• One of the UK's innumerable regulators has fined 4Chan £20,000 for...  Well, basically for telling them to get fucked, which the British didn't take too well in 1776 either.  (The Verge)

  :Today sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act can expect to face robust enforcement action," Ofcom enforcement director, Suzanne Cater, said in a statement.
  
  4Chan has responded by suing Ofcom in federal court...  In the US.
  
  4Chan could be in more trouble still if they don't kiss the ring:

  Starting from tomorrow, 4Chan additionally faces a daily penalty of £100 for either 60 days or until 4Chan complies with the information requests, up to a maximum of £6,000.

  Yes, I'm sure that will do the trick.

• The Dutch government has seized control of technology company Nexperia from its Chinese owner Wingtech.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Nexperia focuses on boring but necessary products like diodes and transistors.  It was spun off from Phillips in 2006 and sold to Chinese interests in two stages in 2017 and 2018.
  
  Seems like they came to regret that.
  
  
  
• The Humbird 3 is a Thunderbolt 5 eGPU dock with a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot for $399.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The numbers.  What do they mean?
  
  It also has three downstream Thunderbolt 5 ports, a DisplayPort port, and a 5Gb Ethernet port.  And up to a 500W power supply though the basic model only comes with 180W.
  
  
  
• Intel Blackout on VROC with Transition to Graid Technology in Another Streamlining Move.  (Serve the Home)
  
  What?
  
  Oh.  Intel sold off its virtual RAID products to a company called Graid.
  
  I guess that makes sense.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 14 2025 10:14 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 14 2025 10:17 PM (1zWbY)

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Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 15 2025 05:57 AM (e0fX0)

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• Hackers breached a service used by Discord to verify users' age and identity and leaked 70,000 ID documents.  (BBC)
  
  Money quote:

  Some online commentators have claimed that the data breach was bigger than Discord has revealed.

  That was a week ago.
  
  

• Hackers now claim to have stolen 2.1 million ID documents from Discord in a 1.5TB data breach.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Yes, that is bigger than 70,000.

• TP Link has confirmed successful WiFi 8 trials.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This couldn't possibly end badly.
  
  
  
• Broacom has announced the Tomahawk 6 switch chip, proving 64 ports of 1.6Tb Ethernet.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That's...  Rather a lot.
  
  
  
• The Curl project, which has lately been overwhelmed with garbage bug reports generated by AI, just received another 50 AI-generated reports.  (The Register)
  
  These ones were not garbage, though.
  
  
  
• Can we stop with all this AI bubble talk?  (Yahoo)
  
  No.  I don't think we can.
  
  
  
• The Orange Pi 6 Plus has more than a raspberry.  (Liliputing)
  
  Eight Arm A720 cores, up to 64GB of RAM, dual 5GB Ethernet ports, and two M.2 slots for storage.
  
  That's not a low-end device.

• Amazon's Prime Day sales are mostly a lie, with prices averaging just 0.6% lower during the company's largest sale of the year.  (MSN)
  
  Some prices are lower, some say they are lower but are the same as the usual discount offered online, while others actually increase during Prime Day sales looking for people who are too busy to price-check.
  
  There are some bargains but they are far and few between.  I did find in the latest sale that it was cheaper to buy a Bosch cordless drill with battery and charger than the battery alone.*
  
  * So I did.

• Crimson Collective, the hacking group that recently claimed to have breached RedHat and stolen half a terabyte of customer data, now claims to have hacked Nintendo.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Such claims should not be believed without evidence, but they did in fact breach RedHat and steal half a terabyte of customer data.
  
  
  
• Beelink's GTR9 Pro is small, quiet, fast, and expensive.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is another of those Strix Halo desktop models - 16 Zen 5 CPU cores, 40 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, and 128GB of soldered RAM for $1999.  It comes in an aluminium case very similar to though a little smaller than the Mac Studio.
  
  Standout feature of this one is its dual 10Gb network ports, very useful given the limited expansion options.
  
  You can play games on it - gaming performance is around the level of a laptop RTX 4070 - but the real use case is to configure it with 96GB of graphics RAM and run local LLMs for a fraction of the cost of a professional graphics card.
  
  
  
• If you bought into Bose SoundTouch home theater equipment, you bought a bunch of dumb speakers.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Bose has a new app.  The new app doesn't work with these old products because fuck  you that's why.
  
  Rival Sonos tried to end support for older speakers and had to walk this back in the ensuring firestorm.  Sonos also released a new app last year which was widely ridiculed and led to the company losing $30 million and the resignation of its CEO.
  
