[HN Gopher] SF's Market Street subway runs on Reagan-era floppy ...
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SF's Market Street subway runs on Reagan-era floppy disks
Author : rwmj
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-02-05 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sfstandard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfstandard.com)
| kelnos wrote:
| > _a city known as a global tech capital would be so reliant on a
| storage format that lacks the capacity to store a single hi-
| resolution photograph._
|
| Statements like these annoy me; having a lot of tech businesses
| in a city is completely unrelated to what government agencies
| use.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| You call 5 1/4" disks 'old'? I remember 8"! And mag-tape! And
| paper tape! And front-panel toggle switches!
|
| Kids these days.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| If it ain't broke and I know they make solid state floppy drive
| replacements for use cases like this. Sometimes older systems are
| perfect by design and shouldn't be replaced.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" SFMTA is hardly unique in using them, however. As recently
| as 2020, British Airways was loading avionics software onto 747s
| via floppy disk."_
|
| Topical thread here,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109565 ( _" Boeing 747s
| receive software updates over floppy disks_" (2020))
| [deleted]
| andbberger wrote:
| just another "state of good repair" hustle
|
| seltrac is the least of muni's problems and there's no need to
| update it
| twblalock wrote:
| Of course there are reasons to update it. It's going to be
| harder to fix when it breaks than a modern system, it's going
| to be harder to find people to work on it than a modern system,
| and those problems will only increase over time to the point
| where they could cause extended transit outages.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Are you saying that they leak these stories out in advance of
| asking for a billion dollars for CBTC?
| andbberger wrote:
| yes
| [deleted]
| netsharc wrote:
| The article embeds a tweet of a news interview where it's some
| guy asserting that this is the case, TBH it'd be more interesting
| to actually see the hardware instead of just watching some guy
| say this is the case...
|
| But if it ever became critical, get some Raspberry Pi's and
| implement this hack:
| https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=58345
|
| Oh wait, there's a Pi shortage isn't there... we're doooomed!
| rwmj wrote:
| Or at least some Goteks: https://www.gotekemulator.com
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| No way this is real. Floppy disks used to get corrupted all the
| time when I exchanged them with friends. Just a little sun light
| and ..
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Is this really an issue? The kind of signalling system needed to
| safely operate trains seems well-understood and doesn't require
| vast amounts of data storage, and it's been pretty reliable since
| the 1970s apparently:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SelTrac
|
| So data about the system configuration is stored on floppies
| instead of USB drives - so what? It might even have the benefit
| of nobody being able to easily corrupt the system by plugging in
| a USB drive loaded with some Stuxnet-type malware.
| fredoralive wrote:
| An obvious issue is that you may have issues finding
| replacement parts for the drive mechanisms, or even the discs
| themselves. Things will wear out and fail, and what was 30
| years ago a commodity item is now either an expensive niche
| spare, or an eBay scavenger hunt.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Just get an emulator. You don't need physical devices for old
| tech.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Yes[1], although as the signalling system on a railway is
| safety critical, you are probably going to have to go
| through a fair amount of safety checks to make sure the
| emulator can't somehow feed invalid data to to main unit.
|
| [1] although the original poster was worried about various
| USB attacks etc, and that's kinda how the emulator would be
| loaded nowadays?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Security through obscurity isn't security.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The issue isn't security through obscurity, the protocols
| and physical layer between the signalling system and disc
| drive are going to be documented. The issues are more
| making sure that the emulator is an accurate emulation,
| and can't somehow feed false data. The "DOS" on the
| signalling system might be a somewhat eccentric system
| written in the 70s, and might trigger edge cases in an
| emulator designed for generic CP/M or MS-DOS systems. It
| might not be, but when the worst case is a train crash,
| you have to be cautious.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _It might even have the benefit of nobody being able to
| easily corrupt the system by plugging in a USB drive_
|
| _Just get an emulator._
|
| Context matters.
| terminalcommand wrote:
| Fun fact, due to corruption Turkey's newly built suburban rail
| system called Marmaray does not have signalization. They
| accepted the project without it. For years, we did not know
| when the next train would arrive. Now we have tables but they
| are based on estimates and are totally wrong (of course).
|
| They cannot risk running two trains on the same track so they
| suspend the rail system whenever an international train is
| passing.
|
| My country managed to invent a new train signalization,
| whatsapp and radio signalization.
| userbinator wrote:
| _It might even have the benefit of nobody being able to easily
| corrupt the system by plugging in a USB drive loaded with some
| Stuxnet-type malware._
|
| That was my thought too --- and given the deteriorating skills
| that even malware programmers today have been affected by,
| fitting it on a floppy might be a challenge itself.
| Oxidation wrote:
| If the problem is that they can't get disks or drives, you can
| buy an "industrial" 5.25 inch USB emulator for $250.
|
| If the problem is that the system is just that old, and that's
| the only criticism, that sounds like it's a near-perfect-for-
| the-job system that's firmly at the bottom of the bathtub
| curve1.
|
| Electronics of the era can plausibly continue almost
| indefinitely: plenty of industrial and aeronautical equipment
| does, as well as things like the tank-like HP printers.
|
| 1: if it's coming up the other side of the bathtub and failures
| across the system are accelerating, _then_ they should watch
| out.
| muzz wrote:
| This seems like one of those things which is perfectly okay for
| private companies to do-- one was even mentioned in the article--
| but somehow not for government
| baby wrote:
| I would say it's not OK for anyone to do. Software, like
| gardens, is something you need to tend to otherwise it decays
| and will eventually stop working.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Why the distinction, in your mind?
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(page generated 2023-02-05 23:01 UTC)