The Internet Archive has uploaded 450,000 songs collected before Myspace’s massive data loss

By Catherine Shu

Last month, it became widely known that MySpace has lost much of the user data uploaded to it before 2016, including potentially million of music tracks from between 2003 to 2015. This is a significant loss for people who may not have used the site anymore, but took for granted that it would remain an online scrapbook of the years when Myspace was the go-to social network, including for musicians promoting their work. A new collection of MP3s hosted by the Internet Archive, however, may help some users recover lost music (and memories).

ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on MySpace, gathered before they were all “deleted” by mistake. https://t.co/oIunuHF7wc includes a link to a special custom search and play mechanism that lets you search and play songs. pic.twitter.com/aGkFPDBN7r

— Jason Scott (@textfiles) April 4, 2019

Called the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, the collection contains 450,000 songs. While this is just a small percentage of the tracks reportedly lost (according to estimates, up to 53 million songs from 14 million artists were deleted), it contains early work from now-famous artists including Donald Glover and Katy Perry, …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber may have left Southeast Asia but its APAC HQ remains in Singapore

By Jon Russell

Uber exited Southeast Asia last year after it sold its local business to Grab but it continues to remain in Singapore, where it has now opened a new regional HQ for Asia Pacific and is hiring for staff.

The company — which is headed for IPO imminently — won’t be restarting its service, however, which puts it in a rather interesting position in Singapore.

The writing has been on the wall for some time, though. TechCrunch reported last August that Uber was on a hiring spree in Singapore, and now that has come to fruition with the opening with a new 2,000 sq meter office near the Central Business District in Singapore. That’ll function as the management center for the nine markets that Uber operates in across Asia Pacific, which include Japan, Korea and Australia. India, Uber’s second largest market, is managed separately to the rest of the continent.

Uber’s Southeast Asia sale — which saw it take a tactical 27.5 percent stake in its Singapore-based rival — gave Grab first refusal on a lot of Uber’s operational talent, but most of Uber’s core management team remained with the company in Singapore. For example, Brooks Entwistle, who was …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

Krablr nets new leadership

By Natasha Lomas

News just in: We’re getting reports the board of Krablr has voted overwhelmingly to jettison the sole remaining founder, Wilson Poney, and install an interim CFO to take the company in a new old direction.

“We’re going to make Krablr great again,” said chairman of the board, Goldie Seamann. “We’re not 100% sure what’s been going on around here but the board is unanimous in agreement that Krablr should return to its roots in the fishing industry to provide strong value to stakeholders and its ecosystem.”

“No more ICOs, no more microdosing podcast retreats flirting with white supremacy. Just good, old clean business,” he added.

Seamann, a former consultant with McKinsey, KPMG and OMFG, said the board believes the shell of the Krablr brand can still be salvaged — in spite of its disastrous ICO last year which saw an estimated $260M worth of ‘Krabcoin’ vanish without trace.

The company is said to be in negotiations to offload its Krab.coin arm, developed specifically for the ICO, for a bargain price of around a dozen Dentacoins. It is also working to offload the assets of a previously developed messaging app to a “major social network” in order …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

In San Francisco, a fight over a homeless shelter shines a harsh light on a conflicted population

By Connie Loizos

As of 2017, there were roughly 7,000 people living without homes in San Francisco, a number that comprises minors — a lot of them. The San Francisco Unified School District estimates that as of 2017, roughly 2,100 of the children in the school system were homeless — a number that it said looked to be escalating, not shrinking.

While parents may not hesitate to send their offspring to these same schools, some in the city’s northeast corner may be uncomfortable with the idea of homeless adults and families seeking shelter in close proximity. Such appears to be the point of a GoFundMe campaign that was launched late last week called “Safe Embarcadero for All.” Its objective: to raise $100,000 for legal counsel to push against the creation of a shelter along the city’s eastern waterfront region.

The campaign is a reaction to an idea introduced earlier this month by San Francisco Mayor London Breed to turn a parking lot along Embarcadero that’s owned by the Port of San Francisco into a center that would provide health and housing services and round-the-clock stays for up to 200 of the city’s homeless residents.

It isn’t just theoretical. If the Port Commission …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

Rela, a Chinese lesbian dating app, exposed 5 million user profiles

By Zack Whittaker

点击查看本文中文版。

Rela (热拉), a popular dating app for gay and queer women, has exposed millions of user profiles and private data because a server wasn’t protected with a password.

Rela disappeared from app stores in May 2017 after it was reportedly shut down by Chinese regulators, though the government never confirmed it took action. But the app returned a year later, according to its app store listing, on a different cloud provider. LGBTQ+ rights in China remain highly limited, even though it was decriminalized in 1997. Many in the community still fight discrimination and attitudes have been slow to change.

Victor Gevers, a security researcher at the GDI Foundation, found the exposed database this week, he told TechCrunch, containing more than 5.3 million app users.

It’s believed the database had been exposed since June 2018, a month after the app returned, Gevers said.

Each record included their nicknames, dates of birth, height and weight, ethnicity, and sexual preferences and interests. Records also, where users allowed, included their precise geolocation. The database also contained over 20 million “moments,” or status updates — including private data.

“The privacy of five-plus million LGBTQ+ people face a lot of social challenges in China because their …read more

Source: Tech Crunch