T-Mobile appears to be blocking some iPhone users from turning on Private Relay

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile appears to be blocking some iPhone users from enabling iCloud Private Relay, a feature that lets you hide the websites you visit from third parties, according to a report from 9to5Mac.

@TMobileHelp What the hey? Why are you keeping us from using @Apple ‘s #icloud private relay? pic.twitter.com/EtdxkVSpWh

— Jon Guidry (@guidryjd) January 10, 2022

Private Relay is still in beta in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, and it isn’t turned on by default. You have to go into your iPhone’s settings to switch it on, which is where some T-Mobile customers have noticed a strange message popping up. As shown in the above tweet, the user is presented with the message, “Your cellular plan doesn’t support iCloud Private Relay. With Private Relay turned...

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Why Take-Two wants to pay nearly $13 billion for the maker of FarmVille

Take-Two wants to bring its franchises to mobile, and Zynga can help. | Image: Rockstar Games

Take-Two Interactive just announced its intent to buy FarmVille developer Zynga for $12.7 billion in what could be the biggest acquisition in video game history. It’s an absolutely massive deal; to put it in perspective, the acquisition would be $5 billion more than Microsoft’s $7.5 billion purchase of the parent company of _Skyrim_maker Bethesda Softworks. You could throw in the money Disney paid for Lucasfilm and still have cash left over.

So what is Take-Two getting for its money? Yes, big Zynga games like FarmVille, Words With Friends, and High Heels! will join Take-Two’s own roster of franchises that includes Grand Theft Auto, NBA 2K, and Civilization. But perhaps more importantly, Take-Two will now be able to use Zynga’s expertise...

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Uber is the latest popular app to bail on the Apple Watch

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Uber has quietly shut down its Apple Watch app, with the software now showing a message that instructs people to “please switch to the Uber mobile app.” The company is “no longer supporting the Apple Watch app,” according to the text, which ends with Uber apologizing for any inconvenience caused by the app’s discontinuation. There’s also a sad face emoji to drive that sentiment home.

As noted by MacRumors, Uber hasn’t yet removed the Apple Watch app from its App Store listing, where it still gets its own tab and screenshots. Presumably, that will all be history once the company releases its next update to the iOS app. _The Verge_has reached out to Uber for more details, and if I had to guess, the company is likely to cite low usage as...

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SEC charges ‘decentralized’ Amazon Web Services competitor with scamming investors

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged the would-be creator of a “decentralized” Amazon Web Services alternative with scamming investors out of millions. The SEC announced a complaint on Friday against Australian citizen Craig Sproule, the CEO of cryptocurrency startup Crowd Machine, which promised a global cloud computing network built on users’ computers. In reality, Sproule allegedly sent $5.8 million to South African gold mines as investors’ cryptocurrency tokens became worthless.

An SEC complaint says that Sproule collected at least $33 million through an initial coin offering (or ICO) to build a decentralized “Crowd Computer” platform, which he claimed was “battle-tested” by Fortune 500 companies. He compared the...

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Europol ordered to delete petabytes of data not clearly linked to crime

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union, has been ordered to delete a huge store of personal data gleaned from police agencies in EU member states over the past six years. The deletion order comes from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), a watchdog body overseeing EU institutions’ compliance with privacy and data protection legislation.

EDPS has given Europol a year to review its databases and then remove any data that cannot be linked to a criminal investigation.

The total volume of data stored in Europol’s systems amounts to around 4 petabytes according to reporting in The Guardian — equivalent to hundreds of billions of pages of printed text — and includes data on at least a quarter of a million current...

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How not to tweet out Golden Globe Awards

Photo by CHRIS DELMAS/AFP via Getty Images

If the controversy surrounding the Golden Globe Awards didn’t already push the show into irrelevancy, announcing this year’s winners via bizarre, out-of-touch tweets sure did (via TechCrunch). As a refresher, the Golden Globes was barred from airing on NBC following a Los Angeles Times investigation that uncovered possible racism and bribery within the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that doles out the awards.

Nowhere in these deeply chaotic Golden Globe tweets do they even mention the projects people are winning for pic.twitter.com/4Tt5CHaojE

— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) January 10, 2022

A physical event, consisting only of a small number of HFPA members, still took place behind closed doors without...

