MusicBrainz Server hotfix, 2023-01-10

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:

  1. Creating new such accounts has been blocked; See MBS-12827.
  2. 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.

The git tag is v-2023-01-10-hotfixes.

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Explore Your Year in Music 2022

ListenBrainz is excited to announce the release of your #YEARINMUSIC reports for 2022! Log in to your ListenBrainz (LB) and click here to see your report. Don’t have a LB account? See what you’re missing.

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.

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Picard 2.9 alpha 1 available for testing

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.

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Unexpected Picard Setups

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.

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