  Bose seems to have slept through the entire thing.

• Just when we were starting to worry about things getting boring again China has blocked exports of rare-earth elements to the rest of the planet.  (MSN)
  
  There are 17 rare-earth elements, used in electronics (particularly magnets) and chemistry, and China has shut off sales of 12 of them.  China gained control of the market not because it has massive resources - Vietnam by itself has half the proven reserves of China - but because rare-earth elements are stinky and China didn't mind the smell.
  
  Past tense, because a lot of China's rare-earth production these days comes from slave camps in Myanmar and not from China at all.
  
  President Trump has announced a 100% tariff on all imports from China in response.
  
  This is hardly the first time China has pulled this shit - the same thing happened in April.  Which seems like hundreds of years ago, but trust me, it wasn't.
  
  
  
• And share prices in Australian mining companies are booming as a result, because Australia is currently the largest Western producer of rare-earth metals.  (MSN)
  
  Because the funny thing is that rare earth elements aren't all that rare.  Vietnam, as I mentioned, Brazil, India, Australia, and the US itself all have millions of tons of reserves.

• Meanwhile, China has cracked down on Nvidia AI GPU imports.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay.  Not sure that anyone cares.
  
  
  
• The US Senate has passed a bill forcing American AI chipmakers to give priority to American customers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Okay.  Not sure that anyone cares.
  
  
  
• China banned the research company that discovered Huawei was violating US bans on using Taiwanese technology to make its chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Apparently China cares.
  
  
  
• And finally, a Singapore company denies that it helped smuggle $2 billion worth of Nvidia AI processors into China, a move now banned by both China and the US.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm sure they do.
  
  
  
• Intel's 18A (1.8nm) process node has entered production ahead of TSMC's 2nm node.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's hard to precisely compare the two since products aren't shipping to consumers yet, but Intel's 18A process looks to be somewhere between TSMC's 3nm and 2nm - 20% denser than TSMC's 3nm but 20% behind the upcoming 2nm process.
  
  But it certainly seems to be a leading-edge process and Intel is not repeating the years of 14nm+++.
  
  
  
• Amazon's Echo Show has abruptly turned into a billboard they expect you to pay for.  (The Verge)  (archive site)

  At Amazon’s hardware event last month, I asked Panay how ads fit into his mission to build products customers love.  He said that if it's relevant, it’s not an ad, "it's an add-on."

  Translation: Fuck you.

  "There are moments on the product where ads aren’t always bad," he told me, explaining that if the customer is looking for something specific, and the ad gets them to that faster, it can be a good thing.

  Translation: You're too stupid to know what's good for you anyway.

  My experience of these ads has not been that they’re an "add-on." They’re intrusive and annoying, showing me products I’m not even slightly interested in, such as elderberry herbal supplements, Quest sports chips, and tabletop picture frames.  (Well, the last one might be an option if I remove the Show from my desk.)  And, unlike some of the previous ad experiences on the Show, they cannot be turned off.

  Translation: Cory Doctorow might be a filthy commie but he's not wrong.  Well, he's still 100% wrong on the solution, but he has correctly identified the problem.

  I asked Amazon if they can be disabled, and spokesperson Lauren Raemhild replied via email, saying, "Advertising is a small part of the experience, and it helps customers discover new content and products they may be interested in.  If customers don’t like a suggestion, they can swipe to skip to the next screen card, or directly provide feedback by tapping the Information icon or pressing the screen."

  Translation: No, seriously, fuck you.
  
  
  
• We're all about to be in wearable hell.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  No, no we're not.  Normal people don't wear four smart watches and an AI ring at the same time.
  
  (Honestly, this article reads like one of the drones that infested tech companies before they all got fired recently complaining My new job is so awful.  Sometimes they expect me to get up in the morning.)

Posted by: Frank at Saturday, October 11 2025 06:57 PM (amxkj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 11 2025 10:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 12 2025 11:03 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 15 2025 10:17 AM (e0fX0)

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• Intel has taken the wraps off Panther Lake, its new laptop family due in January.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A full announcement is expected at CES and general availability by the end of the January.
  
  It includes new performance and efficiency cores, a low power core that isn't described in detail yet, and a new Xe3 graphics engine that provides a preview of the upcoming Celestial discrete GPUs.
  
  Also, while Lunar Lake was one size fits all, there are three different versions of Panther Lake:
  
  The cheapest version has four P cores and four LP cores, four Xe3 graphics cores, supports soldered or socketed RAM, and has eight PCIe 4.0 and four PCIe 5.0 lanes.
  
