NF Has the Number One Album

Jason Tate

NF has the number one album in the country this week:

The set was released on Oct. 6 through NF Real Music/Capitol/Caroline and starts with 55,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Oct. 12, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 38,000 were in traditional album sales — NF’s best sales week yet.

Hit the Lights Announce New Single Series

Hit the Lights
Jason Tate

Hit the Lights have posted an update about the status and future of the band on Facebook:

With that being said, Hit The Lights is proud to announce that we have partnered with our good friend and ally Rick King to create King Sound. Through King Sound, we will be releasing a new song each month. Consistently. Because we have the freedom and the means to do it. People will have the ability to download songs early by purchasing special edition items though our online stores and investing money in us to continue this venture. We’ll be working out the kinks as we go, but the beautiful thing is whatever people decide to do – even down to just streaming our songs – you’re LITERALLY investing in us. These sales will go directly to fund awesome things like new music videos, tours, and even fund raising for great causes! No one to answer to, nothing to wait for – just HTL, King Sound and you- our supporters. Doing it our way because we can.

We have songs lined up for the next six months.

Serious Flaw in WPA2 Protocol

Jason Tate

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

Researchers have disclosed a serious weakness in the WPA2 protocol that allows attackers within range of vulnerable device or access point to intercept passwords, e-mails, and other data presumed to be encrypted, and in some cases, to inject ransomware or other malicious content into a website a client is visiting.

The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks.

This is bad.

Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:

Apple has confirmed to me that the KRACK exploit has already been patched in iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS betas. As soon as the updates leave beta, they’ll be pushed out to everyone. We’ll have to wait and see how fast other manufacturers are to respond, and how many of our connected devices receive updates.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How Machine Learning Finds Your New Music

Jason Tate

Sophia Ciocca, writing for Hacker Noon:

The exact mechanisms behind NLP are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s what happens on a very high level: Spotify crawls the web constantly looking for blog posts and other written texts about music, and figures out what people are saying about specific artists and songs — what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them.

While I don’t know the specifics of how Spotify chooses to then process their scraped data, I can give you an understanding of how the Echo Nest used to work with them. They would bucket them up into what they call “cultural vectors” or “top terms.” Each artist and song had thousands of daily-changing top terms. Each term had a weight associated, which reveals how important the description is (roughly, the probability that someone will describe music as that term.)

Allegations of Sexual Misconduct by Ex-Real Estate Guitarist Detailed by Seven Women

Real Estate
Jason Tate

Andy Cush, writing for Spin:

In the months leading up to the publication of SPIN’s initial story, we spoke with multiple women who gave accounts of alleged sexual misconduct from Mondanile. In the following days, more women came to us with stories of his behavior. These on-the-record accounts, from seven women in total, largely involve allegations of Mondanile touching, kissing, and groping them without their consent. Two women alleged that Mondanile groped them while they were sleeping, and a third said that he did so while she was trying to sleep.

Kendrick Lamar Interviewed by I-D

Kendrick Lamar
Jason Tate

Kendrick Lamar recently sat down for an interview with I-D:

Kendrick lives a life that befits the king of hip-hop, if you think what truly befits the king of hip-hop is to basically live in the studio looking for the perfect beat and the ultimate rhyme. “I can sometimes cut the whole world off to write a verse that is perfect to me,” he says. “I could be in the studio all day and turn the phone off and completely zone out, because I feel like this was what I was chosen to do. And I can’t let anyone get in between that.”