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Google Gave Top Spot For 'Home Depot' Searches to a Malicious Ad

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 06:34 PM PST

"A malicious Home Depot advertising campaign is redirecting Google search visitors to tech support scams," claims Bleeping Computer. Slashdot reader nickwinlund77 shares their report: BleepingComputer searched for 'home depot' and was shown the malicious advertisement on our first try. Even worse, the ad is the top spot in the research result, making it more likely to be clicked... [T]he ad clearly states it's for www.homedepot.com, and hovering over it shows the site's legitimate destination URL. However, when visitors click on the ad, they will be redirected through various ad services until eventually they are redirected to a tech support scam. Ultimately, the visitor will land at a page showing an incredibly annoying "Windows Defender - Security Warning' tech support scam. This scam will repeatedly open the Print dialog box, as shown below, which prevents the visitor from easily closing the page. To make it more difficult for security professionals to diagnose these ads, it appears that they only redirect to the scam once every 24 hours to the same IP address. Once a tech support scam is shown by clicking on the ad, subsequent clicks bring visitors to the legitimate site.

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To Re-Enable Flash Support, South Africa's Tax Agency Released Its Own Web Browser

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 04:34 PM PST

"The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has released this week its own custom web browser," reports ZDNet, "for the sole purpose of re-enabling Adobe Flash Player support, rather than port its existing website from using Flash to HTML-based web forms." To prevent the app from continuing to be used in the real-world to the detriment of users and their security, Adobe began blocking Flash content from playing inside the app starting January 12, with the help of a time-bomb mechanism... As SARS tweeted on January 12, the agency was impacted by the time-bomb mechanism, and starting that day, the agency was unable to receive any tax filings via its web portal, where the upload forms were designed as Flash widgets. But despite having a three and a half years heads-up, SARS did not choose to port its Flash widgets to basic HTML & JS forms, a process that any web developer would describe as trivial. Instead, the South African government agency decided to take one of the most mind-blowing decisions in the history of bad IT decisions and release its own web browser. Released on Monday on the agency's official website, the new SARS eFiling Browser is a stripped-down version of the Chromium browser that has two features. The first is to re-enable Flash support. The second is to let users access the SARS eFiling website. As Chris Peterson, a software engineer at Mozilla, pointed out, the SARS browser only lets users access the official SARS website, which somewhat reduces the risk of users getting their systems infected via Flash exploits while navigating the web. But as others have also pointed out, this does nothing for accessibility, as the browser is only available for Windows users and not for other operating systems such as macOS, Linux, and mobile users, all of which are still unable to file taxes.

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Biofuel-Powered Rocket Makes Historic Launch in Maine

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 03:34 PM PST

Despite bad weather and early technical difficulties, employee-owned bluShift Aerospace "made history Sunday afternoon when it launched its prototype rocket, Stardust 1.0," reports Maine's Portland Press Herald: The company became the first in Maine to launch a commercial rocket and the first in the world to launch a rocket using bio-derived fuel... It carried three payloads, two commercial and one, free of charge, from Falmouth High School... The rocket and payloads returned to the ground under a parachute shortly after launch and were retrieved by a team of snowmobilers. The rocket is intended to be reusable and environmentally friendly. While the components of the biofuel remain a company secret, bluShift CEO Sascha Deri said it is solid, non-toxic and carbon neutral. "I can tell you this much, I discovered it with a friend of mine on my brothers farm here in Maine," he said. The company describes its business model as the Uber of space, where they will target a specific customer who wishes to send their payload into a particular orbit. "We are targeting people that want to go to a specific orbit, they want to have control of their launches, they want to be the primary payload even though their payload is very small," Deri said. The rocket is roughly 20 feet tall and 14 inches in diameter, the newspaper reports — noting that an earlier launch planned for January 15th had to be called off due to bad weather. "It turns out launching rockets is complicated, apparently it's rocket science," CEO Deri told them. "We did learn a lot from that failed launch. We learned, first and foremost, that you can't rely upon weather websites, you really need to use a professional meteorologist." The Associated Press also reports the rocket carried "a Dutch dessert called stroopwafel, in an homage to its Amsterdam-based parent company. Organizers of the launch said the items were included to demonstrate the inclusion of a small payload."

