Maybe the 8" ones? I guess we'll end up creating more questions and not getting any answers any time soon.
You'd think that the duration or lifespan of equipment is written down somewhere, and that when stuff expires it's transferred to a replacement. But even in Japan that doesn't seem to apply to governmental bodies.
Small benefit of this case: it can't be that much data, unless it's a private key to a server that actually contains everything.
The typical reasons costs a lot to upgrade tech for large organizations, existing supply lines to get the equipment, the pro/cons being well understood at this point, etc.
Oh, and of course our good old friend "well we've always done it this way!"
>And yet, such a computer system ranks as one of the most important in the world – so critical in fact that nobody has wanted to change or upgrade it since it was built nearly half a century ago.
devops will eat me alive for this, but my 2c is if it's critical infra, and if it's working, don't touch it. Sure write a new one in parallel, but don't change or upgrade it.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? Or perhaps the news value comes from this fact, but then, they don't make any comment on it... Weird.
I also love that they seem to be taking this seriously, even when it's just 38 people, while all over the world, governments (cough Turkey cough) don't even apologize when they leak the personal details of ALL of their citizens. Well.
That seems like a personal decision to get into the already crowded car instead of waiting for the next one, I don't imagine someone is standing at the station platform and forcing more people into the train car against their will.
I’m not familiar with Japanese law, but frankly leaking information about a _single_ person should be cause for a breach notification everywhere. The fact that it isn’t is indicative of the fact that profit is placed over privacy so often.
Japanese culture is very strict about being being precise and having high expectations of each other and of companies in general.
Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders.
There’s a limited amount of computer control, you have people checking to see that the platform is clear and it’s safe to leave. Meanwhile, the computer is controlling a physical system and it’s not like the control will be perfect… everything from weather to mechanical failures will affect it.
The signal will often go green (or in the case of this line, ATC will show that the train is cleared to proceed) prior to the actual departure time. This is because the trains are not allowed to close their doors until they have a departure signal, so this has to happen well before the actual departure time. Depending on the station configuration and signalling technology the signal clearing may simply occur automatically once the line ahead is clear, so it's up to the train driver to ensure that they don't depart too early.
Computer control is nice but it's one tiny piece. If wayside infrastructure fails during rush hour, trains are going to be delayed, so they have to assure that won't happen. Station dwell times are another big issue that computers don't have any control over (the train can't leave when someone's backpack is caught in the door).
Computer control is more of a safety issue than a reliability enhancer. Computers are pretty good at stopping trains before they crash into another train or rocket off of a curve some idiot took at 80mph, but not so good at driving the train at its safe limits. Ever ride BART? It's been fully automatic since its inception (in normal operation, drivers have an e-stop button and make announcements) and it isn't setting records for on-time performance.
I think the fascination with Japan's on-time record is a little overblown. I went to high school in Tokyo and I was late plenty of times due to train problems. Snow? Schedule is fucked for the entire day; trains canceled, trains late. Someone falls in front of a train? You're not going anywhere for an hour. As a rider of the New York subway system during the "meltdown", I can tell you that you can absolutely do worse than Japan. But the MTA was still happy to hand out vouchers explaining why I was late to work.
> Computer control is nice but it's one tiny piece.
I don't know if they do this, but I'd imagine if they built in buffers and then controlled the train speed based on arrival/departure times they could get pretty accurate. If a run's maximum average speed (mouthful) is 120 km/h then plan on 100 km/h which gives you +20 buffer to play with in order to make sure the time is right. A computer would allow that +20 to be evenly spread so passengers aren't aware of it.
That, of course, has much less to do with computers and more to do with planning and eliminating and accounting for unknowns as much as possible.
Japanese train drivers are trained to the extreme, with periodic auditing by the trainers that involves being timed with a stopwatch as they cover the speedometer. https://youtu.be/xzkU6tmdImY?t=205
The high punctuality isn't necessarily without its faults; it creates a high-stress environment to adhere to schedule. 106 people died in a train crash that is hypothesized to have happened because the train was 60 seconds late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
I’m under the impression it’s a similar thing in Sweden regarding trains. I heard they give you money to cover a taxi if the train is late by a few minutes or something.
They don't give money, but they do get you a taxi if you missed your train change. Alternatively, a night at a nearby hotel and a new trip the next morning.
I heard they give you money to cover a taxi if the train is late by a few minutes or something.
