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July 20th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Tumblr To Bury Adult Blogs Even Deeper, Begins Vilifying Them

It’s time to be very clear about the words “NSFW” and “Adult” in the Tumblr context. They mean different things. Until recently, users were faced with two self-flagging options. This is the relevant screenshot from my May 15 post:

misleading tumblr settings showing adult blogs as visible to search engines when they are not

Here’s how Tumblr’s page on Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs explained the difference, then and now:

Please respect the choices of people in our community and flag your blog as NSFW or Adult from your blog Settings page.

  • NSFW blogs contain occasional nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.
  • Adult blogs contain substantial nudity or mature/adult-oriented content.

Note what’s not present (this will be important later). There’s nothing there about commercial porn sites or affiliate links. The difference between NSFW and Adult is the extent of nudity or “mature/adult-oriented” content. If it’s occasional, your blog should be flagged NSFW; if it’s “substantial”, your blog should be flagged Adult. When we talk about “porn on Tumblr” everybody is talking about Tumblrs that should be flagged Adult. We’re talking about the blogs that are all porn, all the time, the raunchier the better. Accept no substitutes!

So, that’s the Tumblr policy as it’s been for at least the last several months. I am going into this so carefully because Tumblr has been (IMO deliberately) using these words to deflect inquiries and confuse the press. Ask Tumblr about porn or Adult-flagged blogs and they will come back with a phrase about NSFW blogs. The questioner may think he or she just got an answer, but in reality he got a load of bullshit about something else. Everybody needs to watch out for this going forward, if only so you can avoid all the incoherent tech press articles by reporters who never understood that this distinction exists and who (typically and somewhat reasonably) think “Adult” and “NSFW” are plain-language synonyms as they normally are.

OK, that’s the history. What’s the news?

Yesterday, at some time after I posted about the plain falsehoods in that press email from the Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna, Tumblr founder David Karp posted this article to the Tumblr Staff blog, which is “The official feed from the people behind Tumblr.” Karp’s post suggests that changes are coming, and that’s reinforced by a new yellow-highlighted “This Page is out of date and is in the process of being updated” legend on the Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page. (That’s the one that just got updated on Thursday when Tumblr started admitting they were excluding Adult blogs from their internal search indexing. Yup, now it’s “out of date”.)

So what’s the awesome new Tumblr plan to reassure us all that Tumblr has heard our feedback? Well, it looks like the new plan is to hide all the seach-banned Adult-flagged blogs from the interface, deploy a new set of vilifying lies about these now-even-harder-to-find blogs, and carry on talking about the NSFW category only. Possibly I’m uncharitable. So let’s look at Karp’s post together, shall we?

It begins:

All, we’ve heard from a bunch of you who are concerned about Tumblr censoring NSFW/adult content. While there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around, most of the confusion seems to stem from our complicated flagging/filtering features.

It opens like a classic corporate non-apology backtrack. “We hear you, it’s a damned shame you’ve all fallen for the terrible misinformation that’s flying around, however we are complicated which may have prevented you from understanding how awesome we are.” Note the “NSFW/adult” terms being used together in this nonspecific way. Moving on:

Let me clear up (and fix) a few things:

1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings.

Here he’s using “NSFW” to mean both “NSFW” and “Adult”. Of course the Safe Mode applied to both NSFW and Adult-flagged blogs (once the Adult category was added) and it filtered them both out by default.

As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.

This appears to be another flat lie. It may well be true of blogs with the NSFW tag, but Karp says “all blogs” here, and I can show you how to disprove that. Remember, Tumblr’s own little check-box chart says that NSFW blogs are indexed by Tumblr search and Adult ones are not. If they’re not indexed, how can they hope to show up when a user turns off Safe Mode? Now, watch me prove it, using a recent post on Fifi’s wonderful Feeling Is First Tumblr. Is it flagged as Adult? Yes it is; you have only to navigate to http://feeling-is-first.tumblr.com/robots.txt to see the deadly disallow-all instruction.

So, Fifi posted this yesterday (Friday, July 19th) and she tagged it #phonograph:

nude and phonograph

So, Feeling Is First is a Tumblr blog, and David Karp says that turning off the default Safe Mode in your Tumblr account “wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear” but has been fixed. Well, was it actually fixed? See for yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, check that you’re not in Safe Mode, and type “phonograph” into the search box. As I write this, the search is returning precisely two results from yesterday for the “phonograph” tag and neither of them is Fifi’s post.

