The comment section is wild. So many people thinking that the Japanese government is somehow late to the floppy free party. Clearly they have no idea how dire the IT infrastructure situation is for the most critical systems of the world’s major super powers
If you think the US government is floppy free, let alone capable of going floppy free in the next 5 years, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya
Not only because the infra is bad but also because floppy is “safer”. It’s not "connected"amd no one can invade it.
Security by obscurity
Security through obscurity would be having a system connected to a network, but relying on a secret / unknown protocol to secure it.
Air-gapping a system is a real and very useful security method. That being said, it’s not enough by itself.
If you’re interested, have a look at past examples, like the recent work on breaking Tetra communication standard and Stuxnet.
As another guy joked it’s really is genuinely more accurate to call floppy discs security by obsolescence because everyone doesn’t have the stuff required to manipulate/read floppy discs and there are even people who don’t even know what a floppy disk is and just think it’s a physical save button
That’s why I only communicate via poop/sparkle emoji Morse code
✨💩💩💩 ✨✨💩 ✨✨✨ 💩➿✨💩✨✨ ✨✨ 💩✨💩 ✨➿💩 ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨ ✨✨✨
✨✨ 💩✨💩➿💩 ✨✨✨✨💩💩 ✨✨
Security by obsolescence
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Where are floppies used in the US government? Old mainframes are all over the place but where are floppies?
Japan just got an acute case of what a lot of western governments have - IT early adopter disease. These old systems were built using (at the time) revolutionary technology that was designed without much thought given to modularity or sun-setting.
I’m not sure about government but I am aware of test equipment in commercial aerospace that still use floppy disks, soooo…
US gov isn’t even tape free
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has significant advantages in certain situations, such that you have to make specific design decisions if you don’t want people to use it: https://www.chia.net/2018/06/11/the-asic-resistance-of-proof-of-space/ https://chiaforum.com/t/lto-tape-drive-as-a-storage-option/12829/3
I will always remember stumbling upon this video (“HP Protecting your business data (or Disc vs Tape)”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHP_bKJx2xg
Frick yeah
Amazon and Facebook probably aren’t tape free either. Tape is crazy cheap and reliable. It’s just really slow.
Its been a while since I used one but arent 3.5’s unreliable? I still remember having problems with data integrity way back then. I dont remember them as some rock solid tech and I’d rather put my faith into 650MB CDs if I had to choose.
3.5 inch disks only held about 2MB on a good day. Reliable or not, you won’t get much on that disk these days.
Unless you are going to make your own backups and take them somewhere else, I would use a cloud solution. Yes, you have to trust the company you choose not to fuck with your data, but they are fault-tolerant solutions that will likely last longer than some random removable solution.
Granted I’m too young to have handed floppys but from what I understand from my dad and other people the appeal of floppys today is not reliability but rather that normal people have moved on to USB and CDs and have long since thrown away their floppy drives and some people only know them as icon buttons making them pretty good spot to hide classified documents and government secrets
I can’t imagine that’s the main reason. You can buy a 3.5" floppy reader with a usb connection for like 20 bucks on amazon and anyone who wanted to get their hands on government secrets would not be deterred by that.
I think the simplest and most likely reason is that updating things and making changes in bureaucracies is hard on its own, and any time you start dealing with tech it’s all a house of cards where one system depends on another and so changing any one thing will either make it all fall down or bring along with it massive sweeping changes.
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure even putinism didn’t stop Russia from being floppy-free
I somehow wouldn’t be surprised if certain parts of the US government still used reel to reel tapes.
…punch cards. My money is on punch cards.
They still have a love affair with faxes though. Thank God you can fax from 7 Eleven. You can do pretty much anything from 7 Eleven.
You… can fax from 7-11? I need to know more about this!
Convenience stores in Japan are much more than the cigarettes and lottery tickets of North America. They have lots of ready-to-eat food, snacks, drinks as well as some banking services, bill payments, faxing and more.
Ours have that too, but it’s old hot dogs and ATM’s with fees up your ass.
Yeah sorry. I should have said “ready-to-eat food that you actually want to eat”. As in hot food regularly being cooked and refrigerated food that is brought in fresh multiple times a day.
Each 7-11 in Japan has one of those big business multicopiers. You can copy, print, scan, fax. The printing is sweet because it does photo printing on glossy paper, but also laser printing up to A3 size or even making custom post cards. They also have databases of paid content like sheet music and stuff you can print. I prefer Lawson/FamilyMart though since they also have sticker printing!
Get the 7 Eleven multicopy app. You can do all kinds of things.
You know, since e-mail is a fucking wasteland of unread messages and spam, faxing doesn’t seem so bad.
I have had a total of three humans in my inbox in the past year
I hope fax stays relevant, even if it’s less used.
Maybe now they can switch to the magneto-optical disks like in Mission: Impossible.
The funny thing was 1.44mb is probably enough to store a really really long list of names and codenames so…they could have used a normal floppy disk lol.
NOCLIST.TXT, 78KB
“We’ve got it.”
On to Zip drives, then?
If it works well for the job that it’s tasked to perform, why change it? It’s got the added benefit of being an unintentional security feature now too, as very few others will even have a drive for reading them. Sort of like how manual transmissions are much less likely to be stolen now.
This is a great point, but it probably doesn’t do the job as well as more modern alternatives.
- Easy to lose, possible data leak concerns.
- Easy to retain data that should have been deleted.
- Easy to lose data if a disk gets lost or damaged.
- Likely wastes time when trying to track down the disk you need to getting someone to transfer it.
- Lack of access logs and auditing capabilities.
- Easy way for viruses to spread.
Modern IT managed file servers solve a lot of real problems when well-managed.
On the other hand, if you use an old technology that isn’t being mass produced anymore, it can reach a point where it will become a big liability for a mission-critical piece of equipment.
I think there was something about the US government having to finally get rid of vacuum tubes because the only suppliers were in Russia.
Yah this is bad I run a cnc plasma table, big table 10 feet x 20 feet. It uses floppy disks. Pain in the ass to find a new drive and pain in the ass to find new disks because constant write re write emf and metal dust kills them. But despite that it’s still cheaper and easier than a $15k retro fit to a more modern controler.
If it works well for the job
Your example is one where it clearly isn’t a great fit for the job. If you wanted to transfer sensitive data discretely, a floppy could be significantly better than a wired network where you’ve got to worry about America/Russia/China/Israel/Iran and who knows who else peeping on the transfer, or a USB drive which is already known to be compromised by stuxnet derivatives.
Not gonna lie, this sounds like something North Korea would say.
This is a headline
At a broader level, this is why I stopped chasing after the cutting edge technology for the sake of it. If it vastly improves my everyday life, sure, I’ll consider adopting. Otherwise, I’ll just be miserable if it’s not something I’m passionate about.
Next up, official woodblock stamps that every employee working on a project has to stamp every official page.
I kind of love those, but they are definitely excessively used.
