A spam technique has been discovered that consisted in creating an account with a malicious URL in the username and the email of the intended victim, so that the victim would receive a verification email with the malicious URL inside it. It was most often combined with control characters to make the malicious URL even more visible.
Thanks to Devin McGovern from the Cyber Security Operations Department at Hyatt who responsibly disclosed this issue to the team.
To deal with the issue:
Creating new such accounts has been blocked; See MBS-12827.
Existing such accounts, around 40,000, have been removed (since new verification emails could still be requested); See MBBE-68.
It doesn’t affect mirrors so there is no update for MusicBrainz Docker.
Revisit and share your top artists, albums, tracks and neighbours from last year. Topped off with oodles of interesting statistics, a browsable cover collage, and brand new playlists of songs that you may have missed that our currently-benign algorithm thinks you will love.
You made it through, and you listened to some great tunes along the way.
We went for an eye-pleasuring (or blistering, depending on your preferences!) visual upgrade this year, and worked on a bunch of new features that will be refined in future years, as well as having the potential for roll out in other LB pages/features.
We generated two playlists for you this year, your top discoveries of 2022, and your topped missed recordings of 2022. These playlists don’t make themselves – well, actually, they kinda do, but their algorithms sure don’t! The ListenBrainz team has spent oodles of time tweaking and testing these to get them just right, and we hope you enjoy listening to them (hit ‘play’ on any track card to start playing, in Spotify Premium if you’ve set that up, otherwise it will default to YouTube, quota allowing).
A notable new feature is the new sharing option, with custom shareable images being processed depending on what part of the report you’re sharing, with unique graphics and styles for each. We’re ready for you, Instagram generation! (First person to say “Instagram? Everybody’s already moved onto X app” gets coal under their shoes this year)
Another new feature is the cover art collage, with a beautiful rainbow of 2022 album art for you to browse and click through to. Go look for some ‘black’ metal at the bottom, or perhaps you’re more in the mood for the flesh tone section today (ooh la la!)
Top albumsDeliciousThe statistics sharing graphic – go check out your other custom graphics!Judge some albums by their coverWhat’s that, did we accidentally put ’2023’ in the playlist titles? No further questions! Meeting adjourned! (note: has since been fixed)
Please tell us what you enjoyed and what you didn’t, here, via your preferred communications channel, or directly in the YIM 2023 ticket.
If you don’t have a YIM report, but want to get one for next year, don’t forget to sign up to ListenBrainz and start importing and submitting those listens now!
All the best for the new year, from the ListenBrainz team.
Today we have released an alpha version for the upcoming Picard 2.9. The main change coming with this release is limiting Picard to a single instance by default and the ability to run commands inside this running Picard instance from the command line. This work was done by skelly37 as part of last year’s Google Summer of Code.
Keep in mind that we consider this an alpha release and it might contain bugs. As the single-instance mode by default is a significant change on how Picard is being run we want to gather some feedback on the new functionality before we do a final 2.9 release.
This article is showcasing some of the more unusual ways MusicBrainz Picard can be run. Some are useful, some are more technically interesting solutions.
The description in MusicBrainz Picard’s README file says:
MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) audio tagging application.
So yes, Linux, macOS and Windows are our officially supported platforms and the main targets for running Picard. If you are using Picard you likely do this on a laptop or desktop computer running one of these three operating systems. We already offer plenty of options to install and run Picard, including our official downloads for Windows and macOS, Picard in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11 and the popular Linux packages Flatpak and Snap.
But as Picard is free software you can get it running essentially anywhere were Python and PyQt5 are available. Let’s start this year with showcasing some of the more unusual ways Picard can be run. Some are useful, some are more technically interesting solutions.
MetaBrainz Blog 