Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K 252
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
Floating? (Score:2, Funny)
Don't weather ballons float around on high altitude winds?
Of course UFO's are often claimed to be weather baloons by the Govt. Is this a cover up?
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Interesting)
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, this is just an attempt to use crowdsourcing to find a bunch of lost weather balloons. In this day and age of gov't budget cutbacks, every balloon saved is a slightly bigger performance bonus at the end of the year...
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Funny)
There's no real point to it. Here's what they did: There are five balloons around, numbered from 1-5, and four balloons numbered from 7-10. Just like the prank where you release a 3 pigs, painted with a "1", "3", and "4" into a high school.
They're just 5 months early.
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what the agenda here is. It's surely not something as simple as finding how many people jump in their cars and go driving.
FTFA:
The DARPA Network Challenge is designed to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. "It is fitting for DARPA to announce this competition on the anniversary of the day that the first message was sent over the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet," said Dr. Regina E. Dugan, who made the announcement at a conference celebrating the anniversary. "In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems."
But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11.
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
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the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11
Frankly, I'm always paranoid about Slashdot getting turned up to 11.....
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But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11.
Paranoia my ass! Can't you read man? They want us to help them develop methods to control us!!!
The best thing we can do is take those balloons out or put up a lot of extra red balloons on test day.
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).
In that case, you've just broken their experiment.
But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)
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Re:Floating? (Score:4, Funny)
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Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.
OK, good to go -- I've just ordered three red weather balloons on eBay. :)
http://cgi.ebay.com/3-Red-Weather-Balloons-3-ft-30-Gram-Meteorological-New_W0QQitemZ120480696030QQcmdZViewItemQQimsxZ20091015?I [ebay.com]
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Regardless of what their intentions are, they're gathering data on us. How we react, how quickly, how cohesively, whether we react at all, etc. That's the thing about sociological experiments; they always produce data.
The data will be useful. It won't help bring a man to Mars, or fight terrorists in Afghanistan, but it will be useful in some way, shape or form. What they may then do is, based on the responses or lack thereof to this challenge, modify their next sociological experiment to hopefully attain a
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think there's a lot more to this.
What are they observing?
* Establish a geographically diverse target (10 balloons somewhere in the US).
* Observe how the organizers encourage people to work with them.
* Observe how they communicate with the search teams, coordinate efforts, and disseminate data.
This could be used to coordinate efforts between the military and civilians, should the need arise. In the sake of the great terrorism debate, what if a vehicle was known to be in the US, and it is expected to detonate a nuke on US soil. This kind of crowdsourcing would have a better chance of finding it than putting everyone in the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the road hunting.
Unfortunately, this is probably organized towards the handling and neutralization of civilian unrest inside the CONUS. It would:
* Identify civilians who can organize large groups to neutralize them.
* Identify communications routes that would need to be neutralized.
* Identify intelligence breaches that could be used by the dissidents.
So, it's all in how much you trust our government. Would they recruit the civilian population to assist in a time of need? Would they neutralize dissidents during a period of civil unrest?
I'm fairly confident I'm not on the stage 1 list (neutralize in the first hour), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the stage 2 list. I'd suspect the organizers who aren't LEO or government will be on the stage 1 list. The followers will be on the stage 2 list.
Who wants to play the game now?
If I happen to spot a red balloon, with a couple spooks camped out below it, I'm going to plink at it with a BB gun. :)
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The "trawling for information" idea is an easy one. Set a Google News alert for it. You can specify it to provide notifications for other things like website updates. I've already gotten a few, but they were all talking about the contest, and how it could be subverted. :)
I'm just trying to figure out where to buy an 8 foot red balloon. Since I already know the risks associated with being identified as a contestant, I'd rather play the other side, and give people a false target. I
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I'm sure one or two are near traffic cameras or other CCTV cameras. It would be interesting to see if anyone tries to break into them to find these balloons...
This is also an excellent social experiment. It would be impossible to find them all by yourself, so you would have to work together... but who do you trust?
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I always love this idea.
CCTV cameras don't feed into a centralized computer somewhere. Hell, in many commercial buildings with more than one tenant, even they don't share camera feeds.
