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Rintaro Tobita, Nikkei Staff Writer
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This commentary originally appeared in Nikkei Asia.



An economic response toward China will be a leading agenda item for the Group of Seven major economies this year, Michael Beeman, who served as assistant U.S. trade representative for Japan, South Korea and APEC affairs until January, told Nikkei.

"It is important to agree on the most pressing issues, which will send a message to the rest of the world," said Beeman, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The U.S. is urging European nations and Japan to align with export restrictions of advanced semiconductors. "The G-7 is the best forum for discussion," said Beeman, who stressed member nations should work together to address export curbs and other measures.

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Michael Beeman

Dr. Beeman is a Visiting Scholar at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for calendar year 2023 to research and write about trade policy issues such as economic security between the United States and Asia.
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Gi-Wook Shin, Amb. Jung-Seung Shin, and Oriana Skylar Mastro at the Winter Payne Lecture
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Payne Distinguished Fellow Examines South Korea’s Strategic Path Amid U.S.-China Competition

Ambassador Jung-Seung Shin, the Winter 2023 Payne Distinguished Fellow, offered insights into the dynamics of the trilateral U.S.-China-South Korea relationship, the impacts of the great power competition between the United States and China on South Korea, and the prospects for enhanced Korea-U.S. collaboration.
Payne Distinguished Fellow Examines South Korea’s Strategic Path Amid U.S.-China Competition
YOSHIKI and Ichiro Fujisaki at The Future of Social Tech conference.
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Japanese and American Innovators Gather at Stanford to Examine the Future of Social Tech

Kicking off a special event series celebrating the 40th anniversary of Stanford’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Japan Program convened eminent entrepreneurs, investors, educators, and content creators, including global rock star YOSHIKI, to explore pathways for social impact innovation.
Japanese and American Innovators Gather at Stanford to Examine the Future of Social Tech
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Michael Beeman sees the group discussing trade sanctions that align with the U.S.

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Associate Professor of Law, Stanford Law School
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Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.

After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

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John H. Scully Professor in Cross-Cultural Management and Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford GSB
Professor of Psychology (by courtesy), School of Humanities and Sciences
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Michele Gelfand is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy at Stanford University. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture — as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, De Standard, among other outlets.

Gelfand has published her work in many scientific outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Psychological Science, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS 1, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology, American Psychologist, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Current Opinion in Psychology, among others. She has received over 13 million dollars in research funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and the FBI.

She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018) and co-editor of the following books: Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Handbook of Conflict and Conflict Management (Taylor & Francis, 2013); and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press). Additionally, she is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology Annual Series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received several awards and honors, such as being elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2016 Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) provides a civil cause of action for computer hacking victims that have suffered certain types of harm. Of these harms, the one most commonly invoked by plaintiffs is having suffered $5,000 or more of cognizable “loss” as defined by the statute. In its first-ever CFAA case, 2021’s Van Buren v. United States, the Supreme Court included intriguing language that “loss” in civil cases should be limited to “technological harms” constituting “the typical consequences of hacking.” To date, lower courts have only followed the Court’s interpretation if their circuit already interpreted “loss” narrowly pre-Van Buren and have continued to approach “loss” broadly otherwise.

Van Buren did not fully dissipate the legal risks the CFAA has long posed to a particular community: people who engage in good-faith cybersecurity research. Discovering and reporting security vulnerabilities in software and hardware risks legal action from vendors displeased with unflattering revelations about their products’ flaws. Research activities have even led to criminal investigations at times. Although Van Buren narrowed the CFAA’s scope and prompted reforms in federal criminal charging policy, researchers continue to face some legal exposure. The CFAA still lets litigious vendors “shoot the messenger” by suing over security research that did them no harm. Spending just $5,000 addressing a vulnerability is sufficient to allow the vendor to sue the researcher who reported it, because such remediation costs qualify as “loss” even in courts that read that term narrowly.

To mitigate the CFAA’s legal risk to researchers, a common proposal is a statutory safe harbor for security research. Such proposals walk a fine line between being unduly byzantine for good-faith actors to follow and lax enough to invite abuse by malicious actors. Instead of the safe harbor approach, this article recommends a simpler way to reduce litigation over harmless research: follow the money.

