MySpace has lost all the music uploaded during its first 12 years
The company’s data protection officer blamed it on a server migration, and said it had lost over 50 million songs from 14 million artists.
A while coming: All music on MySpace (aw, remember?) from 2015 and earlier stopped working about a year ago. Originally, the company said it was working on the issue, but it has been forced to admit all the data has been lost (no, it didn’t have any backups).
A niche issue: Okay, most people don’t keep their only copy of a particular record on MySpace. But the fact that so much material can be lost in one fell swoop is a reminder that the internet is not an archive. If you don’t have a physical backup, files can be lost, regardless of how unlikely that might feel.
Save Google +: Sites (and history) are disappearing from the internet all the time. Earlier this month two archivist groups, the Internet Archive and the Archive Team, said they were racing to preserve all the public posts on Google + before they are lost forever. Google’s failed social network is due to start deleting data in April.
Sign up here to our daily newsletter The Download to get your dose of the latest must-read news from the world of emerging tech.
Deep Dive
Computing
Learning to code isn’t enough
Historically, learn-to-code efforts have provided opportunities for the few, but new efforts are aiming to be inclusive.
IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer
The company wants to make large-scale quantum computers a reality within just 10 years.
The inside story of New York City’s 34-year-old social network, ECHO
Stacy Horn set out to create something new and very New York. She didn’t expect it to last so long.
Delivering a quantum future
Innovations require engineering breakthroughs and focus on real computational problems.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.