LOL. If that was true the Swedish train companies would have been bankrupt decades ago. Swedish trains are extremely unreliable. As someone who used to take the Stockholm-Gothenburg train a lot for work I was happy every time I arrived less than an hour late.
In Finland you can claim money if the train is late 25% with 60 minutes and 50% at 2 hours... Also taxis are done sometimes, but people really need to know their rights and demand it.
With Stockholm public transport, you get up to $130 for a taxi if the (expected) delay is more than 20 minutes. My guess is that it works out fincancially because so few people know about it / can be arsed to send in the paperwork.
For intercity routes you get 25% off the ticket after 1h delay and 50% after 2h delay.
Not at all, trains and tracks in Sweden are old and not properly maintained. And the official statistics regarding punctuality is insanely misleading.
Yes, if they screw you over you might get a taxi ride. But most probably you'd just have to wait for several hours and get up to 50% of the ticket price as a voucher for the next trip.
Trains are one of the most embarrassing part of Sweden. And we are probably going to spend and absolute fortune on new tracks and new slow trains (slow because costs have already spun out of control).
I was on a 3 hour Shinkansen trip that was 2 minutes late and the staff profusely apologized when we arrived.
I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.
Same here in Canada. I used to take the train between Montreal and Toronto frequently and I don't actually remember it ever being on time. It usually was 30-60 minutes late, since Via Rail shared rail with freight trains, but had a lower priority so it often needed to wait.
I must commend the Berlin transit system. Except for the occasional strike, I found it to be extremely efficient, clean, and rather polite. Especially the trams.
I have a strange compulsion to leave for things much earlier than I need to, and I arrive early always. I honestly didn’t notice, looked down of the platform and checked when the next train was coming, and wait. The tram was fantastic, I took it every day and really liked it. I was there for three months in the fall.
I see. I lived almost a decade in Berlin, and both in west and east. I cannot say enough good things about the trains. However I will not say they are always on time!
I lived in the Washington, DC area for ten years and used its train system every day, and it pales in comparison to Berlin. I've also tried New York City, San Francisco, Paris, Sydney, Moscow, and Atlanta, and Berlin was just top notch. I envy you immensely. The cleanliness, politeness of its passengers, above and under, it was just wonderful.
I've heard very many complaints about Deutsche Bahn though. On the other hand here in Switzerland trains are crazy good, perhaps not as much as Japan, but if you have a 5 minutes connection you can normally assume you'll make it.
Deutsche Bahn is notorious for being late or having technical problems. It's like a running gag. Everytime I have to take a train in Germany, I make sure to have at least 1-2 hours between connecting trains/flights.
And yes, Japanese trains are crazily accurate. Not only are they (almost) always perfectly on time, they also stop exactly at the position that is indicated on the platform, so you can line up and wait right in front of the train door.
It's easy to apologize profusely for something that is well within expectations.
On the other end of that spectrum, I can also empathize a bit with an increasingly unhelpful crew of a 30 hour late train. Yeah, you don't have to be rude about it, but at some point, there's simply a decreasing amount of help that can be given.
I wonder why the Japanese culture is like that. Obviously, some other nations could use the same precision and keeping companies (and governments) to high standards. But out of all countries, I can only think of Japan that does that.
Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
This is Japan. If someone finds an item on the street it will be dropped off at the nearest Kōban box (small police station that are everywhere). I lost a pair of sunglasses once that were $$ that I cared about them. I had a rough idea of were I lost them. The next day I went to the local Kōban and sure enough they had them. Lots paperwork to get them back as it is Japan.
> If someone finds an item on the street it will be dropped off at the nearest Kōban box
Unless it's an umbrella. For some magical reason, umbrellas are excempt from this rule and can be taken from wherever by anyone. I lost a cheap umbrella like this during a trip, and read about it and apparently it's the one item it's definitely not safe to leave unattended in Japan. Go figure!
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022?
What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storage options.
They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.
Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other.
Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
Back when I still used these I remembered they had horrible life span - I would take a new disk out from the box, wrote some files to it, then months later when I tried to read the disk I was unable to do so, with the disk drive making constant cricket sound.
> Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.
In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.
I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)
Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
There was definitely a period, at least with 5.25" disks, when name brand disks like Verbatim definitely tended to be more reliable than cheap disks bought in bulk. The latter weren't that bad (usually) and it often still made sense to use them so long as you were extra-careful with backups.
In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.
They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find.
Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
I just recently went through around 300 floppy disks -- 3.5" HD mostly, but also some 5.25" 360k and a few 3.5" DD. All dating to 1985-1995.
Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.
This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.
The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?
I have many 3.5 inchers. None of them lost data, either.
Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.
I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.
He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.
A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.
So have I. But I also remember plenty of floppies that I’ve written data to not even surviving the 30 minute cycle to college back in the 90s.
Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).
I’d have still expected them be writable because unlike CDs, writing a magnetic field isn’t destructive. But what I meant was whether cheap blank disks used a slightly different (cheaper) magnetic alloy with a shorter read/write limit than commercial software where they maybe spent a little more knowing it needed to be read often?
I do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)
It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.
More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.
It depended on which brands of floppies you bought. Some vendors were more profit-oriented than others and would skimp on the binding agent or just the amount of magnetic material without which the signal can become so weak they could become corrupted by being the the same room as a Wooly Willy.
That was one of the earliest instances I remember, where superior functionality was shipped with a product but kind of locked up. And like some other such “locks” they were easily defeated.
I also remember plenty of floppies that I’ve written data to not even surviving the 30 minute cycle to college back in the 90s.
I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.
These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.
Plenty still do. The Home Depots near me don't do chip. They're magstripe only.
I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.
It has been many years now, but I recall a full floppy dump took on the order of a few minutes to complete. Small data sizes were countered by the incredibly slow floppy drive interface.
Extreme unreliability, terrible speed, tiny storage, dearth of available equipment. The reasons not to use floppy disks for anything that matters are numerous and clear.
USB sticks also require an open USB port which can be used for all kinds of attack vectors that you just don't have to remember hardening against with a floppy.
And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.
> [...] and you can design your own format if you want to.
Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!?
This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade.
It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527
> This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades.
It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.
>Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022?
This is Japan, no pretending needed. They're waaaay backwards, internet there tends to be 20 years behind the times for starters ... Thought this was common knowledge.
When I visited I described this as "one foot in the future and one foot firmly in the past"
Some things are futuristic and obvious improvements (e.g. Suica and ApplePay NFC support in 2016/2017) and others are stubbornly in the past (e.g. cash only, physical media, place and structure of society).
My husband is Japanese so all my information is second-hand, but if you want to learn about Japan in a non-anime-manga-etc based way, I can recommend the TV channel "NHK World", which is in English, and also English-language Japanese news sources like the Japan Times.
Your comment would imply they both lack certain innovations we have but also have equally big ones they're ahead of us on. I don't really find that to be the case. I think it is awesome you can board a bus with a 10,000 yen note and the machine can give you change no problem. Also, ATM machines take your coins for deposit and all. But that has been around twenty plus years, and I can't think of anything else substantial I'm jealous of.
This is Japan, no pretending needed. They're waaaay backwards, internet there tends to be 20 years behind the times for starters ... Thought this was common knowledge.
The Japan you and I know from personal experience isn't anything at all like the imagined futuristic cyberpunk image that the chattering internet has created.
Not sure what you mean by the “internet” being 20 years behind. Maybe website design? Certainly not connectivity which is generally world class.
Japan has a great culture of precision engineering and quality (although software is a bit of a different story). On the other hand decision making is very conservative and change is often blocked by vested interests.
Also they invested heavily in a lot of cutting edge infrastructure during the bubble, but now have been slow to replace it.
The most likely answer as to why the MPD still use floppy disks is there is no funding for a total system upgrade. The most likely reason there is no funding is a combination of conservative decision making combined with a politically well connected vendor that makes big bucks of supporting the existing infrastructure.
Well might stop someone who does not care but someone like me would be highly curious finding a floppy disc this day and age and may spend the 20$ on amazon for a reader.
Won't help if the finder of the floppies has a Mac. I have a bunch of old floppy disks, but from what I've read online, you can't even hook a USB floppy drive to a Mac anymore. All that code is gone from the OS.
As long as it’s not an M1. I tried recently to read some old CDroms that were formatted for OS9. Not a straightforward process to read those old file systems. And, if you have an M1, you then need to have a w OS that runs on the arm chip. Or, you can use qemu to install os9 in full emulation. What a PITA.
IIRC, really old Macs got extra storage out of a floppy by spinning the disc faster when the read/write heads were on the outer tracks. Made them a wee bit difficult to read on any other hardware.