A Karp apologist might remind us that Tumblr isn’t indexing Adult-flagged blogs, so there are no search results from these blogs to appear; they weren’t being blocked by Safe Mode, they just don’t exist. My response to that would be, it tortures the language beyond its limits. You can’t brag about enabling “search results from all blogs to appear” while chortling behind your hand about an entire class of porn blogs for which you aren’t generating search results. Especially not in a post about a controversy over disappearing porn blogs.

Karp goes on:

Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq – which is moderated by our community editors – in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.

There’s another whole blog post to be done on how Apple’s anti-porn apps market is chilling adult discourse on the modern internet, but that’s for another day. Let’s focus on Karp’s last sentence here: “You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.” Yesterday I called out Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna for lying when she said “Users can also find all content with Tumblr search in their mobile web browser.” Karp has cleaned this up to the extent of replacing “all content” with “unfiltered search results”. Since Tumblr says it is not indexing Adult-flagged blogs, there are no search results from them to include in unfiltered results. So Karp avoids the direct lie here. But the deception remains. Karp doesn’t get to brag about “unfiltered search results” while excluding an entire class of supposedly-welcome blogs from search indexing.

But now we get to the truly-astonishing “demonize, vilify, and disappear” discussion where Karp acknowledges the genuinely Adult-flagged blogs for the first time:

Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we’ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check “Flag this blog as NSFW” so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.

Here is the genuine bad news for Adult bloggers on Tumblr. According to the soon-to-be-revised policy, the Adult-flagged blogs were formerly a perfectly-welcome part of the Tumblr community, and porn bloggers on Tumblr were asked to voluntarily flag as such if they posted “substantial” nudity. Now Tumblr is claiming this was all an accident and they are burying the Adult-flagged blogs behind an additional barrier of invisibility. They’ve removed the radio button (that somehow accidentally wrote itself into the interface) for Adult blogs and they will only use an NSFW flag going forward. In the interface, Adult-flagged blogs will no longer exist. You’ll be NSFW or nothing — and, Karp promises, NSFW blogs will (continue to be) visible to the search engines.

So, what about those gazillions of porn bloggers already on Tumblr? You know, the ones this controversy is actually about? The ones Karp now newly claims were “a tiny subset” of “not so nice people” “using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites”? What’s going to happen to them?

Let’s be clear about the fast one Karp is trying to pull here. Tumblr’s community guidelines have long prohibited the creation of blogs that were “for the primary purpose of affiliate marketing.” If caught, the penalty for this (according to some threads I’ve perused on adult webmaster forums) was deletion of the offending blog. At first, Tumblr’s enforcement was lax; but as abuses piled up, they went through a period where they were deleting blogs that had just a single affiliate link. So Karp is lying when he claims that the Adult flag was only intended for “spammy commercial porn sites”. The defining characteristic was “substantial nudity”, not commercial spam. The affiliate spammers were a whole different problem with an entirely different and more draconian solution. Karp knows this. This is not a failure to communicate. This is deliberate deception aimed at marginalizing Tumblr’s porn bloggers and justifying that marginalization.

So what’s going on? Karp has gone out of his way to demonize the blogs that were flagged as Adult. That suggests to me that we won’t be seeing an “all is forgiven” removal of the search engine exclusion for formerly Adult-flagged blogs that are now (by the new definition) merely NSFW. Instead, it looks like the blogs already flagged as “Adult” will stay that way, only now the very existence of the “Adult” category will be invisible in the interface. And anybody who complains? They’re just “not so nice people” trying to scam Tumblr out of free hosting for their commercial spam.

If Karp were honestly trying to fix this, he’d have announced that the search engine blocks for blogs with substantial nudity were being removed. He didn’t say anything of the sort. Instead, he lied, and claimed that they were only supposed to be applied to spammers in the first place. But his own soon-to-be-revised policy documents show the lie; they show that the Adult flag and the search engine exclusion were intended for everyone showing substantial nudity. That’s the history Tumblr is now trying to sweep under the rug. Tumblr has buried its porn blogs, and now it’s trying to scratch dirt over the evidence with its rear claws.

Karp goes on:

Aside from these fixes, there haven’t been any recent changes to Tumblr’s treatment of NSFW content, and our view on the topic hasn’t changed.

Here he uses the NSFW word (and that “recent”) to ignore the actual controversy, which is over the search limitations on Adult (not “NSFW”) blogs that were implemented several months ago. He closes with some happy boilerplate:

Empowering your creative expression is the most important thing in the world to us. Making sure people aren’t surprised by content they find offensive is also incredibly important and we are always working to put more control in your hands.

Sorry for all of the confusion. If you have any more concerns or suggestions on how we can make these features clearer or more useful, please email us!

