Categories
albums

Sunday 8PM

Artist
Faithless
Realse Date
September 28, 1998

Faithless’ [discogs.com] Sunday 8PM [discogs.com] is the soundtrack of my first year at George Mason. I spent many, many hours in the Johnson Center listening to this album. I am actually shocked that I my love of this album survived that year, and that I don’t see calculus problems floating before my eyes when I listen to Sunday 8PM today.

See, they let me into Calculus 2 when I transferred to Mason, without even testing me. But it became very obvious the first day of class that I was out of my depth. By the end of the first week I was completely lost. It had been more than a year since I did any calculus and to say math was not a strong point would be an gross understatement. So. I went to the book store and I purchased the study guide and extra problems supplement for my textbook; Stewarts Calculus, 5th Edition. And I spent an hour or two nearly every evening of my first semester sitting at a table in the Johnson Center with those books and taught myself the first 5 or 6 chapters whatever was part of the Calculus 1 syllabus. I worked every single problem in the textbook, the study guide and the extra problems book, many more than once. I passed Calculus 2 and went on to Calc 3 and many more math classes that an degree from the engineering school required.

A lot of that time I spent working and reworking calculus problems in the Johnson Center was spent listening to Sunday 8PM.

I don’t remember where or why I bought the album. My theory is I must have got it at Plan 9 in Charlottesville sometime in late 1998 or early 1999. I probably bought it just because it was in the techno section and was in a funky cardboard case, not the normal jewel case most CDs came it. I was a sucker for funky packaging, I have a whole stack of mediocre dance and techno albums that came in strange packaging, including one that came in a water filled blaze orange package. I don’t why, I had too much money to spend, most of these purchases resulted in very little music I would actually listen to.

Faithless wasn’t new to me, I liked some of the songs off of their first album, Reverence [discogs.com]. “Salva Mae” and “Insomnia” were great club hits, and something I listened to ridding around C’ville with O███. But Sunday has a totally different feel. Less frantic, less driving, more melancholy and thoughtful, more lyrical and melodic.

“Bring my Family Back”, and “Take The Long Way Home” have some of Maxi Jazz’s best rapping across Faithless whole discography. “Hem of his Garment” features Dido, who is the sister of Faithless member Rollo, and the unbelievable “Why Go?” has lyrics by Boy George. These two songs foreshadow the heavy use of guest vocalists on many later Faithless albums. And both tracks push Sunday further into melancholy terratory.

Basically every song on the album is great. That is, of course, why I can listened to it end-to-end even 25 years after it’s release and why it’s on my list of favorite albums. “God Is a DJ” was the biggest hit on this album and is the most mainstream “dance” song on the album. The rest of the album leans into the trip-hop and downtempo more than anything on their previous album, and way more than anything you could hear in the the US at the time. This type of music just didn’t chart in the US. It’s less about the club and more about the chill hours after the club before the sun comes up.

I have every one of Faithless’ albums and I can, and do, listened to a lot of them. There are good songs and great songs on all of their albums, but Sunday 8PM is there best. Though, there is another album that lists Faithless as the artist that will make an appearance on this list, that album is a bit different and a story for another day. Sunday 8PM is the best Faithless album and if you’ve never heard it you should.

Listen to it on Apple Music:

Or Spotify:

Categories
quotes ranting

If they collect it they will sell it

I understand these companies want my data but you’re supposed to be sneakier and better at getting it than this by now.

Hope Corrigan, in Ubisoft’s launcher broke Steam games on Linux and Steam Deck, [pcgamer.com] on PC Gamer

It’s funny because companies are supposed to hide the fact they are collecting and monetizing our data. By now we all know they do it, but we are not supposed to talk about it. Pay no attention to the data collection behind the curtain.

One of the most insidious aspects of the internet is the “data economy”. User data is hovered up and hoarded by the giant internet companies we know and collected and traded quietly by companies most will never hear of. The harvesting and commercialization of our habits and our connections has become a billion dollar business. Allowing an economy to be built on this trade erodes our privacy more every day.

Even if you choose to live off of the internet or jump through the considerable hoops to keep your data out of the hands of the data brokers and social media they still likely know way more about you than you think. Short of living like Ted Kaczynski you can’t escape it.

Shadow profiles are created about you based on your phone number or email when your friends and associates allow companies to access their contact list. Every website you visit is telling the data brokers what you are reading, what you are buying, what you are searching for. Too many people still don’t realize that if you aren’t paying, you aren’t the customer, you are the product. And more and more even, if you are paying it’s not enough, your data is too valuable to just take your money. Capitalism is the beast which cannot be satisfied, profits must rise, if customer data is monetizable, monetized it shall be. If they collect it they will sell it.

