Ok, let’s get this over with. Some mandatory pictures of Trinity College. Yesterday the weather wasn’t that good, but I found the lighting okay-to-interesting, so I went all Camera+ over Trinity.

There you go: Full Album on imgur, or embedded view here.

Spotify’s Concept

I’ve had but one problem with Spotify for a long time: Its playlist philosophy. With Spotify, the playlist is what once was a mixtape. “I’ve made this awesome mix, check it out, it’s genre A and B, your favourite music and some new stuff you may like!” That’s fine and I use them like that, too.

Why it’s broken

But when you want to discover new music and/or new artists, that’s not what you need, and Spotify acknowledges that. That’s why when you click on an artist’s name, there’s his top five tracks and albums.
But this also is where hell begins. Take Elvis Presley. How many 50 song Best-Of albums do you need? Try listen to his albums in chronological order to understand how his music developed via Spotify. It’s impossible. I don’t have anything against Best-Ofs, they’re great for a quick overview of that artist’s work. But again: You don’t need twenty of them.

It’s even worse with The Velvet Underground. All the music is there, but it’s - you can’t even say sorted wrong, because it isn’t sorted at all. Again, “Top Hits”. Then, “Albums”. There’s four Best-Ofs. Then, two albums. Then four more Best-Ofs. By the way: The year in brackets behind the Album’s title is supposed to state the release date, I think. But since everything is digitally remastered by now and the most recent re-release date is shown, that information is useless.
Then, there’s a 3CD-release containing the first three albums. But without stating that anywhere but on the cover, and the albums being in.the.wrong.fucking.order.

I don’t need to continue, I think. Needless to say that the “Singles” and “Appears On” sections are useless.

I kind of need what iTunes offers with its “Smart Playlists”: An overview. And not of mixtapes, but a (small) selection of artists. When I scroll through my iTunes library, I always find something and I think “Oh, I should listen to that!”. There the “Smart Playlist” comes in handy. With Spotify, scrolling through the library is impossible because of its infinity. And “noting” an artists is impossible because of the lack of “Smart Playlists” or something similar.
You could say: Go to your “Starred” playlist and then look at the individual artists. And I think that could work. But for that to be feasible, the state described above desperately needs to change.

What we need

• There should be an additional “Best Of” section so that the actual “Albums” section can become such.
• The albums should be appear as albums, not as a bunch of tracks on some compilation. Spotify should get some interns to do that.
• Albums should be sorted chronologically .
• There should be a “Create a folder with this artist’s name and put all the albums in it” button at the artist’s page. That folder should be updated automatically, of course.

The Velvet Underground

In the meantime, I arranged the The Velvet Underground discography for you. You’re welcome.
I need to link to every album individually, by the way, because Spotify doesn’t allow me to share a folder.

• The Velvet Underground & Nico
• White Light / White Heat
• The Velvet Underground (My favourite album at the moment, fuckin’ amazing. Wow.)
• 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (Very interesting to hear alternatve versions of some songs)
• Loaded (Or the Fully Loaded Edition)
• V.U.

So, this is really happening I guess. I’ll be in Dublin for the next 9 months, and since this is erasmus, it’s kind of an adventure. It’s been very smooth so far, thanks to the Trinity Students Union and Airbnb. The Students Union actually sent a student to the airport who collected me, showed me around Trinity and basically brought me to my accomodation. All of that after I had sent an email just 24 hours before my flight. Airbnb was way (like: way way) better than daft.ie or rent.ie to find accommodation. The host is a really nice guy, think I’ll stay here the whole time. The Internet helps you make great things happen.

Yesterday, I walked around Dublin for a few hours, just getting to know the city a little since I’ve never been here before. It’s actually quite small, you can walk from north to south of the city in about 25 minutes. It’s really amazing: I stood in a shopping street, looked at the spire, turned left and looked in a very fucked up street. Like my host told me, Dublin isn’t different from area to area, but different from street to street. But have a look yourself.

Full Album on imgur, or embedded view here.

You may have heard of Mat Honan’s case. He got hacked pretty bad. In the end, it was mostly the fault of Amazon’s and Apple’s crappy policies. But it would be short-sighted not to rethink your current setup. Just let me recap what happened to Mat.

The hackers wanted his Twitter Account. They got the link to his personal website on his Twitter profile. On his personal website, they found his Gmail address. On the Google Account Recovery pagge, they saw that his (partially displayed) recovery email address was an apple-run @me.com address. Basically, the rest is Apple’s and Amazon’s fault. They got access to his Amazon account, got the last four digits of the credit card and used that information to get into his Apple ID. The email address associated with it was the Google Account Recovery address mentioned above, so we’ve come full circle.

Countermeasures

I was disappointed with most articles claiming to be a step-by-step guide on how to prevent this from happening to you. So here’s my two cents.
The answer (of course) can’t be not to have your website displayed on the twitter profile page or to use different names on every platform.
Amazon and Apple have changed the policies which enabled Honan’s hackers to do what they did. But that doesn’t mean you can relax. There are other ways, and other service providers may have crappy policies in place.

So, I basically recommend to do what Lifehacker suggests. Like/plus this:

• Use strong passwords. So, use 1Password or another password software.
  Yeah, everything depends on that one password then. But what’s the alternative? I definitely chose one monster password with ultra complex individual passwords for every service behind it over one or two mediocre passwords that are worth nothing once one service is hacked.
• Use Two-Factor-Authentication with every Service that offers it. Currently: Google, Facebook, Dropbox.
• Make the Google Recovery Mail Address (Since you’re reading this, I assume you’re a nerd and use Gmail) an address that is not an Apple-run one, or even better: one not even associated with an Apple ID. That way, if your Google Account gets hacked despite your efforts, the hacker can’t remote wipe your Apple devices.
  It also shouldn’t be easy to guess, since Google displays a few characters of the Recovery Mail Address (like m••••n@me••om, in Mat Honan’s case). But even the best hacker in the world can’t hack something he can’t target. I created a new email address on a different service that is not related to anything else. You can remember that address, print out the password and keep it at your grandparent’s place.
• Create a new Apple ID and use it just for iCloud. Again: An email address that no one knows about is hard to target. And iCloud with its Remote Wipe feature can save you, but also destroy you, like in Honan’s case. If you disassociate your iCloud-specific Apple ID from your other one, it’s not used that often, you just have to enable it once on every device. It’s another Apple ID than the one you use (and that ‘s displayed) every time you buy an App via one of the App Stores. Security win.

The above is all cloud, password, account and Internet stuff. Of course, you should never leave your laptop alone without locking the screen or logging off. Once someone evil gets physical access to your device, it.is.over. So, use the heck out of magic corners, the iOS four-digit-code and so on. With the daily iCloud backup enabled, you should consider the ‘10-times-wrong-code? Erase my iPhone!’ feature.

I’m no securtiy expert, but I think this will prevent you from being the next Honan.