Crossover VS Metalcore

Thursday, May 14th, 2009
by Mark Carras

Sometimes progress is not moving forward. Sometimes innovation is not improvements. Look at mobile phones in America right now. Those things are getting so small they are worthless for anything but talking and maybe a little bit of text messaging. From what I hear Japan has phones twice our size for those that want to watch their media on a respectable sized screen. Let’s face it, unless you are some 20 something with a desk job in some cubicle farm a tiny phone is just not functional. Yet, they keep getting smaller.

About halfway through the 80’s we had this thing we called Crossover. For you young whippersnappers that would be the classic thrash sound mixed with the old school punk sound. It was one of the coolest things to ever hit my young ears. I never got into the whole punk vs metal thing to be honest. If it was good heavy music, I liked it. Sure I am mostly a metalhead, but anything good and heavy is still good. This mixed two of my favorite styles together. Now let’s fast forward about ten years to 1995. Crossover evolved into something called Metalcore. Imagine the watered down thrash of today mixed with the flat and monotone hardcore punk of today and you get the extremely bland cousin of Crossover. Think I’m the only one who thinks this so called innovation is a big steaming pile of crap? LordBling, ruinedmachines, & NeilH73, all pretty much agree with me. Ruinedmachines even went so far as to say “To me, metalcore is more focused on sculpted hair and guys wearing girl’s jeans than the music itself. crossover has more balls! When I think of metalcore I think of all of the bands nowadays that sound exactly the same.” I should mention that metalross thought that “crossover is an early name for Thrash (DRI), whereas metalcore, is hardcore punk that has adopted slayer riffs & Death metal vox”, but since Thrash came out well before Crossover I’m not sure how this could be true. But my point is that when Crossover ‘progressed’ into Metalcore it was not a move forward. The record companies shoved it down people’s throats, but most saw it for what it was rather quickly…a step backwards.

Lastly, I want to talk about something called OpenID. Yes, I am sneaking in a tech lesson again. Deal with it! OpenID is the hot buzz word in tech right now, but I am taking a stand against it. For those that do not know what OpenID is, let me explain it as simple as possible. OpenID is a service that let’s you store all your passwords into one service to log into all your online accounts. So instead of trying to remember a million passwords you just remember your OpenID password and OpenID does the rest for you. Sounds pretty awesome, right? Well, not really.

People that defend OpenID seem to have only one defense. They claim that “Well, people usually just use one password for everything anyways, so why not use OpenID?” So OpenID is a good thing because people are lazy about security? Call me crazy but I think that’s insane! Psogle even calls it a “security hole”. How about we continue to tech them how to have safe passwords instead? Or maybe we should just get rid of the hassle of locks on our doors and windows so we can have the convenience of not needing to carry around so many damn keys?

There has always been a debate over convenience or security. Or should I say that there has always been a debate over what is the perfect balance between the two. You could make things so secure that not even the user can get in, or we can make things so convenient that we get all our personal info hacked with no problem. There is a common sense solution in there somewhere.

How about you think of 3 passwords. Use one for things you don’t really care about at all. The second one you use for things like email or accounts you kind of care about. The third you use for a very select group of online accounts you want to be very protected (bank). All three passwords should be a funny sentence with ten characters in it. For example “Mark’s Blog Post Today Was Extremely long Today For Some Reason” or “That Guy Mark Carras Needs To Shut His Trap Sometimes” Or maybe even “Yes Mark We Get The Point. Now Shut Your Pie Hole!” Take the first letter of each word and you have a password that is more safe then 99% of what most people use. If you want you can make it even more secure by tossing in some numbers in the middle. The extra paranoid can even alter the case, but then you will need OpenID to keep track and the problem starts all over again.

Why is OpenID so bad? Because if a hacker only needs to remember one password to get into your OpenID, it makes his job too easy. OpenID is a hackers best friend. So why do services like TwitterFeed force you to use it? Because some geeks are so distracted by new shinny toys that they forget about the security holes said shinny toys might create. We as an internet community need to also force services like TwiterFeed to stop forcing users to use security holes like OpenID. It’s not progress. It’s a step backwards. Just like Metalcore.