Even traffic light cameras feed to the organization that installed them. Some news stations have their own cameras, and frequently city transportation offices have their own.
I'd love to get access to "the place" that has all the cameras, but that's yet another myth
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Re:Floating? (Score:4, Funny)
Or maybe each of the ten weather balloons may or may not have a live six-year-old boy riding in it, and DARPA full well remembers what happened last time with just *one*.
Solomon
I sense. I sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
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OK, I'm happily joining in here from Germany!
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry to disappoint, but this is only 10 Luftballons.
I think you were looking for 99 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons [wikipedia.org]
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we'd better start in roswell, usa.
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh great....don't fall for it everyone! (Score:3, Funny)
Not another balloon hoax!
Re:Oh great....don't fall for it everyone! (Score:5, Funny)
Help me find them! (Score:2, Interesting)
Lets discuss a serious entry? (Score:2)
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Most major roadways (at least in my moderately sized city of around 4 million) have traffic cameras all up and down them that are freely accessible. I'm guessing this would be a valid strategy - run image analysis on all of the traffic cams you can get your hands on for red balloons.
Wouldn't surprise me if this is what the purpose of the contest is - to get someone to develop this software for them.
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Not sure how you figured this as a 'serious' entry...
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True, but $40k is enough to make some folks who do have access curious.
One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, only one person wins the prize, even though it will almost certainly require the effort of an online community? This sounds like a breeding ground for betrayal.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that's the actual goal of that challenge. Not how people will find the balloons but how people will cooperate together if there's only a single prize to be won.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I was thinking more about that. A public online community will help you find all the real coordinates quickly, but there will undoubtedly be a lot of *fake* coordinates mixed in.
I think the real challenge won't be in finding the balloons, it will be in validating and filtering out all the non-balloons.
Re:One person? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Luckily for the project, both you and the GP are the rare members of society who, like myself, think of deviant ways to hack the system.
Most people are sheep.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Insightful)
The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.
That is, it's not about disparate strangers coordinating quickly, as might be useful in, say, a natural crisis like an earthquake or hurricane or missing child, but networks of social trust. If they just wanted to see how fast people could put together an ad hoc information network, I bet they'd get less wrong answers submitted and the right answer submitted much sooner if there were no prize involved - people would be free with the information because it would just be a game. There'd be no incentive for deception or secrecy.
I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Insightful)
Betrayal is also a function of who makes up the ad hoc network, that is whether it is truly spontaneous and ad hoc among the general population or whether it arises within an existing network. My bet is that if the prize is won at all, it will be within a network that already exists. The general population is too diffuse and unorganized to gather all the data and organize and filter it.
Therefore you can examine various groups and their characteristics and determine the odds of betrayal. For example, if the B-tards decide to go after the prize, the odds of betrayal are essentially unity. (But their self generated noise level would probably prevent them from winning.) If the Boy Scouts decide to do so, the odds of betrayal go way down. (Bit I don't know if the Boy Scouts have the reasonably centralized and connected communications network need to make this work.)
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It probably is some kind of social experiment to see who people trust over the Internet and under time pressure.
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Why would they need to manufacture an event to do that?
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
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While the internet public at large is attempting to mobilize to find the red balloons, DARPA will be monitoring the 'net attempting to stay on top of an unknown number of organizations comprised of an unknown number of individuals coordinating using unknown protocols and communications channels. This will be valuable information similar to finding and shutting down terrorist cells. Expect the front-runner group to be infiltrated by a covert DARPA agent and some key people to "disappear" until after the dead
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- Prepare, plan and hypothesize ahead of time - not really possible with a non-manufactured event.
- Create a unique situation, making the experiment easier by reducing the amount irrelevant information that will be turned up looking for info relating to the event.
- As others have said, this has a social experiment aspect to it as well - who will win with such a big incentive for betrayal? A small well-organized group, or an aggregator site that grabs loads of possibly usele
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If the problem is who gets the prize..
And that's the stumbling block, preventing widespread collaboration..
Set up your collective to donate to a charity, or the EFF, or Cowboy Neal... or something worthwhile.
Go on.. it'll be more fun than a LUG meeting.
How hard can it be to mobilise tens of thousands of Nerds..
