No doubt the password was written on a piece of paper next to the USB. This is the country that loves to send an encrypted attachment and a separate email a minute later with the (weak) password as if that achieves anything.
I once lost my sim card and wanted to lock it, so I called the phone company and they asked me for the first 3 characters of my password to verify myself.
So I know what you’re thinking but it is at least technically possible that they don’t store it as plaintext - like maybe when you set the password it stored a salted hash of the whole thing, plus also a special hash of the first 3 chars for emergency recovery or locking operations (ie can be used when you show up in-person with the photo ID they have on file). So they’d enter the characters, and compare the hash and you’d then follow password reset process offline.
But … while it’s possible, I think we all know they probably just stored it as plaintext :-D
Storing a hash of the first three characters still cripples the security. It is trivial to brute force a hash when there’s only 62^3 possibilities. And once you know the first characters, brute forcing the remaining ones is exponentially easier
It absolutely does and you're right it would still be stupid (though making 62^3 phone calls or store visits might not be feasible). I was trying to say it doesn't necessarily mean your password is stored in the clear. But honestly I think any time you're prompted like this for something that might get implemented via storing a password in the clear it probably means it was been implemented that way.
I always assumed the point of those types of passwords is to prevent anyone MITM the password since you have to communicate it by voice and often in places where people might overhear. So you have a password but ask for a different (random) combination of 3 characters from it each time.
It’s kind of like a TOTP code for noobs (not even remotely as good as TOTP but something your gran could still manage understand).
The services I know which do this will have an additional password for online stuff which is different to the aforementioned and does have to be supplied in full. Thus, you’d hope, is hashed and salted etc. However you don’t supply that password when making phone calls. Sometimes you even have to supply both pieces of information when logging in online.
It's a useful vector for things like malware because an intermediate scanning service can't examine the attachment without having both emails. If there's a concern about some PII or whatever being intercepted in transit, it should help with that too.
We can't expect the general public to be very good at security.
I gave up on PGP, and most of my clients and I don't have an e2e encrypted chat or password manager service in common.
But at least I tell them to use a "burn after reading" post on an encrypted pastebin like 0bin.net for the secrets thing to send me.
It adds almost no complexity, best case scenario, you increase the security against bots since they would need to parse the link, visit the paste, trigger the Burn After Reading feature, interpret JS, extract the password and use it. That's already a pretty specific bot.
Most interceptions, even human, will be detected thanks to the burn after reading. And the password is never stored in the pastebin db since it's encrypted client side.
Worst case scenario, it's the same than a plain text email. Not much to loose.
It's easy to teach. Requires no install, little skill or tech, works in most corporate setup.
It's not good security. But it's better than abysmal security.
What is the intent of admitting this? What happened here is utterly appalling and the employee and a few layers of management above should be fired and prosecuted. Haven’t these fools realized the data can be brute forced offline? Are they that stupid to not realize lists of passwords are run against such data?
It comes from a culture of honor and taking ultimate responsibility for your mistakes in order to preserve this honor through honesty and integrity, all the same which led to the safe return of the data in the end.
Good morning Jamal. I've got to admit, I really respect that culture of taking ownership of their mistakes. Other companies could take a page out of their book and do a little good.
Yeah, I went to school there when I was a teenager. It was an interesting experience to say the least. Much more social cohesion in some ways but definitely a LOT more bullying than I was used to seeing in North America. I got to be friends with the mean gay kids with shaved eyebrows and hot girls due to where I ended up doing my homestay and it was... wow, those kids were MEAN. Never towards me but a few kids in our classes really got the brunt of it. They were insulting their families to their faces in front of the teacher who just completely ignored this happening right in front of him.
It's pretty clear in my travels that there's good and bad in pretty much every culture and every country, and that you should focus and celebrate the good while being highly aware of the flip side of things that might be an issue if you are blind to that.
Incident response always ends on "lessons learned" and it's rarely
productive to hide the facts due to political embarrassment. Earliest
disclosure also mitigates against much bigger liabilities as a
consequence of a leak.
> management above should be fired and prosecuted.
And be immediately replaced by management with the same level of
understanding and responsibility.
> Haven’t these fools realized...
No. And this is the key point. The biggest thing by FAR in
cybersecurity is education. Ordinary people do not have any working
model of the threat landscape and basic operational security because
they foolishly, blindly trust technology and services providers.
We literally need a second digital literacy revolution. One that
undoes a lot of the naive and trusting enthusiasm for digitalisation
that we inculcated in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately that goes against
the grain of almost every policy that's active out there today.
> The company explained that the employee had drinks after work and later fell asleep on the street, but when he woke up he realized that he had lost the bag containing the USB.
If he had gone to sleep in the train station because the trains stop running at midnight, and someone returned the wayward USB drive to him while he slept, with a little note and a can of Premium Boss for when he woke up all hungover, it would be the most Japan story of the month.
That reminds me.. someone I know very well managed to sleep past the only scheduled stop at a station near his home, and it was the last train for the night. But they helpfully made an unscheduled stop at the next station, just for him, which fortunately still wasn't too far away. Japan, of course. Trains in Japan are always on schedule, as in exactly on schedule, but they have margins to work with and could do that extra stop by just increasing the speed a bit afterwards.
They actually announced the length and the characters (letters/numbers) used in the password in yesterday's press conference, if you could believe it...
Many people on the internet guessed what the password probably was (city name + year).
Only just read the BBC article saying it was lost, which is only an hour old so clearly they didn't dig deep into this as the found article is three hours old.
Shows news is best sourced from multiple sources for the full picture.
I’ve undertaken information security training in a number of Japanese companies. They all had what I thought was a disproportionate weighting on the “blind drunk salaryman falls asleep on a train and leaves behind a laptop, mobile phone, USB stick etc.” scenario.
It seems for the UK Ministry of Defense the going rate was 30 lost per year...
"...More than 120 USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence since 2004, it was reported earlier this year....Some 26 of those disappeared this year == including three which contained information classified as “secret”, and 19 which were “restricted”...."
USB media is now prohibited on any classified system. They've even gone as far as disabling the USB storage drivers. Even having a USB memory stick in a closed area is a big no no.
So I actually can believe it happens to Americans as much as anyone, but that story is a bit different -- the Apple employees were testing the devices "in the field", bringing them along with you in your daily activities including the bar was intentional and part of the assignment.
I don't know why you bring a USB stick with half a million people's data with you to the bar. Why is that even leaving the office?
I bring this up not to talk about differences between Americans and Japanese (boring, I think they are probably exagerated), but becuase these are different "threat models". You handle the "USB stick with company data" on it "threat" by training people... not to just stick sensitive data in their pocket as they go about their business? It should be on a USB stick for as little time as possible and that USB stick should be treated like it's worth a fortune (because it is). There's no reason you should be carrying that thing with you to the bar in the first place.
