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US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations
- emp_zealoth 10y agoIt is interesting to learn just how much "technical" debt USA has 911 that is falling apart Nuclear weapons debacle (and a lot of other systems too) The 7 trillion infrastructure problem
- orf 10y agoWould you rather they used USB sticks?
- gravypod 10y agoI'd rather use outdated technology then use new technology that could introduce bugs.
- Malic 10y agoThere is something to be said about using proven technologies. But there is also something to be said about using still supported technologies. Really, are there producers of 8" floppy media anymore? Are we relying on "new-but-old" stock for occasional replacement needs for these systems? Sounds like that wrench that had to be FedEx'ed between silo bases for Minuteman maintenance: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-wrench-nuclear-bases/story?id=26916107 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-wrench-nuclear-bases/story...
- throwanem 10y ago> are there producers of 8" floppy media anymore? It would appear so, and in the US, yet: http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html#8 http://www.athana.com/html/diskette.html#8
- joshavant 10y agoI seem to remember someone telling me how there are a couple of cottage industries that center around the fact that the US Government has to buy goods that are US-made. I think ceiling fans are one example. (i.e. There's relatively few US-based ceiling fan manufacturers. For one of them, I think the large chunk of their business is the US Government.) I have a feeling this may be an example of that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- akg_67 10y agoAt one of my jobs, we used CPU (pre-Intel design), made by a defense manufacturer, in our control systems. When mfr. decided to discontinue CPU manufacturing, we bought all the inventory from last few production runs. AFAIK, we are still running those control systems using the same CPUs and hardware for now 30+ years.
- Scarblac 10y agoCool, a web page linked in a serious discussion that has copyright 1997 on it. The page was created about half way between the heydey of 8" floppies (late 70s) and today.
- Grishnakh 10y agoWhat's really sad is I remember 1997 well; I was still in college at the time, and I laughed any time I saw 8" floppies because they were so antiquated. I remember laughing about them in 1991 even because I came across some in that year. I remember also watching WarGames somewhere around that time (high school) and laughing about the 8" floppies in that move. And now more time has passed since those times than there was between the heyday of the 8" floppies and when I laughed about them. I feel really old... but I also really question WTF is going on with our government that they're still using the things. Disk drives don't last forever.
- 10y ago
- draw_down 10y agoYeah, we should really be using off-the-shelf components for our nuclear weaponry.
- andyjdavis 10y agoPlease wait, updates are being applied... :D
- nickpsecurity 10y agoYeah, they can be quite reliable and available compared to machines no longer produced whose parts are pulled off eBay at times. ;) Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802 http://gaisler.com/index.php/products/components/gr712rc http://gaisler.com/index.php/products/components/gr712rc Off-the-shelf for government even more so: http://www.rockwellcollins.com/~/media/Files/Unsecure/Products/Product%20Brochures/Information%20Assurance/Crypto/AAMP7G%20data%20sheet.aspx http://www.rockwellcollins.com/~/media/Files/Unsecure/Produc... https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/jared/ssp-hase-submission.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/jared/ssp-hase-submission.pd...
- reality_czech 10y agoIf the pointy haired bosses ever decide to upgrade our "nuculur" systems from DOS to the "more modern" Windows 95, we're all done for. All the folks who are whining about how we should be using USB sticks should Google "stuxnet."
- na85 10y agoIf the NSA can run its own semiconductor fab, then I'm sure the US Gov't can pony up a few million annually to manufacture floppy media for something as critical as its nuclear arsenal.
- agumonkey 10y agoThe word new is very detrimental.
- gdwatson 10y agoWhat about the level of hardware failure with floppy disks? CF cards seem pretty suitable. They're simple and well established; there's likely to be a supply of them for a long time, and it seems feasible to have a batch custom made if that's necessary 30 years down the line.
- Zardoz84 10y agoI can verify that a floppy disk can resist a long time. I have 3" 1/4 disks from early 90's that keep working fine, plus this last year, I saw a bunch of old 80's 8" floppy disks working on a old Z80 computer.
- 3327 10y agoThere is more to this than "out dated" technology. There is tremendous espionage and malicious activity protection by using outdated technology. The schematics of these systems were never online, making and introducing malware is also prohibitively difficult due to the lack of domain knowledge and expertise on the technology. There are huge upsides to using outdated technology when it comes to nuclear warheards.
- HillaryBriss 10y agowhat's the difference between outdated technology which has never been documented online, and new technology which has never been documented online?
- excitom 10y agoIf you're using Windows 10 or MacOS, people know how to find their way around in the absence of documentation. How many people could figure out the command line interface to a 1970s era IBM Series/1 without docs?
- kens 10y agoIf you want documentation on old computers, check out bitsavers; piles of information on the IBM Series/1 is at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/series1 http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/series1
- Retra 10y agoOlder machines have a tendency to be simpler.
- firethief 10y agoIf someone does something bad involving a nuclear mainframe, I don't think it'll be on a lark.
- donarb 10y agoThey say the best vehicle anti-theft device is a stick shift.