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CNN: Tesla's Net Profit 'Doesn't Come From Selling Cars'

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 02:34 PM PST

"Tesla posted its first full year of net income in 2020 — but not because of sales to its customers," reports CNN: Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can't, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements — such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars. It's a lucrative business for Tesla — bringing in $3.3 billion over the course of the last five years, nearly half of that in 2020 alone. The $1.6 billion in regulatory credits it received last year far outweighed Tesla's net income of $721 million — meaning Tesla would have otherwise posted a net loss in 2020. "These guys are losing money selling cars. They're making money selling credits. And the credits are going away," said Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research and one of the biggest bears on Tesla shares... Tesla also reports other measures of profitability, as do many other companies. And by those measures, the profits are great enough that they do not depend on the sales of credits to be in the black... Its automotive gross profit, which compares total revenue from its car business to expenses directly associated with the building the cars, was $5.4 billion, even excluding the regulatory credits sales revenue... But the debate between skeptics and devotees of the company whether Tesla is truly profitable has become a "Holy War," according to Gene Munster, managing partner of Loup Ventures and a leading tech analyst. "They're debating two different things. They'll never come to a resolution," he said. Munster believes critics focus too much on how the credits still exceed net income. He contends that automotive gross profit margin, excluding those sales of regulatory credits, is the best barometer for the company's financial success. "It's a leading indicator," of that measure of Tesla's profit, he said. "There's no chance that GM and VW are making money on that basis on their EVs..." Tesla shares are now worth roughly as much as those of the combined 12 largest automakers who sell more than 90% of autos globally. What Tesla has that other automakers don't is rapid growth... Tech analyst Gene Munster also tells CNN "Something most people can agree on... Electric vehicles are the future. I think that's a safe assumption."

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A 'Severe' Bug Was Found In Libgcrypt, GnuPG's Cryptographic Library

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 01:34 PM PST

Early Friday the principal author of GNU Privacy Guard (the free encryption software) warned that version 1.9.0 of its cryptographic library Libgcrypt, released January 19, had a "severe" security vulnerability and should not be used. A new version 1.9.1, which fixes the flaw, is available for download, Help Net Security reports: He also noted that Fedora 34 (scheduled to be released in April 2021) and Gentoo Linux are already using the vulnerable version... [I]t's a heap buffer overflow due to an incorrect assumption in the block buffer management code. Just decrypting some data can overflow a heap buffer with attacker controlled data, no verification or signature is validated before the vulnerability occurs. It was discovered and flagged by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy and affects only Libgcrypt v1.9.0. "Exploiting this bug is simple and thus immediate action for 1.9.0 users is required..." Koch posted on the GnuPG mailing list. "The 1.9.0 tarballs on our FTP server have been renamed so that scripts won't be able to get this version anymore."

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A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 12:34 PM PST

"Twenty five years ago I made a bet in the pages of Wired. It was a bet whether the world would collapse by the year 2020." So writes the 68-year-old founding executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. He'd made the bet with a "Luddite-loving doomsayer," according to Wired — author Kirkpatrick Sale. "Sale while a student in the 1950s co-wrote a musical with Thomas Pynchon about escaping a dystopian America ruled by IBM," remembers Slashdot reader joeblog. This month a new article in Wired re-visits that 25-year bet: They argued about the Amish, whether printing presses denuded forests, and the impact of technology on work. Sale believed it stole decent labor from people. Kelly replied that technology helped us make new things we couldn't make any other way. "I regard that as trivial," Sale said. Sale believed society was on the verge of collapse. That wasn't entirely bad, he argued. He hoped the few surviving humans would band together in small, tribal-style clusters. They wouldn't be just off the grid. There would be no grid. Which was dandy, as far as Sale was concerned... Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right. Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes... "I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we're not even close to the kind of disaster you describe," Kelly said. Sale barely had $1,000 in his bank account. But he figured that if he lost, a thousand bucks would be worth much less in 2020 anyway. He agreed... "Oh, boy," Kelly said after Sale wrote out the check. "This is easy money." Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn't been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year. We're about to find out how easy that money is... Sale failed to account for how human ingenuity would keep us from getting tossed into forests and caves. Kelly didn't factor in tech companies' reckless use of power or their shortcomings in solving (or sometimes stoking) tough societal problems... Sale believes more than ever that society is basically crumbling — the process is just not far enough along to drive us from apartment blocks to huts. The collapse, he says, is "not like a building imploding and falling down, but like a slow avalanche that destroys and kills everything in its path, until it finally buries the whole village forever." "I cannot accept that I lost," he wrote... "The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won..." Kelly warns Sale that history will recall him as a man who doesn't honor his word. But Sale doesn't believe that there will be a history. Kelly responded by offering Sale a second double-or-nothing bet: I believe that we are in fact on the eve of a 25-year period of global progress and prosperity, the likes of which we have not seen before on this planet. In 25 years, poverty will be rare, and middle class lifestyle the norm. War between nations will also be rare. A bulk of our energy will be renewables, slowing down climate warming. Lifespans continue to lengthen. I'll bet on it. Kelly added later that his rival "did not take me up on the double or nothing offer."

