My Bizarre Run-In With Content ID

I recently uploaded a Diablo-themed Special effects video to my YouTube channel, continuing the pattern from that earlier Nerf one.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, but the story behind it highlights a corner of the copyright-related minefield facing content-creators on the web today.

The video is an original work made by me, starring Bill Lyon, a former-colleague and current-collaborator of mine.  All of the audio in it was either recorded by my own microphone, or came from one of two fully licensed stock libraries:  the included library that comes with Final Cut Pro X, and the "Pro Scores" music collection by Video Copilot.

When I uploaded the video to youtube it was flagged by their Content ID system as matching a track owned by AdRev.  The track they were claiming?  One of the pieces from Pro Scores!

Now it gets crazy, because AdRev isn't even the bad guy in this story...

For anyone unfamiliar with YouTube's Content ID system, it's a fully automated process whereby copyright holders can submit their work (video or audio) to Google, and it is then compared against new videos that are uploaded.  If the software detects a match, it will automatically get flagged.  What happens next depends on what the rights holder has chosen.  They may choose to block the new video entirely, or allow it to remain up.  However the most popular option has been to leave the video, but "monetize" it with advertisements, the revenue from which goes to the original copyright holder.  Naturally, this prevents the uploader of the video from monetizing it themselves.

This system has, for the most part, been an extremely useful and pragmatic Faustian bargain for YouTube and its users.  The ability to monetize infringing works has so far been sufficient to placate rights holders, and prevents the YouTube library from being eviscerated by clamping down on the free-for-all nature that made it popular in the first place. A few of my own videos, like Project Gravity, could not remain on the site without this largesse.

However, every system does have flaws.  As it turns out Video Copilot has been having issues for some time with unscrupulous third parties fraudulantly claiming Pro Scores music as their own, submitting it to Content ID, and monetizing videos that use it.  This doesn't sit well with Video Copilot, since the "infringers" being denied full rights to do what they like with their videos are the company's own customers!  As I learned from their site, Video Copilot was eventually successful in getting YouTube to shut down the fraudulant flags, but without the music "assigned" to someone in the Content ID system, there was currently nothing preventing it from happening again.

The solution?  Video Copilot partnered with AdRev, a company that handles this sort of copyright enforcement on an outsourced basis, and registered the music themselves.  Now, videos that included Pro Scores music would still get immediately flagged, but contacting Video Copilot's customer support would let you put your channel on a whitelist to be excluded from the process.

So, after a confused weekend of sending emails to both Video Copliot and AdRev (just to be safe...) my video is now up for the world to see, with full rights retained by myself.  I wish I could end this post with a grand proposal for how to avoid the headaches I went through, but everyone involved seems to be doing the best they can given the odd constraints of the situation.  (Except of course for the people who claimed the Pro Scores audio as their own.  Not cool.)  Regardless, it remains a great example of just how strange the intellectual property landscape has become.

And if you'd like to see the video in question, here it is!

Foam Dart Shootout!

And just like that, the video I teased in my last post is finished!



This took me so much longer to make than I intended it to.  Christine and I actually went out and filmed the source footage late last summer.  "Life" and other related circumstances led me to not really doing much with it for quite a while after that...

This year though, I resolved to get back into filmmaking in a major way, especially after 2013 was almost entirely devoid of it.  Even then, the visual effects took me a bit longer than expected, but I'm really happy with how it turned out!  (as a side note, if anyone ever hears me say again, "setting up a green screen won't be practical in that location - I can just rotoscope everything..."  please smack me.)

"Work" in Progress

The intermediate stages of things can look... strange.

(More to come later...)

Evening Edition

Bouncing around a few of the blogs I follow semi-regularly, (starting with Gruber, in this case) I discovered this:

http://evening-edition.com

It's designed as a concise summary of major news stories of the day, with a sober approach that avoids the list of linkbait that a lot of online aggregators can turn into.

As a bona-fide graduate from a "Journalism" school, the most striking thing about it to me was that although the site is gaining some cred among thoughtful techies for being so refreshingly "well written and concise", its "voice" seemed very old-school to me;  Read it aloud, and it seems to follow all the usual rules for writing good on-air copy...