My predictions for the future:

  • When the “in the process of being updated” Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page gets updated, all references to the former “adult” category will be gone. No search blocking (internal or external) will be disclosed on the page.
  • The millions of currently Adult-flagged blogs (the ones that have “substantial nudity”) will still have the no-longer-visible-in-the-interface Adult flag, they will still have a robots.txt block in place, and they still won’t show in Tumblr’s internal searches.
  • Tumblr’s porn blog community will be invisible and unacknowledged. The suits will call this “winning”.

There is another possibility. The correct thing for Tumblr to do (if they were sincere about replacing the dual system with a single, simpler, NSFW flag) would be to reflag all the Adult-flagged blogs as NSFW. But if they were going to do that, would Karp have lied about the reason the Adult flag was implemented? I do not think so.

Somebody on Reddit said it best, yesterday: “So passes Tumblr, son of Geocities, and cousin to Digg. May it rest in cache.”

Except, of course, that the good stuff won’t be in anybody’s cache, because of robots.txt…

UPDATE: Wow, that was fast. In just three hours, the first of my predictions has already come true: the Understanding NSFW and Adult Blogs page has been updated and it looks just like I thought it would. No charts, no checkboxes, no more “adult” category, it’s all NSFW and there’s no mention of anything being excluded from search engines.

However, it looks like I missed the mark on my other two predictions (time will tell). I’m getting preliminary reports in my comments (and my own random tests agree) that the hated robots.txt is vanishing from many or most of the formerly-hidden Adult-flagged blogs. Karp still deserves censure for telling a big hairy lie about the history and reason for the Adult-flagged groups (and for attempting to deceive the world into thinking these were principally self-flagged by accident rather than auto-flagged by Tumblr) but perhaps the reason for the deception was to avoid the perception of a back-track, rather than to conceal the deeper burying of adult blogs that I feared was coming. But if the robots.txt files that are going away stay gone, this is actually a huge win for adult content on Tumblr.

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July 19th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Tumblr Admits, Then Denies, It’s Hiding Porn

I was among the first to discover back on May 15 that Tumblr was using an exclusionary robots.txt file to hide the contents of blogs flagged “Adult” from all search engines, the Internet Archive crawler, and any other internet service that respects robots.txt files. A few days later when I was poking at that unpleasant fact, I also discovered that Tumblr was excluding these blogs from its internal tag-search function:

Worse yet? Tumblr blogs flagged “adult” aren’t searchable even with Tumblr’s own internal search. You can test this yourself. Log into your Tumblr dashboard, go to your settings, and make sure you haven’t checked the “Browse tag pages in Safe Mode (Hide content from NSFW blogs)” setting:

setting for allowing yourself to search NSFW-flagged (but not adult-flagged) Tumblr blogs

Unlike the one that doesn’t actually “allow search engines to index your blog”, this checkbox appears to actually work in the narrow sense that if it is not checked, you can search for blogs flagged “NSWF” within the Tumblr tag search interface. But this checkbox lies by omission. You’ve got the option to search tag pages of NSFW blogs (or not) but opting to search them does not let you search blogs that have the deeper-level-of-perdition “adult” flag.

I even proved it with a careful set of screenshots:

My test for this is to search for a recent post at Wicked Knickers, which I used as my “adult” flagged example in the Thou Shalt Not Search Adult Tumblr Blogs post:

a recent sample post from Wicked Knickers

The post we will be looking for in the Tumblr dashboard tag search has a time stamp of 9:30pm yesterday, May 18, and is tagged “ziegfeld” which makes it a nice handy and recent thing to search for.

date and tags on wicked knickers sample post

So, what happens in the Tumblr tag search interface? If you’re logged in, this is what you see when you search for tumblr posts with the “ziegfeld” tag. The posts returned are listed in date order (most recent first) and dates are visible as tooltips on the live page, so I’ve added them in the margin with red arrows and white text. You’ll see that the Wicked Knickers post is not returned by the Tumblr search:

searching for a tagged post from adult-flagged tumblr blog

Thus you can imagine my surprise when Twitter started blowing up yesterday with outraged Tumblr-users who had only just discovered that their adult blogs had gone missing (2-3 months ago) from the Tumblr tag search interface. Of course it was all over Tumblr as well. I didn’t pay it any mind; I was busy yesterday and figured it was just one of those moments when public consciousness crystallizes about a long-established injustice.