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Corporate Trolls? A Covert, Pro-Huawei Influence Campaign on Social Media

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 11:34 AM PST

"Huawei, the crown jewel of China's technology industry, has suffered from a sustained American campaign to keep its equipment from being used in new 5G networks around the world," reports the New York Times. Now they've identified "a covert pro-Huawei influence campaign in Belgium about 5G networks." [Alternate URL here] It began when trade lawyer Edwin Vermulst was paid to write an article criticizing a Belgian policy that would block Huawei from lucrative contracts: First, at least 14 Twitter accounts posing as telecommunications experts, writers and academics shared articles by Mr. Vermulst and many others attacking draft Belgium legislation that would limit "high risk" vendors like Huawei from building the country's 5G system, according to Graphika, a research firm that studies misinformation and fake social media accounts. The pro-Huawei accounts used computer-generated profile pictures, a telltale sign of inauthentic activity. Next, Huawei officials retweeted the fake accounts, giving the articles even wider reach to policymakers, journalists and business leaders. Kevin Liu, Huawei's president for public affairs and communications in Western Europe, who has a verified Twitter account with 1.1 million followers, shared 60 posts from the fake accounts over three weeks in December, according to Graphika. Huawei's official account in Europe, with more than five million followers, did so 47 times... Twitter said it had removed the fake accounts after Graphika alerted it to the campaign on Dec. 30... Many of their followers appeared to be bots... The effort suggests a new twist in social media manipulation, said Ben Nimmo, a Graphika investigator who helped identify the pro-Huawei campaign. Tactics once used mainly for government objectives — like Russia's interference in the 2016 American presidential election — are being adapted to achieve corporate goals. "It's business rather than politics," Mr. Nimmo said. "It's not one country targeting another country. It looks like an operation to promote a major multinational's interests — and to do it against a European state." Though the social media campaign had little impact on Belgian policymakers, one telecom consultancy noted Huawei's fear that similar legislation "could spread to other parts of the world." (The article points out Belgium is the headquarters of both NATO and the European Union.) But Phil Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute, see a future where disinformation will become increasingly commercialized. "The flow of money is increasingly there," he tells the Times. "Large-scale social media influence operations are now part of the communications tool kit for any large global corporation."

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Is Misinformation on Nextdoor Impacting Local Politics?

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 10:34 AM PST

Was Nextdoor's impact on the world exemplified by a crucial funding referendum for the Christina School District of Newark, Delaware? Medium's tech site OneZero reports: As the 2019 referendum approached, I saw Nextdoor posts claiming that the district was squandering money, that its administrators were corrupt, and that it already spent more money per student than certain other districts with higher test scores. The last of those was true — but left out the context that Christina hosts both the state's school for the deaf and its largest autism program. District advocates told me later that they had wanted to post counterarguments to the platform, but were hindered by Nextdoor's decentralized structure. Some district officers, for instance, couldn't even access the posts and discussions happening in the city of Newark, because they were only visible to other Newark residents, and they lived outside the city's borders. (The district's headquarters are actually in nearby Wilmington.) After the referendum failed, some pointed to misinformation on Nextdoor as a factor in its defeat.... A month after the failed Christina School District referendum in 2019 the school board voted 4-3 to eliminate 63 jobs, with the alternative being bankruptcy and a bid for a state bailout. Some parents gave up hope; a neighbor of mine who had been among the district's staunch supporters abruptly sold her house and moved her family to suburban Pennsylvania, where public schools are better-funded. Others who could afford it moved their children to private schools, furthering one of the trends that had put the district in tough shape to begin with. The district and its backers started planning another referendum campaign for 2020, with the stakes now desperate... This time, their strategy included arming supporters with facts and counter-arguments to post whenever they encountered criticism on their respective Nextdoor networks around the district... On election day, June 9, polling places had lines out the door — a rarity for a single-issue local election. Turnout was unprecedented, nearly doubling that of 2019. And the result was a landslide: Some 70% of voters approved all four funding requests, with more people voting "yes" than the total number who had voted the year before. Suddenly, the district's future looked hopeful again. Exactly what role Nextdoor played in that dramatic turnaround is hard to disentangle. The option to vote by mail due to Covid-19 may have helped; the sense of urgency for the district certainly did. Claire O'Neal [a parent who won appointment to the school board later that year], believes the informal Nextdoor information campaign made a difference. "I do think it was a factor in its passing," she told me. The lesson for the district, and other public agencies, she believes, is that they can no longer win the battle of public opinion on their own. They have to actively enlist advocates in the community to wage it on their behalf on Nextdoor and other hyperlocal online networks. "It just requires more of individual citizens," the schoolboard member added. "It's a lot more work because there's just so much information out there, and it's up to you to decide what's right and what's wrong. "There's a part of that that's beautiful, and there's a part of that that's really scary."