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Razer no longer claims its Zephyr mask uses ‘N95-grade’ filters

Razer

Razer’s popular $100 Zephyr mask isn’t a replacement for PPE (because it _isn’t_PPE), but its announcement of the Zephyr Pro last week spurred a surge of claims that the company had overstated the masks’ protection. Razer responded by scrubbing every instance of “N95-grade” from the mask’s product page late last week (via PCMag).

Previously, Razer used N95 in multiple places to describe the filtration and efficacy of its replaceable filters, which were referred to as “N95-grade” because of their 99 percent bacterial filtration efficiency (BFE). Razer now refers to them as “air purification filters.” While Razer claims that testing showed its filters meet a 95 percent particulate filtration efficiency (PFE), the entire mask (not just the...

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Apple says App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

App Store developers have earned more than $260 billion since the store launched in 2008, according to a Monday press release from Apple. Apple said last January that developers had earned more than $200 billion since the launch of the App Store, so the new figure shared Monday indicates developers earned $60 billion in 2021. The iPhone maker also said that spending on the App Store between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve in 2021 grew by a double-digit amount, though it didn’t specify exactly what that number might be.

While the new numbers suggest that the App Store continues to be a big moneymaker, developer unhappiness with the store is high at the current moment. Many developers have taken issue with what they see as restrictive...

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Apple quietly discontinues the Beats Pill Plus, its last battery-powered speaker

Apple appears to have quietly discontinued the Beats Pill Plus, with the portable wireless speaker no longer appearing on either Apple or Beats’ websites, as spotted by 9to5Mac.

Originally released in 2015, the Pill Plus was the first speaker released under the Beats brand since the music company was purchased by Apple for $3 billion back in 2014. A more refined version of the original Beats Pill speaker, the Pill Plus was an Apple-ified version of the original product, with sleeker monochromatic color options and the addition of a Lightning port for charging.

Apple and Beats would continue to go on to build out Beats’ lineup of headphones over the intervening half-decade, with products like recent Beats Fit Pro or Powerbeats earbuds,...

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23andMe gets FDA clearance for prostate cancer risk test

Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

Genetics testing company 23andMe received Food and Drug Administration clearance for its prostate cancer risk test, the company announced today. It’s 23andMe’s third clearance for a cancer risk report — the company also has tests for genes that predict breast and colorectal cancer risk.

The test screens for a specific mutation on the HOXB13 gene linked with an increased risk of developing prostate cancer. Men with the mutation, the G84E variant, have around a three-fold higher chance of developing prostate cancer than men without, one study found. Around one in 70 people of European descent have the variant, according to a statement from 23andMe.

The prostate cancer risk report is not yet available to 23andMe customers, the company...

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Moxie Marlinspike has stepped down as CEO of Signal

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike is stepping down as CEO of the company, he announced in a blog post on Monday. Executive chairman Brian Acton will serve as acting CEO until a replacement is found.

“Every day, I’m struck by how boundless Signal’s potential looks, and I want to bring in someone with fresh energy and commitment to make the most of that,” Marlinspike wrote. “I now feel very comfortable replacing myself as CEO based on the team we have.”

The company has met with several CEO candidates “over the last few months,” Marlinspike wrote, but the search remains ongoing.

Founded in 2014, Signal has grown into one of the most trusted and robust apps for encrypted messaging. The service has more than 40 million monthly users and is...

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Today I learned about the Shazam Chrome extension

Shazam is available in yet another place. | Image: Shazam

Today I learned about Shazam’s Chrome extension, which seems to have been out for about a month and can help you identify music playing on the webpage you’re viewing. Having the app directly in Chrome could help you figure out what song is playing in an ad, trailer, or livestream without having to mess around with your phone. (Thanks to 9to5Google for finding and pointing out this nifty tool.)

The extension does everything I’d expect it to — you go to the tab where music is playing, press the Shazam button, and it’ll try to identify the song. If it succeeds, it’ll give you a link to the song in Apple Music (serving as your occasional reminder that Apple owns Shazam). It’ll also keep track of the songs you’ve identified in a running list...

