Music & Web Security
For reasons I’ll put aside, a good friend recently reminded that it’s a good security practice to filter in what you know what you want, rather than filtering out what you know is bad.
This comes up a lot in web apps, as you need to make sure data passed in by the user isn’t doing anything nasty. Rather than saying “let’s remove quotes, ampersands, etc. and leave the rest”, you should say “let’s keep in letters, numbers, commas, periods, etc. and filter out the rest.” That way, if you didn’t know something like semicolons can do a bad thing, the latter covers you, but not the former.
This morning, setting up a new playlist in iTunes, I realized the same principle could be applied. And not only that, but help you find music you already own and may even like, just you’ve never listened to it.
My typical playlist is of the pattern “Play me songs from Artist X whose rating I’ve given 3 stars or more.”
This certainly gets me the music I know I like, but it keeps hidden songs I might.
So this morning, I started to flip it: “Play me songs from Arist X, but leave out songs I’ve rated 1 or 2 stars.”
I always knew Green Day was awesome, but, man, I didn’t realize so many other songs were so good as well.