It wasn’t until this morning, when I finally had time to get caught up, that I discovered what had caused the moment of crystallization. At first I thought it was the Daily Dot article that appeared yesterday, which I only skimmed at the time due to it being such ancient news to me: New NSFW content restrictions enrage Tumblr users. But then this morning Violet Blue published a similar (but much better, and I’d say that even if she hadn’t quoted my May reportage in detail) article at ZDNet: Adult Tumblr blogs now removed from every form of search possible. Violet’s too good a reporter to jump on a bandwagon just because it’s starting to speed up, so I took a second look at both articles to see what, if anything, had actually happened recently and wasn’t old news. Finally I twigged to it. Although the Tumblr internal search (which has always been a tags-only search) hasn’t revealed content from blogs flagged “adult” for months, the “new thing” is that Tumblr’s cryptic little internal checklist has finally (yesterday? Nobody seems to know just when) been updated to reveal that fact. Here’s the box as it existed on May 15, with my red arrow:

tumblr chart showing that adult blogs are not indexed by Google no matter what preference the user has expressed

And here’s the box as it is today, which Violet linked to and the Daily Dot printed:

tumblr policy

I’ve outlined what’s actually new in the graphic. Once again, it isn’t new policy at Tumblr; these are the rules since (near as I can tell) some time in February. What’s new is that Tumblr is now admitting what the rules have been for some time.

Now we come to the happy fun-time “evasions and denials” section of this post!

Remember, first, that Tumblr’s internal search has always been a tags-and-titles-only affair. So, look again at that line in the first red box of mine: “Posts appear in tag pages and search pages for logged-out users.” They are playing games with multiple pairs of yes-no variables here, for maximum confusion. The one checked box is for unflagged blogs; the unstated obverse is that “posts on flagged Adult and NSFW blogs do not appear for logged-out users”. Fair enough so far. What does the statement “do not appear for logged-out users” imply? Well, it implies that the posts do appear for logged-in users, which would make this a fairly benign (if still nanny-ish) attempt to make sure everybody who sees porn has opted-in to see it.

But that benign implication is false. Remember the other new (red boxed) line in the graphic? It says “Blog indexed by Tumblr search” and shows an unchecked box under “Adult”. So, in the first red box they say “you can’t see adult adult or NSFW blogs when logged out”, implying that logged in users can see them. But then in the second red box they carve the adult ones away, because they admit that Tumblr search (which is tag search) won’t index these blogs at all, meaning that logged-in users won’t see them either. NOBODY WILL SEE THEM except your logged-in followers, and that appears to mean legacy followers only, because how would anybody not already a follower of an adult-flagged blog ever discover it now? If your blog is flagged adult on Tumblr, you’re blogging inside a sealed black box, and you have been for months.

So much for evasion — now for the outright false denials. The reporters for the Daily Dot sought comment from Tumblr, and they got this from Tumblr Head of Communications Katherine Barna. I’m including my commentary inline [in italicized brackets like this]:

Tumblr’s longstanding policy regarding NSFW content has not changed [true, if a few months is “longstanding”] and emphasizes the importance of free expression. [Bullshit!] As addressed in these policies, we are constantly taking measures to ensure our users can avoid this content [true so far] unless they’d like to see it. [A lie — if they’d like to see it, they still can’t find it because Tumblr doesn’t index it.] You can read about some of these features here: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw

Adult and NSFW content will be visible to anyone who has opted-in via their Settings page. [“Visible” only if you know the link already, but not searchable for anyone. In other words, more bullshit. Unless the “will be” future phrasing means Tumblr plans to change this? Do not die holding your breath.]

Different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. [Presumably true, but freighted with the false implication that this is why Tumblr restricts adult content in its apps, given that they restrict it elsewhere likewise] Users can also find all content with Tumblr search in their mobile web browser. [Flat lie. Tumblr’s own policy chart newly shows that Tumblr search does not index the adult-flagged blogs.]

So, there you have it, folks! Months after making a policy change to exclude adult-flagged blogs from its internal search, Tumblr updates its docs to disclose the change. Internet goes wild, so their spokeswoman sends email that contradicts the new policy document and falsely denies the change.

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July 18th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Porn Makes People Happy

Yesterday Spanking Blog linked to spanking model Alex Reynold’s self-described rant about the unwarranted judgmental criticism that porn models are subjected to. Myself, I wouldn’t call it a rant at all; to me, it reads more like a stirring manifesto. Here’s my favorite paragraph, on the social importance of porn (emphasis in original):

Porn, especially fetish porn, is actually important. Fetish porn allows people to realize that they aren’t the only people who are interested in what they are, to visualize their fantasies when they can’t connect with people in their personal lives and to be validated that what they like is okay. Despite how deeply involved I am in the creation of porn, I’m still a consumer of spanking pornography. I have subscriptions to five sites, and I watch them for my personal enjoyment, especially when I am unable to play for periods of time. There are lots of people for whom videos are the only way that they interact with their fetish. This is very important to them. Even when it’s not something so near and dear to someone’s heart, porn makes people happy. It doesn’t save anyone’s life. This is true. Neither does art. Neither does working in sales. Neither does designing roller coasters. The amount of people I know whose jobs are actually “necessary” when you really get down to it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I have a job that makes other people AND me happy. That’s a win.

