Survey: 27% Think A Gigabyte Is a Type Of South American Insect [Update: Or Not]

from the I-see-dumb-people dept

Fri, Mar 14th 2014 6:30pm — Karl Bode

Update: Or not. It appears that this survey may be bogus. Still, the key point, that we've noted for years, is that the average person has no idea how much a gigabyte really is -- and we'd bet that's still true, even if this "survey" appears to be just a marketing stunt.

A new survey from a UK company unsurprisingly found that more than a few people are slightly clueless when it comes to technology terms. The multiple-choice survey, which polled 2,392 U.S. men and women 18 years of age or older, found that one in ten Americans believe that html is some form of sexually-transmitted disease. While most survey respondents knew the definition of more general terms (like "dialect"), the full survey (pdf) found that even basic tech terms confused many people. 42% thought a motherboard was a deck on a cruise ship, 15% thought that software was comfortable clothing, and 77% of respondents didn't know what SEO meant.

Interestingly, while 67% respondents knew that a gigabyte was a unit of measurement of digital information (though the survey didn't ask them how much information is contained in a gigabyte), 27% believed that a gigabyte was a type of South American insect. That's actually a better statistic than I've seen in the past. A 2008 poll suggested that 87% of those polled had no idea what a gigabyte was or how many they use. The New York Times did an entirely unscientific street poll a few years back and found that few, if any, passers by knew what a megabyte is:

"If a sampling of pedestrians on the streets of Brooklyn is any guide, most people have only a vague idea. One said a megabyte was “the amount of something we have to use the Internet,” adding, “We should have three or four." Miranda Popkey, 24, was closer: “It’s a measure of how much information you store. If there are too many of them, I can’t send my e-mail attachment."

The thing is, most people can get away with not knowing what a motherboard is without losing a limb. Thinking that USB is an acronym for a country in Europe may not make you the smartest person in the room, but it's not going to hurt your wallet. Even the 29% of survey respondents who thought a migraine was a type of rice should probably make it through the day without any major repercussions (assuming they don't choke on their own tongue or something). But with both fixed line and wireless carriers increasingly charging by the megabyte and gigabyte, people might want to brush up on the term before they have to take out a second mortgage to fund their Angry Birds habit.

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Filed Under: gigabyte, html, survey, uk

66 Comments

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zip, 14 Mar 2014 @ 6:40pm

... but how many people knew the 'correct' way to pronounce "GIGABYTE"?
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- Chronno S. Trigger (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:41pm
  
  Re:
  Just as long as it's not pronounced with a soft G we're good.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Mason Wheeler, 14 Mar 2014 @ 8:45pm
    
    Re: Re:
    ...and then the line will transmit precisely 1.21 jiggabytes of data into the Flux Drive, and you will be sent BACK!
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - zip, 15 Mar 2014 @ 8:20am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      As 'Back to the Future' was set in the 1950s, "jiggabyte" would have been the correct pronunciation. However, I suspect that its phonetic closeness to "jiggaboo" may have served to discouraged its use from the 1960s onward.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - Anonymous, 15 Mar 2014 @ 11:01am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Gettin' jiggy with it!
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- silverscarcat (profile), 15 Mar 2014 @ 5:23am
  
  Re:
  From watching Reboot, duh!
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - zip, 15 Mar 2014 @ 8:23am
    
    Re: Re:
    But 'Reboot' was made in Canada. Don't they (still) speak a slightly different language?
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - btrussell (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 3:35am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      Yes, we speak maplese.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 14 Mar 2014 @ 6:50pm

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the American Education System.
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- Michael Whitetail, 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:09pm
  
  Response to: Anonymous Coward on Mar 14th, 2014 @ 6:50pm
  Generational gap detected!
  
  When I went to public high school in 1990, they were just getting a real computer education program setup with the cutting edge 286 pc clones.
  
  Hell, just the year before in middle school, we eere still on 2e's!
  
  Some people never had the chance to learn computers in public schools.
  
  Instead of blaming the schools, I blame those that didn't strive to learn something so important after the fact!
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Chronno S. Trigger (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:44pm
    
    Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Mar 14th, 2014 @ 6:50pm
    When I went to public high school in 1999, we had computers in the library that were so locked down you couldn't do anything on them. The computer lab was still using Dos.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - zip, 14 Mar 2014 @ 9:09pm
      
      Re: Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Mar 14th, 2014 @ 6:50pm
      The most 'educational' era computer-wise might have been in the 1970s, when about the only thing anyone could do with a computer was to program it themselves.
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - S.A., 14 Mar 2014 @ 9:53pm
    
    Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Mar 14th, 2014 @ 6:50pm
    Closest we had in public high school was an IBM Selectric.
    
