🤔 The Strange Depths of Spotify, Ransomed Coffee, and the rise of Liquid Death!
Murdering your thirst one can at a time
Hey! It’s almost the end of September. Fall is quite literally here, and we’re already having some nice cool weather here in Tennessee.
I’ve already started watching some horror movies - and I’ll be honest with you. I’m obsessed with “found footage” style films. I think - I think I’ve watched pretty much all of the good ones at this point.
My lists keep getting more and more low budget. For example, I watched The Monster Project and Skew last weekend. There were a few decent jump scares but honestly . . . they weren’t very good.
A far cry from when I discovered The Houses that October Built or Hell House LLC a few years ago. Both of these (and their sequels) are awesome and spooky.
If you know any good ones, please send me your recommendations. 🤣
Well, let’s dive on in, shall we? Grab that espresso and let’s go!
🎵The Strange Depths of Spotify
Have you ever gone deep - like real deep into Spotify? Clicking on related artists until you’ve reached the strange world of one track artist, pirated audiobooks, disorganized albums, and odd names?
Well, there’s two reasons for that.
First - Spotify used to be a P2P network. Did you know that? Yes, the big bad Spotify used to be just like Napster, Grooveshark, and all the other music piracy services. Here - read one of Spotifys decks from 2011. However - Spotify played it safe and paid (at least in theory) for all the streams of that music it was “borrowing” from your desktop. Here’s a slide from that deck.
Now - I believe that some of that “borrowed” music is still floating around on Spotify - deep within the millions of tracks. Think about it - do you think the Spotify team actually goes through all the millions of tracks to remove all the random weird stuff? I seriously doubt it.
Want to get to strange Spotify? Well, first - you gotta get some weird music tastes. Nightcore, Deathcore Rap, Anime music, and other music genres. Start clicking on a song of your choice and click on “fans also like” until you get to the really small artists, the ones with like 20 songs and only a thousand streams. Then - click on related artists from them until you get to the WEIRD stuff. Artists with one track, Music with no album art. GO DEEP - Tell me what you find.
Second - There’s a pretty good “con” happening on Spotify. Hundreds of “ghost” artists are making a decent living by gaming searches on Spotify - and tricking the Algorithm into listing their music.
Spotify is full of “artists” like this: Pro Sound Effects Library, On Hold Music, Yoga, Jazz Music Therapy for Cats, and Natural White Noise Best Nature Sounds for Sleeping, Stress Relief, Relaxation, Sound Therapy . . . So, if your music ranks highly for a search term, you can accumulate enough listens to steadily make hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars a month with minimal effort. The key to success is to find a phony artist name that Spotify users are likely to type into search. Like Relaxing Music Therapy, some of these “artists” use names inspired by an adjective commonly used to describe music . . . Often, these creators optimize further by titling tracks and albums with related words and reuploading the same songs ad nauseum, which can look especially absurd when filtering to see just a single tune. Source
Essentially - SEO is being applied to Spotify to make money. Heck, even MSCHF talked about this idea in their digital Bread Magazine, which you can download at this link if you have the Password, which may or may not be the word italicized in this sentence. Heck, they even made an album generator. 🤣
What do you think? Are you going to take a stab at gaming Spotify to make some quick cash every month? At least make the music some sort of enjoyable aesthetic background music. 🤣
☕ Ransomed Coffee
How many products have you purchased from the Internet of Things? Do you have a Echo Dot? any Smart Lightbulbs? A Chromecast? or anything of that nature?
The “smart home” keeps sneaking into more and more devices. Fridges now have cameras, many coffee pots have smart functions, and the Alexa is in just about everything these days.
Well, what happens when one of these devices gets “hacked?”
For the most part (I use the term liberally) we know our Alexas and Google smart devices probably won’t be hacked - but what about that “smart” $20 coffee pot at Walmart? the one that has a free app?
Well, Martin Hron over at Decoded set out to see if he could hack a coffee pot for nefarious purposes.
Through a combination of reverse-engineering the companion app, the motherboard in the coffee machine, communications between the coffee pot chip and the app, and other components, Martin discovered that he could push modified firmware to the device.
Now - what did he do?
We decided to turn the coffee maker into a ransomware machine where a certain trigger initiates the ransom message. It looks completely innocent and operates normally until the trigger is hit by an attacker making it even more surprising. To do so, We hijacked one of the commands that originally served to connect the maker to the network so that when a user tries to connect the machine to home network a user can trigger the ransom behavior themself unintentionally. We used the unused memory space at the very end of the firmware to create the malicious code. By using the ARM assembler we created ransomware that when triggered renders the coffee maker unusable and asks for ransom, while at the same time turning on the hotbed, water dispensing heating element, permanently and spinning up the grinder, forever, displaying the ransom message and beeping. We thought this would be enough to freak any user out and make it a very stressful experience. The only thing the user can do at that point is unplug the coffee maker from the power socket. (Source)
This is all so very evil and all, but how do you actually hack the coffee pot without actually being there?
