[HN Gopher] Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on ...
___________________________________________________________________
Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing
applicants
Author : ardel95
Score : 203 points
Date : 2021-12-30 16:50 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mainichi.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (mainichi.jp)
| ab_testing wrote:
| So less than 3MB of data.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| techolic wrote:
| I did an MRI a while ago, and waited for 20 minutes for the
| images to be burnt on a CD so that I could physically bring it to
| my doctor. I thought that was archaic.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| 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).
| nine_k wrote:
| Equipment to read floppies is readily available on eBay, and is
| not excessively expensive.
| DJBunnies wrote:
| 1.44MB?
| pklausler wrote:
| You mean "1.44MB", not 1.44MB :-) since they hold 1440 KiB
| (1474560 bytes), not 1509949, despite the name. Those disks sat
| on a throne of lies.
|
| And the disks in this story were most likely Japanese "2.88MB"
| disks, whose true capacity I do not know.
| mancerayder wrote:
| > According to the MPD's third organized crime control division,
| the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s
| who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the
| floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs.
|
| Putting aside the "floppy disk" question, I have to say they seem
| a hella lot more polite and regretful for the lost data than the
| constant and more extreme breaches and loss of PII that seem to
| get stolen regularly here in the U.S. Equifax?
| asddubs wrote:
| 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
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| 2 what? Did they time-travel from 1992?
| [deleted]
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I wouldn't worry. Everybody knows that floppy disks are used to
| safely watch solar eclipses. Nobody would plug them into ancient
| computers expecting to find some data there.
| fegu wrote:
| Norwegian Health Department sent floppies to doctors until 2016
| on a large scale. See https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-
| disks-in-2015/
| egeozcan wrote:
| 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.
| howdydoo wrote:
| I think using floppies is a great way to safeguard privacy.
| Even if someone finds those disks, they won't be able to read
| them
| 14 wrote:
| 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.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an
| affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| lreeves wrote:
| You can install VirtualBox and pass the USB floppy device
| through to any OS that can read it.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.
| abakker wrote:
| 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.
| marban wrote:
| Haven't checked lately but I bet Yodobashi still has a
| dedicated Floppy section.
| dbavaria wrote:
| Alright then, we're upgrading to ZipDisk for added security
| through obscurity.
| jart wrote:
| 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
| adventured wrote:
| > 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."
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-
| hack...
| ibejoeb wrote:
| I still have a functioning zip 250 drive. Step.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Functioning until the clic of death arises, you mean.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| A brutal trip down memory lane
| SahAssar wrote:
| That's why iomega released the Clik! disks. You don't
| have a Zip! drive anymore, you have a Clik! drive.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Was thinking the same thing, like theoretically it's better
| than encryption :D
| nine_k wrote:
| Punched tape, OTOH, is too easy to read.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The same could be said about an encryption
| goldcd wrote:
| "Security by obscurity [of medium]"
| cosmodisk wrote:
| 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
| spicybright wrote:
| Why even publish this tbh? I mean it's good they're doing that,
| but advertising a leak with so few people affected seems weird
| to me.
| jen20 wrote:
| 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.
| robbedpeter wrote:
| The real data pirates are the big data surveillance
| overlords.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| This is Japan. If someone finds an item on the street it will
| be dropped off at the nearest Koban 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 Koban and sure
| enough they had them. Lots paperwork to get them back as it
| is Japan.
|
| https://jref.com/articles/koban-japanese-police-boxes.199/
| the_af wrote:
| > _If someone finds an item on the street it will be
| dropped off at the nearest Koban 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!
| qmarchi wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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?
| iszomer wrote:
| Heavy laws and discipline?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ZLGqL1FMo
| neom wrote:
| I presume then they are computer controlled? If so, how
| does one actually leave early or late?
| jrockway wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > 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.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| They have a driver.
| klodolph wrote:
| 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.
| bdonlan wrote:
| 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.
| ace2358 wrote:
| 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.
| tjoff wrote:
| 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).
| medstrom wrote:
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| Only if there is no other option. If there's another
| train in three hours, then you are waiting three hours.
| dagw wrote:
| _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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| 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.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| And I'd imagine _everyone_ on board was becoming rude and
| unhelpful.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| Amtrak sucks so bad.
| cogman10 wrote:
| In Wales, I've had a train scheduled for every hour that
| has both just not shown up and has ran straight through
| the station without stopping (lol).
|
| Pretty awesome watching the train you've been waiting for
| just sort of keep going :D. (The magic of newtown Wales!)