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Greenhouse gas emissions jumped in 2021, despite Biden’s climate pledges

Trucks are seen outside the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, California, November 17, 2021.  | Photo by APU GOMES/AFP via Getty Images

After falling more sharply than at any point since World War II in 2020, US greenhouse gas emissions rebounded from the pandemic in 2021 — likely growing faster than the nation’s economy did last year, according to a preliminary analysis by research firm Rhodium Group. The rise in planet-heating pollution risks putting the US’s climate goals further out of reach, Rhodium warns.

Greenhouse gas emissions rose 6.2 percent last year compared to 2020, Rhodium found. That’s slightly higher than initial estimates for economic growth in 2021: a 5.7 percent rise in GDP, according to Goldman Sachs.It’s the latest evidence that as countries return to their old, polluting habits, the pandemic will do little to slow down climate change in the...

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Apple Watch Series 8 may not have a body temperature sensor after all

The Series 7’s big update was a larger screen, which some found disappointing. | Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

If you were hoping for more exciting updates with the Apple Watch Series 8, you might have to start tempering expectations. While it was initially thought that the next-generation watch would have a body temperature sensor, it’s looking like that may not be the case after all.

A body temperature sensor for the Series 8 has been heavily rumored for some time now. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman — who has a pretty good track record when it comes to Apple rumors — first hinted a body temperature sensor was coming in June. That was echoed by The Wall Street Journal in September for a potential fertility feature. Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo also predicted a body temperature sensor that same month. All in all, there have been several solid...

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The FCC’s still in a stalemate a year into Biden’s presidency

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After nearly a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, new pressure is mounting on the Senate to expeditiously confirm nominations for positions at two of the federal government’s top agencies with control over broadband and data privacy.

In new statements issued on Monday, public interest groups Free Press Action and Fight for the Future called on the Senate Commerce Committee to fill the final seats at the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Both Gigi Sohn and Alvaro Bedoya, for the FCC and FTC, respectively, have finished their confirmation hearing processes, but neither nomination has received a final committee vote to set them up for floor confirmation.

“Americans are in desperate need of these consumer...

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GM finally bends the knee to California’s authority to set vehicle pollution rules

Photo by Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

General Motors isn’t done wiping the egg off its face from its misguided decision to back then-President Donald Trump’s failed effort to take away California’s ability to set fuel efficiency standards. In a letter sent to the state’s governor today, the automaker said it “recognizes California’s authority to set vehicle emissions standards” under the Clean Air Act and offers itself up an EV supplier for the state.

This represents a reversal of GM’s position three years ago, when it joined Fiat Chrysler and Toyota in supporting the Trump administration’s escalating battle with the state over vehicle emission rules.

a reversal of GM’s position from three years ago

Under the Clean Air Act, California has historically been allowed to set...

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LinkedIn to launch audio events later this month

LinkedIn is planning audio events | Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images

The live audio feature LinkedIn confirmed it was working on last year will reportedly debut later this month in beta as part of the company’s new events platform. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn said last March that it was doing “early tests to create a unique audio experience connected to your professional identity.” According to TechCrunch, LinkedIn’s all-virtual events platform will eventually include moderated panel-style discussions, roundtables, and fireside chats, with the formats left up to the event hosts.

The virtual events will be built on LinkedIn’s in-house tools, and event participants will potentially be able to converse with each other during and after the live events. The video version is expected to be available later in the...

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Snag a Sonos Beam 2 refurbished for almost $50 off

Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Last year, Sonos raised its prices for some of its most popular products due to the pandemic’s negative effect on the supply chain. But one of its latest releases, the Sonos Beam 2 soundbar in white, is almost $50 off when you buy refurbished at Best Buy right now. It comes with a 90-day warranty via Best Buy, and the Beam 2 includes all original accessories, including the soundbar itself, a power cable, an HDMI 2.0 cable, and a Sonos optical audio adapter.

Sonos touts Dolby Atmos as being the Beam 2’s big spec upgrade over the first-generation model. But my colleague Chris Welch stated in his review that Atmos shouldn’t be the sole reason why you buy it. It does feature wider, more expansive sound than the first iteration, but it’s the...

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Take-Two Interactive to acquire social game developer Zynga in $12.7 billion deal

Photo by Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Take-Two Interactive, the video game publisher that owns Rockstar and 2K Games, is set to acquire social game developer Zynga in a deal valued at $12.7 billion (via The Wall Street Journal). The cash and stock transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023, pending regulatory approval.

