Author: Chinmoy Kanjilal

The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is just a few days away now. Though, this latest news of the X.Org memory leak has slightly dampened the spirit of the Ubuntu release. A bug which was affecting GLX version 1.4, was found at a crucial last moment in Debian. Read more about this bug at an earlier post on Techie Buzz.

Ubuntu being a Debian based OS was affected equally. Being on the safe side, Ubuntu will now ship with an older version of GLX: version 1.2. You can check this at the bug tracking page at launchpad.

About GLX,

GLX (initialism for “OpenGL Extension to the X Window System”) provides the binding connecting OpenGL and the X Window System: it enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System.

(Via: Wikipedia)

About X.Org,

X.Org Server (commonly abbreviated to Xorg Server or just Xorg) refers to the X server release packages stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.

(Via: Wikipedia)

As evident from above, GLX and X.Org manage the windowing system on a typical Linux desktop. The GLX patch, which  caused this crash of GLX 1.4 has been withdrawn by Debian and is no more available.

The Problem in Ubuntu

The actual problem the bug was causing in Ubuntu was a deallocation problem while running Clutter apps. After the patch released by Debian was removed, Ubuntu tried to apply its own patch to the memory leak problem. It even worked initially. Though, it was revealed later that the patch by Ubuntu failed to check the memory leak and only slowed it down making the PC considerably slow over time.

The Fix

Fall back to GLX 1.2.

(Via: WebUpd8)

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“Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report” collects cybercrime and vulnerability data from across the globe and analyzes it to produce near-perfect cybercrime reports. The 100 page report generated from 2009 just came in and the most pressing issue according to it is that criminal activities over the Internet, termed as cybercrime has started moving to emerging countries.

Two countries in focus in these reports are Brazil and India. The Internet is a global entity and the lack of awareness has put India into that report. China, which was included in the last report has evolved and is now much more aware regarding the Internet.

Not only this, India is also a soft target in cybercrime. India serves as the best testing bed for hack attacks and more than 4/5th of hacks in India originated in other countries. There is a high broadband penetration but the awareness of safe usage is absolutely zero. People are still happy winning those lotteries and screensaver and are willingly giving away potential personal information.

India ranks #5 in cybercrime and serves 788 bots each day. Out of these, Mumbai, India’s largest city also claimed the largest bot activity of 50% in the country. Also, there are at least 62,623 bot infected computers in India.
(Via: PCMag)

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This is Ubuntu’s week in FOSS and it is to stay this way till the launch of Ubuntu. Canonical has recently faced some problem relating to its flagship product Ubuntu which includes the next version. The version 10.04 of Ubuntu is around the corner and Ubuntu fans all over the world are gearing up for it.

News

• Ubuntu 10.04 RC Release

Canonical  has just released the RC of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This marks the release candidate indicating that the product is due in time. Ubuntu 10.04 RC has all the final features that the final version of Ubuntu 10.04 will have. Want to download the RC? Get it here.

• Memory Leak in X.Org on Ubuntu

This memory leak has resulted from a patch which was released to prevent GLX 1.4 crashes. Developers are unable to fix this and the GLX will possibly be rolled back to version 1.2. This problem is being considered urgent and is the top priority at Canonical right now. Read more at this post on Techie Buzz.

How To

• How to get a free Ubuntu 10.04 CD if you are from UK

Ubuntu shipit is open but apparently, it is not shipping out any CDs currently. Although, there is an alternative way to get free Ubuntu CDs if you are in the UK. OS Disks is giving out free Ubuntu CDs at their shop. Simply go to this page and order a free CD. It looks like a shopping portal but the CD is free to buy. Unfortunately, it works only for people in the UK. Read more at OmgUbuntu!.

We are nearing the Ubuntu release and will do a full coverage of its release, download and features. Stay tuned.

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Twitter has made it’s latest acquisition this Friday. It goes by the name of Cloudhopper and is an SMS service that connects to Twitter. The two founders of Cloudhopper, who were working in partnership with Twitter will now join it full time. This is a part of the expansion plans Twitter has probably decided on after Chirp’s success.

Cloudhopper is described on the homppage as,

Cloudhopper provides mobile messaging technology and expertise to businesses in the wireless space. Currently, Cloudhopper powers some of the largest and most successful mobile messaging (SMS and MMS) campaigns in North America, Europe, and Africa.

This provides new ventures for Twitter’s expansion plan. Twitter has been popular on networks with data access but that is not the situation in most countries. This move will help Twitter expand into markets where mobile voice networks have emerged without giving much thought about data communication.

