Techbros really went full police state just to deliver ads I wouldn’t click on straight into my adblocker
You’d be surprised how many people raw dog the internet.
It’s terrifying
Even people you’d really expect to use adblockers. A good example is right here on Lemmy, people here are generally pretty tech-savvy yet you get threads with lots of people complaining about ads. This has been a weird lesson as I get older, seeing that most people somehow don’t even think about lifting a finger to fix things they see as problems, they really just complain and then do absolutely nothing to help themselves. It’s the same with if someone mentions something they don’t know what it is, instead of taking 5 seconds to just look it up they comment to ask about it and then never reply to people answering their question. I’m certain that it’s very common to have some weird need to make others do work for you, they don’t actually care about finding out what something is or how to do something to fix a problem, they just care about making others spend any kind of effort for them.
They’re called help vampires in the programming world.
if someone is like, half of the described vampire i don’t mind. Honestly it feels strange to have our ancient way of finding things out (asking your friends if they know) be somehow seen as wrong nowadays. I want to learn from other human being, not disembodied pieces of information oftentimes tied to ads for driver updating software
I encountered a user a week or two ago who was confused by the inaccurate output of an LLM, didn’t/couldn’t understand that it’s more or less just fancy autocomplete, who then tried to interact with the post replies as if the users were also an LLM. I had a great time calling that out. It was kinda hilarious, tbh.
Dude. Paragraphs.
I mean, five sentences is a paragraph.
I work as a software engineer with other software engineers. Even software engineers and UX designers using the internet that way. Talented ones. Many of them - maybe the majority. It takes me a second to get over my astonishment when they share their screens. Not only astonishment at how overboard ads have gotten w/o an adblocker, but also that this particular person doesn’t use an adblocker.
So many people aren’t well-informed about what ad networks or doing, or how different the web experience could be.
I have a friend that pays Google a YouTube tax every month… He tells me he wants to support the creators.
I’m just kind of sad for him… I tried to explain direct donations were a million times more effective, but he clearly just doesn’t want to learn how to use an adblocker.
This guy is like 30 years old.
Why in the world would you think that someone paying to use a service is a problem? Sure direct donations are more helpful, but that doesn’t run servers to actually distribute the content you’re viewing. Your problem is completely different than what we are discussing about ad blockers.
Do you mean YouTube premium? Old YouTube music because they’re different things I think premium includes music actually but you can just have the music subscription.
Youtube music is actually better than something like Spotify for creators, so it’s not the worst justification in the world.
I see people doing it and its terrifying.
It’s about to be a lot more with the chrome manifest update. I got my dad into chrome some 15 years ago and explaining why he should switch to Firefox is completely confusing for him. He thinks his own business listing on Google won’t work if he’s not using Chrome.
I’ve had people that refuse to use an adblocker because “the creators deserve to get paid”. Well, your funeral if you get malvertising…
Recent versions of Android make it much more difficult for a background app to access the microphone. There will be a notification if any background app is using the mic or camera.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
Edit: screenshot of the “Now Playing” feature
For what it’s worth, I did just test it with airplane mode and it still correctly identified the song playing. So at the very least, it’s not lying about using a local database to identify songs, at least when it is offline.
It also uses a cloud fingerprint database apparently according to the second paragraph:
If you turn on “Show search button on lock screen”, each time you tap to search Google receives a short, digital audio fingerprint to identify what’s playing.
Oh, I didn’t notice this, my apologies. Turning on identify songs nearby reveals two new options, notifications and show search button. That show search button option must be new; I had identify nearby music on already since my last phone. Guess they added something new. My bad.
I have seen said feature being mentioned or brought to other android versions whether with apps or modules, do they work the same way?
I’m not sure how other apps or android versions work. This is a flaw with the closed source software ecosystem.
The thing is I really can’t see Google allowing anyone else access. They don’t even allow Android OEMs to have access
if this is used, or there is some whitelist that gives permission for background microphone use in voice interaction services, apps with tracking capabilities probably use some set of predefined keywords (hardcoded inside the app itself) and those can be triggered while being on standby/in background, when there is a match some pinging goes to outside servers…
Why is that scary to you?
What other apps use Google’s “Android Private Compute Core” and therefore don’t show mic or camera usage notifications? Not trying to sound all tinfoil hat here, but seriously: can apps other than those from Google use the “Android Private Compute Core”? Even if only Google’s own apps can use the “Android Private Compute Core”, we can’t see the source code for Google’s apps as (far as I know, anyway) they are not open source. If an app is not open source, we do not really know what the app is doing in the background; we’ll just have to take them at their word.