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Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy: New Research Says #42 Really Is Our Number

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 09:34 AM PST

Just 11 months before his death in 2001, famous author Douglas Adams answered questions from Slashdot readers. And Slashdot reader Informativity still remembers how Adams (also a Doctor Who script editor) had included a supercomputer named Deep Thought in his first book which spent 7.5 million years to determine that the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, was...the number 42: Turns out the entire universe is a product of the number 42, specifically 42 times the collection of lm/2t, such that l, m and t are the Planck Units. In a newly published paper, Measurement Quantization Describes the Physical Constants , both the constants and laws of nature are resolved from a simple geometry between two frames of reference, the non-discrete Target Frame of the universe and the discrete Measurement Frame of the observer. Its only and primary connection to our physical reality is a scalar, 42. Forty-two is what defines our universe from say any other version of our universe. So, while Douglas Adams may have just been picking numbers out of the sky when writing Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it turns out he picked the right number, the one that defines ... well ... everything. In addition to presenting new descriptions for most of the physical constants (descriptions that don't reference other physical constants), the paper is also noted for presenting a classical unification of gravity and electromagnetism. One more interesting piece of trivia. Wikipedia reminds us that in January 2004, asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the permanent name 25924 Douglasadams... Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, remarked that, with even his initials in the provisional designation, "This was sort of made for him, wasn't it?"

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Researchers Try Using CRISPR To Genetically Engineer Zika-Resistant Mosquitoes

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 08:34 AM PST

A new research study at the University of Missouri is using CRISPR gene-editing technology to produce mosquitoes that are unable to replicate Zika virus and therefore cannot infect a human through biting. Slashdot reader wooloohoo shared an announcement from Cornell's Alliance for Science: Alexander Franz, an associate professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collaborated with researchers at Colorado State University... Their work was recently published in the journal Viruses. Franz added that the genetic modification is inheritable, so future generations of the altered mosquitoes would be resistant to Zika virus as well... "[W]e are simply trying to expand the toolbox and provide a solution by genetically modifying the mosquitoes to become Zika-resistant while keeping them alive at the same time." Franz' research is designed to help prevent another outbreak of Zika virus disease from occurring while also addressing concerns that have some have raised about reducing populations of mosquitoes, which are a food source for some animals... The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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Are We Overestimating the Number of COBOL Transactions Each Day?

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 07:34 AM PST

An anonymous Slashdot reader warns of a possible miscalculation: 20 years ago today, cobolreport.com published an article, according to which there are 30 billion Customer Information Control System/COBOL transactions per day. This number has since been cited countless times... [T]his number is still to be found in the marketing of most COBOL service providers, compiler vendors (IBM, Micro-Focus and others) and countless articles about how relevant COBOL supposedly still was. The article originally reported 30 billion "CICS transactions", but within 2 years it had already been turned into "COBOL transactions"... The "30 billion" likely originates from a DataPro survey in 1997, in which they still reported 20 billion transactions per day. Only 421 companies participated in that survey. They actually scaled the results from such a small survey up to the IT-market of the entire world! That same survey is also the source of many other numbers that are still to be found in the marketing of COBOL compiler vendors and articles: - There are 200 billion lines of COBOL Code - That's 60-80% of all the source codes in the world [sic] - 5 billion lines of COBOL code are newly written each year - There are 2 million COBOL developers in the world - COBOL processes 95% of all "in person transactions", "ATM swipes" or similar DataPro was bought by Gartner Inc. in 1997. Since then, all the numbers are reported to come "from Gartner". Only very early sources quote DataPro as their source. Some of these numbers are obvious nonsense. The explanation for this is that DataPro had only surveyed mainframe owners. So it only says that 60-80% of all the source codes on mainframes are written in COBOL (which is plausible at least for 1997). And only 95% of all credit companies that have mainframes use their mainframes for processing credit card transactions. Considering the low participation, we are probably talking about 19 of 20 credit companies here.