Well, there’s a few ways.
Attack vector 1: Passer-by. In this approach we need physical access to the device to initiate the update. {I go into your apartment and upload the hack to the coffee pot}
Attack vector 2a: Breaking the perimeter.
In this scenario we use the network to get to the coffee maker. {I hack into your WIFI network and upload the hack}Attack vector 2b: Breaking the perimeter.
This attack is a variant of the previous attack vector, the only difference is that it fools the user into pressing the update button without any concerns.Attack vector 3: Social engineering. An android app as a mediator.
In this attack scenario, we trick the user into downloading a fake app to control the coffee maker. (Source)
Of course, it would be a little ridiculous for someone to take the time to hack into a few coffee pots. However - what about in 5 years when most people have “Walmart” smart devices of some kind or another? It will be much more advantageous for hackers when lots of people have the same smart coffee pot. Martin says it best. “We live in a world where things talk to things, and where the number of smart things is slowly outnumbering the number of computers. These devices, for the most part, have no screen and can therefore mask malicious activities running in the background from their owners.”
Today it’s an experiment - but five years from now? Well, I think there’s a decent chance we’ll be seeing a lot more hacks.
I recommend reading the article in its entirety. It’s a fascinating deep dive look into the world of hacking the Internet of Things.
💀The Rise of Liquid Death
Have you heard about Liquid Death? the canned water brand that’s been thrashing into the bottled water scene? It’s designed to “Murder Your Thirst.”
It’s not your average water brand. It’s honestly pretty metal, and they know how to make an eye-catching ad.
I remember hearing about this brand a few years ago. Founded by Mike Cessario, it came on the scene back in 2017 in an Indiegogo campaign and has been steadily making its way into the industry.
Here’s a snippet on some of the Cessario’s marketing inspiration for the brand from an Adweek interview back in 2018.
The youth of today care more about health than ever . . . But they still like explosions and extreme sports and heavy music and blowing zombie heads off in video games. But only unhealthy brands, whose products they don’t love, are speaking their language from a brand perspective. No healthy brands are actually trying to fit into real youth culture. It’s likely why we keep getting hundreds of messages from our target audience telling us how much they love the brand. Plus, it makes it easier when the people behind the brand are also the target audience. (Source)
Liquid Death is intentionally loud in its mission to bring hydration and recycling to young people - and it works! Millennials and Gen Z (as a general rule) tend to be much more environmentally conscious.
Here’s the down-low. Plastic water bottles are bad for the environment. Aluminum cans are better. “Aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Plastic is not. In fact, plastic is not even technically recyclable anymore because it is no longer profitable to recycle. So most recycling facilities simply send plastic to landfills because they would go out of business trying to recycle it.” (source)
For every can, Liquid Death donates 5 cents to nonprofits.
AND - they turn their hate comments into DEATH METAL SONGS.
Seriously. Oh - Did I mention the Death Metal baby name generator?
Seriously, the marketing team at Liquid Death knows how to create conversation and get some of that “virality.”
Best of all, they are now in Whole Foods! 😀
That’s a huge leap for a beverage brand. Getting that “on the shelf authority” is very important. You can check out availability here.
Check out their website at the link!
🐙 The Land of Random
You asked - I found them. Random links.
🎵 Make Digital Beats in Your Browser
It’s as easy as typing your name. Mine sounds pretty dope. What about yours?
😀 Send Musical Messages to Your Friends
Listen to musical notes of The Land of Random and make your own to send to your friends. Seriously, I love this so much.
Check out the work of Phil Hackett
Skateboard themed art. So cool!
Play Plutonium - BO2 and MW3 Reimagined
Play the olde Black Ops 2 and Modern Warfare Free multiplayer for free with this mod.
Guard Your House with a Flying Drone
Seriously, Amazon is coming out with this next year. 5 years ago, this would have cost a fortune. Now? It’ll cost $250 next year.
Edit Photoshop Photos in your Browser
Did someone send you a Photoshop file with an error? You gotta fix it quickly, but this laptop doesn’t have Photoshop on it. Well, do it in the browser for free with Photopea! It works like a charm. I’ve used it before!
🎵 TikToks You Can’t Miss
Maybe this app will be banned IDK but let’s enjoy it while we can?
Seriously, this house has some creepy vibes
This teacher is so savage. Must be a millennial.
I mean - something like this probably happened
This is what happens when an adult gets a nerf gun
These metaphysical puppets are hilarious
Hopefully, Dave & Busters don’t find out about this trick