The iPhone case... eh, if you ask people to carry a device along with them in their daily lives, it's inevitable that someone will forget one someplace at some point. Maybe some kind of proximity alarm that beeps if you walk away from it?
Does Apple do controlled leaks? Of course, any company which is able to keep secrets in the first place does.
For the iPhone 4? Absolutely not, the only other model which changed iPhone as much as the 4 was the X, Steve was still alive for the 4 and there is absolutely no way he would have approved just leaving it in a bar for hype.
Steve Jobs wanted to be the person who showed that to the world. Remember the first MacBook Air? Steve lived for that moment.
We live in a conspiracist society, any secret plan you can imagine has "been suspected", and generally people require no particular evidence other than "it would make sense to me" (as if there aren't plenty of things that would make sense to me that haven't happened!)
But if Apple actually wanted media outlets to cover it, having law enforcement seize and search the property of the editor that broke the story, and then banning the media outlet that broke it from WWDC... doesn't seem like the way to encourage anyone to cover it next time there's a leak, if you're actually hoping for coverage of secretly orchestrated leaks. https://www.pcmag.com/archive/gizmodo-banned-from-wwdc-25149...
I'm with you on asking why that data was even on a removable drive. What possible use case is there for that? And if there is one, like transferring between airgapped networks, it seems you'd encrypt it at least.
The USB key was used to transfer the data from a government office to a service firm reviewing Covid19 related benefit claims and fund distribution. The employee mistake was to not delete data from USB key after transferring to the firm's system.
Interesting ... I came here to highlight the quote from the affected city:
> The company explained that the employee had drinks after work and later fell asleep on the street, but when he woke up he realized that he had lost the bag containing the USB.
My premise was going to be that perhaps this isn't the company you'd trust with the residents' subsidies but clearly I misunderstand the cultural aspect to this story. The other thing I didn't get is that the employee who "lost" the bag filed a police report for theft. If you're passed-out-drunk, how would you even know it was a theft?
There is something like a 90% return rate on lost wallets in Japan. Failure to attempt to return a lost item of value is an actual crime... so if the bag was not sitting on the street next to him when he woke up and not returned by a kind soul it was by Japanese definition stolen
Yes. They cover this exact situation. If you have work data in your bag, don't go drinking, don't put your bag in the coin locker, go directly back to the office.
At work we are dealing with a bug which causes USB XHCI controller to die and become inaccessible after failed runtime resume, and it took me a while to understand how "lost USB" can be related to city resident data.
> The company explained that the employee had drinks after work and later fell asleep on the street, but when he woke up he realized that he had lost the bag containing the USB.
I respect the honesty but wow, I can't believe any company would spell it out that literally.
They sound a lot more trustworthy to me for owning up to it and spelling it out literally. That makes it sound like an isolated incident that they're able to recognize as a problem publicly.
When a company does a standard "we take your privacy very seriously" non-response right after demonstrating that they do not, in fact, take it very seriously, it makes it sound like they're not willing to acknowledge the problem at all.
The transparency of the entire event, end to end, becomes a "ho hum, thanks for telling me, i guess" sort of story. Which is, I suppose, why it's on HN.
I mean, "guy loses usb with data, finds usb with data" used to happen to me twice on Thursday back when usb was a thing. It was hardly front page news.
> That makes it sound like an isolated incident that they're able to recognize as a problem publicly.
I think it’s more that 80% of all company employees can symphatize. The situation isn’t all that uncommon (falling asleep on the street and misplacing your stuff somewhere). The fact that this person had a USB stick with the data of ~450k people on was.
Given how Japanese work culture functions, this is not that different from an American company saying that an employee went to a company happy hour and lost the USB stick in the taxi on the way home.
Staggering to a bench and sleeping it off is just, normal. No one is going to pick your pocket, so why not?
It's on my list of places to go. For now, all I have is PaoloFromTokyo, which is family friendly so there isn't much nightlife content. I had no idea there was this level of public good will.
that was one of the things that surprised me on an early saturday bike ride, also in regards to street crime in japan, at least in my experience it is so exceedingly rare that most people there are incredibly naive to it.
You don't have to fear getting mugged in the streets, but you can still get ripped off.
One example are the notoriously expensive bars in Roppongi, at night there will be touts in the streets trying to convince tourists to join them for a night of drinking. They'll then go to the bar that hired those touts where, after a night of drinking, the tourists will be presented with a bill that's the equivalent of getting robbed.
Just curious, how much are we talking here? Sometimes out here the bar tab can get up to 300-400 for 2, especially if you order bottle service, since the law states they can only sell per drink and not full bottles.
Thousands (USD) for a drink or two, tens of thousands for a bottle or two. It's a very well known scam in some parts of Tokyo, and similar forms exist in many parts of the world.
Long and short, don't let someone on the street talk you into going into a bar or tea shop or whatever, and especially don't follow them to a second location.
The line for "acceptable robbery" was "no physical violence" + "someone consensually gives me their money."
Which is still possible (and easily doable if that mark is drunk), but is substantially different from American (and European?) style physical robbery.
In that case, you might also be interested in Tokyo Lens, TAKASHii from Japan, That Japanese Man Yuta and Let's ask Shogo, all on YouTube. Dogen is also highly recommended.
For whatever reason we were in Ginza on a Tuesday at like 2pm, and already two salarymen were carrying their boss who was clearly incapable of walking back to the office
It's not the civilized world, but here in the south you'll wake up with a racoon in your pocket making off with your Dentyne Ice and a flock of mosquitos airlifting a liter of O-positive.
I don't usually actually laugh at HN comments, but when I read "audited" in this context, I did. I don't know why, but this kind of tongue-in-cheek use of a more "sophisticated" word to refer to something mundane like robbery is my kind of humor.
For all of the "freedom" we have as Americans, there are many areas much of the rest of the western world does things better. Not getting political, but just factually... check out gun violence statistics next.
A cursory google pulled this wikipedia article up (linked below), and it makes it seem like mass knifings are generally rare and generally less destructive compared to north american shootings.
Do you have an article or graph (per capita or absolute) of deaths comparing the two countries you could point to for more info?
Gun violence stats in the U.S. have little to do with easy legal access to guns itself. Other factors, especially demographic ones, influence. Note that many states with very light gun laws have little gun homicide, other states with strict gun laws have high gun homicide rates and sometimes it's completely vice versa. Furthermore, if you look at the FBI's uniform crime statistics, the picture gets a bit clearer still, showing that the vast majority of gun crime happens in very specific areas of certain cities and particularly occurs among the African American community. I'm simply stating the numbers as they appear here, not making any judgments on any ethnic group per se.