Not to mention companies and their software (especially older versions) are commonly hacked. If there was a vulnerability, how long did my phone provide the hackers with unlimited access to those features to have them possibly try to extort me in real life.
Yup, the green dot top right
Now if there was only an easy way to get to the offending app to identify it
Pull open quick settings and tap the dot.
Really? Thank you!
For Samsung at least, tapping the dot will tell you what’s accessing what. I can’t confirm if it works on other flavors of Android unfortunately.
Yeah, this sounds like a shareholder soapy titwank speech to me.
They’re bullshitting everyone including the people we hate.
Supposedly more difficult.
Android likes selling ads too, why would google want to stop ad blocking microphne access?
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read.
Meanwhile:
Not defending Facebook, but if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
That said, delete Facebook. Fuck Zuck.
if you record a video with sound, then the FB app has to have permission to record your audio.
I can’t tell if you’re trying to explain how it currently works (which I know very well, thanks) or asserting that the current behavior is necessary in order to record with sound.
It really doesn’t have to be as it is. The OS can provide a record-video API, complete with a user-controlled kill switch and an activity indicator, and the app can call it. The app doesn’t need direct access to the microphone to allow the user to create a file with sound.
Edit to clarify: I’m not saying that the “permission” doesn’t work as advertised. I’m saying that recording an audio file doesn’t have to require a permission system as coarse and disempowering to users as it is today. I guess the people clicking the downvote button misunderstood.
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
But the whole point of doing so is to use it in the app, and you for sure can’t do that without the permission.
I think this is more a teleological argument he is making and I agree. We’ve become numb to these permission warnings. Oh this app needs access to my camera because I need to take a photo of something once at registration. Why can’t it link to my default trusted photo app and that app can send a one time transfer to it? I hardly question these permissions anymore since many apps need permissions for rare one off functions. The only thing I deny every single time is my contact list.
teleological
I will thank you
about a million words from now
I don’t give anything mic or camera access on iOS. It’s really not an inconvenience, and anything that demands it is something I don’t want on my phone anyways.
You don’t use the camera or phone?
I’m very obviously not talking about system apps.
You don’t have to give third party apps permissions they don’t need.
Come on man, you know they didn’t mean it literally 💀
Pretty sure that qualifies for that permission.
I don’t know what you mean. Existing behavior does not provide the control or visibility that I described.
One important difference is that the “permissions” in the screen shot are effectively all-or-nothing: if you don’t agree to all of them, then you don’t get to install the app. They’re not permissions so much as demands.
(Some OS do have settings that will let you turn them off individually after installation, but this is not universally available, is often buried in an advanced configuration panel, leaves a window of time where they are still allowed, and in some cases have been known to cause apps to crash. Things are improving on this front with new OS versions, but doing so in microscopic steps that move at a glacial pace.)
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so. “Using the API” (which is just how the OS works) doesn’t prevent it from appearing on that screen, especially when you’re doing so for the purpose of putting video and audio in posts.
If your app touches the camera and mic, it will show up on that screen that it does so.
Showing up on that screen is no substitute for what is actually needed:
- Individual control (an easy and obvious way to allow or deny each thing separately)
- Minimal access (a way to create a sound file without giving Facebook access to an open mic)
- Visibility (a clear indication by the OS when Facebook is capturing or has captured data)
All of those things are implemented in modern Android. Well, almost.
- Whenever the app wants to use microphone an OS popup asks you if you want to give the app permission to use the feature. The options are “when using app”, “only this time” (it will give the app one-time-use access to the mic) and “never”. If you click the 1st or 3rd options, you wouldn’t see the popup again and you’ll have to change the permission from settings. If you choose the 2nd option, you can manually choose to give permission each time it’s requested.
- This is impossible? The OS can either let the app use the mic or not, it can’t tell what the app is doing with the mic. Unless you mean give a one-time permission this time, but not in the future, then we covered that in previous point.
- Android always shows a green indicator on screen (upper right corner) when any app is using the microphone or camera API. Well, almost always, some system apps might not trigger it. But if you want to see which app is using mic/camera you can tap the indicator.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
No snark intended. Do you run into that so often that you’ve come to expect it?
Intention vs. Impact, look it up.