    Now, how many people are clueless as to what type of
    computer that is?
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- dave blevins (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:48pm
  
  Re:
  Betcha Congress would do worse !!
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 7:21am
  
  Re:
  In response to fake survey results depicting an uneducated populace, you take a denigrating swipe at the system of education. Typical wingnut response to a fake story.
  
  Yes, even if the educational system sucks and you are somewhat lacking knowledge, the obvious thing to do is whine and bemoan your situation rather than picking up a book and begin fixing the problem.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 8:07pm
    
    Re: Re:
    It doesn't take a fake survey to depict an uneducated populace. You can see it yourself by looking just about anywhere.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 7:42am
      
      Re: Re: Re:
      "It doesn't take a fake survey to depict an uneducated populace. You can see it yourself by looking just about anywhere."
      
      Indeed. I would estimate the percentage of people needed further education at 100%. Anyone who claims they know it all are clearly incorrect. But that is not the point.
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      - Anonymous, 18 Mar 2014 @ 4:33pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re:
        So, if nobody knows it all, and everybody needs further education, who's going to educate them?
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- weneedhelp - not signed in, 15 Mar 2014 @ 9:22am
  
  A special message for you
  010000100110010100100000011100110111010101110010011001
  0100100000011101000110111100100000011001000111 00100110
  100101101110011010110010000001111001011011110111010101
  11001000100000010011110111011001100001 0110110001110100
  01101001011011100110010100101110
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Al's House of Crypto, 15 Mar 2014 @ 6:20pm
    
    Re: A special message for you
    Do people often suspect you of of being EBCDIC without the extended binary coding part? Or are you 7 bitting us?
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Griff (profile), 16 Mar 2014 @ 12:14pm
    
    Re: A special message for you
    That was a hoot! Especially the 01101 part, that was clever.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 5:14pm
    
    Re: A special message for you
    No ty, Ovaltine is gross
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Thank Goodness..., 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:00pm

It's good to see TechDirt practising safe cybersex and using Shtml
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Mar 2014 @ 7:05pm

I hope they were trolling them. Guess they couldn't exactly include a "Panda-B" question. Named for a school drug survey quality control measure. If they mentioned using Panda-B their survey can be marked down as lying.
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Carl "Bear" Bussjaeger (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 8:17pm

Hoax
Can you say "hoax"?

The survey was supposed conducted by or for a company that specializes in viral marketing. Last I checked, they finally released what they claim were the actual questions, but nothing on the methodology.
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Violynne (profile), 14 Mar 2014 @ 8:32pm

"But with both fixed line and wireless carriers increasingly charging by the megabyte and gigabyte, people might want to brush up on the term before they have to take out a second mortgage to fund their Angry Birds habit."
Do me a favor, Karl. Take a quick trip to Netflix and find me information on the amount of data will be used to play the video about to stream.

Okay, now head to Facebook and see if you can find a quick reference on the data push there. Amazon? Techdirt?

I've learned long ago people don't care about space and limits. All they care about is accessing content. When customers get bill shocked, they'll simply cut back on frivolous websites like Techdirt and The Wall Street Journal so they can spend more time on Facebook without punishment.

Because a website doesn't tell people how much data it's pushing, nor does it engage people with caution notices a stream is going to be over 500MB. People don't realize the true impact of many images over the course of time.

All they want is to access it.

I understand the point you're trying to make, but I think you're overshadowing the true culprit here: websites don't state how much data they're pushing because to do so may actually get visitors to leave, and not come back.

Instead of trying to blame consumers, blame the carriers and ISPs who are purposely gouging customers because they're well aware how much data they're using, and precisely where to cap them.

Educate them to fight this stupidity, not learn what a gigabyte is.

That's my job, as a web developer, as it's necessary to streamline the content with as little as data as possible since it also costs us to push it.

:)
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- zip, 14 Mar 2014 @ 9:39pm
  
  Re:
  Visiting many websites is like opening a mail-bomb. It would be nice if all browsers had the option of user-defined limits on page size, image size, etc. - better than being at the mercy of the coder. Even Google.com has probably 10 or 20 times the amount of code as it did originally, although on the surface it's barely changed. Just like the trend of increasingly-bloated software, there are extremely few websites that are optimized to use as little code as possible and load as fast as possible. If anything, it's the total opposite.
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Scote, 14 Mar 2014 @ 9:09pm

Except they don't...
The survey really only shows that people don't know the correct answer and if pushed to guess will guess wrong. How many would have said a Gigabyte is a South American Insect in an open ended question? None, most likely.
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 8:44am
  