  The version for high-end laptops with dedicated graphics has four P cores, eight E cores, four LP cores, four Xe3 graphics cores, supports soldered or socketed RAM, and has eight PCIe 4.0 and twelve PCIe 5.0 lanes.
  
  And finally a model for fast laptops without dedicated graphics has four P cores, eight E cores, four LP cores, twelve Xe3 graphics cores, supports soldered RAM only, and has eight PCIe 4.0 and four PCIe 5.0 lanes.
  
  So you has to pick and choose.  There is no model that gives you everything.
  
  Though potentially the last of these can support CAMM2 modules to allow for expandable LPDDR5X RAM, and four lanes of PCIe 5.0 is enough to drive a mid-range laptop GPU.
  
  It's also supposed to user 30% less power than Lunar Lake thanks to the move from a 3nm to 1.8nm process.

• Intel's Xe3 integrated graphics in Panther Lake could deliver 50% more performance than Lunar Lake's Xe2 because there's 50% more cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Big if true.
  
  
  
• It only take 250 poisoned documents to drive an AI insane.  (The Register)
  
  According to a study by Anthropic, it is remarkably easy to craft malicious data that will turn any LLM into a train wreck.  Testing on Meta's Llama and GPT 3.5, as well as the open source LLM Pythia, this worked 100% of the time.
  
  What's more, larger models offered no increase in protection.  The poison pill of 250 documents worked on 13 billion parameter models just as it did on 600 million parameter models.
  
  
  
• The Bank of England and the IMF are now warning of the dangers or the AI bubble.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Great.  Now I'm on the side of the bubble.
  
  
  
• AMD and Sony have highlighted features coming in the the next generation of RDNA graphics cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Radiance cores (for enhanced ray tracing support), neural arrays (for AI), and universal compression will all be coming to RDNA5 and, presumably, the PlayStation 6 - because AMD designs and manufactures the chip inside the PlayStation.
  
  
• The specs of the next-generation Xbox may have just been leaked.  Probably have, because they're not all that exciting.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Three full-size Zen 6 cores, eight smaller Zen 6c cores (about 75% of the clock speed), 68 RDNA5 cores, and 48GB of GDDR7 RAM on a 192-bit bus.
  
  48GB of RAM will change things for developers, and the jump from Zen 2 to Zen 6 will speed things up.  Moving from 52 RDNA2 cores to 68 RDNA5 cores will provide...  Twice the graphics performance?  Something like that.
  
  And yes: AMD designs and manufactures the chip inside the Xbox as well.
  
  
  
• The $10 billion recipe for disaster.  (Tech Trenches)
  
  Building good software costs me money.
  
  Building bad software costs you money.
  
  It's not that hard to figure out how we got here.
  
  
  
• New York City has sued social media companies over the youth mental health crisis...  In New York City.  (Gizmodo)
  
  The social media companies should sue New York City over the exact same problem.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 10 2025 11:53 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 10 2025 11:56 PM (1zWbY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 11 2025 12:33 AM (rcPLc)

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• The editors apologise for the unwontedly upbeat tone of many of today's new items.  We do expect to be back to our usual predictions of imminent doom tomorrow.
  
  
  
• The European Parliament has voted that words mean something.  (The Guardian)
  
  In a 355 - 247 vote, the parliament said that you can't call a plant-based product "steak" unless it was produced by feeding the plants to a cow.  The same goes for terms like "burger" and "sausage".
  
  All the usual suspects are outraged, as well as supermarket chains who will have to make sure all their products are appropriately labelled.
  
  
  
• Germany meanwhile has ruled that the police can shoot down drones, whether they are plant-based or not.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  I think this should not only be allowed, but mandatory.

• Salesforce told Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters to go screw themselves.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The alliance of hacking groups claims to have stolen close to a billion records of data belonging to Salesforce customers, and demanded that the company pay them ransom.
  
  Salesforce said no.
  
  
  
• Synology announced that you know how we said you had to buy Synology-branded drives even for our desktop models, well, forget we ever said that.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Which is nice and all, but I think for many people the bridges are burned, the horses are bolted, the cat is out of the bag, the genie out of the bottle, and the toothpaste can't be squeezed back into the tube.
  
  
  
• Python 3.14 is here.  (The Register)
  
  This version actually brings some significant changes: The dreaded GIL - the global interpreter lock - has been removed, and a new JIT (just-in-time) compiler has been added.
  
  Neither is the default to ensure compatibility with previous versions, but they are there and ready for you to play with.
  