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| IIRC buses in London do that when they are overfilled.
|
| The worst is tho running and rushing and then finally
| making it into train car that turns out to be going
| completely wrong direction.
| Naga wrote:
| 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.
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| 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.
| jmercouris wrote:
| Did you and I live in the same Berlin??? The S Bahn is
| literally always late.
| martopix wrote:
| 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.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| In Europe notifying of leaks is mandatory. And when police is
| doing it it tends to leak, so better do it themselves too.
| everydaybro wrote:
| it's a level of honesty that we are not used to it
| tux3 wrote:
| Japan has been known to apologize publicly when a train runs
| a couple minutes late.
| iszomer wrote:
| Japan has also been known to cram passengers into trains
| during rush hour.
|
| I imagine this practice has probably been fervently
| deprecated due to covid19.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
| Zircom wrote:
| 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.
| iszomer wrote:
| Yes, people willingly got on the train and the platform
| stewards helped.
| onion2k wrote:
| _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.
| tjoff wrote:
| 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.
| ncann wrote:
| 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.
| iypx wrote:
| > 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I constantly had failed floppies.
|
| 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| alerighi wrote:
| They are not reliable at all.
|
| 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.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| I found it depends upon the make. The windows 95 floppy are
| good. Only linux in CD-ROM at that time. Both work ok.
| WalterBright wrote:
| USB sticks are better in every respect.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Except security. Floppies can't do anything other than
| storage, but USB devices can be just about anything.
| glandium wrote:
| The story doesn't say much about what kind of computers
| are used, but the floppy drives could just as well be USB
| ones...
| serf wrote:
| I never had a floppy fake an HID.
| DocTomoe wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > prone to media decay
|
| Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that
| haven't lost a byte.
| laumars wrote:
| 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).
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd cut a notch in the floppies so I could turn them over
| and use them. The back sides worked fine, too!
| laumars wrote:
| 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.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| pxx wrote:
| ... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by
| taking them for a five minute walk a block away.
|
| 40 years indicates you're probably using 51/4" (or
| larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay
| due to lower densities.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
|
| (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 )
| Javantea_ wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your source code for Empire!
| wolrah wrote:
| My old floppies are great. The newer ones, starting
| around 2000 or so, are mostly junk.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I haven't bought a floppy since 2000, so I wouldn't know!
| akoster wrote:
| They are decently easy to find in popular capacities at
| http://floppydisk.com
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They are also tremendously slow_
|
| When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't
| that big a deal.
| santoshalper wrote:
| 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.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > [...] 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
| jfim wrote:
| > 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.
| grishka wrote:
| 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.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| Isn't the most sensitive information here that they applied
| for public housing?
| silverpepsi wrote:
| >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.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| 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).
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Japan isn't backwards. It's more accurate to describe them as
| "sideways". They just don't follow the same tech track as
| everyone else.
| silverpepsi wrote:
| 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.
| incompleteCode wrote:
| Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in
| depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
| mcguire wrote:
| _They_ have flying cars. See the documentary Red Sun
| (1993) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)).
| :-)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| incompleteCode wrote:
| Thank you!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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.
| np_tedious wrote:
| So 3MB of personal information? That's well under 1 byte per
| citizen how bad can it be?
|
| /s
| kahrl wrote:
| If they are 5.25" 1.2MB high density floppies, that's a max
| of 64k per person. What the what?
| np_tedious wrote:
| I had used total city population as denominator. Oops
| TT-392 wrote:
| Using floppies is apparently still pretty common in japan.
| sonicggg wrote:
| Instead of encrypting the data, maybe they are relying on the
| fact that nobody else today has a reader for floppy disks, so
| the data is safe.
| madiator wrote:
| Shhh, you are giving ideas to the crypto banks.
| iszomer wrote:
| I wouldn't surprise me if they did: cold storage on obscure
| storage formats.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| hereforphone wrote:
| I heard they were superfamicom cartridges
| jle17 wrote:
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| I know it's security by obscurity, but this would secure the
| data a very decent amount lol
| scoopertrooper wrote:
| Not quite obscurity given the attackers could measure the
| disk and do a quick Yahoo search. Maybe, security by
| antiquity?
| iszomer wrote:
| 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.
| chrisstanchak wrote:
| Don't worry they were Bernoulli disks
| rzzzt wrote:
| Maybe HiFD or SuperDisk, Iomega something-or-the-other...
