It wouldn’t be ethical, legal or really even feasible, but I wonder how long it would take for law enforcement to aggressively reform their methods and attitudes if some percentage of the calls they were sent to were “secret shopper” style tests involving important people.

Dispatched for reports of suspicious activity or drug dealing and it’s some relative of the DA/mayor/governor etc. Make it part of the hiring process that relatives need to accept they might be unexpectedly used for that purpose and if they decline it hurts or prevents the official or officer’s chances of being hired. Surely if there isn’t any expectation of being abused there should be no concerns with having engagements with the police.

I’m sure in practice they’d work out secret handshakes and markers to identify themselves but maybe that could be exploited by the public like some do with police supporter bumper stickers.

EDIT: I recognize this didn’t happen in the US, adjust specific terms and concepts as needed to localize :)

Tesseract is one tool that can do it.

It’s an entirely different kind of IP theft, altogether.

There’s a cool rework by of this by Chilly Gonzales with a sample from Rocky Balboa (2006)

What am I missing that’s mildly infuriating? If it’s because it’s shown backwards it would make sense to show the mounting hardware & location if the front side looks the same as the back.

Will need to check out more of their stuff. AFAIK I’ve only heard, but really liked, “Appetite.”

Because of all the bullshit with subsidies etc. intended for improving broadband infrastructure being abused, my dream is:

• All the poles & lines (and access rights to them) are nationalized and then opened up for individual ISPs to service. Current ISP exclusivity contracts/agreements should be dissolved. Let them actually compete for customers with price, features and customer service.
• The government should also offer tax-funded baseline connectivity to everyone since it’s effectively impossible to live in modern society without internet access. The provided speeds must be sufficient for a typical bloated framework-script-heavy site, all (meta)data/packets should be considered constitutionally protected private info not able to be monitored/scraped/sold.
• Use building out and supporting the above as a useful jobs program instead of more military adjacent stuff.

It’s not web based but MKVToolNix GUI is pretty user friendly. I haven’t dug into it too deeply so I don’t know if it offers any automation tools to batch change files etc.

I suspect the repetitive titles were intentional to draw attention to how common this problem is and how vague the reason/justifications for it happening are.

I whipped up a basic page with PHP and just used XAMPP when I was on Windows. I recently switched my daily driver pc to linux and haven’t updated it yet. I only used it to save MP3s, videos at yt-dlp default “best available” settings, and a custom option that lists available video/audio formats where I can specify the ID to grab of each. No validation or sanity checking etc, just some switch statements and basic form functions.

main page

custom selection