Drummer, keyboardist, and singer, Louis Cole, has been at it for a while. Whether it's releasing music under his own name, with the band Knower, or as a rumored member of the mysterious and masked duo, Clown Core, he's been keeping very busy making interesting (and incredible) music. He is part of what some have dubbed the Viral Jazz sub-genre, and his sound is some mixture of electronic, pop, dance, jazz, and funk. In other words, it's awesome. His album Quality Over Opinion is incredible and definitely worth checking out. Although, it may be best experienced through his YouTube channel (check out the video for I'm Tight below). Enjoy.

Note: See my post on Viral Jazz.

As we head into the new year (Happy New Year! 🥳), hot on the heels of my own decision to re-commit to a personal blog and owning my own content, The Verge has posted an interesting article called Bring back personal blogging. One section addressed owning your own content and platform:

If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?

What happens to all the content you have created? Where will the archive of all your funny memes and jokes be? What is going to happen to all those selfies you felt cute in but didn’t delete later?

The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it.

Owning your content and controlling your platform is essential, and having a personal blog is a great way to do that.

This absolutely resonated with me and I believe many others are beginning to wrestle with this as well. The challenge, in my eyes, is creating an easy path for users without technical knowledge to do it.

Buy that domain name. Carve your space out on the web. Tell your stories, build your community, and talk to your people. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to duplicate any space that already exists on the web — in fact, it shouldn’t. This is your creation. It’s your expression. It should reflect you.

I wholeheartedly agree. Yet again, this is much easier said than done. I suppose a product like Squarespace makes this pretty easy, especially now that it provides the means to secure your own domain all in one place? Will something like Micro.blog take off?

First of all, this isn't the first time it's been predicted that personal blogs will be making a comeback, so take this with a grain of salt. But if it does (or maybe, in order for it to), I think it would require the process to become easier.

I've been a fan of jazz music for almost as long as I can remember. Whether it was dancing to the improvisations of Vince Guaraldi while watching Peanuts and Charlie Brown as a toddler, or grooving to the swing of the Count Basie big band in elementary school, jazz has been a part of my life from a very young age. My father plays saxophone, and my grandfather on my mother's side was the president of the Chicago Jazz Institute until his death. I guess you could say myself and my brother were destined to love the genre from before we were even born.

Unfortunately, jazz music is well past its heyday, and true lovers of the genre are few and far between. Less than 1% of streamed music is categorized as jazz. So one would imagine how heated the discussions about the state of jazz music and its future can become amongst its fans. However, the reality is jazz is far from dead, as long as you're willing to look beyond basic genre classifications. It's easy to find obvious jazz influences in rock music, hip-hop, R&B, funk, soul, or by listening to the improvisations of jam bands. I even had a friend tell me me that some metal music is heavily influenced by jazz.

But now, there's a new evolution of jazz that's taking shape, which some have referred to as Viral Jazz. Now here's the crazy thing. Before I even knew this music had a name, I started to find connections between some of these bands and artists that I was checking out. I'm sure I'm not unique in making these connections, and perhaps this is how others have felt at the birth of something new.

For instance, I remember listening to Kneebody when their first album came out and I was still in music school. I discovered Knower and Louis Cole several years ago, although I don't exactly remember how. I recently came upon DOMi and JD Beck, and their album NOT TiGHT. And then I'd come across a random video where maybe they'd be collaborating together, like seeing the drummer and sax player from Kneebody in a Louis Cole video (see below).

Or the bass player from the above video also be in a Scary Pockets video. Or I'd see one of the guitar players (Rai Thistlethwayte) and bass player (Sam Wilkes) from that Scary Pockets video also be in a Knower video (see below) which was shot in (seemingly) the same house as the Louis Cole video from above, with Louis Cole now playing drums (also with singer Genevieve Artadi). PHEW!

Oh, also Thundercat released a song called I Love Louis Cole. And he also appeared in one of DOMi and JD Beck's music videos. So yeah, there's a lot of overlapping and intersecting going on.

Then I came across this article from NPR, mentioning many of these artists (and more), and giving this whole movement a name; Viral Jazz.

From the article, referencing Louis Cole:

Cole is a stupefyingly proficient multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer and trickster whose bracing new album, Quality over Opinion, releases this Friday on Brainfeeder. He's been a major player in the musical online attention economy for the better part of a decade, as a solo act and as one-half of Knower, with singer-songwriter and producer Genevieve Artadi. Together with virtuoso oddballs like MonoNeon, an electric bass whiz and vocal funkateer, and DOMi & JD Beck, a sly keys-and-drums duo repping mayhem in the rhythm matrix, Cole stands at the center of a cohort whose identifying traits are easy to recognize and harder to define. Many of these musicians have at least a tangential connection to Thundercat, the bassist and falsetto warbler whose interstellar jazz-R&B has been a defining Brainfeeder trademark. Like him, they're known for jaw-dropping technical ability, jazz-inflected genre fluidity and an irreverent yet allusive savvy regarding image and platform. At this disorienting moment in our age of digital exchange, they can sometimes seem like the only ones who've gleefully cracked the code.

And there it was. An article that started to put these pieces together! It was incredible to read something that laid it all out, while also incorporating other artists I didn't realize were connected, or was not yet familiar with. No, about that name:

A few months ago, pianist and composer Vijay Iyer coined a good handle for this new musical phenotype. Taking to Twitter, he wrote: "latest subgenre: 'viral jazz'," adding a parenthetical: "(I don't think the term exists, but the music definitely does)."