John Carter

I still say that Disney's marketing team screwed the pooch on this one by dropping "of Mars" from the title, leaving the uninformed viewer really confused as to what in blazes the movie is even about.

I just saw it the other night, and found it thoroughly entertaining and well executed, but with a plot that was pretty rough around the edges.  In the end, I enjoyed it more than I expected, though that may be aided by the fact that there's been a dearth of adventurous science-fiction/fantasy in my viewing as of late...

This quote from io9's review sums it up pretty well for me:

The real question is should you watch the movie to catch those moments of greatness, or skip it because you know you'll be frustrated by its problems? I would err on the side of watching. This is an imaginative bit of fun, and it looks fantastic splashed across a giant screen. (Do not, however, make the mistake of seeing it in 3D. It wasn't filmed in 3D, and the 3D frankly looks like crap, spoiling the visuals at every turn.) John Carter may not be the gamechanging retro-futuristic epic we were hoping for, but it's still worth checking out.

Though I disagree with the author on one point:  I rather liked the frame story!

On another note, the original Edgar Rice Burroughs story, A Princess of Mars, has lapsed outside of copyright in the US, and is available on Project Gutenberg!  I'm partway through now, and it's intriguingly different enough from the film to be worth a read if you're interested.  Very much a product of the time it was written, and if you're fascinated by the history of the genre, it's cool for that reason alone.

Extreme and Murderous Absence

Space is a vast and frightening thing; it is an extreme and murderous absence; it's the closest physical metaphor for the disturbing unknowns that follow death; space is a villain from a children's book -- it's the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story.

- Robert Brockway, writing the Cracked.com article "7 Awesome Images That Will Make You Mourn The Space Shuttle".

Last weekend Christine and I went on a very-much-needed brief vacation to Toronto.  As has become our habit, we took the Megabus there and back.  During the trip up last friday, I took some time as we passed through Buffalo to fire up Ustream on my iPhone and make good use of my unlimited 3G data...

On one hand, it was certainly impressive to realize I was watching the launch of a rocketship.... from over a thousand miles away (and orders of magnitude farther once it flew higher), in pristine quality, on a device pulled from my pocket, on a bus -- a true "This is the 21st century" experience.

On the other hand however, it was very bittersweet to see the end of this era.

Supreme Court Rules Video Games Covered By First Amendment

Full NY Times Link

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Thank you!  (And take that, Jack Thompson!)

PlayStation Network Data Compromised

This morning I received an e-mail from Sony, including the following:

Although we are still investigating the details of this incident, we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

Fun.  Time to change some passwords...

"The Formats Won"

Adam Wilt, writing for ProVideo Coalition about the current state of the film/video post-production world:

A few years back, we were talking about seeing the end of the formats wars.  Remember when we shot interlaced 4x3 SDTV with a specified colorimetry and gamma to a handful of tape formats, and delivered interlaced 4x3 SDTV to an audience using interlaced 4x3 CRTs? Ah, those were the days… we didn’t know how simple we had it.

Now, let’s see, for acquisition, we have AVC-Intra, AVCHD, HDCAM, HDCAM-SR (in three different bitrates), ProRes (in more than three different bitrates, depths, and color resolutions), XDCAM HD and EX variants, DVCPROHD (still out there), ArriRAW, R3D, Codex Digital, Cineform, uncompressed (S.two; DPXes on SR 2.0), and whatever your HDSLR du jour shoots, just to name a few. And that’s just HD. There’s still SD being produced, and 2K and 4K, in gamma-corrected “linear” or log (LogC, S-Log, REDlog); 4x3, 16x9, 2:1, 2.4:1; 8-bit, 10-bit, or 12-bit; 4:2:0 to 4:4:4; full-res, subsampled, or oversampled (both well and poorly).

If you add in the number of deliverables the various presenters were talking about, and consider all the permutations of inputs and outputs, it just boggles the mind.

The format wars are over. The formats won, all of them. May their tribes increase.

Deal with it.