People love to point at the U.S and its gun crimes as a direct result of the country's gun laws in particular, but overall, when certain very specific factors, population areas and very specific geographic regions are excluded, much of the country where guns of all kinds are easily available is barely more violent than your typical Western European country. The school shootings that people refer to are awful things, but statistically, they don't move any needle so much as an iota. They do however get enormous amounts of media attention. Other countries with very strict gun laws also have mass shootings and mass killings, both with guns and without guns, but again, less media focus because it doesn't fit certain narratives about the U.S being violent as hell because of gun posession.
I don't know. That would depend on whatever number is necessary for it to register in a statistically significant way.
Tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly stupid to make sweeping, broad, categorical judgments of certain things because of isolated, exceedingly rare incidents. It's even dumber to make broad, sweeping laws around emotional reactions such as yours to such events.
Every school shooting is a grotesque tragedy, but means of fighting them exist that don't require gun ownership to be banned for the millions of people who not only peacefully use guns but also in some cases need them for an assortment of reasons. "What about the children?" has rarely been a good or honest argument for anything, particularly for badly considered laws pushed forth by bouts of moral indignation and self-righteousness.
You can argue all you like, but American kids have been dying in much larger numbers than they should, in a way that happens only in America, and not a thing has been done about it. Saying it's not an issue because it doesn't kill a significant percentage of kids is monstrous.
Even among rabid USA fans like me, American prestige is currently falling like a brick.
I happen to live in a country where civilian ownership of guns is strictly controlled and mostly forbidden. Despite this, in this country, many kids die because of gun violence, more than in the U.S in both absolute numbers and proportionally. "In a way that happens only in America" is simply misleading and shows how the media narrative I mentioned in my original comment influences your thinking.. All things have tradeoffs, even those that can sometimes be tragic. You're basing extremely broad generalizations on emotional reactions to what really are isolated tragedies.
Oh yes, drunk businessmen sleeping around JR stations because they did not make it for the train to come home for the night are treated as holy cows in India. Full respect, including Police.
I'm told that in northern Europe you could leave your laptops or whatever in semi-public places (like, cafès I suppose), and if you come back after a few hours it would still be there.
Having lived in Norway and Finland, I’d say it would be very likely that you would get your items back. And if there would be contact details, someone would have most likely tried to call you before the few hours would be up. Would more or less the same in actual public spaces as well.
I lived in Sweden for a little bit, traveling around and into Norway and I can confirm this, at least partly.
Where it is not true is in large cities. Small cities and rural areas are one of the safest places on Earth as long as you don't get nibbled by a moose or overrun by ants.
From Sweden, Stockholm, can say a solid NO. my coworker lost his backpack (wallet, iPad and Mac) in the university computer room (card key required to get in) by just leaving it for 5min under summer HPC course. When we managed to track the mac down (through cloud & GPS) it was 40km away, moving in a car.
You can usually ask someone to keep an eye out while you go to the restroom/refill coffee and most people are happy to help, but you need your due diligence
For hours? No way. I wouldn't do that, even if I sometimes leave stuff for a few minutes if I'm in a cafeteria I know well, plus etc. etc. But not for hours. At best your stuff would be taken care of by e.g. the cafeteria personnel, if not then with that much time the statistics won't be in your favour.
Sex of what, the unattended item that is about to get stolen? Or thieves can typically tell the item owner's sex by just looking at the item they were thinking about stealing?
Japan is awesome. I’m a brown guy and went to Japan and I had the mistaken thought that I would feel like an outsider.
I couldn’t be farther from the reality. Japanese people are so kind and welcoming, and their cities and towns are beautiful, safe, and clean. Just a simple hello led to some amazing conversations, and I felt as if I was living at the edge of the future because we talked by passing our phones to each other. Google translate enabled us to have real time conversations and get to know about each other.
I met an old man who gave me my Japanese name and dropped some wisdom. A businessman and I shared our thoughts on life and family over a late night off the map hole in the wall type of seafood ramen place. Ran into some people at a bar who happened to work in the same industry as me and we shared stories over beers. When I missed my bus in a remote town, a family reopened their restaurant and cooked a meal for me.
I was there for only a few weeks, and I wish I could move permanently to Japan. If any Japanese company or entrepreneur wants to hire me as a software engineer manager or as a co-founder, hit me up!
Riding the bullet train from Kyoto to Osaka, accidentally left my iPhone in the seatback pocket. Didn't realize it until way later, but was able to use find my phone to see that it was still powered on and had made its way all the way to the end of the line. Went to the local train station's lost and found, they called the other station where the phone had been turned in. They shipped it to where we were staying. I can't imagine ever getting my iphone back like that in the US.
I lost some clothes, sneakers in a duffel bag on my first ride with LIRR from NY Penn. Nothing valuable, but certainly essential. Was told off by the on-duty person to either show them a picture of the bag & items or get new ones lol.
Fwiw I live in Barcelona, pickpocket capital of Europe due to misguided laws, and I always turn in lost property to the authorities. Over time I've turned in at least 10 ID cards, phones and a bunch of bags. It does happen :)
Of course I'd return a wallet as-is as well without dipping in the cash (though I would count it and register the amount on the form when submitting it to the authorities to avoid any 'mislaying') but I've never found one with any in it. Most of the 'lost property' I find here is just discarded by the pickpockets.
Also, when there's identifiable information in the wallet I would contact the person on Facebook or LinkedIn if possible.
PS the misguided part is that pickpockets get only a fine for thefts below 400€. Even if it's the 5000th time.
I had a similar thing happen to me in Belize. I left a bag with my $2k DSLR on a park bench and didn’t realize it until hours later. I went back and talked to a couple of the groundskeepers, someone had turned it in and they had it waiting for me, nothing missing.
My immediate guess, based upon dealing with people not Japanese specifically: Japanese culture welcomes outsiders who respect the culture. But once you try to get deep into the fabric of the community (buy property, marry a local, etc.) there is a strong invisible wall of which you were not aware.
Most cultures seem to have different ideas of where and how boundaries are created to push away outsiders. The notoriously cold Germans are initially very cold, but once you're on the inside there is complete trust. Meanwhile, the flaky southern California "let's do lunch" thing is an endless series of weak onion-like translucent boundaries and you never can get to the core of things.
Japan is consistently very welcoming of visitors. It's a fantastic place to be a tourist - clean, safe, welcoming, and top-tier cheap transit in major cities. If you're a permanent resident though, you start grinding against the extremely strong culture of conformity, which you can never quite achieve simply due to biology.
I've lived here nearly a decade and never felt any kind of "visitors are fine but don't you try to think you can belong here" kind of vibe.
The only "you don't belong here" vibe is from the constant "microaggressions" from being a visible minority - people will see your face and assume you don't speak Japanese, can't use chopsticks, etc etc, but those don't come from malice but rather ignorance. Once I open my mouth and speak Japanese all that mostly goes away.