  Re: Except they don't...
  "The survey really only shows that people don't know the correct answer"
  
  How does it "show" this?
  Responders could easily know the correct answer and yet provide an incorrect one because they find it humorous.
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Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 15 Mar 2014 @ 6:20am

But Is That A Gigabyte Or A Gibibyte?
Lots of people have no idea...
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 9:21am
  
  Re: But Is That A Gigabyte Or A Gibibyte?
  Lots of people do know, they just don't give a shit. This term has never been accepted, only some academics try to push it. nobody really uses it. I don't either, and I will not. neither does anybody I know, including the academics.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 15 Mar 2014 @ 3:35pm
    
    Re: they just don't give a shit.
    Except that �shit� is a difference of over 7% for a gibibyte versus a gigabyte, rising to 10% for a tebibyte versus a terabyte.
    
    It may not have mattered much when we could fudge the meaning of a �K� to 2-3%, but it�s getting harder to ignore now.
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- Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 7:47am
  
  Re: But Is That A Gigabyte Or A Gibibyte?
  Wow I didn't know they had created new prefixes.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 8:04am
    
    Re: Re: But Is That A Gigabyte Or A Gibibyte?
    Furthermore, no one I know in the tech community uses those terms either. The ISO may have accepted them but frankly they took way too long to address the problem to gain any widespread acceptance.
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    - Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 16 Mar 2014 @ 4:43pm
      
      Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
      So how does your �tech community� calculate how many hertz there are in a gigahertz?
      
      If your �tech community� were to design a comms channel that can transmit 1 bit per second with a 1Hz clock, how fast could it transmit with a 1GHz clock?
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
      - Anonymous Coward, 17 Mar 2014 @ 4:47am
        
        Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        I agree it's a mess that should have been cleaned up a long time ago (or never have been started by adopting prefixes based on an approximation) but it's going to take a much bigger effort than what has been made to get the public to adopt it.
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        Anonymous Coward, 17 Mar 2014 @ 4:52am
        
        Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        " based on an approximation"
        
        What is this approximation you speak of?
        There are differences in methodology, but each method is concise. I do not see any approximation.
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      - John Fenderson (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 6:58am
        
        Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        I'd never head of "gibi-" either. Nor have my coworker, and we work on large units of bits all the time.
        
        "So how does your �tech community� calculate how many hertz there are in a gigahertz?"
        
        As the AC said, this prefix business is a mess. However, the rule I was taught was that you determine exactly what these prefixes mean (the same problem exists with kilo-, mega-, tera-, etc) from context: if you're talking about units of memory, it's the power of 1024 prefix. Anytime else, you're talking about the power of 10 prefix. So gigahertz is 10^9 hertz, but a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes.
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
        
        Anonymous Coward, 17 Mar 2014 @ 12:20pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        Actually, you probably have and just never noticed.
        Most commonly it's from formatting hard drives, such that a
        500 GB drive shows up as ~= 465.66 GiB available.
        
        GB is ISO/IEC's notation for base 10, and GiB is the notation for base 2. So according to ISO/IEC, 2^30 bytes is technically a Gibibyte and that is shown as available space on most *nix and Windows computers. Apple decided to go with base 10 notation at Snow Leopard, so you show about the same as the box.
        
        More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
        
        Honestly, I think of it as an advertizing scam on customers for the most part and feel we should just stick with binary on computers.
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
        
        John Fenderson (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 12:57pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        "Actually, you probably have and just never noticed"
        
        Which is the same thing as "I've never heard of it." :)
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        The Wanderer (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 3:20pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: o one I know in the tech community uses those terms either
        you determine exactly what these prefixes mean (the same problem exists with kilo-, mega-, tera-, etc) from context: if you're talking about units of memory, it's the power of 1024 prefix. Anytime else, you're talking about the power of 10 prefix.
        Exactly this. I've been arguing this every time I get too aggravated with the "gibi-" crowd to avoid getting sucked into a discussion about the subject for quite some time; it's good to see someone else advocating the same guideline.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 7:24am

Given an unscientific study, who would have guessed results would be skewed for the LULZ.
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Annonimus, 15 Mar 2014 @ 10:04am

Why did you forget to say how much a Gigabyte is?
1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes. 1 Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes. 1 Kilobyte is 1024 Bytes. 1 Byte is 8 Bits. A Bit can have a value of 0 or 1. How hard was that to write?
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- Anonymous, 15 Mar 2014 @ 11:07am
  
  Re: Why did you forget to say how much a Gigabyte is?
  Ever wonder where they come up with these weird numbers? Why not an even 1000? Why is a ton 2000 pounds instead of simply 1000? A mile is 5280 feet. Where did they come up with that?! Mysteries of life...
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 11:21am
    
    Re: Re: Why did you forget to say how much a Gigabyte is?
    Itt's because much of the math in computing is based on octets.
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  - Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 12:48pm
    
    Re: Re: Why did you forget to say how much a Gigabyte is?
    It's not a mystery, you just need to research the topic. You might even find it interesting.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 11:25am
  
  Re: Why did you forget to say how much a Gigabyte is?
  Unless of course you are a hard drive manufacturer and you want to exaggerate the capacity of your products.
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- Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 15 Mar 2014 @ 3:37pm
  
  Re: 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
  How many hertz is 1 gigahertz?
  