  
  
• How fast is it?  (Miguel Grinberg)
  
  Not very.  PyPy is a far superior solution to speeding up generic Python code, running 4x to 16x as fast as the Python JIT compiled in tests presented here.
  
  But the new implementation of the free-threaded model - the version that removes the GIL - is significantly faster in 3.14 than the first version released in 3.13, so there is still that.
  
  
  
• A chart of the bubble that dare not speak its name.  (Bloomberg)  (archive site)
  
  "A Ponzi scheme with extra steps", somebody called it.
  
  
  
• eBird - the world's largest citizen science project - has now clocked two billion sightings.  (Phys.org)
  
  They're still not real.

• Took my blood pressure this afternoon.  120/77.  It's always lower when I come in after a walk or working in the garden, but I hadn't done either, at least not in the past few hours.
  
  Just six weeks ago it was 70 points higher.
  
  
  
• Tried out my new lawn trimmer that I bought to replace my old Bosch model that went phut last week.  It works.  It actually works great.
  
  I don't like the handle arrangement as much as the old model, but it was half the price with a battery of the Bosch without, and Bosch doesn't make the old model anymore and their new model has the exact same handle arrangement as this cheap one.
  
  Power Blade brand, if anyone is looking.
  
  
  
• Got a couple of new roasting pans from Kmart to replace the old ones that had gone rusty, which I had also bought from Kmart.  I know, I know.
  
  The new ones were slightly more expensive which I put down to inflation, but they turn out to be far higher quality.  They weigh at least twice as much as the old ones, and seem to have a better non-stick coating as well.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Friday, October 10 2025 02:16 AM (3NtfN)

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 10 2025 06:38 AM (e0fX0)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 11 2025 03:34 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 11 2025 03:37 AM (1zWbY)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, October 12 2025 05:31 AM (ZLF73)

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• Qualcomm has bought hobby electronics board maker Arduino for an undisclosed sum.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Well, that's the end of that then.
  
  Sorry?
  
  Qualcomm poisons everything it touches.
  
  You're thinking of Broadcom.
  
  Oh.  You're right.
  
  
  
• The first announcement from the combined company is the Arduino Uno Q, a $44 development board featuring both a Qualcomm Dragonwing CPU running Linux and an STM32U585 microcontroller for real-time control tasks.  (Arduino)
  
  The Dragonwing is a traditional not-very-powerful Arm processor with four 2GHz A53 cores.
  
  The STM32U585 is a microcontroller with an Arm M33 running at 160MHz, 2MB of embedded flash storage, and 786kB of RAM.  (No, that's not a typo.)
  
  The board includes 2GB of RAM and 16GB of eMMC flash storage for the Dragonwing, as well as WiFi 5 and a whole slew of low-level I/O functions.

• Minisforum also has a NAS.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It features 5Gb and 10Gb network ports, five 3.5" drive bays, three M.2 slots (convertible to one M.2 slot and two U.2 bays), RAM expandable up to 128GB, and a Ryzen 370 CPU.
  
  That's a 28W part with 12 Zen 5 cores and 16 graphics cores, and it's AMD's current fastest mainstream APU, six times as fast as the N150 found in certain low-end NASes we just bought.
  
  On the other hand, it costs $1019 without any memory or drives, vs. a current price of $204 for the Beelink Me Mini, so you definitely pay for what you get.
  
  
  
• The 16GB RAM model of the Beelink Me Mini is now available for $284 with a 1TB Crucial SSD bundled in.  (Beelink)
  
  Well, it's available for pre-order, but so was the model I have and it was on my doorstep in rural Australia in about five days.
  
  
  
• Let the bubbles roll: Spending on datacenters and information processing generally contributed about 90% of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.  (Fortune)
  
  The author notes that this spending did contribute to higher energy prices and continued high interest rates, and estimates that without all of these GDP would still have grown at around 2%:

  Our economy might just be three AI data centers in a trench coat.

  
  
  
• OpenAI has signed $1 trillion worth of deals for computing hardware and services so far this year.  (MSN)
  
  A trillion here, a trillion there...

Posted by: PatBuckman at Wednesday, October 08 2025 07:30 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, October 09 2025 04:39 AM (amxkj)

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, October 09 2025 01:05 PM (XWgGM)

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• Now it's AMD's turn.  (Serve the Home)
  
  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nvidia's plan to invest $100 billion in OpenAI in return for OpenAI spending $100 billion on Nvidia hardware.  Or some random amount - the scale is so absurd they're talking about graphics cards in gigawatts.  OpenAI is buying 10 gigawatts of graphics cards.
  