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Firefox 85 Isolated Supercookies, But Dropped Progressive Web App Support

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 04:34 AM PST

Tech blogger Paul Thurrott writes: Firefox 85 now protects users against supercookies, which Mozilla says is "a type of tracker that can stay hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you clear cookies. By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to the next." It also includes small improvements to bookmarks and password management. Unfortunately, Mozilla has separately — and much more quietly — stopped work on Site Specific Browser (SSB) functionality... This feature allowed users to use Firefox to create apps on the local PC from Progressive Web Apps and other web apps, similar to the functionality provided in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based web browsers. "The SSB feature has only ever been available through a hidden [preference] and has multiple known bugs," Mozilla's Dave Townsend explains in a Bugzilla issue tracker. "Additionally, user research found little to no perceived user benefit to the feature and so there is no intent to continue development on it at this time. As the feature is costing us time in terms of bug triage and keeping it around is sending the wrong signal that this is a supported feature, we are going to remove the feature from Firefox." Thurrott's conclusion? "Mozilla is walking away from a key tenet of modern web apps and, in doing so, they are making themselves irrelevant."

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Perl.com Domain Stolen, Now Using IP Address of Past Malware Campaigns

Posted: 31 Jan 2021 12:34 AM PST

"The domain name perl.com was stolen and now points to an IP address associated with malware campaigns," reports Bleeping Computer: Perl.com is a site owned by Tom Christiansen and has been used since 1997 to post news and articles about the Perl programming language. On January 27th, Perl programming author and Perl.com editor brian d foy tweeted that the perl.com domain was suddenly registered under another person. Intellectual property lawyer John Berryhill later replied to the tweet that the domain was stolen in September 2020 while at Network Solutions, transferred to a registrar in China on Christmas Day, and finally moved to the Key-Systems registrar on January 27th, 2020. It wasn't until the last transfer that the IP addresses assigned to the domain were changed from 151.101.2.132 to the Google Cloud IP address 35.186.238[.]101... On the 28th, d foy tweeted that they have set up perl.com temporarily at http://perldotcom.perl.org for users who wish to access the site until the domain is recovered... d foy has told BleepingComputer that it is not believed that the domain owner's account was hacked and that they are currently working with Network solutions and Key-Systems to resolve the issue. "I do know from direct communication with the Network Solutions and Key Systems that they are working on this and that the perl.com domain is locked. Tom Christiansen, the rightful owner, is going through the recovery process with those registrars." "Both registrars, along with a few others, reached out to me personally to offer help and guidance. We are confident that we will be able to recover the domain, but I do not have a timetable for that," d foy told BleepingComputer. The IP address that perl.com is now hosted has a long history of being used in older malware campaigns and more recent ones. "Anyone using a perl.com host for their CPAN mirror should use www.cpan.org instead," advises an announcement page today at Perl.org, which d foy tweeted "is now going to be the source for the latest http://Perl.com info." On Thursday d foy tweeted that "There's no news on the recovery progress. Everyone who needs to be talking is talking to each other and it's just a process now."

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Will Mark Zuckerberg Retire From Facebook in 2022?

Posted: 30 Jan 2021 09:34 PM PST

Among tech pundit Robert Cringley's predictions for 2021? "This year is going to be a tough one for Mark Zuckerberg." [W]hile I don't expect Zuckerberg to abandon his CEO job this year, he eventually will, simply because it isn't as much fun as it used to be and there will come a point (maybe in 2022) when leaving the top job will help Facebook's stock... Zuckerberg no longer has any who have faced what he is facing today. He has outgrown his own psychological support system... Zuckerberg's primary role models have been Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Page. Each modeled different ways to manage through dominance. Steve was a brilliant tyrant ("I know I'm an asshole," he told me more than once); Bill tried to technically dominate by claiming to identify bad code from across a room (he really can't); Larry taught by example to hide behind the algorithm, blaming it for, well, everything from nonexistent customer service to employee income inequality. The only unique truly self-actualized character in this mentor group was Steve Jobs and Steve is dead... But none of those guys faced what Zuckerberg faces today, calling all the shots and making all the hard calls by himself. That has to be exhausting... [T]he social media market is in transition and none of my kids have Facebook accounts, which I think is telling... And so 2021 will see Facebook poked and prodded and taxed and regulated and possibly even torn apart. Google will be, too, but Facebook is frankly less essential and more vulnerable. How Zuckerberg responds will be where he blazes his own managerial trail. However it goes will take a toll, though, and even Zuck will eventually decide it's better to become a philanthropist and find some new way to change the world. Though probably not until 2022.

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