Take-Two Interactive’s acquisition of Zynga marks the company’s foray into the mobile game market. Take-Two is behind some of the most well-known game series, including Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, BioShock, Borderlands, and NBA 2K.

Take-Two’s $12.7 billion acquisition is one of the biggest in video game history

Meanwhile, Zynga has a pretty impressive portfolio of its own, defining a genre by planting some of its earliest games,...

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Honor announces the Magic V, its first foldable smartphone

Honor’s new foldable, the Magic V. | Image: Honor

Former Huawei sub-brand Honor has just announced its first foldable smartphone, the Honor Magic V. It uses a similar folding form factor to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold devices, combining a large internal folding display with a smaller external display that can be used while the device is folded. Today is the foldable’s Chinese launch, where its price starts at ¥9,999 (around $1,569) for its 256GB storage model. It will go on open sale on January 18th.

The Magic V’s flagship feature, its internal folding screen, measures 7.9 inches from corner to corner, has a resolution of 2272 x 1984 with a refresh rate of 90Hz, and an aspect ratio of 10:9. That’s slightly bigger than Samsung’s Z Fold 3, whose internal screen is 7.6 inches with a...

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Leaked images show new Surface Go 3 matte black option

Microsoft appears to be readying a matte black version of the Surface Go 3. Leaked images from Aggiornamenti Lumia on Twitter show the 10.5-inch Surface Go 3 with a new matte black finish. The device looks identical to the Surface Go 3 otherwise, and the marketing images could suggest a launch is imminent.

Microsoft first launched the Surface Go 3 in September, with new Intel processor options. The Surface Go 3 can be configured with an Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y or Core i3-10100Y, upgrades over the Surface Go 2, which launched with a Pentium Gold 4425Y or a Core m3 chip. Little else changed with the Surface Go 3 over the previous model, though.

pic.twitter.com/q10SpNcK5o

— Aggiornamenti Lumia (@ALumia_Italia) January 10, 2022

LTE...

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Google says Apple ‘should not benefit from bullying’ created by iMessage lock-in

Apple’s Messages app distinguishes between iOS users (in blue) and Android users (in green). | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Google has accused Apple of benefiting from bullying as part of a deliberate strategy to make Android users into second-class citizens on the iPhone-maker’s iMessage service.

Apple’s messaging service includes a number of iOS-exclusive features, like Memoji, and famously turns texts from Android users green instead of the iOS-native blue. This has turned iMessage into a status symbol among US teens, creating peer pressure for young people to buy iPhones and sometimes leading to the ostracization of Android users. Showing up in a group chat as a green bubble has become, for some, a social faux pas.

A recent report in The Wall Street Journal highlighted this dynamic and prompted a response from both the Android team and Google’s head of...

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Samsung Display’s new QD-OLED panel can hit 1,000 nits brightness for improved HDR

Samsung Display’s new panels combine a self-emissive layer with quantum dots. | Image: Samsung Display

Key specs for Samsung Display’s new QD-OLED TVs have been revealed by third-party certification company SGS, the South Korean display manufacturer has announced. According to SGS the new panels are capable of hitting a brightness of 1,000 nits, and can display over 90 percent of the BT.2020 color space, which both represent substantial improvements over current OLED TVs on the market, otherwise known as WOLEDs.

The figures are in line with those that were put out by YouTube channel LinusTechTips (LTT) last week, in a video that was sponsored by Samsung Display. So it’s notable that these relatively impressive specs have now been validated by an independent certification company, albeit only partially.

LinusTechTip’s video compares the...

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Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta has an ‘assertive’ driving mode that ‘may perform rolling stops’

Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta lets you choose from three driving “profiles” that dictate how the car will react to certain situations on the road. Each mode, “Chill,” “Average,” and “Assertive,” varies in terms of aggressiveness (and potentially safety).

The feature was included in the October 2021 version 10.3 update, which was pulled two days after it started rolling out due to an issue with left turns at traffic lights. Tesla issued version 10.3.1 one day later, which still includes FSD profiles, as shown on the release notes posted on Not a Tesla App. Based on these notes, FSD profiles are described as a way “to control behaviors like rolling stops, speed-based lane changes, following distance and yellow light headway.”