Or safeguard nuclear weapons. America's nukes got hacked literally the same month they proudly announced that they had modernized away from floppies. You'd think that'd be more newsworthy than a couple public housing applicants in Japan having their privacy invaded but nope. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/#footnote6
> America's nukes got hacked literally the same month they proudly announced that they had modernized away from floppies.
You're conflating two entirely different things. US nukes were not hacked, that's a massive exaggeration.
"Shaylyn Hynes, a DOE spokesperson, said that an ongoing investigation into the hack has found that the perpetrators did not get into critical defense systems."
"They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE."
From what I remember, Samsung killed off floppy disk manufacturing when it was still bringing $70M annually. Not surprised some places still use them. Considering how dated it is, it's probably safer than having a USB dongle because nobody can read it
Also — name, date of birth, and sex are considered highly guarded top-secret personal information. Most people would voluntarily publish this and more on any social media platform without giving it a second thought.
And I don't see anything wrong with floppies, besides them and drives no longer being produced. USB sticks are too expensive, and optical media are too delicate, often single-use and an overkill for this purpose.
Wouldn't it be interesting if the floppy disks lost were 2.88MB and also only commonly readable in japan, where that rare format of drive was very slightly more popular in the mid 1990s.
Both. There was an episode in the second `gig` of GITS anime that showcased this model to secure a character's secret ledger before hackers fried his brain.
For a brief period, I kept a copy of my /etc/passwd and keyfiles on a HiMD disk with an RH1.
I remember in the mid-90s a customer had just prior to my contract with them starting deployed some 3COM enterprise core routers. They were having issues with connectivity to their Banyan Vines servers which I tracked down to an issue with the routers. 3COM had a bug fix but the routers required the use of 2.88MB floppies to upgrade them. Neither the customer or I had a 2.88MB floppy drive to write the upgrade to. It took 2 full days of searching to find anyone who could get me one in less than a month.
I think you mean famicom. Unless I'm mistaken, the famicom and the 64 had floppy drives add-ons (FDS and 64DD), but I don't think the super famicom did. Unless you're speaking of 3rd party tools like those used to copy games, but afaik they use standard floppies.
There's many options to buy affordable 3.5" USB floppy drives on Amazon and eBay. However, I haven't been able to find any obvious options to read 5.25" floppy disks on a modern machine.
There were external 5.25 drives back in the day that connected via parallel port, one of those paired with a parallel to USB bridge should do the trick. The really hard part will be drivers, unless your USB adapter has one baked into the firmware you may find yourself writing your own drivers.
To be fair those posts are only mostly a few years old, so they’re being upvoted by the same HN crowd that generally decides what makes it to the front page.
Nor mine. I distinctly remember back to college circa 2000, copying a project from my computer in the dorms, walking to a project partner's dorm room adjacent to mine, and in that 15 second walk, having the data corrupted.
Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed like if I walked near them, they'd get corrupted.
I had a lot of issues with corrupted ZIP disks back in those days. They were far more reliable than floppies but far less reliable than hard drives. It got so bad I gave up using them for long term backups and switched to tape for that, relegating ZIP to quick (for the time) transfers between computers and always checking file integrity after every move.
USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.
Zip drives and cartridges were infamously unreliable, like literally every product iomega ever made. The old Bernoulli cartridges would fail all the time, too.
They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in.
Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.
Likely the floppy was ejected too soon and/or had a corrupted filesystem. Or one of you had a floppy drive that needed to be cleaned, or was slightly out of spec and couldn't be read by the other.
My understanding is that quality varied a lot, and that near the end (when USB thumbdrives were starting to take off) manufacturers started cutting a lot of corners, with the result that everyone remembers floppies as being more unreliable than they actually were, or at least could be.
Mine either. Even putting aside media decay there is the mechanical failure (for 3.5"). For mechanical issues I was the go-to resource among friends and family, and when I worked at my Uni's help desk. I'd open them up and put the spring back together, or if need be take apart the drive to remove stuck disk, canabalize a blank disk-- toss out the media, keep the mechanical bits to slot in the old media.
Unfortunately stuck disks were often corrupted if mechanical failure occured during r/w. Sometimes I was still able to use recovery software to get data off, but plenty of times it was gone.
Around 1992 or so I was working at a large manufacturer that was still working to eliminate punch cards. Don't underestimate how long a technology can stay in use in organizations where technology is not the main business line.
not just problematic because of the data on them, but if they keep losing them they might also run out of floppy disks for their day to day business, since they've been out of production for a decade
I still have a USB floppy drive that came with a Vaio laptop from the early 2000s. I've only ever used it once just to test that it worked but have held onto it for fun.