The Article proposes (1) amending the CFAA’s “loss” definition to prevent vulnerability remediation costs alone from satisfying the $5,000 standing threshold absent any other alleged loss, and (2) adding a fee-shifting provision that can be invoked where plaintiffs’ losses do not meet that threshold. Tightening up the “loss” calculus would disqualify retaliatory litigation against beneficial (or at least benign) security research while preserving victims’ ability to seek redress where well-intended research activities do cause harm. Fee-shifting would deter weak CFAA claims and give the recipients of legal threats some leverage to fight back. Coupled with the Van Buren decision, these changes would reach beyond the context of vendor versus researcher: they would help rein in the CFAA’s rampant misuse over behavior far afield from the law’s core anti-hacking purpose.

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Portraits of speakers Chisako T. Masuo, Ryo Sahashi, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui.

In the context of growing tensions between the U.S. and China, many Asian countries have faced the challenge of balancing their relationships with the two countries. Given its security alliance with the U.S. is a cornerstone of its foreign policy, Japan seems to be more closely aligned with the U.S. than any other country. However, Japan’s most important trade partner is China, and it cannot overlook its economic relations with China in making foreign policy decisions. What should Japan’s approach be with the increasingly authoritarian regime in China expanding its ambitions to compete with the U.S. while domestic turmoil hampers the U.S. capacity to project its power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region? As a growing number of trade agreements in the region, such as CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership), RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), and now IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework) create an alphabet soup of intersecting economic relations, how should Japan navigate the treacherous terrain to ensure its economic security and energy sufficiency? To answer these questions, this webinar features two leading Japanese experts in Chinese politics, economy, and diplomacy — Chisako Masuo and Ryo Sahashi.

Speakers

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Square photo portrait of Dr. Chisako T. Masuo
Chisako T. Masuo (益尾知佐子) is a Professor at the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA). She was given the Nakasone Yasuhiro Award of Excellence in 2021 for her contribution to China studies and for the policy discussions regarding China’s Coast Guard Law. She received Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 2008. Her research topics include Chinese domestic politics, foreign and maritime policies, and international relations with regard to China. Professor Masuo was a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and China Foreign Affairs University in 2019, and a coordinated research scholar working with the late Professor Ezra F. Vogel at the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 2014-2015. She is the author of China’s Behavioural Principles: International Relations Determined by the Domestic Currents (Tokyo: Chuko Publishing, 2019), as well as China Looks Back: Mao’s Legacy in the Open-Door Era (University of Tokyo Press, 2010), and a co-author of A Diplomatic History of China (University of Tokyo Press, 2017) all in Japanese. She also writes articles and book chapters in English and Chinese.

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Square photo portrait of Dr. Ryo Sahashi
Ryo Sahashi is an Associate Professor of International Relations, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo. Dr. Sahashi specializes on international politics in East Asia. His recent book is US-China Rivalry: A Shift of American Strategy and Divided Worlds (Tokyo: Chuko, 2021), In a Search for Coexistence: the United States and Two Chinas during the Cold War (Tokyo: Keiso, 2015), and he edits East Asian Order in the Post-Cold War Era (Tokyo: Keiso, 2020). In English, he edits Looking for Leadership: The Dilemma of Political Leadership in Japan (Tokyo and New York: Japan Center for International Exchange, 2015), and his recent articles appears on China International Strategy Review, Contemporary Politics, and Journal of Contemporary China. he serves as a Member for Council on the Actual State of Land Use, Advisory Panel on Science & Technology Diplomacy, and Expert Panel on 50th Year of Japan-ASEAN Friendship and Cooperation. He also works as Faculty Fellow, Research Institute of Economy, Trade, and Industry; Visiting Fellow, 21st Century Policy Institute, Keidanren; Research Fellow of Japan Center for International Exchange. He has been Japan Scholar, Wilson Center, Visiting Associate Professor, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center, Stanford University and Professor, Kanagawa University. He received his B.A. from International Christian University and his Ph.D. from the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics at the University of Tokyo.

Moderator

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Square photo portrait of Kiyoteru Tsutsui
Kiyoteru Tsutsui is the Henri H. and Tomoye Takahashi Professor, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Deputy Director of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, where he is also Director of the Japan Program. He is the author of Rights Make Might: Global Human Rights and Minority Social Movements in Japan (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-editor of Corporate Responsibility in a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Courteous Power: Japan and Southeast Asia in the Indo-Pacific Era (University of Michigan Press, 2021). 