Twitter acquired Tweetie a few days ago and is also planning to create official apps for all mobile platforms. Twitter is surely looking forward to an expansion into the mobile sector. It also claims that the number of tweets sent over SMS is on a constant rise and the aquisition of Cloudhopper has made it easier for Twitter to provide its services in some specific areas regionally. Thus, the responsibility of maintaining uptime locally falls on Cloudhopper.

(Via: Twitter Blog)

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Ubuntu 10.04 RC was released yesterday and is available for download at the official Ubuntu release page. Head over to this page, navigate to the bottom and there, you will see a number of releases for you to choose from.

If you are interested in the DVD and the source CD, visit this page instead. This includes most common Ubuntu custom distros featuring different desktop environments.

Please do not put the entire load on the main servers and user the download mirrors if possible. The list of download mirrors is also available. A common system requirement is 256 MB of RAM. If you own a newer Intel processor powered Mac system, good news is that you can install Ubuntu on it as well.

This page includes the server, netbook, alternative and the very common desktop version. The desktop version is also a Live CD so you can give Ubuntu a try and decide on whether to install the final version or not. This will not alter your current installations in any way.

A great software to consider when installing Ubuntu with Windows is Wubi. If you want to try Ubuntu inside Windows, go for Windows Ubuntu Installer Wubi. It makes Ubuntu easy to install and does not make any major changes in the boot-loader.

My suggestion is that, with the release of RC only a few days away, you should wait for the final version though surely, give this RC a try.

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Despite of all the speculation on Apple buying ARM, which took the internet by swarms, we were waiting for the inside scoop and it has appeared on eWeek finally. It is confirmed that Apple is not buying ARM and there are a good number of reasons for that.

This news has been confirmed by ARM itself and the ARM CEO Warren East says,

How this affected Apple?

This news has not affected Apple at all. Apple, which clearly had no intentions to buy the book techarraz.com and firm enjoyed the movie. There were many speculations on why Apple should buy and why it should not buy ARM. The best one was that ARM is an investment of $8 billion to acquire a technology which is pretty much open and needs sharing to thrive. Apple could either attempt to stop this sharing which would send down ARM revenue or it could just buy and keep ARM as a souvenir, sit on it and keep losing money on it.

How this affected ARM?

ARM is the only one with a benefit from this deal which was not made. ARMs low stock prices rose up so high, it recorded an eight years high. ARM’s business design is such that it will thrive only if it runs on the current model.

How this affected Intel?

Intel, which could not make its ARM killer into a success now seems like the most suitable one to buy ARM. Now, Intel has an advantage of already being in thread same field.

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In a recent study conducted by What.app, Facebook fails in maintaining standard privacy of its users.

WhatApp is a site that rates the privacy, security and openness of web and mobile applications as well as the various platforms they run on.

What.app uses various analysis tools to rate apps and websites and Twitter and iPhone apps fared well with good scores whereas Facebook was slapped on the face with a score of 2. The total score was five. The results obtained are extrapolated from data obtained from individual apps running on platforms. Facebook was rated based on its apps.

The co-founder of What.App Ryan Calo, who is also a Stanford University Law fellow says,

I think people are upset because when you download an app, you don’t have any control over what the app developer sees on your profile,” says Calo. “There’s the perception among users that they don’t need to give away so much information to have the apps do the same thing as they are currently doing.

There were three areas of analysis, namely privacy, security and openness. Facebook scored two in all three. This should not come as a surprise as it simply justifies Mark Zuckerberg’s earlier statement of “privacy is no longer a social norm”.

(Via:Forbes)

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Yahoo! has bought the Me.Me domain as a part of its strategy to compete with Twitter. This will serve as a nice add-on for its Yahoo Meme service which was supposed to take on Twitter. The domain owes its mane to the country of Montenegro and the particulars of the deal are being kept undisclosed.

This is clearly indicating that Yahoo! has big plans for the Yahoo Meme it had been sitting on it all this long. Antonio Silveira, director of product development and engineering, Yahoo! says,

Thanks to Sedo’s services and the consultation of Sedo broker, Jeff Gabriel, we were able to obtain the Me.Me domain name, which is an essential component of our online branding strategy.

Sedo went the extra mile by proactively recommending the domain for our campaign and utilizing their existing relationship with the .Me Registry to quickly and securely acquire it on our behalf.

About Sedo,

Sedo, an acronym for “Search Engine for Domain Offers,” is the leading domain marketplace and monetization provider. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Sedo has assembled the world’s largest database of domain names for sale, with more than 15 million listings.

