Disruptive Conversations

If you are a user of Tweetdeck, as I am, and you somehow missed the security warnings from last week, you need to update Tweetdeck!

There is a critical security vulnerability that allows an attacker to remotely execute code on your system. Granted, "all" it can go is send out tweets from your account, follow users or do other tasks that your Twitter account can do, i.e. it can't access your local hard drive or system. Still, though, having tweets go out from your account(s) via Tweetdeck could be harmful in any number of ways.

More information is available in these articles:

• The Verge: TweetDeck vulnerability lets attackers execute code remotely
• The Guardian: Tweetdeck vulnerability found by teen trying to code emoji heart
• Vox: Here's how that major Tweetdeck vulnerability works

It seems to be the stereotypical case where a programmer didn't check to see if the text that is about to be displayed contains only allowed HTML code. This is the kind of error that has been found in any number of web applications over the years.

The net is that you need to update Tweetdeck to the latest version through whatever means you use to update your computer.

If you are a regular user of Tweetdeck you should have seen an update notice come up last week - and hopefully you did so! If you only occasionally use Tweetdeck, you may want to go in now and make sure you update to the latest version.

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What is SoundCloud planning for their next mobile app release for at least iOS and presumably Android? On Friday (June 6, 2014) I received an email stating this:

We noticed you've used our app to record and upload tracks to SoundCloud. With an upcoming version of the app, we'll be making changes to the way tracks are stored on your phone. If you have tracks that you've recorded but haven't uploaded, please follow the instructions below to save them. You can upload the tracks to your SoundCloud profile, or you can download them to your computer. Please do this as soon as possible to ensure that you don't lose anything you've recorded.

I cringed when I saw this... because I do use the SoundCloud app on my iPhone to record tracks for my "The Dan York Report" podcast and I do keep a number of different unpublished tracks sitting in the SoundCloud app. Often I may record a sound somewhere with the intent of later folding that into a recording (and which, admittedly, I often wind up never getting around to doing).

The key message of the email from SoundCloud is this:

YOU WILL LOSE YOUR TRACKS THAT YOU HAVE NOT UPLOADED UNLESS YOU TAKE ACTION BEFORE THE UPGRADE!

The email points out that all you need to do is upload the tracks to your SoundCloud account - and you can do so and make them "Private" so that they are only visible to you. They also note that you can download your sounds to your computer if you would prefer to do that. I chose to upload my tracks to SoundCloud as private recordings.

IMPORTANT: Note that when you upload your tracks to SoundCloud, the original date information will NOT be saved! That track you recorded in December 2012 that has the title "Sounds from Tuesday evening" will be uploaded to SoundCloud with a timestamp of when you upload the track. So if the date of the original recording is important to you, you may want to incorporate that date into the title of the track BEFORE you upload the track.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, the email from SoundCloud helpfully provided this image showing tracks that have not been uploaded:

I cringed when I read the email from SoundCloud for a larger reason. This upload of local tracks was no big deal. I was done in maybe 5 minutes. My larger concern though is... what is SoundCloud going to do to the recording experience?

Right now I mostly used the SoundCloud iOS app to record my TDYR podcasts (as I explained in an episode) as my TDYR podcast is all about trying to see how minimally and easily a podcast can be recorded.

However, the SoundCloud app seems to continue to move to being more about music consumption rather than creation. This started a while back when they moved "Record" from the home screen to being under the "..." menu choice. And then we haven't really seen any improvements or changes to the recording capability.

Will they improve the recording experience? Or further de-emphasize it?

We'll see... but in the meantime if you have any local recordings in the app you need to do something if you want to retain any of those recordings.

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