Kiyoteru Tsutsui

Virtual via Zoom Webinar

Chisako T. Masuo Professor, Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies Kyushu University
Ryo Sahashi Associate Professor of International Relations, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia University of Tokyo
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Applications opened today for the China Scholars Program (CSP), Sejong Korea Scholars Program (SKSP), and Reischauer Scholars Program (RSP) on Japan—three intensive online courses offered to high school students across the United States by SPICE, Stanford University. All three applications can now be viewed at https://spicestanford.smapply.io/. Interested students must submit their completed application (including an essay and letter of recommendation) by the October 31, 2022 deadline.

All three online courses are currently accepting applications for the Spring 2023 term, which will begin in February and run through June. Designed as college-level introductions to East Asia, these academically rigorous courses offer high school students the unique opportunity to engage in a guided study of China, Korea, or Japan directly with leading scholars, former diplomats, and other experts from Stanford and beyond.

Rising high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the United States are eligible to apply to any of the three online courses. Students who are interested in more than one program can apply to two or three and rank their preferences on their applications; those who are accepted into multiple programs will be invited to enroll in their highest-preference course. High school students with a strong interest in East Asia and/or international relations are especially encouraged to apply.

“Some students who enroll in our online courses already have a solid foundation in East Asia, but many do not,” says Dr. Tanya Lee, instructor of the China Scholars Program. “What’s important is that they come with a curious mind and a willingness to work hard. We’re fortunate to be able to connect high school students with all kinds of scholars with expertise in China, Korea, and Japan, and we want our students to make the most of this opportunity.”

For more information on a specific online course, please refer to its individual webpage at chinascholars.org, sejongscholars.org, or reischauerscholars.org. The CSP, SKSP, and RSP are part of SPICE’s online student programs.


To be notified when the next application period opens, join our email list and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Michelle Murcia at Gyeongbokgung Palace, South Korea
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Academic Exploration: My Studies in the Sejong Korea Scholars Program and Korean Peninsula

The following reflection is a guest post written by Michelle Murcia, an alumna of the 2021 Sejong Korea Scholars Program.
Academic Exploration: My Studies in the Sejong Korea Scholars Program and Korean Peninsula
Santiago Calderon at Harvard University for debate tournament
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How SPICE’s China Scholars Program Accelerated My Love for International Relations

The following reflection is a guest post written by Santiago Calderon, an alumnus of the China Scholars Program, which is currently accepting applications for the Fall 2021 course.
How SPICE’s China Scholars Program Accelerated My Love for International Relations
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Subtitle: Students with a strong interest in East Asia or international relations are encouraged to apply. Applications are due October 31.

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Affiliated Scholar, Deliberative Democracy Lab
Kleinheinz Fellow, Hoover Institution
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Valentin Bolotnyy is a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution and an Affiliated Scholar at CDDRL's Deliberative Democracy Lab. He designs and analyzes randomized experiments aimed at understanding how Americans communicate about politics and public policy, and what factors may lead to changes in public opinion on key issues. He also works on forming research partnerships with government agencies to improve public services and gain insight into social behavior. His recent studies have covered the America in One Room experiment, climate adaptation, the gender earnings gap, public infrastructure procurement, immigration policies, and graduate student mental health.

Bolotnyy’s work has received national attention in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Vox, and American Theatre Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Desai Prize in Economics in 2019.

Bolotnyy received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University and a BA in Economics and International Relations, with honors and distinction, from Stanford University.

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Michael Breger
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Guam, the small island territory in the Pacific Ocean, plays a unique strategic role in the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy. In a new article, part of a Hudson Institute collection of essays on the challenges and motivations of defending Guam, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro analyzes the island’s strategic importance to the United States, China’s threats to U.S. forces on the island, and the pathways to deterrence against Chinese encroachment in the region. 

Mastro enumerates a number of reasons behind Guam’s strategic importance. First, “the Chinese missile threat to U.S. regional bases, especially those located in the first island chain, enhances the operational role of those bases sufficiently distant from China to partially mitigate the threat it poses, yet also close enough to be operationally impactful.” Guam’s geostrategic potential is rooted in its proximity to China, and represents “the westernmost location from which the U.S. can project power, manage logistics, and establish command and control.” 

In a Taiwan contingency, Mastro argues that Guam would play an important role as a logistics hub and jumping-off point for combat forces headed toward the Taiwan Strait, with the caveat that U.S. forces could maintain roughly half the sortie rate from Guam as that from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. Another reason behind Guam’s strategic utility comes from reliable base access, which is more reliable than in other Asian host countries.

