Those are, as you noted, audio-less WEBM files, not MP4s (though it may have automatically transcoded a video into that format). It’s essentially a more-efficient form of animated GIF, not really a video in the sense that non-technical end-users likely think of it.

Yeah I agree. It’s tough, but the people responsible for this need to be held accountable. But the only way that can ever happen is if victims report the crime.

Part of it may be, as another comment mentioned, that reporters often are not believed or taken seriously by police and immigration authorities, and in some cases can even end up penalised. A hard institutional change to make, and I don’t have a lot of faith it can be done (police being what they are and overwhelmingly standing up for those with power at the expense of those without). But even worse, even if the change was made here, communicating to victims that they will be safe reporting to authorities in Australia (especially if they might be used to authorities being likely corrupt and unhelpful where they’re from). One thing that might help is if we had a guaranteed amnesty from any honest mistakes in the working holidayer’s visa status if they contact immigration to allege wrongdoing (with the amnesty holding even if their complaint is not upheld).

I also hope Indonesian authorities crack down hard on any Indonesian residents doing false marketing on behalf of these predatory businesses.

Connections
Puzzle #491
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Skill 97/99
Uniqueness 1 in 1,611

More people exist who cannot drive than who have to drive due to disability. Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly ableist.

Oh that’s clever! I didn’t even notice that red herring!

But I’ve taken to using copilot but default most days, which really helps reduce the chance of getting caught by red herrings.

Lemmy uses for its markup a language called “markdown”. It’s the same one used on Reddit, Stack Exchange, as well as in a modified form on Discord.

Markdown requires two line breaks to define a new paragraph to allow you to break your paragraphs across multiple lines, a useful ability to have with writing that’s going to be tracked by Git, or displayed on some old-school text editors. It also gives you the ability to separate between two paragraphs
and one paragraph with a line break in it.
Which is a useful thing to be able to do in some circumstances, like when writing poetry, or sharing your results in !dailygames@lemmy.zip. To enter a “line break”, end a line with two spaces and then press enter only once.

I don’t think Lemmy does take MP4 files. Where have you seen that?

Or if you want, something like SoundCloud or (from a quick Google—I don’t know how reliable this is) Vocaroo.

Catbox isn’t ideal because a lot of countries and ISPs block it, but it allows uploading of arbitrary files. MP3 files should work fine.

Connections
Puzzle #490
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Counterpoint: ‘ABC “centrist” political boomer comedy written by Rob Sitch’ could also describe Utopia, and everyone here is (quite rightly) saying that’s an excellent show.

Of course he fucking won’t. If we did decide to become a republic, it would be us declaring that we no longer care what he says, so if he did try to stand in the way it wouldn’t have any effect.

Not that I see it happening any time soon. Australia’s constitution is notoriously difficult to change; it’s politically impossible to change it without bipartisan support, and the current Liberal National Coalition is the furthest right they’ve ever been.

I forget, what was the purple? (It’s already Sunday here so I can’t see it anymore.)

I mainly know that definition because it’s related constantly in Wheel of Time.

Connections
Puzzle #489
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threat to up-and-coming social networks

This is the serious danger. The established guys welcome legislation, especially if it’s onerous to comply with but doesn’t actually affect the bottom line too much. That essentially locks in the likes of Facebook and Google and ByteDance who can easily afford to comply, while making it harder for smaller social networks to compete.

Maybe the computer platform developers need to introduce some sort of anonymised age/identify verification API

Interesting. If it were a setting locked behind a parental control password, that might make it much harder for kids to lie about, which is an interesting idea. I had previously suggested that, in the vein of the UK’s earlier-proposed “go to the pub to get age verified”, we could have the government themselves do the age verification, but do it with blinded digital signatures to preserve anonymity of the user from the government—the government would know that you have an age verified token, but not where you used it.

But I quite like this idea of building it in to the platform itself, instead. The user’s device would, when parental controls set up the user’s age, created a signed token verifying the age using a signing key which is itself signed by three platform vendor. Or, alternatively, they could at that point in time send an API request to the platform vendor to sign their age verification token (blinded), which the device would send (unblinded) along with any account creation requests, or at some other stage when age verification is necessary.

Connections
Puzzle #488
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For a long time, I used a Raspberry Pi running stock standard Raspbian with an external USB drive connected. I just Googled around how to set up a Samba file share, and that’s all I used. Didn’t really see the value in any media-specific software, myself. For me that was secondary to the LAMP stack web server, anyway.

Biggest thing I would recommend is making sure you have, from day one, a full backup of your data and any configuration necessary to read the data.

If you’re thinking about wanting access away from your home network, my recommendation would be to do it by also setting up a VPN and connecting to your local network, rather than something that is directly exposed to the Internet. That is, unless you want to be able to share files with other people at ease.

Ah yeah. You pronounce it like “sue” instead of like “so”? That’s certainly how one would think it’s pronounced in English, based on its spelling.

Oh right, yeah. That was a sneaky one.