I downvoted because of the snark in first paragraph.
Ooh, I spy more snark!
Yeah watch me not deny it tho; I intended for it to be snarky and anticipated this impact.
That rudely condescending comment lends nothing useful to the discussion, and has just earned my only downvote of the day. Enjoy. Bye.
That is not the same thing as listening in the background.
Nobody said it was the same thing as listening in the background. It’s still relevant and important.
I trust that most adults understand the implications of an exploitable permission and a strong incentive to abuse it, as well as the track record of corporate denials.
Using the permission to record audio triggers an on-screen indicator that the mic is recording. Someone would probably notice it on 24/7 recording. Someone would have also by now found the constant stream of network traffic to send the audio to be analyzed, because they also aren’t doing that on-device.
Meta said it does not, but what about 3rd parties…
What a horrifying list of data collection. Fuck all that hahaha
Why wouldn’t you want to share your fitness data with the company that will sell it to the company setting your health “insurance” premiums? </s>
“Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years,” the statement read. “We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”
Ah, yes. The tried and true defense of “we’ve denied it for years and continue to deny it” must be credible coming from a source as trustworthy as Facebook. I hear they’re planning on holding a press conference to pinky swear they’re not listening to the microphone they demand access to in order to show you ads that make them money.
FWIW, this was debunked when CMG originally made the claim. It was a marketing guy overselling their product and they had to correct their statement. They use the same info data brokers collect, and phones actively listening to you is not true.
Even what they said could be true without applying to phones. They said “smart devices” a lot. They never said “smart phone”.
There are a lot of IoT devices, some of which have microphones, a lot less secure than either iPhone or Android.
The fundamental question is, “Do you trust Facebook?” They have the resources to manipulate the story and twist the truth. They have the capability to spy on you with mics, but they say they don’t do so. Do you trust them?
No it was quite a lot more than “a marketing guy” - there were pages and pages of details about their Active Listening program on their website, investor presentations etc. They went far into detail about how much they could listen to and what they could do with all that audio data.
Here’s the Internet Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231116115055/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening
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call me a normie but I do like having contact with my family. And though I’d love to move somewhere where my privacy is respected - there’s no point in using a messaging app if you’re the only one there
and no I can’t convince my 76 year old grandma to move to signal, she barely wrapped her head around Facebook
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That’s a BS reason. I have 2 members of the Baby Boomer generation in my Signal contacts, they use it all the time with no problems. It’s no harder than iMessage to use. They would like it better when they see that Signal doesn’t gimp the image quality between Android and iOS phones unlike iMessage
It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.
I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.Well i’m very happy for you and for them, but my 76 year old Polish grandmother - who got her first mobile phone at the age of 60ish, probably doesn’t even know what image quality is, definitely doesn’t know the difference between android and iOS, and has recently called me panicked to ask why all her photos were on Facebook, they weren’t, she was looking at her gallery preview through the Facebook app - is not going to be very enthusiastic about learning to use an app only her grandson uses.
so I’ll just stick to messenger
What’s a normie in this context?
An average person
That’s ludicrous. “An average person” cares about more than “nothing” - such statements saying otherwise are just what the 0.1% want.
Stop fighting each other and start fighting the people who have created and persisted this dumpster fire.
“Yeah but my friends use Messenger!”
My mom uses Messenger. Acts like texting is too hard for her but Facebook Messenger isn’t. Literally the only reason I have it installed on my phone, because otherwise I don’t get the message when she needs something. If I could pry her away from it I could finally be done with the thing forever.
They really need to name-and-shame beyond “Facebook Partner” considering we’re talking about fucking Cox Media Group.
Fuckers got my entire complex’s Internet shut down (I am a renter not the owner)
Dildos, lots of dildos! I’m just gonna repeat that while I’m driving to see if I start getting Google ads for dildos.
Keep us updated!
Hold on, I just tripped on another goddamn dildo, you don’t wanna know where I fell.
If that works, you should try it with a product that you aren’t interested in too and compare the results.
I’ve tried that, it didn’t work…unfortunately.
I tried that. Didn’t work. There may be some filters so they don’t serve inappropriate ads to people with families or some such.
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Wouldn’t want to be mean to Facebook users, but the vast majority of them probably has micophone access enabled for Messenger at least, if not Facebook.
This comment inspired me to go turn off microphone, camera, Bluetooth, and local network access for every app. I’ll reenable as necessary.