  Now AMD is sort of doing the same.  OpenAI is planning to buy 6GW of AMD Instinct cards and in return AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for up to 160 million shares of its common stock, worth about $32 billion at current prices though since some of the shares wouldn't vest until the share price reaches $600 (from $200 today) it's potentially $100 billion again if the bubble don't burst.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?  (Anime by the Numbers)
  
  Because they fired everyone who cared about typesetting.
  
  And you're kind of screwed, because all the other streaming services either don't care either or relicense Crunchyroll.
  
  It sucks.
  
  
  
• SCOTUS to Google: Stet.  (Thurrott)
  
  Google requested a stay in the Epic Game decision, which went very, very badly for them.
  
  The stay was denied.
  
  Google now has two weeks to open Android up to alternate app stores and payment services, and stop even attempting to force this on developers and device makers.
  
  And I'm all out of popcorn...
  
  
  
• There's a remote exploit flaw in Redis that has been lurking quietly for 13 years.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Redis is typically run as a local caching service, not exposed to the internet, but researchers found 33,000 instances that were so exposed.
  
  Coupled with the recent sudo bug that could instantly give attackers root access on all those machines.
  
  
  
• OpenAI plans to allow developers to build apps that run inside ChatGPT.  (The Verge)
  
  There are an uncountably infinite number of ways in which this could go badly.
  
  
  
• There's a single-slot water-cooled version of Maxsun's Arc Pro B60 Dual 48G Turbo, just in case you want to fit seven of them inside a standard ATX case.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  And who doesn't want that?
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 08 2025 03:24 AM (aAzn2)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 08 2025 06:52 AM (e0fX0)

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Posted by: J Greely at Monday, October 06 2025 11:44 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, October 07 2025 12:56 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, October 07 2025 02:59 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 07 2025 09:11 AM (e0fX0)

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• The Eternal September is finally over after 34 years as AOL shuts down its dialup service.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Looking around and seeing the current state of the internet, I think they might have left it running a little too long.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, how does my upgraded 500Mb internet feel?
  
  Exactly the same as before, one 100Mb, to be honest.  Moving from ADSL (I got about 16Mb down and 2Mb up) to a nominal 100/40 connection was a huge upgrade.  At least it was until I got hit by lightning and my modem exploded.
  
  Since I mostly look at (and work on) US-hosted sites, that trans-Pacific latency erases any obvious gains.  The new plan is cheaper, though, and the next step down goes all the way to 50/20 and only saves $2.
  
  

Tech News

• Maxsun has teamed up with case manufacturer Abee to produce a workstation powered by Intel CPUs and GPUs, the latter specifically being Maxsun's Arc Pro B60 48GB Turbo model.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The B60 is based on Intel's B580 gaming card, not particularly powerful compared with Nvidia's RTX 5060 or AMD's 9060 XT, but $50 cheaper at $250 and equipped with 50% more VRAM - 12GB rather than 8GB - which makes some memory-intensive titles run better even though the hardware is nominally slower.
  
  The Arc Pro B60 48GB Turbo takes two of those, doubles the memory on each, and fits them on a single card for $1200.  It's only really useful for certain specific tasks - you wouldn't buy one of these to play games - but it's a lot cheaper than any 48GB cards from AMD or Nvidia.
  
  
  
• HP has launched the ZGX Nano G1n, powered by Nvidia's GB10 chip.  (WCCFTech)
  
  What?
  
  It's an AI thing.
  
  Oh.
  
  It has 20 Arm CPU cores - 10 X925 full-size cores and 10 A725 mid-size cores, 48 graphics cores - the same as an RTX 5070 desktop graphics card, 128GB of soldered LPDDR5X memory on a 256-bit bus, and two 200Gb Ethernet ports for attaching it to more of the same.
  
  Price not announced but expect it to cost around 50% more than AMD's very similar systems based on the Ryzen AI Max 395.
  
  
  
• Food delivery robots have human names and blinking eyes. But they’re not our friends.  (CNN)
  
  I might return to this item tomorrow because the article is impressively deranged.
  
  
  
• Gmail is dropping Gmailify and POP support.  (PC World)
  
  Going forward, you will need to use an email client that supports the new IMAP standard, which came out in...  1986.
  
  
  
• A comparison of Ada and Rust.  (GitHub)
  
  Is it just me, or is Rust kind of...  Bad?

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 06 2025 06:27 AM (1zWbY)

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