Despite the U.S. force posture and the island’s protective distance from China, Guam remains vulnerable to Chinese intermediate-range ballistic missile attack. According to Mastro, the U.S. has systems on the island to protect against missile threats, such as a THAAD battery, but “U.S. military commanders want much more of a guarantee that the U.S. would be able to continue operations out of Guam even under Chinese missile attack.”

Given China’s ability to threaten U.S. bases on the island, Mastro proposes an “unappreciated and underutilized” pathway to deterrence: deterrence by resiliency. Similar to deterrence by punishment, which seeks to prevent adversary attacks by employing the threat of severe penalties should the adversary do so, deterrence by resiliency is based primarily on shaping adversaries’ perceptions of one’s own capabilities. “However, unlike deterrence by punishment, the goal is not to create fear of retaliation but rather to encourage the perception that disruptive events would have little effect on an adversary.” Mastro uses the term resiliency to refer to a state’s ability to both absorb and deflect costs at a given level of violence.

Once in place and even under attack, planned defenses of Guam would ensure that the US could continue operations there to the degree necessary to, for example, maintain air superiority over the Taiwan Strait.
Oriana Skylar Mastro

Mastro argues that resilience is about signaling to China that “the benefits it would derive from a particular action would actually be less than it believes them to be. Improving defenses can enhance deterrence through this mechanism, but, given its limitations, other avenues—in particular, pursuing viable alternatives and creating redundancy—should also be pursued to ensure that an attack on Guam would not cripple a U.S. war effort.”

Guam, frequently cited as the U.S.’s viable alternative to bases within the first island chain, represents a critical strategic waypoint, but as long as the U.S. is reliant on the island to fight and win a war, “China will ensure that it can effectively target the island, thus making messaging associated with Guam’s defense key.” Mastro proposes that the language about defending Guam must expand to accomodate resilience contingencies for the island’s planned defenses, which, “once in place and even under attack […] would ensure that the US could continue operations there to the degree necessary to, for example, maintain air superiority over the Taiwan Strait.” 

Whether China would accept deterrence by resilience remains to be seen, but policymakers must employ new thinking about Guam’s defense to meet the new security challenges posed by China.

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Oriana Skylar Mastro

Oriana Skylar Mastro is a Center Fellow at FSI and is based at APARC, where her research focuses on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, nuclear dynamics and coercive diplomacy.
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Assessing U.S. Force Posture in a Taiwan Contingency

Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro talks to the Center For Advanced China Research about the risk of Chinese attacks on U.S. military bases in Asia at the outset of a Taiwan conflict, the likelihood of Japanese or NATO involvement in a war over Taiwan, the downsides of focusing on communicating resolve to defend Taiwan, whether the United States is “outgunned” by China, and more.
Assessing U.S. Force Posture in a Taiwan Contingency
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News

Problems with Revisionism: A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Chinese Intentions

Deciphering China’s intentions is a pressing task for U.S. scholars and policymakers, yet there is a lack of consensus about what China plans to accomplish. In a new study that reviews the existing English and Chinese language literature on intentions and revisionism, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro offers five propositions to allow for a more productive and data-driven approach to understanding Beijing’s intentions.
Problems with Revisionism: A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Chinese Intentions
Honor guards prepare to raise the Taiwan flag in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall square.
Commentary

Biden Says We’ve Got Taiwan’s Back. But Do We?

Many will applaud Mr. Biden for standing up for democratic Taiwan in the face of Chinese threats. But he could be putting the island in greater danger, and the United States may not be able to come to the rescue.
Biden Says We’ve Got Taiwan’s Back. But Do We?
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Expanding upon classic deterrence strategies, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro proposes an underutilized path to deterrence in which Guam — a remote U.S. outpost that has become a strategic hub as tensions with China rise — would remain a crucial logistical waypoint, even in the face of potential Chinese missile attack.

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Suzanne Smalley
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When the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council announces it plan next week for overhauling how the agency combats the spread of disinformation online, its focus will be on “how to achieve greater transparency across our disinformation related work” and how to “increase trust with the public,” according to council meeting minutes released Monday.

Read more at Cyberscoop.com

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Herb Lin, a disinformation scholar at Stanford, said DHS will need to tread carefully moving forward. He worries “about any government involvement in this business” and whether “any mechanism that you set up can be made tamper proof.”

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