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July 17th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

A Week Of Being Adored

You want to know what women want? It’s a big topic with no universal answers. But there’s a hint in this excerpt from a post at More Pecudum:

The power of two skinny legged, perky breasted 18 year old pussy-carrying miscreants isn’t a thing you can measure with a few words about heat. Girls like my cousin and I are crazy dangerous on our own. She had a talent for not giving a fuck, and I had a talent for giving off a sex vibe. So, young, full of sexy, and with access to clubs since she was running sound for rock shows and I was holding, we had a few solid weeks to fill ourselves with any cock we pointed ourselves toward.

The night I met you, we were bored as hell with the usual routine… We were stoned, we were driving around, and we saw you and your friend walking down a sidewalk. We circled the block and we picked you up.

Over the next week you kept coming over, and I took your virginity, and you kept calling me your fantasy woman. The way you looked at me as I walked around naked, summer sun skin and strawberry blonde hair, I felt like a girl out of a song. Nobody had ever — nobody has ever looked at me that way. I blame you, in a way, for all the years that followed of me loving every single song with “girl” in the title, because all I ever wanted after that was for someone to think I was their fantasy.

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July 16th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Galen Examines His Lesbian Daughter

An ancient medical investigation of lesbianism:

Galen, the second-century Greek physician whose own daughter was a lesbian, according to medieval Arabic writers, is supposed to have examined his daughter’s labia and surrounding veins and to have concluded that her lesbianism was due to “an itch between the major and minor labia” that could be soothed only by rubbing them against another woman’s labia.

From Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women by Sahar Amer, in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (2009).

Galen was renowned for centuries as the greatest doctor who had ever lived. But that doesn’t mean he was actually all that good.

Also: readers may remember that Galen’s previous appearance on ErosBlog where his name was invoked as part of a husband’s appeal for buttsex during pregnancy:

Thy size repels me, whilst thy charms invite;
Then, say, how celebrate the marriage rite?
Learn’d Galen, Celsus, and Hippocrates,
Have held it good, in knotty points like these,
Lest mischief from too rude assaults should come,
To copulate ex more pecudum.

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July 15th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Margaret Cho’s Laughing Orgasms

This is kind of fun: in the most recent installment of Hysterical Literature, Margaret Cho keeps breaking out in squirming giggles and laughter as she orgasms — and eventually drops her Kindle — while reading aloud at a table (both hands firmly above the table in clear view of the camera) from The Claiming Of Sleeping Beauty by “A. N. Roquelaure” (Anne Rice). (Am I a hopeless pedant for being annoyed that the Hysterical Literature site wrongly identifies the book she’s reading from as Sleeping Beauty? Yes I am.)

Although nothing in this video clip makes it clear who is doing precisely what to Margaret under the table, we know from the essay Stoya wrote about her episode of Hysterical Literature that in her case, there was a woman under the table applying a Hitachi Magic Wand with some degree of skill:

When I tell Clayton’s lovely assistant for the evening that I’ve never experienced the Hitachi, her eyes light up. I’ve obviously gotten myself into the most fun kind of trouble. Lights get set and everyone assumes their positions. My underwear lays on the floor out of frame. As I start reading, my disbelief is suspended. I forget what is about to happen. The first touch on my thigh sends all available blood to my vulva…

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July 13th, 2013 -- by Bacchus

Anal Tunnel Plugs

OK, it takes a lot for me to look at a new sex toy and go “bu… but… WTF is it for?” These anal tunnel plugs have done it to me today:

anal plugs with large central holes

Can somebody please point me to an internet resource describing the sexual use of these things? I can’t imagine there are too many people enforcing fecal incontinence on the long-term residents of their dungeons, right? Are people being penetrated through the central holes in these things? Is it for visual access? Perhaps all these things are true. I just can’t say. The promotional copy wasn’t very enlightening:

Want to open yourself and your lover to more intense sensation? These safe, flexible anal tunnel plugs take the conventional butt plug to an entirely new level of physical and visual pleasure. Whether you’re an advanced player or just beginning to explore, our three size options ensure satisfaction, and these tunnel plugs warm to the body and adjust to create a one-of-a-kind fit just for you!

We eagerly await further reports from the sexually-adventurous exploratory front.

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