Truer words, never spoken - even in my low-end, behind-the-curve corner of the industry.  I just moved into a new apartment, and glancing over at my newly-reorganized shelf of archival media for video projects from the last couple years, I see:

• MiniDV tapes
• Digital8 Tapes (basically the same as MiniDV, but require a different camera/deck.)
• Video DVD's with some Quicktime masters as a bonus
• Mini-DVD's from a Sony DVD-camcorder (not my choice)
• A couple SDHC cards from my HDSLR, that I still haven't decided on an ideal archival plan for.

But hey - at least we're leaving tape behind!  (I say, having just spent over an hour tonight fighting to get Final Cut to stop complaining of timecode problems while recapturing some interview footage from barely a year and a half ago.  But I digress...)

It's The Little Things...

How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail

This is what I love about many Apple products - not big, impressive features that "revolutionize" a product, but the little, well-thought-out details that, once your realize them, make you frustrated that everything doesn't work that way.

Other favorite examples, from Mac OS, include spring-loaded folders, and proxy icons.

Soundtrack Preview for Tron: Legacy

So, so very excited for this movie!

Flynn Lives!

Post-Gazette Video on iD Tech Camps

As some of you might already know, I spent the last month and a half working at the CMU location for iD Tech Camps.  This past week was my last week working there, and during the week a reporter from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette stopped by, doing a story on "non-traditional" summer camps in western Pennsylvania (the story appears in today's paper, starting in a sidebar on the front page).

The reporter also shot some video of the camp!



Unfortunately, the class I was teaching that week was in a different lab, so you won't see any of me there.  But the camp director gets plenty of face-time!

And yes, I was (more or less) dressed as a pirate that day too...

Hacked!

Oh well isn't that cute... someone hacked my webcomic!

Of course, I'm not exactly clueless when it comes to these things, so after verifying the extent of the damage, I did some digging through the logs.

Ready for a laugh?

"K4Rel," the Iranian "L337 H4x0r!" who defaced my site is a complete poseur!

The actual break-in was done on Monday by someone in Jakarta, Indonesia.  They found a way in, uploaded a backdoor for themselves (the quite useful "b374k" php script), and changed the (hashed) passwords for the admin section. Once finished, it appears this individual passed off (or let's be honest, probably sold) the admin passwords to a second person.

The second guy actually was from Iran.  But he was only able to add a new "comic" to the database, as you can see above, and wasn't able to touch anything else on the site.  Heck, he barely even did that - the internal page id had incremented by two, which means he effed it up the first time and had to try again!  Laaame.

For the technically curious:  the original Indonesian hacker used classic SQL injection.  SomeryC, the extremely lightweight comic-oriented CMS I use for Directionless, was doing nothing to sanitize the page number in the URLs.  This allowed him to edit the hashed passwords for the admin section.  From there, he used the comic uploader to install the backdoor script, and after that appears to have left the server alone, after passing it off to the Iranian "hacker" (and for him, I use the term very loosely indeed...)

Over the last few hours, I've restored Directionless to normal.  Will helped me with some of the PHP, so the site should no longer respond to bogus input.  Additionally, I have put the entire admin section between an additional level of security with htaccess, and of course, changed all the passwords. DirectionlessComic.com should be secure now, at least from this type of attack.

Inside Facebook "Like" Spam

Update 6-1-10:  Looks like Download Squad caught the story now too.  They're calling it "likejacking." Cute. According to them, security experts have confirmed that this is simply an annoyance, and there appears to be no real security threat at this time.
----------

Be careful what you "Like" on Facebook - there's a new exploit someone out there has discovered, and it seems like people are falling for it in droves!

A couple hours ago, I was taking a look at my Facebook news feed, when I noticed some of the usual silliness:

[So-and-so] likes "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE."

Eh, seemed like it could be funny, and I was bored.  So I clicked on it.  This brought me to an external website, with an empty white page with black text reading "Click here to continue".

Hovering over the text didn't show any destination URL in the address bar.  Naturally, I was suspicious, but since Macs are immune to most viruses, I clicked to see what would happen.

Nothing happened.  Or so it seemed, until my brother informed me that I now liked this page...