Categories
quotes ranting

Nazi AIs are the logical conclusion of the internet

How are people surprised that AIs trained on the internet are spewing Nazi shit [gizmodo.com]? (Substitute any bigotry you want, any -ist or -phobic adjective you prefer) I mean, a Nazi AI [forbes.com] is not even a new thing… This is the internet people, don’t you know how it works?

Godwin’s law, short for Godwin’s law (or rule) of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 1.

Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]

Somehow people think that AI trained on the web is going to be like Project 2501? Elegant and articulate? Fuck off. Do they know about 4chan? Without content moderation on social media it would descend into some unholy offspring of The Human Centipede and Mien Kampf.

It’s amazing that we aren’t all gouging our eyes out like Dr. Weir on the Event Horizon. Hats off to all the underpaid, over traumatized [duckduckgo.com] content moderators out there. Take a Prozac and get some therapy.

Categories
albums

Meteora

Meteora [discogs.com], Linkin Park’s [discogs.com] sophomore album, is a rare beast: a second studio album, from a band that hit the big-time with their first album, that manages to surpass the earlier album. I listened to Linkin Park’s first album, Hybrid Theory [discogs.com] pretty much from it’s release in 2000. It was one of my favorite albums while sitting in my dorm or studying at the Johnson Center at George Mason.

Hybrid Theory is a good candidate for the album I listened to most in the CD drive on my first laptop, sitting in my dorm or in the Johnson Center while studying. I remember it being one of the first albums I ripped to my fancy MP3 player when I was going off to study in England. I purchased the MP3 player specifically because there was no way I was going to carry all those CDs around Europe but I’d have been dammed to go without my music. I was working at a small dot-com era consulting company while I was in school and I enlisted their entire fleet of desktops in the evening for a few weeks to rip my CDs to a central location.

And while I discovered much new music while I was in England, I spent many hours walking around the great and small cities of Europe or riding trains between those cities listening to my favorite albums, and Hybrid Theory was there with me the whole time.

By the time Meteora was released in March of 2003 I was back in the US. I had just started a new job, and I spent hours coding while listening to Meteora. It’s not the best thing to program to I must admit. Dance or Jazz works better, for me. But still, I was obsessed with Meteora for a long time when it came out, as I said it surpassed, for me at least, Hybrid Theory.

In the late 1990’s and the first few years of the 21st century my appreciation of heavy metal and related genres was at its peak. Having been in two relationships with people who liked heavy metal I had gotten deeper into many bands that I already knew; Metallica [discogs.com] of course, and Black Sabbath [discogs.com] and Rammstein [discogs.com] (including several live shows that are among the best I was ever at, one of my favorite bands of all time but I don’t listen to any of their albums end-to-end so much…), and more. I also discovered a host of heavy metal I would never have found, like Drain STH —an amazing all female band I would never have come across otherwise. But I was also a fan of much rap and hip-hip, like OutKast [confusion.cc], A Tribe Called Quest, and more, Eminem was at his zenith and both Slim Shady [discogs.com] and Marshall Mathers [discogs.com] were among my rips. So I was primed for nu metal when it came and I was still listening to a lot of heavy rock when Meteora was released.

Of all the nu metal or rap-rock or rock-rap bands of the early oughts Linkin Park was, by far, my favorite. Chester Bennington singing and Mike Shinoda rapping across Hybrid Theory and Meteora was the quintessential mix of these two genres. The success of their official mashups with Jay-Z should attest to how they were fully competent in their rap side. In any case, Linkin Park was the right mix for me.

After Meteora I was less enthused about their album output for along time. It was more straight rock and while I listed and there were many songs I liked, they never topped Meteora, or even Hybrid Theory for me. That is until their final album, One More Light [discogs.com]. I seriously debated if I should put One More Light on this list, I may still, but I think Meteora deserves to go first at least.

The suicide of Chester was a tragedy and the end of Linkin Park a sad thing. Too many music stars and stars in general are lost too early, to suicide and to drugs; to fast living and mental illness, to the intensity of fame. It should make you question the whole idea of fame and make you worried about the generations now and in the future growing up in front of the spotlight of social media, always on camera, always under scrutiny, always at the good, the bad and the truly ugly we as a society can throw at them. Our society chews up and spits out anyone who becomes famous, be it the work of days or years. Of course, some survive, a few even thrive, but fame is serial killer. Think on that while you listen below.