I use floppy disks for my Akai S2800 sampler :)
Originally built around 1992 it still works (and sounds) great!
Modding it to support USB is too expensive, and I quite enjoy some of the limitations it brings. You have to get creative for some things.
I quite enjoy some of the limitations it brings. You have to get creative for some things.
There really is something distinctive from the golden age of hip hop where you were limited sample size and really had to flip and combine many different samples to produce a beat. J Dilla came a little later, but he was certainly influenced by the sound and I think it should be no surprise that his Akai Sampler (MPC3000, which also had a 3.5" disk drive) would be included in the Smithsonian collection [0].
There were 2.88MB floppies, or... I think that was actually an encoding thing? That is, I think you could take a "standard" 3.5" floppy and use special software to format it up to 2.88MB. (Maybe it just changed the track sizes or something, and hoped your disk was high enough quality to take that)
ED floppies have a different media notch. You can't get higher capacity in them using HD disks. You can however superformat HD media to 30MB in the later LS120 drives. The catch is they don't support random writes. New data requires a total rewrite.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people
Amateurs. In the USA we can do that kind of thing for 38 million people. with the advances in private sector we're on track to do so for 3.8 billion any day now.
Haven't seen a floppy disk for 20 years. Haven't seen an 8" floppy since about 1988.
Floppies got bitrot quite badly; I doubt they're readable without forensic equipment (come to think of it, even without the bitrot, equipment for reading floppies isn't common).
221 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadYou'd think that the duration or lifespan of equipment is written down somewhere, and that when stuff expires it's transferred to a replacement. But even in Japan that doesn't seem to apply to governmental bodies.
Small benefit of this case: it can't be that much data, unless it's a private key to a server that actually contains everything.
Oh, and of course our good old friend "well we've always done it this way!"
I also imagine that we've made at least 10x as many DVDs by now, than all the floppies that were ever made, regardless of the floppy disk size.
"US nuclear weapons command finally ditches 8-inch floppies"
>And yet, such a computer system ranks as one of the most important in the world – so critical in fact that nobody has wanted to change or upgrade it since it was built nearly half a century ago.
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2017/12/19/no-mclaren-doesnt-need-...
I also love that they seem to be taking this seriously, even when it's just 38 people, while all over the world, governments (cough Turkey cough) don't even apologize when they leak the personal details of ALL of their citizens. Well.
I imagine this practice has probably been fervently deprecated due to covid19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders.
The easiest one I could find was from 2017 where a train left the station 20s earlier than scheduled. Source: https://www.mir.co.jp/assets_rti/pdf/2017.11.14.pdf
Computer control is more of a safety issue than a reliability enhancer. Computers are pretty good at stopping trains before they crash into another train or rocket off of a curve some idiot took at 80mph, but not so good at driving the train at its safe limits. Ever ride BART? It's been fully automatic since its inception (in normal operation, drivers have an e-stop button and make announcements) and it isn't setting records for on-time performance.
I think the fascination with Japan's on-time record is a little overblown. I went to high school in Tokyo and I was late plenty of times due to train problems. Snow? Schedule is fucked for the entire day; trains canceled, trains late. Someone falls in front of a train? You're not going anywhere for an hour. As a rider of the New York subway system during the "meltdown", I can tell you that you can absolutely do worse than Japan. But the MTA was still happy to hand out vouchers explaining why I was late to work.
I don't know if they do this, but I'd imagine if they built in buffers and then controlled the train speed based on arrival/departure times they could get pretty accurate. If a run's maximum average speed (mouthful) is 120 km/h then plan on 100 km/h which gives you +20 buffer to play with in order to make sure the time is right. A computer would allow that +20 to be evenly spread so passengers aren't aware of it.
That, of course, has much less to do with computers and more to do with planning and eliminating and accounting for unknowns as much as possible.
It can, if the door slam shuts instead of attempting to reopen and close.
The high punctuality isn't necessarily without its faults; it creates a high-stress environment to adhere to schedule. 106 people died in a train crash that is hypothesized to have happened because the train was 60 seconds late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
LOL. If that was true the Swedish train companies would have been bankrupt decades ago. Swedish trains are extremely unreliable. As someone who used to take the Stockholm-Gothenburg train a lot for work I was happy every time I arrived less than an hour late.