I'm married to a local, have plenty of friends who are married and own property or businesses, no problems of any sort. Get along well with neighbors, business partners, hobby circles.
The biggest barrier will be work and business culture, where Japanese will have strict requirements on cultural integration (can't be rude to a client or make them lose faith in your company) and have higher requirements on dedication to work (over health and family) than westerners and that's where I've seen all the friction.
edit: I want to clarify that this is the experience of a white westerner. I hear things are very different for people from other parts of Asia (SE Asia/China)
As someone who lived in Japan, most everyone is extremely friendly to your face, especially if you are a tourist and demonstrate some ability to speak Japanese or know about the culture. Out right rudeness is extremely rare, especially in the Kantou region.
But when you live there you learn about the underlying racism.
If you could pass as Japanese, because you are of east Asian descent, you will be fully expected to be completely fluent in the language and culture. If you aren't then you must be extremely dumb, because you are Asian after all. Any insight you might have coming from a western country is disregarded, because why would you know anything the collective society doesn't already know. When I was switching from teaching English to a tech job, I recommended a childhood friend I grew up with in America to take over my position. He was making far less teaching at a much worse eikaiwa school. In Japan, you include a picture with your resume, and when my boss saw that he was Filipino American, he outright said they would prefer someone who looks American and went with a previous coworker I had told him was awful.
If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
But when it rears its ugly head the worse is when you try to do anything real in the country a tourists wouldn't normally do. Lots of people in Tokyo bike to various places, but when I studied there we were warned to either buy a bicycle and make sure its registered or just never ride. Borrowing a friends bicycle was outright forbidden. At some point you will be stopped by the police and if you can't prove you own the bike or have permission to ride it, you will be taken in until they figure out the owner. The few students who did get bikes were stopped atleast once every couple weeks.
Depending on perspective the racism can be considered light atleast. Black and brown friends usually would say the annoyances were atleast obvious and evenly applied. The racist landlord will tell you up front that hes going to increase the monthly rent on the apartment you're trying to rent because he "had problems with foreigners" before and you don't have a song and dance with a racist person that really doesn't want to rent to you finding constant issues with your application until you give up. You can quickly scout around to find someone who agrees not to do that or atleast less so. Certain banks will outright deny certain services to foreigners, but if you know the right banks you can get a credit card. The police will bother you, but if you have your gaijin papers they aren't going to beat you or make up charges. For white friends it was usually extremely shocking that such things existed at all and usually were the most vocal about the societal racism they were experiencing for the first time in their lives. But I think it made them more sympathetic generally to people from their home countries.
Despite all of that, I loved my years in Japan. A lot of the smaller annoyances usually go away once you actually get to know people and explain the issues you're having. One girlfriend even took it on herself to explain to new friends how condescending it was to say I can use chopsticks so well after living in the country for multiple years. Often times its ignorance not malice and people understand. But there are definitely issues you will have if you're a foreigner and you move to Japan.
> If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
Americans find a lot of things like this incomprehensible and annoying, but if you're British you'll be right at home. Japanese people are just Asian English people.
(This also explains why they're train otakus, the way other countries only like their nerdier TV shows, and the occasional colonization.)
That's what happenes when you are not tied with US political corectness BS and can say things as they are, one of the few things I liked about China as well, which is similar int his aspect, people have no problem to say harsh truth (unless it's politics), though on the other hand they often lie about irelevant things.
Interesting to label vague, indirect phrasing as "political correctness" -- US police departments are notorious for this when giving accounts of police shootings.
> one of the few things I liked about China as well, which is similar int his aspect, people have no problem to say harsh truth
That explains the daily mass protests I see on TV in Shanghai and Beijing about slave labor. Or all the discussion about the Tiananmen Square protests. Or all those T-Shirt vendors with shirts that have the Tank Guy pic or Free Hong Kong slogans.
Getting drunk after work and passing out on the street, on a train, at your office desk, are all actually fairly accepted aspects of Japanese "salaryman" work culture.
For content, Japan is well known for finding & returning lost items.
From 2020: “With an inner-city population fast approaching 14 million people, millions of items go missing here each year. But a staggering number of them find their way home. In 2018, over 545,000 ID cards were returned to their owners by Tokyo Metropolitan Police – 73% of the total number of lost IDs. Likewise, 130,000 mobile phones (83%) and 240,000 wallets (65%) found their way back. Often these items were returned the same day.”
No it's a sign of the overall culture, not the individual. You could do this in New York but it would be so unusual that people would think you are scamming them or just look at you like you grew a second head.
I think "a sign of a mannered people" refer to the collective rather than the individual, but it also takes changing the individual to change the collective.
> A group of 13 research assistants (11 men and 2 women) were recruited for a trip around the world. They traveled to 355 major cities across 40 countries. In each city, they visited banks, theaters, hotels, police stations, and other public spaces and turned in a “lost wallet,” which they claimed to have found on the street, to a nearby employee.
New Yorkers are incredibly mannered, people return items in the subway that people drop or leave behind all the time.
The issue with finding lost items is that people would usually leave them at the police station, if you're familiar with the NYC police department you would know they are one of the most corrupt and overbudgeted forces in the world.
For some reason theyre not returning lost items to people or actually interested in doing so.
They're really good at standing around and parking illegally though.
It's a testament to Confucianism. Same in Korea, you can leave your items unattended, lost items are always returned.
I also wonder if this is more the result of a homogenous society. Since everyone is expected to know the rules and the cost of going against it is known. ex) ijime culture in japan
I don't live there. I have had a lost wallet held for my retrieval in the Washington, DC, suburbs, and have myself returned lost wallets, ID, etc. in Washington. Is New York that different?
I see that a lot of people are praising the openness of this admission but cynical old me who's lived in Japan a while - a culture that (generally) values appearances over truth - notes that the article mentions that USB was found. I have to wonder if we'd have heard about it if they hadn't.
I had my personal information lost three times at one company when someone at HR decided to go out for drinks, left their laptop in their car and their laptop was stolen. THREE TIMES.
When I asked why our personal information was stored on a laptop I was told that I was being "unhelpful".
Thankfully not long after the company was acquired and they fired everyone who wasn't directly making products or customer facing or a direct manager of a customer facing or product development employee. It was a pretty stark layoff.
I later ran into the new CEO who was super personable and we were chatting and I asked about the acquisition. "We wanted the products, we wanted the support team and engineers, but we knew we didn't want any of the rest, they were not smart people." I liked that guy.
It’s a romanization, not specifically an English one. Romanizations, or transliterations in general, don’t translate from one language into another, but from one writing system into another. You’d have more of a point if the word was substantially changed for English, for example like the English Munich is quite different from the original German München.
i think this sort of demonstrates just how far behind and backwards Japan is. It's like the country is stuck in late 90s.
