leads to content which is attention grabbing, not better. They are not the same thing.

rollcat• 2 years ago

It also creates an echo chamber effect, X is popular so we make more X.

Our culture is already revolving around rehashing what's "proven". The most original and interesting ideas may come from those who oppose that trend, and these ideas are most likely to drown in the sea of slop.

Also the "content" "creators" who are most likely to benefit from tracking are the giant corporations - we're just making the rich richer.

Also somewhat related: https://rubenerd.com/stop-calling-people-content-creators/

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Question about anonymous data is well, why not do it where the content originates? Sale of discs? Rental instances online. Number of times something was streamed... Why does it have to happen on end device, when it is entirely possible at source.

BLKNSLVR2• 2 years ago

content creators better cater to demand

That's actually the perfect description of why 'content creators' aren't called artists. They're not creative, they're regurgitative.

Society needs not faded, watered down, muted copies of originals. It needs more originals to inspire more creativity.

Originality is an art unto itself.

What you are right about, however, is the profit inherent in bland copies, which means there's a market out there consisting of dumb, easily satisfied cattle, to be milked by the lazily regurgitative bottom feeders that know only 'what's trending' and have said subscribe! more often than they've had hot meals. Those saviours of society.

ramraj07• 2 years ago

Flowers can’t be eaten. They’re just for someone to look at. Heck most people probably don’t even look at them and buy it as a part of a ritual or formality. Does it mean the flower industry is of no benefit to society?

Most things we do are in the end just burning energy to create, move and destroy things in the process. The guys who benefit from ads buy salad from shops employing people. It’s arguable that anything that increases economic cycles is of at least some benefit to society. That’s the advantage of capitalism.

ok_dad3• 2 years ago

This isn’t some flowers that actual humans enjoy, it’s fucking spying and it’s ad industry bullshit. Don’t try and put lipstick on a pig.

chimpansteve2• 2 years ago

Yeah, but people who grow or sell flowers are not on the same level as the very very good engineers who develop these dystopian systems. The people in the advertising industry who make these systems could absolutely do more good for society in a different field.

theodric• 2 years ago

This is an example of the broken window fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)

slothtrop3• 2 years ago

Ad revenue means tvs priced for less than they ought to be, it's a trade-off for consumers. You could quibble about the externalities but it's ridiculous to suggest there's no upside, for anyone. If that were true they wouldn't sell.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

It's about as fair as burning own money to sell at loss to undermine competition I'm afraid.

Eisenstein11• 2 years ago

You can't claim something is a benefit for consumers if the consumers are not offered a competing product without the predatory features for more money. Let's put a 'dumb' TV on the market and regulate that 'smart' TV boxes have to say 'this is cheaper because we make most of our profit from it by screenshoting what you watch 100 times a second and selling it to the highest bidder' and see what the market thinks about it.

m4633• 2 years ago

You could probably say the same of engineers/scientists that are employed by wall street or google/facebook/surveillance-advertising businesses.

advael3• 2 years ago

Could and would

mystified5016• 2 years ago

Under end-stage capitalism, the one and only thing driving the market is maximal extraction of all conceivable value within a financial quarter. There are no other concerns. The market inherently cannot consider any other consequences or benefits beyond short term gains at any cost.

bottom999mottob2• 2 years ago

Surveillance capitalism continues to crush people's privacy, and I don't think the incentive to collect personal data will ever go away. Seriously someone needs to give the big middle finger to Samsung and LG because I want my dumb TVs back.

slothtrop3• 2 years ago

It may happen. I think at present there is too little demand for comparatively expensive tvs that respect privacy. The tech is in a phase of diminishing returns, as televisions from over a decade ago still suit most people fine, and don't break that easily. Tech people were just turning off features they don't like (until, of course, that's no longer possible). But alongside the price-point, manufacturers are also playing a game of chicken expecting everyone to continue purchasing despite invasive features. At least among tech-oriented people it's possible that sales will slow down, but that might not matter enough for their bottom line to offer an alternative. There may be room for a competitor to try selling boutique tvs, but it's risky. "the market provides", but the demand needs to be strong enough.