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Floppy disks in 2022? Maybe Doc & Marty got lost in Tokyo :)
| woudsma wrote:
| 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.
| C19is20 wrote:
| I somehow remember some way of getting them to be read on an
| atari.
| notRobot wrote:
| I used to use floppies for my Yamaha synth from the early
| 2000s, but I recently finally did the USB mod and I completely
| recommend it!
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _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].
|
| 0 -
| https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.139.1?destination=/...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Cool! Those things are indestructible. Very nice hardware.
| shmerl wrote:
| I wonder how long ago did they stop using punch cards?
| dqpb wrote:
| > 38 people
|
| The number of people whose info can fit on 2 floppy disks.
| jrexilius wrote:
| The citizens are probably fine, because.. flopp disks!? Who can
| read those now? ;-)
| 83457 wrote:
| I bought a usb floppy drive last month off amazon to archive
| disks of historical value to my company. It was delivered in 1
| day.
| jhot wrote:
| 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.
| omoikane wrote:
| I am disappointed by all the comments being focused on the use of
| floppy disks, as opposed to questions about whether contents on
| these removable media were encrypted. Even the original news
| article doesn't mention what are the data security practices
| employed by these agencies, other than the physical storage was
| locked.
| pc86 wrote:
| If you're using floppy disks in ~2022 you're almost certainly
| not encrypting the data on them.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Just last year we got documentation for a self-driving car
| project from a japanese OEM on a DVD. Hilarity ensued, I remember
| IT running around like a headless chicken trying to find a
| reader, then trying to buy one, then trying friends and family.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| Makes me wonder how old the citizens are on the floppy disk ?:-)
| JamesMcMinn wrote:
| From the 4th paragraph of the article
|
| > 38 men in their 20s to 80s
| daebersold wrote:
| Ah, the nostalgia. Reminds me of hole-punching the side to turn
| it into a double sided disk.
| [deleted]
| k_ wrote:
| Forgot to add (1994), right?
| monksy wrote:
| Linux officially dropped support for floppy disk drives:
| https://techreport.com/news/3464145/linux-dropping-floppy-dr...
|
| Why are they still using that?
| stunt wrote:
| In mid-late 90s, when floppy disks were not dead yet, I used to
| help my father to extract lots of files from their devices to
| floppy disks. They were using floppy disks only because an
| application that they were using to extract and convert data from
| their devices was designed to only copy files in chunks to floppy
| disks.
|
| One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the
| application that they were using to convert and extract data to
| see if I could make sense of anything. I accidentally found out
| that there was a config file that had a destination path for
| copying converted files. It was hard coded to drive A (floppy
| drive).
|
| I changed the path, tested the application, and it worked. I
| shared the trick with my father and he shared it with his
| organization. He became the employee of the year for that
| discovery.
|
| Floppy disks were expensive on the scale that they were using
| them, and they often had to deal with a lot of data loss
| accidents. Their IT team even had a data recovery team
| specialized to recover data from broken floppy disks because
| usually it meant they had to send a team back to redo the work.
| The storage on the devices they were using was very limited, so
| often during their week-long operations, they had to extract data
| before they could continue their work, only to realize later that
| some chunks were missing from the first part, and then they had
| to redo that part of operation again.
| aspaviento wrote:
| How did your father react when you told him the trick? And
| after becoming the employee of the year?
| bitigchi wrote:
| Oh Japan, never change.
| cbfrench wrote:
| Criminals recover the disks but then are foiled in their
| dastardly endeavors because they can't find a disk drive to load
| the floppies.
| snek_case wrote:
| 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.
| morganvachon wrote:
| 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.
| ent101 wrote:
| No worries. Nobody knows how to use floppies.
| mdni007 wrote:
| This makes me wonder what the top posts on HN would have looked
| like if it existed in 1995
| pcurve wrote:
| The headline is borderline the Onion news material. I love it.
| notadog wrote:
| This gives a glimpse of what it may have looked like:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1995
| jacquesm wrote:
| We should send a dupe filter update using a time machine.
| dahart wrote:
| The scariest part is how much _hasn't_ changed. ;)
| anikan_vader wrote:
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still
| trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped
| making them"
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...
| throwawayboise wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Lot of these companies claim that implementing a modern
| system would cost too much.
|
| They just haven't figured out opportunity cost due to poor
| capabilities, or how much lost productivity there is because
| of the old system.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > The disks "almost never broke and lost data," Yoichi Ono, who
| is in charge of managing public funds for Meguro ward, told the
| Nikkei.
|
| This was not my experience.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I've never had to do more surgery on my storage media to
| recover data than I did on floppy disks.