Almost every tech giant out there is so much in love with microblogging that they are launching one of their own. Though, they should clearly see it now that Twitter rules the microblogging world. Any attempt to get at Twitter is a waste of time and resource. You need an assured and dedicated future-user base even before a huge investment. Twitter here, already has it.

(Via: BusinessWire and PaidContent)

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Google buzz fell flat after 10 weeks of its launch. The current state of Google Buzz is such that there are fewer people using it, more of them leaving it and even fewer bothering to try it out. Google Buzz had initial problems with exposing contact lists and probably, this has taken a toll on the awesome tool launched by Google.

Postrank blog writes,

we were really excited about the buzz around Google Buzz (pardon the pun), as it meant more social engagement data that we could integrate into our system. Which we did. PostRank now tracks all of the public Buzz feeds. However, after doing some careful data analysis, the quality of the Buzz feeds is, well, questionable.

Google Buzz has around 60% of its content coming from Twitter and almost 27% of it is from automated RSS feeds. That leaves a mere 11% of content which is purely typed in by the user. These statistics show that Buzz is losing out. This makes the Buzz it button on websites useless as there is no-one to buzz the topic. It is only going into the Buzz stream one-time.

Though in my opinion, it is too early to call this service a flop. Google has integrated this service into Gmail and if done right, it has a huge potential. It is powerful enough to thrive in a world of Twitter and Facebook which are its direct competitors. 10% of original user generated content in 10 weeks cannot be called bad if not impressive enough.

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Google has rebranded its Local Business Center and launched it as Google Places. There are million and ever rising searches on local business and business owners are looking for ways to stay on focus and on top of Google search results for local business. Google Places will help businesses connect with users from the real world.

John Hanke, VP Google Maps, Earth and Local says at The official Google,

We launched Place Pages last September for more than 50 million places around the world to help people make more informed decisions about where to go, from restaurants and hotels to dry cleaners and bike shops, as well as non-business places like museums, schools and parks. Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners.

Places promises to help business owners manage their online presence and claim their place in the niche. There are millions of businesses already on the Place Page through the Local Business Center. According to the blog post, you can get your business on Google Places too by “verifying and supplementing your business information to include hours of operation, photos, videos, coupons, product offerings and more”.

Some new features available in Google Places are Service Ares depicting geographic areas you provide services in, advertisements on Google search and Google Maps and business photo-shoots where businesses can get their work features as a photo-shoot for free. A new feature of real-time updates is also available for the last few months. Thus, you can easily promote a sale or discount day.

The final verdict is, if you have a business; do not forget to get it listed on google.com/places.

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Facebook employees are an elite group of coders, engineers and entrepreneurs who have all it takes to manage the 400+ million user base Facebook has developed over years. The Facebook team is extremely small and the ratio of a Facebook engineer to Facebook users is more than one million. This is possibly the largest ratio amongst all tech giants.

Facebook is now a part of 2010 TopCoder(R) Open as a sponsor. It also has plans of taking in winners as interns and full time employees. Facebook says,

Help develop the second most-trafficked site and one of the largest MySQL installations in the world.

Facebook uses PHP, C++, Python, Java and Erlang besides other languages.

Every technology has some form of a limit. Tech companies like Facebook hack these technologies to scale them according to their needs and go beyond that limit. Facebook uses Cassandra, Hive, Scribe, and Thrift open source projects and is active in developing them as well.

Facebook boasts more by saying,

At Facebook, we move fast. Our rapid development cycle is supported by tools that always keep us operating ahead of the curve. Our engineers are able to write code and have it running live on the site that same night – see the impact you’re making in real-time.

Learn more at the http://www.topcoder.com/tco10 page.

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The ODF (Other Document Plugin) plugin was first launched for Microsoft Office by Sun Microsystems in 2007. It can extend the Open Document Format capabilities to Microsoft Office 2010. With this plugin, we can store open and edit files as belonging to one of the standard Open Document Formats.

Now that Sun has been acquired by Oracle, the Open Document Format plugin for Microsoft Office is managed by Oracle. Oracle has recently released a new version of the plugin as a free software.

However, although the official page of ODF at Sun says its free, it still does not explain everything because in reality, the software is not free anymore.

Now, Oracle is charging a sum of $90 per user for a right to use the license for a year and another $19 for support throughout that year. The customer also requires a minimum order of 100 licenses to make a purchase. This needs a purchase of $9,000 before you can think of starting with ODF. Clearly, they did not at all care about personal computer users because they would have no reason to buy keys in mass.

One interesting fact here is that the plugin in this case costs even more than the application itself.
Get the plugin here.
(Via: HOnline )

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An online British game retailer has recently announced that it officially and legally owns the soul of 7,500 people who made any form of online purchase at their website. They are basing this claim on a clause added to their license agreement which gives control of a customer’s soul over to GameStation.