At this point, I felt a little silly, but also curious as to what was going on here...  how had the site made me Like something without clicking on a Facebook "Like" button?  And who was running these things anyway?

Well, I did some digging...

From the HTML of the "Continue" pages, it was fairly clear how the trick was working.  The words were just plain text - not even a link.  However, the pages also contained an HTML "IFRAME" which was used to embed the on-Facebook page that is used to confirm a "Like".  This page element was rendered invisible, and positioned underneath the page's text.  Any clicks on the words would pass though them, and into the actual "yes, I want to like this" button on Facebook.  Clever.

The particular bit of spam I fell for was hosted on a Blogspot blog, but there were quite a few other popular ones, such as The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School!  That one was hosted on thedatesafe.com/promdress.  When I went to the top-level, I found folders for several other similarly-set-up scams...  as well as a running tally page, at thedatesafe.com/stats.htm

Whoever runs this server has since locked it down, so you can't see these pages anymore.  But I was sure to take screenshots...

Cute.  This particular shot was taken around 11:50 pm on Sunday May 30th.  The one with over 130,000 "likers" is the prom dress one.  Six minutes later, the number had grown by another 6,000.  Facebook admins finally got wise and started blocking the page shortly after midnight.

I found similar scams spread across a number of domains:

• Several Blogspot blogs, including girlownedbypolicelike.blogspot.com
• thedatesafe.com - probably the main site, since that's where the stats page was located.  WHOIS information (a public registry of who owns what websites) was anonymized on this one.
• mprosperstats.info - this one did have valid WHOIS info, but I won't post it here, since it's unclear whether the owner of this site is involved, or just an innocent victim who had their website taken over by spammers.  It would hardly be the first time.

I suppose it's possible that these are separate spammers, unrelated except in the method they use.  But I think they're all connected.  Facebook recently gained a feature that lets you "hover" the mouse over a link on the site to get some brief info on it - for example, if you hover over someone's name, you get their picture, and a list of some friends you have in common.

Hovering over these spam links also gives some info, including a picture... the same picture, across pretty much every one I have seen...

So uh.... anyone know this face?

ConFICK!

The Enemy Within - Magazine - The Atlantic

Utterly fascinating (albeit long...) article on the history of the infamous "Conficker" worm. I had never realized just how sophisticated - and let's be honest, clever - it was/is.

Spoiler:  The worm is still out there, lying dormant in a massive botnet estimated at over 6.5 million computers in size.  And security researchers aren't entirely sure they can ever truly eradicate or contain it...

Portal for Free! (Until May 24)

Steam is now finally available on Mac OS X, and clearly I'll post my impressions on it here in due time.  However, Valve did something else pretty exciting, coinciding with the Mac release...



Portal is an amazing game, and this is the perfect time to check it out if you haven't gotten a chance to yet. This also serves as a great bit of advertising for the upcoming Portal 2, due out late this year.

As a side note - love the trailer too.  Like the earlier teaser for Portal itself, the stylized, graphic animation perfectly captures the game's wicked sense of humor.

My iPhone Goes For a Swim

Update June 23, 2019: It's worth noting that, nearly a decade later, current wisdom no longer suggests the use of rice.

Ok, so this happened several weeks ago, but I wanted to see how things actually played out before writing this post.

I was getting ready to do some laundry while carrying on a conversation with my mother.  Start the water, soap goes in, shirts, pants - pretty automatic.  I finished the conversation, finished loading, and went upstairs.  I made it as far as my second-floor bedroom.

"Oh FUCK!"

I think you can see where this is going...  I essentially flew down the stairs, continuing the stream of expletives, whipped open the cover of the washing machine, and fished the expensive trinket out of the pocket of my jeans.

Now, for those of you without extensive experience with the havoc created by computerized electronics and moisture, I'll recap:  There's something of a "standard procedure" for giving your prized device a fighting chance in this situation:

1. DO NOT TURN IT ON! No, seriously. Don't check if it works. Turn it off if it's already on.  Electricity can't short circuit if it isn't flowing.
2. Take out the battery!  Again, can't have a short circuit if you don't have any power.
3. Open the thing up as much as you can.  If possible, and you are skilled enough, partially take it apart.  Dry it out thoroughly before doing anything else.  The common suggestion for cell phones is a bed of dry rice, left in the sun for a day or two.
4. Clean the insides if you can.  Once the moisture is gone, corrosion from minerals left behind is your biggest worry.  Be meticulous, but gentle.  A cotton swab with rubbing alcohol works well.
5. Pray.