I...

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Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

A developer appears to have purposefully corrupted a pair of open-source libraries on GitHub and software registry npm — “faker.js” and “colors.js” — that thousands of users depend on, rendering any project that contains these libraries useless, as reported by Bleeping Computer. While it looks like color.js has been updated to a working version, faker.js still appears to be affected, but the issue can be worked around by downgrading to a previous version (5.5.3).

The sabotaged versions cause applications to infinitely output strange letters and symbols

Bleeping Computer found that the developer of these two libraries, Marak Squires, introduced a malignant commit (a file revision on GitHub) to colors.js that adds “a new American flag...

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Victims of $200 million hack of BitMart crypto exchange still waiting to get their money back

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Cryptocurrency exchange BitMart promised a full reimbursement to the victims of the platform-wide $200 million hack, but some users still haven’t gotten their money back, according to a report from CNBC. Hackers made off with a variety of tokens on December 4th after using a stolen privacy key to gain access to one of BitMart’s hot wallets, otherwise known as a crypto wallet that’s connected to the internet.

Shortly after the incident, BitMart announced that it would use its own funding “to cover the incident and compensate affected users.” However, as _CNBC_reports, there are still several frustrated users who have yet to see their funds returned.

CNBC’s report details the experience of an Iranian refugee who says he stored $53,000 worth...

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Roblox shuts down Chinese mobile app to work on a new version

Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Roblox shut down the Chinese version of its iOS and Android app, also known as LuoBuLeSi, just five months after its release in China, according to a report from TechCrunch. The app, which was rolled out as a test in partnership with Chinese game company Tencent, will be rebuilt and potentially re-released in the country at a later date.

Roblox was officially taken off app stores on December 8th of last year, as announced on a translated version of Roblox China’s website. The post thanks players for testing out the app, and says that developers will “continue to optimize the product.”

“A number of important transitory actions are necessary” as devs rebuild the app

“Last year, we launched Roblox China also known as LuoBuLeSi with a...

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FAA lists 50 airports that will have 5G buffer zones ahead of C-band expansion

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

With AT&T and Verizon set to bring their 5G expansion live on January 19th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has chosen 50 airports (PDF) that will have buffer zones to help prevent flight disruptions (via Reuters and Wall Street Journal). Safety regulators picked airports based on location, traffic volume, and the likelihood of low visibility — all factors that may increase cancelations, delays, and diversions as both carriers roll out 5G C-band service.

As pointed out by the Wall Street Journal, notably busy airports like Chicago O’Hare, Orlando International, Los Angeles International, and Dallas / Fort Worth International are included on the list, along with airports in locations that are often impacted by foggy conditions,...

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The James Webb Space Telescope finishes unfolding its primary mirror, concluding major deployments

Photo by Northrop Grumman

The James Webb Telescope (JWST) has finished unfolding its primary mirror, ending a series of major deployments that took place over the span of two weeks. All of those deployments needed to go perfectly in order for the massive space telescope, which was decades in the making, to function.

The JWST has two primary mirror panels on either side that it will use to collect infrared light from the distant Universe. Each of them consists of three gold-plated hexagonal mirrors. Today, the rightmost wing was successfully unfurled, just one day after the leftmost wing was deployed. Now that both sides have been locked into place, this completes the array of 18 mirrors that makes up the 21-foot-wide JWST.

Congratulations, @NASAWebb! You are...

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Older Honda and Acura models hit by Y2K22 bug that resets clocks 20 years in the past

Owners of older Honda and Acura models started up their cars on New Year’s Day, only to find that their vehicles turned into time machines, according to a report from Jalopnik. Instead of seamlessly transitioning to the year 2022, cars’ clocks jumped 20 years back in time, and Honda says a fix could be months away.

My @Honda 2007 CR-V clock now useless in 2022; resets to 2:00 MST on 1/1/2002 after every startup. 32-bit signed integer overflow of yymmddHHMM? Would unsigned int fix it? This is time-critical. ;-) Thousands of us need a software update! pic.twitter.com/BSGCaxnMmx

— Sumner Hushing (@_______shushing) January 4, 2022

As spotted by Jalopnik, reports of digital clock issues have been popping up in HondaandAcura forums all...

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