The exact clause says,

By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant Us a non transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should We wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamesation.co.uk or one of its duly authorised minions.

This was an April Fool’s joke. The term of soul ownership was added on the 1st of April. It clearly proves that no-one reads the license agreement. Also, there was another checkbox to opt-out; only 22% of the total people clicked it. Surprisingly, this led them to a £5 discount.

To further clarify the customer’s position in this, the company will e-mail clients and tell them the truth about this being a joke.
(Via: Foxnews)

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Facebook is an amazingly crazy place. You will find the most unexpected type of people here. But these two Facebook pages which have surfaced this week and are surely the ones you would want to check out.

Kip Drordy

The first is that of Kip Drordy. Southpark fans went gaga over the release of the last episode of Southpark. The last episode marks the 200th birthday of Southpark. This episode shows a Facebook overdrive amongst people and a craze for friend count. Our character Kip Drordy, who is new to Facebook, is in desperate need of online friends on Facebook.

Well, someone went ahead and created a real page for Kip Drordy on Facebook. He has 133,299 fans now and you can see his fan page created by a guy from North Carolina. He has no connections whatsoever with Facebook. But it is interesting to see that status updates like “Made oatmeal cookies. Ate 2.2 cookies” get 6,343 likes and “There was a bee in my room” gets 1321 comments.

Osama Bin Laden

Even before you read any further, I want to tell you that this is a fake Osama Bin Laden profile. This profile is not real. It is clearly a case of identity theft and Facebook has banned the page now. The profile went by the name of The leader of the Mujahideen, Osama bin Laden. As expected, the messages posted on the page were in Arabic and the page has over 1000 fans. The account went online just a month ago and you can read more on this at The Sun.

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Ubuntu has a system of sending live CDs to enthusiastic users who order it online. This time as well, we have Ubuntu 10.04 live CDs shipping for free through Ubuntu Shipit. To order your free copy of the Ubuntu live CD, visit the Shipit homepage.

You have options to choose between the desktop and the server version. You can also check the status of your order at the link given on the homepage. The request link takes you to a page where you need to login and place your order.

The delivery will take up to 10 weeks and if you have a fast internet connection, you should consider downloading your copy instead of ordering a CD.

The release of the final product is only 12 days from now . If you are enthusiastic about it and want to spread the word, you can place a countdown timer on your website. Get the countdown timer here.

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The first ever Twitter Chirp developer conference which was held on Wednesday this week, saw the release of some decisive stats. Updates from the conference are available at this earlier post. However, some more news from the conference has surfaced recently.

Stats show that Twitter is generating 55 million tweets a day and has over 100 million registered users. That size is comparable to that of Facebook and there is a wide possibility that now, Twitter will have its own data center just like Facebook. John Adams, one of the operations engineers of Twitter made this announcement at the Chirp Developer Conference.

Twitter started out in the cloud and later moved to the NTT to host its servers. The cloud service, although sounded impressive, had many drawbacks in reality.

NTT has leased 15,000 square feet in Santa Clara where it will expand its data center. Twitter’s success and the expansion of its host (NTT) indicate that this new unit at Santa Clara is being created because of Twitter.

Twitter traffic has grown 1,358 percent over the last year and whether Twitter develops its own data center or uses the expanded NTT unit, it will definitely help solve the problem of occasional downtime problems of Twitter.

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Microsoft Office 2010 along with three other products reached the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) milestone. This announcement was made at “The official blog of the Microsoft Office product development group” at Technet by Takeshi Numoto, the Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Office.

RTM is the final engineering milestone of a product release.

Office 2010 has reached the RTM milestone alongside Visio 2010, Project 2010 and SharePoint 2010. The flagship Office suite from Microsoft saw the public beta release of its latest version in November last year. Since then, more than 5,000 partners and testers have continuously evaluated the product. Stats at the Office blog indicate that the testing of Office 2010 was the largest ever for a software product.

As far as availability of the final product is concerned, Volume License customers with active Software Assurance will be able to download the latest version from April 27. Others may get their hands on it from 1st of May onwards.

This time, Office 2010 will have a virtual launch at the 2010 event website. You can expect to see product demos, customer and partner testimonials, and interviews with product managers and executives at this virtual launch.

Even though Office 2010 along with SharePoint and other 2010 products is available online only two weeks from now, it will hit the stores only in the US in June 2010. The India launch is also expected to be sometime in June this year.

Do not forget to check the pricing and edition details to choose your Office 2010.

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This week has been profitable for Open Source. We have seen the open sourcing of two software products and a lot more.