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I always had the bad luck that 1 outta 10 ejects would tear
| the metal shield off.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I guess I was lucky. Our pile of Castle
| Wolfenstein/Doom/Infocom disks made it all around the
| neighborhood with nary a flipped bit.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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.
| dlsa wrote:
| Disks varied in quality. Some failed days after purchase.
| Some had a mishap. Some just plain degraded. Others... _still
| work_.
| hermitdev wrote:
| 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.
| morganvachon wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| 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.
| panda88888 wrote:
| They should migrate to minidiscs :D
| megatoaster wrote:
| you think this is bad?
| https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf
| sosborn wrote:
| Interesting contrast to
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734021
| anonu wrote:
| Reminds me of 2 random tidbits on Japanese culture [1] Hanko [2]
| Fax Machines
|
| Hanko are the red stamps that people require for official
| paperwork. Fax machines are still in vogue, probably related to
| the fact that Hanko are needed to complete official paperwork.
|
| [1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/ [2]
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-f...
| kube-system wrote:
| > According to the MPD's third organized crime control division,
| the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men
|
| Looks like they leaked their sex a second time.
| zapdrive wrote:
| Haha. That's what I noticed. Looks like it's a translation
| error.
| aww_dang wrote:
| 3.5 inch diskettes ?
| oneplane wrote:
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Maybe they meant a SD card or USB drive, but translated it as
| "floppy".
| ronsor wrote:
| The Japanese version says "FD" multiple times, so it really
| is talking about floppy disks.
| Jorengarenar wrote:
| Japanese version of the news also reports floppy discs
| (rotsupideisuku), what would make sense since leaked was
| "only" the data of 38 people.
| zilchers wrote:
| These are the real questions
| jpfed wrote:
| Tens of citizens' personal information may have been exposed.
| alanh wrote:
| I really expected to see a comment here asking mods to update the
| title with the year of publication. I did not expect that year to
| be 2021
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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.
| textcortex wrote:
| Is this from 2021?
| abruzzi wrote:
| I still use floppies a lot. I know, why? Well there is a lot of
| hardware from the 80's and 90's that, unlike simple PCs, does not
| really obsolete.* I know this affects a lot of areas, but mine is
| synthesizers and samplers. Synths allows you to save sounds you
| created or banks of sounds, and depending on the synth, possibly
| other things. Samplers recorded short snippets of digital audio
| and then allows you to place that sound in a configuration that
| allowed you to play it like a synthesizer.
|
| Fortunately, most synths no longer really need the floppy since
| most of what it gets you is easily replaced with MIDI SYSEX, and
| dump requests. Samplers on the other hand, while many did
| implement MIDI SDS, dumping digital audio at 31.25kbps is an
| exercise in boredom. Some of the later samplers have SCSI, so
| saving off to SD cards is easy (thanks to the SCSI2SD boards) but
| for some, I still have to save off to floppy.
|
| * While there are newer devices of this type available without
| the floppy dependancy, each musical instrument is a unique
| creation with its own sound, so just because there is something
| new it doesn't mean that new thing is a replacement for the
| original thing (just as a trumpet isn't a relacement for a
| violin.)
| desktopninja wrote:
| If the system/process ain't broke, don't fix it! #respect-oldtech
| :)
| vmception wrote:
| more questions than answers, I love how the article provides no
| information on why floppy disks were being used as if it occurred
| in 1995.
| spicybright wrote:
| 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!"
| adolph wrote:
| Since the nuke one was filed here I add as a sibling comment
| that the McLaren F1 no longer needs a particular 1990s Compaq
| laptop.
|
| https://tiremeetsroad.com/2017/12/19/no-mclaren-doesnt-
| need-...
| oblio wrote:
| True, but on the other hand neither CDs, DVDs nor Blurays are
| bleeding edge tech these days :-))
|
| 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.
| aww_dang wrote:
| https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/10/22/us-nuclear-
| weapo...
|
| "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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-12-30 23:01 UTC)