Listen on iTunes:

Or on Spotify:

Categories
ranting

The Perils of 2FA

Yesterday I was sitting at a cafe near my house with my daughter, I had just finished a video call with my boss —a weekly touchpoint since my boss sits in Amsterdam and I sit in Singapore— when a guy approached me and asked if he could use my iPad.

It took a minute to understand what he wanted and why. It seems that his phone screen had died, he could receive a call, using his headset to answer it, but he could to make a call or browse his phone in any way. He wanted to log into gmail to get a contact number and use my phone to call them.

Ok, no problem I’m happy to help a guy out. So I opened up Firefox in incognito mode and loaded gmail. After the username and password were entered a two factor authentication (2FA) page opened. Google wanted the guy to enter a code that could be found on a device already logged in… that would be his phone, the one he could not access.

Google gives options to allow you to try others ways of verifying yourself; receive an code by email (not helpful if you are trying to login to that email), receive a code by text (since his phone screen didn’t work he would not be able to see the code), and others. The only one that was an option for this guys was to receive a code by voice call. Luckily he could still receive as call and pick it up using his headset.

So after a couple of minutes he was able to login and get his friends contact. I let him use my phone to call and his friend called him back so they could coordinate whatever they needed.

Glad to help a person out. But the real story here, for me, is the perils of 2FA. All the security experts out there will tell you to enable 2FA for all your logins, all the major services on the internet offer 2FA: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, blah, blah, blah.

I’ve been using 2FA for about two decades, I believe I was issued my first physical RSA token back in 2003. Now days I have multiple software tokens on my phone – Microsoft Authenticator (for work), Adobe Access —just for creative cloud, damn you Adobe—, Authy. Google has an Authenticator, which I don’t use for anything anymore, I should delete it and most importantly 1Password for as many services as I can use it’s built in code generator.

Google and Adobe, and, to a lesser extent, Apple piss my off with their 2FA. Google and Adobe use proprietary software, I can’t add them to my 1Password for the code generation. I have to use Gmail and Adobe Account Access respectively. Gmail is the worst, I don’t use Gmail’s app for anything else, I use the built in mail app on my phone, but I have to keep Gmail on my phone just to login to Google. Adobe is nearly as bad, they have a dedicated app, it’s not even in the existing Lightroom or Creative Cloud or other Adobe apps I already have. Apple uses a push to logged in Apple devices and since I’m helplessly mired in the Apple ecosystem that’s not really a problem but how do people with only one Apple device do it?

I think 2FA is important, we hear daily about new hacks. I have been on the internet for three decades and using the same email address for almost that whole time. I was foolish, like most people, and used the same password for everything for years. That email address has appeared in many leaks, accordng to haveibeenpwned [haveibeenpwned.com] I have, in fact, been pwned 26 times. And that’s only known pwnings. My old go to password has appeared 4 times, meaning the plain text password with the hashed string is there, so if that hash shows up in another breach the hacker does not even need to break the encryption, they already know the password.

So, these days I use a password manager. I use 1Password. And while there is always a chance that they get hacked an my data get leaked I think the benefits out way the risks. I am able to set a different password for everything and I don’t have to remember them, I only have to remember one master password, I can make that as complex as I want to make it harder to crack, not worth the time of a hacker (If you want to understand how easy it is to crack passwords watch this Computerphile video [youtube.com].

1Password allows me to set 1Password as my 2FA code generator [1password.com] for sites or apps that follow the standard. You can see which sites support it here [2fa.directory] and which use proprietary solutions.

But, for all the extra security 2FA provides you have to be prepared. To make sure you have access to the code generator. If you loose your phone you still need to be able to get a code to login… I can login to 1Password on my computer but what if someone does not have a computer, only their phone? What if I’m overseas without access to my computer? What if you loose your phone so you go to use someone else’s computer to login somewhere and to get the code you need your phone? Sure, they offer other methods to verify, so you select receive code by email, but then you need a 2FA code to login to your email, but you’ve lost your phone… How deep does this rabbit hole go? When it works it’s great but I can see how this whole thing is to complicated for many people.of

This rant isn’t goin anywhere so let me explain, no, there is too much, let me sum up: Passwords suck, but we don’t have anything better yet (people are working: Alternatives to passwords [builtin.com]), 2FA is better, but there are some issues. All of this security is to complicated for most people.