Back to my situation, I had a soaked-through iPhone 3GS in my hands.  It had only been underwater for maybe 60 seconds, but that's more than enough time for the water to work its way through.  It wasn't fully "off" - just in its usual "suspend" mode, but I didn't want to risk waking it up to properly turn it off.  And with a sealed-in battery, (grrrr...) I couldn't remove power quickly.

As my fellow geeks would probably expect, my immediate instinct was to rush to my computer, fumble around for my set of Very Small Screwdrivers (what, you don't have one?) and head straight to iFixit.com's tear-down instructions for the iPhone 3G/3Gs.  (I eventually had to look at several of their other guides for more detailed instructions on certain parts, but seriously, I can't plug iFixit enough!)  Thankfully, I happened to have the required suction cup sitting around, so I was able to frantically open the phone.  One the major pieces were disassembled, I put them in their rice-y rehab center.

To help with the drying process, I augmented the powers of Uncle Ben with one of the 150-watt lamps I use for my video work...

I also put some saran-wrap over the dish that held the rice and iPhone parts.  This would create a bit of a "greenhouse effect," increasing the drying heat inside.  I also hoped it would let me see the progress of the drying, as the evaporating water condensed on the inside of the plastic. And condense it did...

I let it sit there for about 12 hours, changing the plastic whenever it got noticeably wet. Ideally, you should give a phone as much time as you possibly can, since you really want it to be bone dry.  Of course, like anyone, I was impatient.  Luckily, I was comfortable enough with tiny devices like phones, PDA's and laptops, that I was o.k. with taking the iPhone apart almost completely.  That really helps the drying process, but your mileage may vary if you're less experienced with this sort of thing.

In any case, once I finally sat down that night to clean and re-assemble the thing, I didn't know what to expect. Most everything inside looked ok, except for one slightly scorched-looking area on the main logic board (See picture to the right).  I still haven't found solid confirmation on what this is online, but at this point my assumption is that it's a surface-mounted Wi-Fi antenna.

Well, the water sensors were also all tripped, but well... y'know.

After a good cleaning, I nervously reassembled the phone, not sure of what was going to happen. After popping the case back together and twirling home the final two screws, I held the power button, and waited...

Not too bad, all things considered. There was a very noticeable light blotchiness across the screen (as well as some faint diagonal lines that don't come out well in photos), but I had read reports of that elsewhere online. Consensus was that it's trapped residual moisture between the LCD and the glass, and that it dissipates over time. The real annoying bit was the Wi-Fi - it wasn't unreliable, it didn't have trouble locating networks - it simply wasn't there.  Wouldn't even read as a function the phone had.  AT&T's 3G network is pretty fast, but it's still not Wi-Fi fast, and the cellular connection also puts a much higher drain on the battery.

The next day, the Wi-Fi was still M.I.A., but the blotchiness had definitely improved.

It continued to get better as the week wore on.  By two weeks, both the blotches and the diagonal streaks were gone.  The phone looked almost good-as-new, except it couldn't do Wi-Fi.  My dad called it my "iPod un-Touch".  I resigned myself to this being my situation for the foreseeable future. Liquid damage instantly voids the iPhone warranty (standard practice for cell phones) and Apple would charge me $200 to replace it out-of-warranty. Not a bad deal, all things considered, but I don't have a whole lot of discretionary income at the moment, so not something I can take advantage of.  Besides, other than the Wi-Fi, the phone works.  Quite well.  So that's that.

But hold on just a second...

Fast-forward to last week. I had periodically been doing a full shutoff-reboot of the phone, just to see if that would do anything. Some websites had reported seeing lost wireless functionality return after doing this, but it never did anything for me.

Except, this time, it did!