In contrast, Korea seemed like it was on a different timeline with the massive digitization and broadband internet movement in the early 2000s.
With a dwindling population, Korea seems more flexible/apt at dealing with the future. There is also a much larger awareness/movement to multiculturalism whereas Japan seems unwilling to deal with the looming crisis.
Still feels more intelligent then the average doctor visit these days in the US. Painting a country with the same brush overlooks the fact that some professions aren’t sent the best and brightest, depending on country.
> i think this sort of demonstrates just how far behind and backwards Japan is. It's like the country is stuck in late 90s.
I've lived in Japan for the last 10 years, in no way does it seem "stuck in late 90s". And this single incident in no way demonstrates this.
For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".
You could if you wanted say "wow the US/UK are stuck in the 1990s" because copper broadband is still common in the US/UK. In Japan you often have 4G fiber to the home in rural locations, and 10G connections available in some locations... it's not a super helpful comment though, because countries are complex and you can't point to single issues and make general statements about the countries stage of development.
How widespread is checkbook use in the US compared to the fax use in Japan?
Asking because I had a bank account for almost a decade now, and I only had to use the checkbook twice, and it was pretty niche use-cases. I still have the same checkbook that I got back then, and I think I won't be able to go through the entirety of it even in multiple lifetimes.
Cannot comment on how widespread the usage of fax in Japan (since I haven't lived there myself), but, from what I heard from other people, you pretty much need to have access to a fax machine.
Thanks for answering this. My original comment wasn't meant as a retort, I legitimately had no idea, so I asked here. Because on reddit, one can easily get an impression that one needs a fax machine access in Japan just as much as one needs a car in the majority of the US. I kind of suspected it was a typical exaggeration, but wasn't sure.
That can be useful if you feel Unicode doesn't represent what you want to say - for instance, if you can only communicate in ASCII symbols you can't invent any new symbols, you can "only" build them out of ASCII art.
It's mostly because Japan is bad at web technology and APIs though. They also love gratuitous complexity; you've seen their websites and how every page is covered in stuff, but the URLs themselves are less like "youtube.com" and more like "blahblahblah.bsd.unix.nicovideo.jp/several/tech/buzzwords.jsp".
Nintendo, one of Japan's largest/most successful companies, still doesn't know how to run an online service properly. Sony's Playstation is better (but not as good
as Microsoft's Xbox), but the Playstation online service is run in California.
And I could name a half-dozen US government -.gov - websites that are downright terrible with respect to usability and security practices. Since when does Nintendo represent all of Japan?
I feel like Nintendo is better than average for a Japanese company tech-wise. But it is notable how they treat the internet; they updated Animal Crossing Switch to add a few new online features, but if you try to use them you have to go through a conversation with a cute animal who basically says "to use this service you MUST agree that EVER GOING ONLINE means HACKERS will LITERALLY KILL YOU and you're only doing this because you're AN IDIOT".
While I don't think sweeping generalizations are useful, there do seem to be some categories in which Japan has seen slower modernization than others.
This doesn't have to imply anything more than that, just like the prevalence of copper broadband doesn't say much more about the US than the fact that the US has some pretty antiquated broadband technology. You can argue about "coulds" and "shoulds", but it's always more complicated than that.
My personal experience in this space is specifically related to "RPA / Robotic Process Automation". There is significant RPA demand (and growing) in Japan due to the significant number of old systems that have never been modernized, preventing traditional forms of API-centric automation from happening. I learned about this when consulting for an RPA product team, and was surprised that a disproportionately large percentage of their prospective customers were in the Japanese market.
I won't claim that Japan is "stuck in the 90s", but there are certainly some categories in which there seems to be a cultural tendency towards caution / away from modernization for the sake of it. This isn't inherently good or bad, just interesting. It's part of what's fueling the RPA hype cycle, which is arguably just a different path to modernization than the one many other companies followed. Acknowledging this doesn't have to be disparaging.
> For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".
Examining the rate of progress and current state of things doesn't automatically have to imply there was intent to disparage or conclude anything negative.
I realize that some people will do just that, but I'm just trying to say that not all discussion is coming from this place - I personally find the RPA thing fascinating, and it helped me better understand the nature of the problems some companies are trying to solve, and why those problems are more challenging in the Japanese market than others.
I wonder how much of this is because of early adoption and then a laggy update cycle because of that. There's quite a few European countries that look much more modern than the U.S. in their roads and ports and buildings, and it's always been my pet theory that later modernization has something to do with it. Much of the major U.S. infrastructure was created in the 50's and 60's as we went though a major modernization (the highway system, for example), but that means that all those "modern" works are now half a century old or more. Countries that went through modernization more recently often look much newer to my eyes.
Was Japan early to adopt technology in the 90's? If so, maybe what we're seeing is that modernization effort left them somewhat stuck at that level in some industries, just like it sometimes feels like the U.S. is stuck a decade or two or three behind in some industries based on the last time the majority of it retooled and modernized. If so, maybe we'll see another modernization effort soon.
In some respects this is just like buying a brand new top of the line TV with all the bells and whistles, and then skipping the next 2-3 cycles of innovation trends until the current TV seems like it's just not cutting it anymore. That seems to be a natural cycle for a lot of things.
I wouldn’t bother guessing the password, I’d scrape the Wikipedia page for all 9 character words, then run hashcat with a simple 4 digit mutator rule. It would take longer to remember how to use hashcat than to iterate through all possible combinations on my low end laptop GPU.
The last thing I heard yesterday about this event is that they found the employee's bag where he presumably left it when he slept. He "just" forgot it there when he woke up...
For all the talk about the USB and the handling of data, I so wish it had sparked some conversation about the drinking problem in Japan, but nope, not one bit about that. But you'll regularly hear how dangerous and evil Marijuana is...
Sounds like a manual about how you fix a minor leak that would pint directly to you, with a big leak that dissociates you from the problem and divert the hounds to chase a random tool. Creating a reasonable doubt that would serve well in case of legal troubles.
It seems that exactly the same happens here and there each a few years.
If they even were encouraging people to try possible passwords, well... nobody is so dumb. My bet would be that the USB has been hidden in a safe place for some hours but knowing all the time where was.
201 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadBut … while it’s possible, I think we all know they probably just stored it as plaintext :-D
It’s kind of like a TOTP code for noobs (not even remotely as good as TOTP but something your gran could still manage understand).
The services I know which do this will have an additional password for online stuff which is different to the aforementioned and does have to be supplied in full. Thus, you’d hope, is hashed and salted etc. However you don’t supply that password when making phone calls. Sometimes you even have to supply both pieces of information when logging in online.