  If an async comms channel can transmit 1 bit per second with a 1Hz clock, how fast can it transmit with a 1GHz clock?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 8:15pm
    
    Re: Re: 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
    Hertz isn't based on octets though like computers are.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
    - Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 15 Mar 2014 @ 9:42pm
      
      Re: 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
      So what�s the answer to the question I posed?
      [ link to this | view in chronology ]
      - Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 6:29am
        
        Re: Re: 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
        The answer is 42. What was the question?
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
      - Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 6:45am
        
        Re: Re: 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes
        Just under 120MB/s
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        Lawrence D�Oliveiro, 16 Mar 2014 @ 4:41pm
        
        Re: Just under 120MB/s
        Is the difference enough to sue over?
        
        If a product was advertised to you as doing 125MiB/s, and it turned out it only did 125MB/s (or worse still, �just under 120MB/s� as you claimed), would you feel ripped off?
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
        
        The Wanderer (profile), 19 Mar 2014 @ 3:28pm
        
        Re: Re: Just under 120MB/s
        If I did the measurements enough to notice, then yes, I would.
        
        I base that on the fact that I've felt ripped off after buying a hard drive with an advertised capacity of 1GB and discovering that it had an actual capacity of only about 950MB.
        
        (The original numbers were smaller; I think I first noticed this back around the time when 60GB was a midsize-to-large hard drive. Didn't make it any less noticeable to me, though.)
        
        That said: yes, using different values for the multiplier prefixes for the different contexts (count of data size vs. count of anything else) does make the math harder, and the potential for confusion greater, when converting between them. However, the "powers of two" meaning of the prefixes in a data context were far too long-established before anyone tried to come up with replacement terminology. They left it too late; there's no going back and changing it now, and trying to do so is high-handed and offensive.the established one
        [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous, 15 Mar 2014 @ 11:11am

And then they pull all this other crap out of thin air, terabytes, googolbytes, etc.
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PopeRatzo (profile), 15 Mar 2014 @ 2:03pm

That's nothing. More than 60% of people think that "an Apple" is something you eat.

Oh wait...
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 2:18pm

maybe its time to stop reporting on surveys so quickly, it makes you guys look foolish.
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- Anonymous Coward, 15 Mar 2014 @ 5:17pm
  
  Re:
  You guys?
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
anon, 16 Mar 2014 @ 11:53am

Many things
I would not be surprised if most people did not know relatively common terms, damn there are people that think England speaks a different language not english.
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- John Fenderson (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 8:16am
  
  Re: Many things
  It's us here in the US that speaks a different language that we mistakenly call "English". It's really "American".
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 16 Mar 2014 @ 6:16pm

This poll was actually done in a retirement home for people 90 and up , but it's not biased.
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btrussell (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 3:53am

Do you know how electrical companies charge?

How much is a watt? What?

How many feet in a mile?

Were these questions asked as well?

A lot of people eat food, ask them where it comes from.
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- Anonymous Coward, 17 Mar 2014 @ 4:56am
  
  Re:
  Electric companies rip off their customers by selling them the same electrons over and over.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - John Fenderson (profile), 17 Mar 2014 @ 8:18am
    
    Re: Re:
    It's worse than that!
    
    Technically, the electrons being "conducted" through a wire are the ones that were in the wire to begin with. The power comes from making them move. So power companies are selling our own electrons back to us!
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
james howard, 17 Mar 2014 @ 5:36am

creative designe
That's interesting to know about the behaviour of the people about the different topics.We comes to interesting answers and knowledge and bloggers and experts get feedback to further guide the people.
creative printing
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oxguy3, 17 Mar 2014 @ 7:58pm

Highly questionable
Would love to see some description of the methodology. Based solely on the answers they offered, I'm not convinced this isn't garbage. Supplying people with answers gives soooo much bias -- people might remember the answer solely because it was provided to them, they might choose one of the wrong answers because it's so wrong it's funny, etc. This should have really been run as a "define this term" sort of deal (and it would probably have to have been administered orally so that the surveyors could question ambiguous answers).
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