(Unless its really windy.. these suckers arent getting to Australia.. so I cant help..)
They should release 99 luftballoons! Sorry. Unecessary 80's flash back there..
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Indentifying the Balloons (Score:5, Funny)
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Now, that was funny!
Not Enough Red Ballons (Score:5, Funny)
There should have been 99.
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Only 547,040. I'm the last one.
This can't end well. (Score:3, Funny)
A big red balloon with guys waiting around it all day, yeah, that's not going to freak anyone out.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html [cnn.com]
Hmmm - strategies and counter-strategies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.
What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?
What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?
Possible strategy (Score:3, Interesting)
Social media test? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
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I was thinking exactly the same thing.
Otherwise is seems so completely fucking pointless.
Project Luft Balloon.
Re:Social media test? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Warrants aren't really necessary when you're dealing with freely available public API's for the services in question. It's public speech, not private property.
If you were coordinating the information on your personal website behind a secure login, you would probably have a valid argument, otherwise you've really got nothing to get riled up over.
Re:Social media control test? (Score:3, Interesting)
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The beauty of this is that it could be a lot of things. If some American official someday leaks "this is why we really did this" the odds that I would discount spin can't be over 50%, which relegates this to a quasi-permanent bucket of unknowability. It's a rare thing when a lightening bolt momentarily catches the men behind the curtain with a ruse in flagrante. The Soviets had their washer microphone. The Americans had the thermohaline undersea acoustic channel (where I live, a couple of decades ago, a
Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:4, Funny)
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I'd say it's a bargain. Think about all the driving and snacks, hell, maybe even consumer gadget purchases this contest will inspire. Those have gotta be worth something to the economy. Maybe the next stimulus package should be a scavenger hunt.
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:4, Informative)
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My guess: half of a high-tech vs low-tech contest (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is, we're seeing half of a contest pitting high-end defense technology vs the "stupid cheap easy" solution.
SCENE: PENTAGON STAFF ROOM
Mil Contractor: "And so you see, with our latest satellite imaging systems, we can search and pinpoint the location of a human-sized target object within 10 days for a nation the size of the US or Russia."
Dumb General: "Wow. We need to spend some billions on this."
Smart General: "Pff. I bet you could do better by plain old "boots on the ground" spywork. You'd need a pretty big network of observers though..."
Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."
at least, this is a good enough story that I *hope* it's what's going on...
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I didn't know that. That's bad. Imagine all the four star generals sitting around twiddling their thumbs going, "If only we could bomb Russia, we'd get that last fucking star!"
The Purpose (Score:4, Informative)
To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.
Re:The Purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
Bloons (Score:2, Funny)
Using satellite imagery (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a [digitalglobe.com] sample image. [digitalglobe.com] Yes, that's from orbit.
Each satellite images about 1 million km^2 per day, so in 250 days, they can image the entire planet at high resolution. But they'll do the populated parts of the US more often (they can aim the cameras for each pass), so they will pick up many of the balloons.
Microsoft Bing is buying all the data, so it's going on line. The data rate is about 50GB/hour. Start programs looking for red dots.
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So pray tell... how are you going to filter out every single red VW bug from your data without filtering out your balloons too??? This is a way bigger problem than a satellite can handle... you have to shoot your cameras up, not down.
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It will narrow it down very much from near infinite places to go look, to some tens of thousands of places.
And cars are quite easy to filter: they are on roads. Not likely those balloons are going to be on top of a road. Give those red spots lower priority.
Although heavy on subterfuge... (Score:2, Interesting)
Men who stare at goats. Jedi warrior training... (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought that the mind / clairvoyance study had been axed. I see they are reviving it.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/overture/themenwhostareatgoats/themenwhostareatgoats-clip1_480p.mov [apple.com]
Psych/Mob experiment (Score:2)
If you have a central clearing house, the data can be stolen by others. If the submitted data is kept private, then the participants need to have a high level of trust in the central organizers. You also need to be resistant to spoofing from other parties, including potentially organized efforts by other groups trying to win the prize.
My b
Red40k.com (Score:2)
Kudos, DARPA (Score:2)
With all that money you've appropriated, what better way to waste^H^H^H^H^H spend it then on a tribute to Lamorisse [wikipedia.org].