Just leave it on for whatever runs your phone calls. I emabarrasingly discovered that the phone app NEEDS microphone access lol.
I keep my microphone and camera off at the OS level always now. Android has quick options for it that you can add to your pull-down menu thing at the top. When I get an incoming call, a popup comes up asking if I want to allow voice permissions. Then after the call I disable it again. Same goes if I need to take photos.
I’ve never not believed that they listen to this shit. I’ve had far too many coincidental ad placements after saying something completely unrelated to anything I’ve ever searched for.
Can’t take calls? Don’t threaten ME with a good time!
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At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:
The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:
The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.
The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.
Android has the same feature.
My Pixel does the colored dot thing as well. It also has the ability to add “Mic access” and “camera access” quick options to the pull down menu to quickly turn the permissions on/off at the OS level. I keep mine off at all times. If I receive an incoming call, I get a popup asking if I want to enable the microphone to answer it.
Yeah it’s great, same thing on the Google Pixel. The mic/camera thing brings peace of mind
I know you mean well, but you are making assumptions that the software is not lying to you. You can’t trust a UI element.
because Google/Apple lie to you on behalf of meta, sure
For anyone who doesn’t have a device that natively supports this feature, there’s an app on F-Droid called “Privacy Indicators” that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions
You can change the color of the indicator, mine’s red for more visibility.
I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App
Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.
Nope
There are other ways they do that, like thrird party cookies, and combining data from many, many sources.
Apps simply CAN’T access those kinds of things unless you allow it. You can check this in the apps permissions on your phone if you’re not sure. If microphone access is allowed, then yeah, they’ll be listening, probably. But remove that permission and you’ll be fine
Ever use voice in messenger? If so FB has the permissions it needs to open your mic.
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It remains funny to me that futurism.com became mostly about covering the dystopia we live in.
The future is going to be amazing! Well, it has the potential to be amazing if we use tech the right way. No I mean, like in an ethical way. Without exploiting people. No not like that, in a way that helps people. Well yes, billionaires are people, but I meant… at least it should be in legal ways. Or at least policed. Not hostile to average people. Not an openly criminal endeavour. Maybe just dont criminalise resistance to it? … oh, actually the future is going to be a techno-monopolistic dark age, I see. We can pivot to covering that.
Yeah that’s a shame, electronics seems to have reached a level where most people just don’t need or dream of a better something (PC, phone, etc) and other tech is hard to grasp like biotech.
Not, like, “haha” funny…
I am so numb to outrage that this just seems… Meh. What happened to me.
It’s the world we live in. It’s very much intentionally designed to make you complacent.
They spent decades gaslighting you so you thought you were crazy for even imagining it.
yeah like tell me something I don’t know.
“This just in: to the surprise of no one, your phone has, in fact, been spying on you from day 1. Now we go to Jim with sports. Jim?”
tell me something I don’t know
My grandad said “It’s really humid today isn’t it?”
I said “Tell me something I don’t know!”
He said “Err… Ok… I can fit my whole fist up yer gran’s arse”
Normative nihilism is going to get us all.
This is such a strange reality to live in. All of the futuristic, dystopian fiction I have consumed has the same premise that people living in the dystopia know it and know it’s bad. Somehow reality is worse.
I remember reading some time ago that “the idea (of phones listening to everything you say to serve ads) makes no economic sense, because it’d be too expensive to run”
Looks like it actually isn’t “too expensive” to run in the end.
Except Facebook never used it this was a 3rd party trying to hype up investors. Many audits have been run on these apps and there is no way they use your microphone. It’s way cheaper to just look at your search history.
It’s not when it’s your device doing the computing. All electronic devices should have visible hardware indicators for when their camara or microphone is on, but that’s a consumer rights issue most people are dismissive of, so it’s not happening. Some people even always want it on for the assistant functionality.
The mic is always on for android phones anway, thats how it hears “Hey Google”
Not how it works.
They have an ultra low power processor that listens for the “hey Google” keyword, then that wakes up the main audio processor. But the main microphone is not actually on, and that small processor isn’t capable of recording audio it’s just looking for a certain matching sound wave and then triggering.
That’s why it sometimes triggers if you just go “hurr ner dorrll” because those random sounds are close enough to what it’s looking for.