So now my formerly-aquatic iPhone even has WiFi back. Well... kind of.  The range is really limited, and kind of unpredictable (making me more confidant the "scorched" part was, in fact, the antenna). But hey, if I'm sitting 5 feet from the router, it stays pretty reliable!  ;-)

So there you have it. A testament to Apple's engineering team... or my ineptitude. Take your pick.

F-Bombs

Let's compare:

Dick Cheney:  "Go fuck yourself."

Joe Biden:  "This is a big fucking deal."

Hmm...

Valve Announces Steam For Mac OS X

(Image blatantly taken from the WIRED story)

Awesome. Some reading material:

WIRED story: "Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac"

Valve Press Release

Valve Software has announced that next month they will be releasing a Mac client for their popular online video game store and community portal, Steam. With this, comes the news that they have also ported their substantial catalog of games, as well as the Source engine running most of them (as well as a fair number of other 3rd-party games)

There's plenty of info in the two links above, but here's a few takeaways:

• All Source-powered Valve games you've already bought will carry over to either platform - no need to re-buy anything!  (Valve is also encouraging other developers who sell their games on Steam to do the same)
• Games that use the relatively-new "Steam Cloud" services will be able to sync game settings, save files an the like across platforms.
• Full multiplayer compatibility.
• All future Valve games (starting with Portal 2, which looks great) will be simultaneous releases on Windows, OS X, and Xbox 360. (still no love for the PS3)

This ought to make things rather interesting.  Back in early 2005, I got a Mac as an early high school graduation gift. It made a lot of sense - I was going to film school in the fall, and I needed a laptop for college. Obviously, that machine needed to be something that I could run Final Cut Pro on.  I had been a gamer all through high school, even attending QuakeCon the previous year. But if I wanted to keep playing Counter-Strike at Syracuse, I would need to lug up my old self-built PC tower.

However, the specs of my new PowerBook were tantalizing. Admittedly, the 1.67Ghz PowerPC G4 wasn't anything to write home about.  The weaknesses of the PPC had become so severe that Apple would announce their big Intel switch later that very year.  But the hard drive and (upgraded) RAM were respectable, the screen was gorgeous, and the ATI Radeon 9700M graphics card really caught my eye.

It was a generation behind the current cutting edge... but this was a laptop.  And it had as much video memory as my desktop GPU!  I tested a couple games that did have Mac versions (Quake 3 and the demo for Unreal Tournament 4) and they ran pretty well, for a laptop.  Keep in mind, back then very few laptops actually had decent GPU's, unless you were talking about Alienware.  But even lower-end Macs always had dedicated graphics cards, simply because they needed the graphical horsepower to run the Aqua GUI smoothly, especially on anemic G4 chips. It was a real shame I couldn't just fire up some Half-Life on this shiny new machine...

Of course, a few years later a fortuitous run-in with Applecare would net me an even shiner new Intel-based MacBook Pro. It had even better hardware than my now-ancient PC tower, so I wasted little time in installing XP on a Boot Camp partition, and being only a reboot away from gaming bliss.  Of course, the rebooting does get to be annoying...  I'm looking forward to April!

This is also pretty fascinating from a game-industry standpoint.  There are now two major long-time PC developers (Blizzard and Valve) dedicated to simultaneous PC/Mac releases. (id Software fell off that wagon with Doom 3 and Quake 4, but looks to be coming back with Rage? We'll see.) And the Source engine - quite popular among both developers and mod teams - can now, presumably, seamlessly target either DirectX or OpenGL.

Interesting. Very interesting.

Canada's Olympic Win... and Pittsburgh

I'll be honest, I've never really followed hockey.  But even I was drawn to the drama of this showdown between the U.S.A. and our "neighbors to the north."  This wasn't just about a game, or a medal.  This was flat out national pride on the line!

However, I found the fallout in my digital circle of friends rather amusing.  I live in Pittsburgh, and while Americans are mighty proud... Sidney Crosby is a Penguin.  In a town famous (infamous?) for fanatical devotion to its sports teams, this made for some interesting facebook-reading post-game:

(click the image to view large enough to actually read!)