The city name is Amagasaki. Everyone on Twitter is guessing the password was "Amagasaki2022"
It's a useful vector for things like malware because an intermediate scanning service can't examine the attachment without having both emails. If there's a concern about some PII or whatever being intercepted in transit, it should help with that too.
I gave up on PGP, and most of my clients and I don't have an e2e encrypted chat or password manager service in common.
But at least I tell them to use a "burn after reading" post on an encrypted pastebin like 0bin.net for the secrets thing to send me.
It adds almost no complexity, best case scenario, you increase the security against bots since they would need to parse the link, visit the paste, trigger the Burn After Reading feature, interpret JS, extract the password and use it. That's already a pretty specific bot.
Most interceptions, even human, will be detected thanks to the burn after reading. And the password is never stored in the pastebin db since it's encrypted client side.
Worst case scenario, it's the same than a plain text email. Not much to loose.
It's easy to teach. Requires no install, little skill or tech, works in most corporate setup.
It's not good security. But it's better than abysmal security.
It's pretty clear in my travels that there's good and bad in pretty much every culture and every country, and that you should focus and celebrate the good while being highly aware of the flip side of things that might be an issue if you are blind to that.
Incident response always ends on "lessons learned" and it's rarely productive to hide the facts due to political embarrassment. Earliest disclosure also mitigates against much bigger liabilities as a consequence of a leak.
> management above should be fired and prosecuted.
And be immediately replaced by management with the same level of understanding and responsibility.
> Haven’t these fools realized...
No. And this is the key point. The biggest thing by FAR in cybersecurity is education. Ordinary people do not have any working model of the threat landscape and basic operational security because they foolishly, blindly trust technology and services providers.
We literally need a second digital literacy revolution. One that undoes a lot of the naive and trusting enthusiasm for digitalisation that we inculcated in the 80s and 90s. Unfortunately that goes against the grain of almost every policy that's active out there today.
Oh, Japan...
Many people on the internet guessed what the password probably was (city name + year).
Shows news is best sourced from multiple sources for the full picture.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-61921222
I stand corrected.
Edited for clarity
It can happen to Americans as well, as evidenced by an Apple engineer leaving an iPhone prototype at a bar after his birthday.
> "I underestimated how good German beer is," he typed into the next-generation iPhone 4
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-loses-another-...
"...More than 120 USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence since 2004, it was reported earlier this year....Some 26 of those disappeared this year == including three which contained information classified as “secret”, and 19 which were “restricted”...."
"UK Ministry of Defense Loses Memory Stick with Military Secrets" (2008): https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/09/uk_ministry_o...
I don't know why you bring a USB stick with half a million people's data with you to the bar. Why is that even leaving the office?
I bring this up not to talk about differences between Americans and Japanese (boring, I think they are probably exagerated), but becuase these are different "threat models". You handle the "USB stick with company data" on it "threat" by training people... not to just stick sensitive data in their pocket as they go about their business? It should be on a USB stick for as little time as possible and that USB stick should be treated like it's worth a fortune (because it is). There's no reason you should be carrying that thing with you to the bar in the first place.
The iPhone case... eh, if you ask people to carry a device along with them in their daily lives, it's inevitable that someone will forget one someplace at some point. Maybe some kind of proximity alarm that beeps if you walk away from it?
For the iPhone 4? Absolutely not, the only other model which changed iPhone as much as the 4 was the X, Steve was still alive for the 4 and there is absolutely no way he would have approved just leaving it in a bar for hype.
Steve Jobs wanted to be the person who showed that to the world. Remember the first MacBook Air? Steve lived for that moment.
But if Apple actually wanted media outlets to cover it, having law enforcement seize and search the property of the editor that broke the story, and then banning the media outlet that broke it from WWDC... doesn't seem like the way to encourage anyone to cover it next time there's a leak, if you're actually hoping for coverage of secretly orchestrated leaks. https://www.pcmag.com/archive/gizmodo-banned-from-wwdc-25149...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
> The company explained that the employee had drinks after work and later fell asleep on the street, but when he woke up he realized that he had lost the bag containing the USB.
My premise was going to be that perhaps this isn't the company you'd trust with the residents' subsidies but clearly I misunderstand the cultural aspect to this story. The other thing I didn't get is that the employee who "lost" the bag filed a police report for theft. If you're passed-out-drunk, how would you even know it was a theft?
Edit: An eye opening video on how well this works https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/ondemand/video/9999897/
Fall asleep thinking you are carrying bag. Wake up when slightly less drunk. No find bag. Freak out. Rush to report bag as stolen.
Later go back the all the bars in town (forgot where you went), and find the one where you left your bag behind.
I respect the honesty but wow, I can't believe any company would spell it out that literally.
When a company does a standard "we take your privacy very seriously" non-response right after demonstrating that they do not, in fact, take it very seriously, it makes it sound like they're not willing to acknowledge the problem at all.
The transparency of the entire event, end to end, becomes a "ho hum, thanks for telling me, i guess" sort of story. Which is, I suppose, why it's on HN.
I mean, "guy loses usb with data, finds usb with data" used to happen to me twice on Thursday back when usb was a thing. It was hardly front page news.
I think it’s more that 80% of all company employees can symphatize. The situation isn’t all that uncommon (falling asleep on the street and misplacing your stuff somewhere). The fact that this person had a USB stick with the data of ~450k people on was.
Staggering to a bench and sleeping it off is just, normal. No one is going to pick your pocket, so why not?
I can't fathom this. I cannot imagine a world in which passed out drunk guy doesn't get audited in his sleep.
One example are the notoriously expensive bars in Roppongi, at night there will be touts in the streets trying to convince tourists to join them for a night of drinking. They'll then go to the bar that hired those touts where, after a night of drinking, the tourists will be presented with a bill that's the equivalent of getting robbed.
Long and short, don't let someone on the street talk you into going into a bar or tea shop or whatever, and especially don't follow them to a second location.
The line for "acceptable robbery" was "no physical violence" + "someone consensually gives me their money."
Which is still possible (and easily doable if that mark is drunk), but is substantially different from American (and European?) style physical robbery.
I've not before seen this word used to substitute for being checked over for being robbed.
Do you have an article or graph (per capita or absolute) of deaths comparing the two countries you could point to for more info?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China
People love to point at the U.S and its gun crimes as a direct result of the country's gun laws in particular, but overall, when certain very specific factors, population areas and very specific geographic regions are excluded, much of the country where guns of all kinds are easily available is barely more violent than your typical Western European country. The school shootings that people refer to are awful things, but statistically, they don't move any needle so much as an iota. They do however get enormous amounts of media attention. Other countries with very strict gun laws also have mass shootings and mass killings, both with guns and without guns, but again, less media focus because it doesn't fit certain narratives about the U.S being violent as hell because of gun posession.
Tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly stupid to make sweeping, broad, categorical judgments of certain things because of isolated, exceedingly rare incidents. It's even dumber to make broad, sweeping laws around emotional reactions such as yours to such events.
Every school shooting is a grotesque tragedy, but means of fighting them exist that don't require gun ownership to be banned for the millions of people who not only peacefully use guns but also in some cases need them for an assortment of reasons. "What about the children?" has rarely been a good or honest argument for anything, particularly for badly considered laws pushed forth by bouts of moral indignation and self-righteousness.
Even among rabid USA fans like me, American prestige is currently falling like a brick.
I'm told that in northern Europe you could leave your laptops or whatever in semi-public places (like, cafès I suppose), and if you come back after a few hours it would still be there.
Can northern Europeans confirm or deny this?
Where I'm at when people (like, taxi drivers) do bother to return lost-and-found wallets, it's newsworthy enough to make its way to the newspaper.
That should tell you the status quo here.
Where it is not true is in large cities. Small cities and rural areas are one of the safest places on Earth as long as you don't get nibbled by a moose or overrun by ants.
You can usually ask someone to keep an eye out while you go to the restroom/refill coffee and most people are happy to help, but you need your due diligence
I couldn’t be farther from the reality. Japanese people are so kind and welcoming, and their cities and towns are beautiful, safe, and clean. Just a simple hello led to some amazing conversations, and I felt as if I was living at the edge of the future because we talked by passing our phones to each other. Google translate enabled us to have real time conversations and get to know about each other.
I met an old man who gave me my Japanese name and dropped some wisdom. A businessman and I shared our thoughts on life and family over a late night off the map hole in the wall type of seafood ramen place. Ran into some people at a bar who happened to work in the same industry as me and we shared stories over beers. When I missed my bus in a remote town, a family reopened their restaurant and cooked a meal for me.
I was there for only a few weeks, and I wish I could move permanently to Japan. If any Japanese company or entrepreneur wants to hire me as a software engineer manager or as a co-founder, hit me up!
A friend left an iPad on a flight. That was shipped back to him as well, albeit with a dick drawn on the screen in sharpie.
Of course I'd return a wallet as-is as well without dipping in the cash (though I would count it and register the amount on the form when submitting it to the authorities to avoid any 'mislaying') but I've never found one with any in it. Most of the 'lost property' I find here is just discarded by the pickpockets.
Also, when there's identifiable information in the wallet I would contact the person on Facebook or LinkedIn if possible.
PS the misguided part is that pickpockets get only a fine for thefts below 400€. Even if it's the 5000th time.
My immediate guess, based upon dealing with people not Japanese specifically: Japanese culture welcomes outsiders who respect the culture. But once you try to get deep into the fabric of the community (buy property, marry a local, etc.) there is a strong invisible wall of which you were not aware.
Most cultures seem to have different ideas of where and how boundaries are created to push away outsiders. The notoriously cold Germans are initially very cold, but once you're on the inside there is complete trust. Meanwhile, the flaky southern California "let's do lunch" thing is an endless series of weak onion-like translucent boundaries and you never can get to the core of things.
The only "you don't belong here" vibe is from the constant "microaggressions" from being a visible minority - people will see your face and assume you don't speak Japanese, can't use chopsticks, etc etc, but those don't come from malice but rather ignorance. Once I open my mouth and speak Japanese all that mostly goes away.
I'm married to a local, have plenty of friends who are married and own property or businesses, no problems of any sort. Get along well with neighbors, business partners, hobby circles.
The biggest barrier will be work and business culture, where Japanese will have strict requirements on cultural integration (can't be rude to a client or make them lose faith in your company) and have higher requirements on dedication to work (over health and family) than westerners and that's where I've seen all the friction.
edit: I want to clarify that this is the experience of a white westerner. I hear things are very different for people from other parts of Asia (SE Asia/China)
But when you live there you learn about the underlying racism.
If you could pass as Japanese, because you are of east Asian descent, you will be fully expected to be completely fluent in the language and culture. If you aren't then you must be extremely dumb, because you are Asian after all. Any insight you might have coming from a western country is disregarded, because why would you know anything the collective society doesn't already know. When I was switching from teaching English to a tech job, I recommended a childhood friend I grew up with in America to take over my position. He was making far less teaching at a much worse eikaiwa school. In Japan, you include a picture with your resume, and when my boss saw that he was Filipino American, he outright said they would prefer someone who looks American and went with a previous coworker I had told him was awful.
If you aren't obviously east Asian you get the opposite treatment. You'll constantly be complimented on your ability to do basic things like pick up food with chopsticks and the ability to say hello. If you can have a conversation, there will be constant "compliments" on it. It gets annoying very quickly.
But when it rears its ugly head the worse is when you try to do anything real in the country a tourists wouldn't normally do. Lots of people in Tokyo bike to various places, but when I studied there we were warned to either buy a bicycle and make sure its registered or just never ride. Borrowing a friends bicycle was outright forbidden. At some point you will be stopped by the police and if you can't prove you own the bike or have permission to ride it, you will be taken in until they figure out the owner. The few students who did get bikes were stopped atleast once every couple weeks.
Depending on perspective the racism can be considered light atleast. Black and brown friends usually would say the annoyances were atleast obvious and evenly applied. The racist landlord will tell you up front that hes going to increase the monthly rent on the apartment you're trying to rent because he "had problems with foreigners" before and you don't have a song and dance with a racist person that really doesn't want to rent to you finding constant issues with your application until you give up. You can quickly scout around to find someone who agrees not to do that or atleast less so. Certain banks will outright deny certain services to foreigners, but if you know the right banks you can get a credit card. The police will bother you, but if you have your gaijin papers they aren't going to beat you or make up charges. For white friends it was usually extremely shocking that such things existed at all and usually were the most vocal about the societal racism they were experiencing for the first time in their lives. But I think it made them more sympathetic generally to people from their home countries.
Despite all of that, I loved my years in Japan. A lot of the smaller annoyances usually go away once you actually get to know people and explain the issues you're having. One girlfriend even took it on herself to explain to new friends how condescending it was to say I can use chopsticks so well after living in the country for multiple years. Often times its ignorance not malice and people understand. But there are definitely issues you will have if you're a foreigner and you move to Japan.
Americans find a lot of things like this incomprehensible and annoying, but if you're British you'll be right at home. Japanese people are just Asian English people.
(This also explains why they're train otakus, the way other countries only like their nerdier TV shows, and the occasional colonization.)
That's hilarious. I don't know many English or Japanese people, but all of my stereotypes of both have way more overlap than I thought.
Maybe it's something in the tea.
"Nationwide cybersecurity attack performed by state level actors using novel techniques"
What a hearty laugh this gave me early in the morning, thank you.
Some of the people who live there would disagree with your assessment.