Putting the name Viral Jazz aside for the moment, I think it's clear that whatever this is, it's definitely at least related to jazz, if it wouldn't be called it outright. But to me, this is the clearest indicator that jazz is alive and well, regardless of what name it may go by.

In case you haven't heard, popular password manager LastPass released an updated statement on December 22nd with some terrifying details to anyone who uses their product. Basically, customer's password vaults are now in the hands of hackers.

Now that some security experts have had the chance to read the statement and assess the damage, LastPass is getting absolutely roasted.

LastPass’ December 22nd statement was “full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies,” reads a blog post from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher known for helping originally develop AdBlock Pro, among other things. Some of his criticisms deal with how the company has framed the incident and how transparent it’s being; he accuses the company of trying to portray the August incident where LastPass says “some source code and technical information were stolen” as a separate breach when he says that in reality the company “failed to contain” the breach.

Even one of their competitors, 1Password, has decided to weigh in.

But what concerns me about all of this is the impact on users, and the ongoing challenge of remaining safe and secure online. I mean think about the type of person who uses LastPass. These are people who are trying to be safe online. Instead of relying on a single password for everything (I know people who still do this), or maintaining a document or note with all of their passwords (yep, I know people who do this, too), they went so far as to start using dedicated software for this. But now they're being punished because they basically chose the wrong product.

While a lot of LastPass's mistakes pertain to their system architecture decisions on what pieces of data to encrypt or not, one piece that I find interesting is various decisions to require, or not require, users to adopt more secure master passwords for their vaults. Not only were users with eight character passwords not required to change them to twelve characters, as pointed out by Wladimir Palant of Almost Secure:

That’s because LastPass didn’t ask existing customers to change their master password. I had my test account since 2018, and even today I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it.

So LastPass required twelve characters for the past four years, but a large portion of their customer base likely still uses passwords not complying with this requirement. And LastPass will blame them should their data be decrypted as a result.

Woof. Not only that, but users weren't encouraged to generate particularly strong passwords. From Jeffrey Goldberg of 1Password:

The LastPass account password “best practices” advice linked to in their announcement says nothing about using a password generator, so it would be incorrect to assume that users are generating their LastPass passwords using a strong password generator.

So where does this leave us? First of all, if you're reading this:

1. Please, please use a password manager that helps you generate unique passwords for every account you have on the web, like 1Password, Bitwarden, or even iCloud Keychain (if you're an Apple and Safari user).
2. Please, please use multi-factor authentication (MFA) where available, ideally not through SMS (hopefully your password manager can offer this, too).
3. If you were using LastPass – stop. Move to 1Password (I've been a happy customer for years), or Bitwarden, or iCloud Keychain.
4. If you did have passwords saved in LastPass, (after moving to another password manager) start generating new passwords ASAP, beginning with the services and accounts that you use most frequently or contain the most sensitive information.
5. Be very careful of any suspicious emails, texts, claiming to be from one of these services, attempting to "phish" for your password. These LastPass hackers can see URLs in the data they got, because they weren't encrypted, so they can target users based on the services they actually used.

But beyond that, this breach shows us just how far we have to go to keep users safe. Will something like Passkeys be a viable solution? Even if it is, how long will it take for it to be widely adopted?

In the meantime, stay diligent, and help your friends and family to do the same.

You may have noticed that things look a little bit different around here. I decided to make a few changes. Maybe this is the result of holiday boredom, or maybe some new year’s resolutions, maybe I needed to scratch that proverbial itch that many technologists have for new projects, or maybe I’ve been compelled by some things happening in the news. As with most things, it’s likely a little bit of all of the above, along with some other reasons that I may or may not be aware of. But regardless, here I am, and let me tell you a few reasons why.

It starts with Twitter (I know, sorry)

I mean, it sort of starts with Twitter. I’ve been a Twitter user for a long time (*checks profile* since January of 2008), and throughout the years my usage of the platform has gone up and down. Over the last few years, while the amount that I’ve posted (or tweeted) has decreased significantly, I relied more heavily than even on Twitter as my source for news and some entertainment. I would occasionally retweet something, but would often just scroll and read.

Well, you may have heard, but things have not been going great over at Twitter since a certain billionaire decided to buy them. So, like many others, I decided to check out Mastodon.

Mastodon and the Fediverse

I was one of many that Twitter refugees to flee to Mastodon, and I have to say, it’s gone way better than I expected. In fact, it has largely replaced all of what I was using Twitter for previously. The big omission (as of this writing) is sports writers and journalists, though that’s pretty typical for new tech platforms.

One of the things that makes Mastodon unique is that its part of the Fediverse. In essence, this means that instead of Mastodon being controlled by one company on their “server(s),” it’s actually installed on thousands of servers (i.e. instances) that all communicate with one another. And, as it turns out, this sort of arrangement has worked quite well for things like email and the world wide web.

Per Axbom - https://axbom.com/fediverse/

Owning Your Own Content

Ultimately, the goal of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and pretty much every other social network, is to get users to post and generate content. That content, your content, is actually making the site more valuable. That value comes in the form of more users, and ultimately advertisers. Think about that for a second. Posting your content to Facebook makes them more money. What a business!

Even though I knew this was how social networks worked, it wasn't until I experienced Mastodon that I saw that there could be another way. And it inspired me to take a look at other content I'm creating to generate value for others. Where else am I generating content that isn't actually mine? This perspective is well summed up by Molly White (@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io) on, of course, Mastodon:

So that's why I'm here, and that's why things look a little different.

In future posts I'll share why I chose the platform I chose (Ghost), and why the issue of open source versus managed platforms isn't so black and white.

You may have noticed that things look a little bit different around here. I've moved, and I have some things to share. Stay tuned.