That is why some older devices can’t actually install the assistant software. They lack the necessary hardware to do it in a power efficient manner.
my Samsung has a green light in the task bar when my camera is on
Yep, and it’s not just Facebook, not just microphone. My lappie recently started serving ads for something I searched on a device not linked to it. I’m guessing it’s my ISP engaging in these sneak tactics.
Depemds if you are logged i to google services on your phone and on you pc browser. If you log into anything google on your browser it retains that log in across all the apps
Oh you know what? Gmail!
That’ll do it 😀
Even then, you have local voice recognition. You don’t need to stream all microphone recordings to some central server for processing, you just do voice recognition and keep a log of say the last 100 nouns and a high priority log for the last twenty nouns used near verbs like purchase, buy or get. Then send those lists to the ad provider as context. All the hard work is done on the client device and the same backend used for ad context on web pages can be used for this as well.
Then hide it encrypted in an image upload or some other packet. Listen for ‘buy a <something>’ encrypt its text version, wait for something to cargo it with in a data transmission so people looking at data transmissions aren’t any the wiser, hide it in some obscure way that would look normal otherwise, it’s intercepted, sends off to advertisers. Adtech is cyber terrorism.
You don’t think security experts know about stereonography techniques? It’s like the first thing you learn about in uni for it. Like the first week.
Yeah, a marketing agency selling snake oil to people that actually think they can do it is not expensive. Of course they never actually built the tech.
Most of the non tech people reaction
But before that, when it was not acknowledged by social media, it was more like ’ you’re paranoid. And you think you’re that important that they listen to you? Common, get back to reality ’
Yeah, being not paranoid is hard in XXI century.
TBH the same scenario has been mentioned in the “ex machina” movie from 2014 when colleb has been asking how the humanoid robots work. The deep blue was AI of search engine taking data from listening to the phone calls
I feel like we’ve been gaslighted so bad about this that we were even denying each other’s reality.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it.
The only good thing that came out of it was I learned about ad blockers. Fine, listen to me since I can’t fucking stop you(keeping phone off was inconvenient), but it’s futile now and you wasted money since I won’t see your stupid fucking ads anymore.
I knew they had to be doing this so I turned off all mic permissions. One day it pissed me off so much I started keeping my phone off completely unless I needed to use it
It might be an easy to just stop using Facebook really.
I’ve had enough time to work out which of my relatives are racist, so I don’t really need it anymore.
I don’t have fb or the youtube app and haven’t for years… so I’m not sure what was doing it. I have ublock origin now, so if it’s still happening I wouldn’t know.
Honestly the thought of them pouring that much money into r&d and launching that spyware just to have us plebs block the end result(ads) does feel kinda good at least.
It’s the reverse. Non tech people believe the snake oil, tech people know this is snake oil.
What’s the last “bombshell scandal that would ruin a company” that actually ruined a company?
Enron? Maybe the SBF thing? Seems like financial scandals are the only thing that matters.
Cambridge Analytica, but only because what they were doing was so monumentally illegal. I’m sure the government would have let them get away with it if they could have thought of a way out for them. A lot of them mates were involved in that scandal.
As a business you can be a maverick against many laws, just not the laws regarding finance.
Unroll.me was a service that would scan your email and clean up your inbox. The New York Times reported that the company was gathering sales receipts emails, anonymizing them, and selling them to rival companies; for example Uber paid them to hand over all the sales receipts they could on Lyft rides in people’s mailboxes. The bad press made them eventually sell the company to Slice, mainly for the email archives they amassed.
Slice like… the pizza website?
That’s what I assumed too but it appears to be a package tracking website
This is why I don’t like the push of everything needing an app. I sure do wish people in congress cared about this type of privacy issues the way they did Tiktok.
I highly doubt that they actually managed to do this, at least any time recently.
As another commenter noted, Android alerts you when an app is accessing the microphone in the background, and it would also absolutely destroy the phones battery life more than the FB app currently does. The only way that we have the “Hey Google/Siri” command prompts active all the time is with custom hardware not available to the apps, and certainly not without Android knowing about it.
Maybe they actively listen while the app is open, but even then I think recent Android/iOS would let you know about that.
Google’s “Now playing” feature constantly listens to what’s going on in the background to show you what songs are playing. They claim this is done with a local database of song “fingerprints”. The feature does not show the microphone indicator because: “…Now Playing is protected by Android’s Private Compute Core…”
I’m not saying that other, non-google, app do this to my knowledge; but the fact that this is a thing is honestly a bit scary.