News

• Lightworks, an Academy Award winning software goes open-source

Lightworks is an academy award winning non-linear video editor. It has recently been open sourced by the holding company Editshare. Editshare has released Lightworks as a platform. This allows developers to write code for Lightworks plugins as well. We had covered the news of this open-sourcing. Also see OMG!Ubuntu.

• Nvidia Releases First OpenGL 4.0 Driver

Nvidia has released its first OpenGL driver for Linux. This driver is labelled 195.36.07.04 and will support all Fermi GPUs. The deprecated functionalities of older drivers will not be discarded though. Read more here.

• On2 might become open-source, thanks to Google

Newteevee has shed light on the possible open-sourcing of the On2 video codec Google acquired earlier this year. Currently, H.264 and Ogg Theora are fighting to get the open-web standard. If this goes through, Google will introduce an unbeatable contender in the video codec race. Read more here.

• Oracle stops free OpenSolaris CD. Will others follow?

Oracle has stopped distributing free OpenSolaris CDs. Though, you can still download the CD image from the website. The OpenSolaris community is also planning on forking OpenSolaris. Read more at the H-Online.

How To

• Connect Tata Photon Whiz of Plug2Surf in Linux

Connecting Tata Photon Whiz with Linux is easy. You just need to install wvdial and proceed with the tutorial given here.

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Tata Indicom has changed the face of wireless broadband in India. With its comparatively cheap unlimited offer, it is currently the best buy.

Tata Indicom offers unlimited surfing + download at Rs.800 per month. The offer is valid for Tata Photon Whiz. Although it operates at a compromised speed, it provides the advantage of unlimited surfing.

Tata Indicom Whiz has a dialer for Windows. However, many complain that there is no Tata Indicom dialer for Linux.

Well, there is no dialer because Linux has a dialer of its own which does the job. Follow these steps to setup your Photon Whiz with the “wvdial” dialer.

1. Install “wvdial” if you do not have it already. To install wvdial, use the command:

   sudo apt-get install wvdial

2. Next, plug in your Tata Indicom USB Modem.
3. Now, create a dialer for your modem with the command:

   sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

   This creates the appropriate dialer configuration for your modem. Remember to keep the modem plugged in while running this command.

4. Edit the wvdial.conf file by issuing

   sudo vi /etc/wvdial.conf

5. Your wvdial.conf file opens on issuing the above command. It should look like this :

   [Dialer Defaults]
   Init1 = ATZ
   Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
   Init3 = AT+CRM=1
   Stupid Mode = 1
   Modem Type = Analog Modem
   Phone = 0
   ISDN = 0
   Password = <password>
   New PPPD = <username>
   Username = internet
   Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
   Baud = 9600

6. Now you have to edit the file. If you did not get the

   Init3 = AT+CRM=1

   and

   Stupid Mode = 1

   fields, add them manually. Next, put “internet” in place of <username> and <password>. Do not change any other auto-generated entry. Place the appropriate phone number in place of 0. It is #777 for Tata Indocom.

That should complete setting up your dialer. Now, to dial a connection, simply execute

sudo wvdial

in a terminal window. Enjoy.

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The Twitter Developer Conference, which was held yesterday at San Francisco, saw 800 attendees. This was Twitters first developer conference and was held at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. Evan Williams, the Twitter CEO was one of the key speakers at the conference.

He and other speakers repeatedly told developers that Twitter will not change its existing relation with developers. Williams assured that,

That’s the world I want you to pour your creative minds into. That’s the world were creating together. It’s not just about us, but it’s about you, if you chose to participate in that.

Twitter has released usage stats for the first time since its inception in March 2006. It says, the Twitter network is growing by 300,000 per day and has 105,779,710 registered members with 100,000 registered applications to its credit. There are around 600 million search queries and 55 million messages posted each day. To cope up with this, Twitter has increased its size from 25 to 175 employees over an year.

Additionally, there were reports of Twitter releasing its own official apps for most mobile platforms. This included the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and others. Twitter has already acquired Tweetie for the iPhone and has declared an official app for BlackBerry. Next, the development of an Android app is already underway.

New feature announcements for Twitter included a “Places” feature in geo-location. So the next time you want tweets from an event, simply look for a tweet from that “Place”. Moreover, streams of user data will now be available publicly in real time. Another rumor was of Twitter launching its own URL shortener.

At the end of the conference, developers aired their concerns with some questions. Twitter responded by highlighting its belief in a collective effort. It said,

Twitter is the way it is because of our ecosystem. There’s no way we could be successful without you being successful.

(Via: Sfgate)

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