DylanDmitri• 2 years ago

A 32" computer monitor is awful similar to a dumb TV from 20 years back. Projectors too.

lifthrasiir• 2 years ago

That's concerning. To be clear, I once worked on a company that developed an audio-based ACR technology to be used in conjunction with a secondary device that users would turn on at their will. Anything more invasive would have been substantially challenging in legal aspects so that was the status quo more than 10 years ago. So it's new to me that not only ACR is somehow pervasive in "smart" devices but also they even don't care whether they are really being used as a television (which has no other interaction mechanism in principle, and ACR is not only for ads).

submeta• 2 years ago

Off topic: Anyone knows how a document like this is created? I find the layout very appealing. - In MS Word?

KuzMenachem• 2 years ago

LaTeX

starky• 2 years ago

The typeface is Computer Modern which indicates they likely used LaTeX.

https://www.latex-project.org/

jwr5• 2 years ago

If you have an LG TV, ACR tracking is ON BY DEFAULT and you need to turn it off manually. It is well hidden, in settings, "Additional Settings", "Live Plus" needs to be switched off.

It is mind-boggling that there is no uproar over this. Of course, if the EU were to make a fuss, Americans would be all screaming "it's over-regulating!".

burnerthrow008• 2 years ago

None of the major TV manufacturers is based in the US, so I guess we won't have to worry about the EU regulating ACR, will we?

Apropos of nothing, what other country besides the US has a law that specifically prohibits giving a bribe to a foreign government?

exe343• 2 years ago

the UK

ben_w• 2 years ago

None of Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, or Google are based in the EU; all have faced issues due to operating in the EU.

(Off the top of my head: USB-C, GDPR, Digital Services Act, Schrems, and anti-trust fines respectively).

jajko• 2 years ago

You clearly dont know how regulation works, EU pushed many corporation to globally change their arrogant ways, ie apple dropping their proprietary plug, globally. Thats the power of half a billion relatively rich market.

The other part is immature basic whataboutism that doesnt deserve a response, I am sure you can do better, and more on topic hopefully.

bunabhucan• 2 years ago

[Laughs in CIA and Jared Kushner]

buran77• 2 years ago

None of the major TV manufacturers is based in the US, so I guess we won't have to worry about the EU regulating

The EU tries to regulate things that get too dangerous to its citizens. The important part though is enforcement which due to limited resources will inherently focus on the biggest players, where the impact is greatest. Players don't get bigger than US based big-tech. It's not unreasonable at all once you think about it.

what other country besides the US has a law that specifically prohibits giving a bribe to a foreign government?

They allow and encourage lobbying which is literally used to the same effect. So it's a bit of a moot point, more like posturing than anything else... Much like some apropos :).

derf_• 2 years ago

Apropos of nothing, what other country besides the US has a law that specifically prohibits giving a bribe to a foreign government?

Every member of the OECD (including Japan and South Korea) and 8 more countries besides [0]? At a minimum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD_Anti-Bribery_Convention#M...

fnordpiglet3• 2 years ago

My strategy is I never accept the ToS on the TV. By and large major manufacturers don’t track unless the ToS are accepted after Vizio was caught. I still get firmware patches and can do home automation signals from the TV activity on LG without ever accepting the ToS. YMMV. Periodically after a firmware update it prompts to accept the ToS again otherwise it’s pretty silent. I do not however use any smart tv features. For my prior generation I just never attached them to a network.

jwr5• 2 years ago

I didn't accept them either. That didn't prevent LG from auto-enabling the ACR.

meowster3• 2 years ago

I hope you never have a guest that accepts the ToS.

tabiv• 2 years ago

You'll take my 2010 Sony Bravia panel over my dead body.

SV_BubbleTime• 2 years ago

lol, 2010 LCD with edge or a couple zone local dimming... Don't worry, no one is going to try and take your varying degrees of grey levels from you.

yesssql2• 2 years ago

Does this send screenshots when you're on HDMI? Wouldn't that be corporate espionage since most tech workers are from home now and lots use a small 4K TV for their PC?

Eisenstein11• 2 years ago

Yes. Also casts from phones and tablets. 100 times a second for LG and 2 times a second for Samsung, according to the paper.

Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs

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