Would an airplane be of any use? (Score:2)
If some folks want to pile into a 172 and go flying around San Diego County/Southern California/anywhere else we can get to from here armed with binoculars and split the cost 4 ways I'm game. I'm not sure what our chances of actually spotting anything would be though.
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A few more datapoints here: We can reasonably fly anywhere between 1000 and 12,500'. We can fly anywhere between 60kts and 180kts depending on what airplane we want to fly (those are just the ones I reasonably have fast access to).
Bring good binoculars, fly high, and scan as much ground as possible as fast as possible? Fly just high enough that we can recognize weather balloons?
Anyone got a red weather balloon or red object of equivalent size we can set up in a field somewhere soon and experiment with? We c
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Not at all. The Cessna 210 I usually fly has a useful load around 1500lbs. 90 gallons of fuel weighs 540lbs. That leaves 960lbs left for flight crew and passengers. I weigh 165. That means I could take myself plus 3 265lb slashdotters. And that's just a Cessna 210. There are much bigger planes.
Why all the marketing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else noticed DARPA's recent major marketing/publicity campaign? There is now this well-publicized balloon hunt. There was the televised robotic vehicle challenge. Even very recently, DARPA was central to the plot of an episode [cbs.com] of NCIS: LA. Its research efforts [scientificamerican.com] have been given very visible press in magazines such as Scientific American. (Look here [scientificamerican.com] for another recent SA article about DARPA research.) DARPA has also been featured twice on 60 Minutes in the past few months. And, it now has quite a fo [facebook.com]
Decoys (Score:5, Funny)
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From the sumary:-
and accompanied by DARPA representatives
Which means unless you have a few spare DARPA staff hanging around you might have problems with the authenticity part...
Re:Decoys (Score:5, Informative)
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Which means unless you have a few spare DARPA staff hanging around you might have problems with the authenticity part...
"I am government man, come from the government, the government has sent me." - random decoy dude
Now prove he is not DARPA staff.
Simple Winning Coalition (Score:2)
Well what you want to do is find a group of other people who have located the other balloons and agree to pool your info in exchange for shares of the prize. Importantly nothing in the rules prevents
Time to panic!!!! (Score:2)
It's obvious now that the government not only knows that aliens exist, but that it also knows they are large, rotund, crimson and warlike - and they're on their way!!!
Don't you love paying taxes? (Score:2)
You know, at first, I thought this was going to be some valid balloon chase, where we would be finding balloons that had actually been released into the atmosphere, until I read "...and accompanied by DARPA representatives.". Er, how is this a balloon "hunt"?!? What the fuck is the point in finding balloons DARPA already knows the location to?
Gee, I just love paying taxes for shit like this. Makes paying thousands for finding the gazillionith obscenely-large-prime-number(EFF) look like a Warren Buffet in
Geek license suspended! (Score:2)
Er, how is this a balloon "hunt"?!? What the fuck is the point in finding balloons DARPA already knows the location to?
Your geek license has been suspended, please hand over your card at the door. You will be eligible to regain your license in 8 weeks upon passing a new Imagination Test.
Decoys anyone? (Score:2)
Strange that nobody has mentioned it yet, but I guess it's a good bet that there will be hundreds of red balloons rising on Dec 5. Besides the obvious "because we can" motive, if you are after the prize money, it makes sense to launch a few decoys the location of which is only known to yourself. Even a few of those and the contest is no longer about spotting the balloons, but about picking the correct 10 out of the confirmed sightings.
It would have made a lot more sense to launch the balloons before announc
That may be... (Score:2)
Red40k.com will be setup to take balloon location submissions and paypal $3000 to the first email address associated with a correct balloon location, if we win the $40k.
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Absolutely, 6 months later.
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well let the spam begin!
Dear Robbie.h.wilson,
Hello, I represet a cosortum which has found nine of the baloons in question. If your baloon is the tenth baloon, you to win $5714.28 ! Please to visit this website and enter your accounts infomations for your electronic payment. http://balooncontest.darpa.gov.example.com/ [example.com] We look forward to hearing from you. We all want to win our $5714.28
Bingo! (Score:2)
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