For intercity routes you get 25% off the ticket after 1h delay and 50% after 2h delay.
Yes, if they screw you over you might get a taxi ride. But most probably you'd just have to wait for several hours and get up to 50% of the ticket price as a voucher for the next trip.
Trains are one of the most embarrassing part of Sweden. And we are probably going to spend and absolute fortune on new tracks and new slow trains (slow because costs have already spun out of control).
I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.
And yes, Japanese trains are crazily accurate. Not only are they (almost) always perfectly on time, they also stop exactly at the position that is indicated on the platform, so you can line up and wait right in front of the train door.
Pretty awesome watching the train you've been waiting for just sort of keep going :D. (The magic of newtown Wales!)
The worst is tho running and rushing and then finally making it into train car that turns out to be going completely wrong direction.
On the other end of that spectrum, I can also empathize a bit with an increasingly unhelpful crew of a 30 hour late train. Yeah, you don't have to be rude about it, but at some point, there's simply a decreasing amount of help that can be given.
Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZLGqL1FMo
https://jref.com/articles/koban-japanese-police-boxes.199/
Unless it's an umbrella. For some magical reason, umbrellas are excempt from this rule and can be taken from wherever by anyone. I lost a cheap umbrella like this during a trip, and read about it and apparently it's the one item it's definitely not safe to leave unattended in Japan. Go figure!
What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storage options.
They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.
Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.
In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.
I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)
Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.
Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.
40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.
Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.
This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.
The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?
Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.
I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.
He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.
A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.
(The missing file was one of the source files to Empire for the PDP-11, which I have now backed up on https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )
Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).
I do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)
It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.
More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.
I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.
These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.
I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.
When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.
And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.
Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!?
This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade.
It happens though, there was a story some years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527
It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.
This is Japan, no pretending needed. They're waaaay backwards, internet there tends to be 20 years behind the times for starters ... Thought this was common knowledge.
Some things are futuristic and obvious improvements (e.g. Suica and ApplePay NFC support in 2016/2017) and others are stubbornly in the past (e.g. cash only, physical media, place and structure of society).
The Japan you and I know from personal experience isn't anything at all like the imagined futuristic cyberpunk image that the chattering internet has created.
Japan has a great culture of precision engineering and quality (although software is a bit of a different story). On the other hand decision making is very conservative and change is often blocked by vested interests.
Also they invested heavily in a lot of cutting edge infrastructure during the bubble, but now have been slow to replace it.
The most likely answer as to why the MPD still use floppy disks is there is no funding for a total system upgrade. The most likely reason there is no funding is a combination of conservative decision making combined with a politically well connected vendor that makes big bucks of supporting the existing infrastructure.
/s
You're conflating two entirely different things. US nukes were not hacked, that's a massive exaggeration.
"Shaylyn Hynes, a DOE spokesperson, said that an ongoing investigation into the hack has found that the perpetrators did not get into critical defense systems."
"They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-hack...
And I don't see anything wrong with floppies, besides them and drives no longer being produced. USB sticks are too expensive, and optical media are too delicate, often single-use and an overkill for this purpose.
For a brief period, I kept a copy of my /etc/passwd and keyfiles on a HiMD disk with an RH1.
> 38 men in their 20s to 80s
https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...
This was not my experience.
Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed like if I walked near them, they'd get corrupted.
USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.
They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in.
Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.
Unfortunately stuck disks were often corrupted if mechanical failure occured during r/w. Sometimes I was still able to use recovery software to get data off, but plenty of times it was gone.
They just haven't figured out opportunity cost due to poor capabilities, or how much lost productivity there is because of the old system.
And the disks in this story were most likely Japanese "2.88MB" disks, whose true capacity I do not know.
There really is something distinctive from the golden age of hip hop where you were limited sample size and really had to flip and combine many different samples to produce a beat. J Dilla came a little later, but he was certainly influenced by the sound and I think it should be no surprise that his Akai Sampler (MPC3000, which also had a 3.5" disk drive) would be included in the Smithsonian collection [0].
0 - https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.139.1?destination=/...
The number of people whose info can fit on 2 floppy disks.
Amateurs. In the USA we can do that kind of thing for 38 million people. with the advances in private sector we're on track to do so for 3.8 billion any day now.
Floppies got bitrot quite badly; I doubt they're readable without forensic equipment (come to think of it, even without the bitrot, equipment for reading floppies isn't common).