That explains the daily mass protests I see on TV in Shanghai and Beijing about slave labor. Or all the discussion about the Tiananmen Square protests. Or all those T-Shirt vendors with shirts that have the Tank Guy pic or Free Hong Kong slogans.
> one of the few things I liked about China as well, which is similar int his aspect, people have no problem to say harsh truth (unless it's politics)
From 2020: “With an inner-city population fast approaching 14 million people, millions of items go missing here each year. But a staggering number of them find their way home. In 2018, over 545,000 ID cards were returned to their owners by Tokyo Metropolitan Police – 73% of the total number of lost IDs. Likewise, 130,000 mobile phones (83%) and 240,000 wallets (65%) found their way back. Often these items were returned the same day.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-...
> A group of 13 research assistants (11 men and 2 women) were recruited for a trip around the world. They traveled to 355 major cities across 40 countries. In each city, they visited banks, theaters, hotels, police stations, and other public spaces and turned in a “lost wallet,” which they claimed to have found on the street, to a nearby employee.
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-lost-17-000-wallets-in-hundr...
The issue with finding lost items is that people would usually leave them at the police station, if you're familiar with the NYC police department you would know they are one of the most corrupt and overbudgeted forces in the world.
For some reason theyre not returning lost items to people or actually interested in doing so.
They're really good at standing around and parking illegally though.
I also wonder if this is more the result of a homogenous society. Since everyone is expected to know the rules and the cost of going against it is known. ex) ijime culture in japan
I learned about this when the police pulled me over to return the wallet.
Freaking Sicily!
My cynicism will live to fight another day though!
When I asked why our personal information was stored on a laptop I was told that I was being "unhelpful".
Thankfully not long after the company was acquired and they fired everyone who wasn't directly making products or customer facing or a direct manager of a customer facing or product development employee. It was a pretty stark layoff.
I later ran into the new CEO who was super personable and we were chatting and I asked about the acquisition. "We wanted the products, we wanted the support team and engineers, but we knew we didn't want any of the rest, they were not smart people." I liked that guy.
Call me cynical, but I'd say that sentence translates to "someone at HR wanted a new laptop".
Reporter: Wasn't the password something insecure like a four-digit number?
Officer: No, it's a 13-letter alphanumeric password.
Reporter: But if it was totally random wasn't it hard to use?
Officer: It's a meaningful English word, followed by a meaningful four-digit number, so it's quite easy to memorize.
Reporter: By an English word, you mean something like _password_?
Officer: It's not a simple word. It's a word and a number that are related to the City of Amagasaki.
Reporter: Do you use a capital letter?
Officer: It's grammatically correct, as only the first letter is capital.
For god's sake, if you just lost a USB stick with the whole city's personal data, don't spell out how you chose your password!!!
In contrast, Korea seemed like it was on a different timeline with the massive digitization and broadband internet movement in the early 2000s.
With a dwindling population, Korea seems more flexible/apt at dealing with the future. There is also a much larger awareness/movement to multiculturalism whereas Japan seems unwilling to deal with the looming crisis.
I've lived in Japan for the last 10 years, in no way does it seem "stuck in late 90s". And this single incident in no way demonstrates this.
For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".
You could if you wanted say "wow the US/UK are stuck in the 1990s" because copper broadband is still common in the US/UK. In Japan you often have 4G fiber to the home in rural locations, and 10G connections available in some locations... it's not a super helpful comment though, because countries are complex and you can't point to single issues and make general statements about the countries stage of development.
Asking because I had a bank account for almost a decade now, and I only had to use the checkbook twice, and it was pretty niche use-cases. I still have the same checkbook that I got back then, and I think I won't be able to go through the entirety of it even in multiple lifetimes.
Cannot comment on how widespread the usage of fax in Japan (since I haven't lived there myself), but, from what I heard from other people, you pretty much need to have access to a fax machine.
It's mostly because Japan is bad at web technology and APIs though. They also love gratuitous complexity; you've seen their websites and how every page is covered in stuff, but the URLs themselves are less like "youtube.com" and more like "blahblahblah.bsd.unix.nicovideo.jp/several/tech/buzzwords.jsp".
It's more fair to compare them to other gaming companies.
This doesn't have to imply anything more than that, just like the prevalence of copper broadband doesn't say much more about the US than the fact that the US has some pretty antiquated broadband technology. You can argue about "coulds" and "shoulds", but it's always more complicated than that.
My personal experience in this space is specifically related to "RPA / Robotic Process Automation". There is significant RPA demand (and growing) in Japan due to the significant number of old systems that have never been modernized, preventing traditional forms of API-centric automation from happening. I learned about this when consulting for an RPA product team, and was surprised that a disproportionately large percentage of their prospective customers were in the Japanese market.
I won't claim that Japan is "stuck in the 90s", but there are certainly some categories in which there seems to be a cultural tendency towards caution / away from modernization for the sake of it. This isn't inherently good or bad, just interesting. It's part of what's fueling the RPA hype cycle, which is arguably just a different path to modernization than the one many other companies followed. Acknowledging this doesn't have to be disparaging.
> For some reason it's culturally acceptable to make these kinds of comments about Japan in English language forums. But I don't really understand why... Japan is no doubt very different from other countries in various respects. But it doesn't seem helpful to say essentially "we are 30 years ahead of Japan".
Examining the rate of progress and current state of things doesn't automatically have to imply there was intent to disparage or conclude anything negative.
I realize that some people will do just that, but I'm just trying to say that not all discussion is coming from this place - I personally find the RPA thing fascinating, and it helped me better understand the nature of the problems some companies are trying to solve, and why those problems are more challenging in the Japanese market than others.
https://41j.com/blog/2022/05/startups-and-japan/
But when people make broad statements based on single events it doesn't come off as a thoughtful comparison but something else entirely...
Was Japan early to adopt technology in the 90's? If so, maybe what we're seeing is that modernization effort left them somewhat stuck at that level in some industries, just like it sometimes feels like the U.S. is stuck a decade or two or three behind in some industries based on the last time the majority of it retooled and modernized. If so, maybe we'll see another modernization effort soon.
In some respects this is just like buying a brand new top of the line TV with all the bells and whistles, and then skipping the next 2-3 cycles of innovation trends until the current TV seems like it's just not cutting it anymore. That seems to be a natural cycle for a lot of things.
"The city was founded on April 1, 1916."
Amagasaki1916
[1] "Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29738298
For all the talk about the USB and the handling of data, I so wish it had sparked some conversation about the drinking problem in Japan, but nope, not one bit about that. But you'll regularly hear how dangerous and evil Marijuana is...
It seems that exactly the same happens here and there each a few years.
If they even were encouraging people to try possible passwords, well... nobody is so dumb. My bet would be that the USB has been hidden in a safe place for some hours but knowing all the time where was.