- ForHackernews 10y agoEveryone needs to shut the hell up about nuclear obsolescence. If we can just keep the politicians from noticing the need to "modernize" these terrible weapons, then in a few short decades we will have achieved a de facto global disarmament. Everyone can continue manning their silos filled with stale dud warheads, fingers hovering over buttons that no longer work. We'll have all the stratigic stabilizing influences of mutually-assured-destruction, with none of the actual threat-of-destruction. But engineers and journalists need to shut up and not point out that the emperor's got no nukes.
- briarrose 10y agoIt's too late. The Obama administration has proposed a one trillion dollar budget to modernize the nuclear arsenal. The inclusion of low-yield nuclear devices is considered especially unnerving as it is believed their use would be easier to justify and could lean to a full nuclear exchange. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernizes-nuclear-weapons-smaller-leaves-some-uneasy.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernize...
- saalweachter 10y agoTo be fair, Obama requesting the money is one of the best ways to ensure Congress does not appropriate it.
- dragonwriter 10y agoWhile true in general, with regard to military applications, Obama requesting money can be a way to get Congress to appropriate more.
- saalweachter 10y agoObama also unfortunately tends to act in good faith and with intent, so snark aside if he requested the funding for them he is probably OK with tactical nukes.
- 10y ago
- cm2187 10y agoIt reminds me this story, which was told to me as a true story, but I wouldn't bet too much on that. A soviet bomber gets lost and finds itself over western germany. It has to land on a military airport, which pilots jovially invite the soviet pilots for a drink. While they are drinking, intelligence officers take pictures of the plane, and are laughing at antiquated soviet technology, using bulbs while the US was well into the age of transistors. It's only back in the US that the intelligence officers realised that the soviet were using bulbs not for the lack of transistors, but because they can resist a nuclear explosion...
- hereonbusiness 10y agoAs far as I remember that story about "vacuum tube hindsight" is from a documentary on History Channel(?) about Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko [1] defecting by landing his Mig 25 in Japan, thereby letting the west get their hands on the most advanced soviet plane at the time [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Belenko [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Western_intelligence_and_the_MiG-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25#Wester...
- ZanyProgrammer 10y agoMost American military hardware has long since been shielded against EMPs I believe.
- Merad 10y agoFun story, but to my knowledge most military computer systems have always been radiation hardened in the nuclear age. Enrico Fermi correctly predicted EMP prior to the first nuclear tests all the way back in 1945, and made sure that the test equipment was shielded. Although, we did explore high altitude nuclear explosions (produce huge amounts of EMP) in the late 50s to early 60s and managed to accidentally fry some of our own early satellites in the process.
- bhollan 10y agoThey still sell them today. They're called Nuclear Event Detection (NED) chips. It detects a spike in voltage from the air and drops all power to everything, acting as an instantaneous power interrupt for everything you care about. I used to test them for Lockheed all the time on stuff that flies on stealth aircraft. There is a very specific sequence of events with very tight specs they have to pass, the whole thing is over in 250 ms, and that includes the shutdown duration.
- avaliente 10y agoTreasury's master business file, which contains all tax data on individual business income taxpayers, likewise is written in that same assembly language code, which was first used in the 1950s, and maintained on the old-school IBM mainframe. https://callenq.com https://callenq.com is the free market bringing 2016 technology to the IRS to receive prompt customer service.
- draw_down 10y agoWell, does it work? If so then what's the problem?
- randyrand 10y agoDid the article say there was a problem? If so, what did they say the problem was?
- etrevino 10y agoThe article describes the IT systems as "creaky" and referred to the "jaw dropping" GAO report that inspired this article was described as "sobering". So, it would appear that the problem the article referred to is the obsolete systems.
- missed_out 10y agoAt one time, government engineers were in equal standing with contractor engineers. As defense spending dwindled down after the Vietnam war, defense contractors began to lobby for more control of defense workloads. On a contract, the government engineers would maintain the product and defense contractors did the development. Money set aside for documentation was devoured by the contractors so that only the contractors had the knowledge base of the product. Future weapon system development is the money maker for contractors, so to have them bid on upgrading a weapon system such as this, the cost would be very inflated. So you have this situation where the government cannot organically do the job either because of loss of expertise or documentation of the system. Or it is cost prohibitive using a defense contractor. The expertise for government oversight for contracting is a major problem. As an example, the DMV database system for the state of California. When you look at all the companies today using the cloud and creating huge databases practically overnight, how can projects like this fail. Another example, the Obama Care website. The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract. And then you have all this lobbying crap by the contractors to contend with. It really comes down to ETHICS. Contractors are not out to give you the most bang for your buck, they want the most bucks for smallest bang. After spending 28 years working with defense contractor engineers, I was not impressed. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with the ethics or the adherence to security concerns of my coworkers either, so I walked away. I would not be so concern with the 8 inch floppies, but more concern with the electronics that use them.
- eru 10y ago> The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract. Ideally, they would have even more expertise to make judgement calls, so that they could rely (in some sense) on the spirit of the contract and not just the letter. I guess comparisons to public sector and military procurement in other countries (and times) might be instructive.
- hodwik 10y agoI think they have just as much experience and technical know-how as their contractors, but have neither the funds or the go-ahead to implement this stuff themselves. For example, Obama signed an executive order requiring the DoD to use electronic records management systems to store all of their classified data. The tricky part is that the way it is written, they have to buy this, they're not allowed to write the system that holds their own data. (See JITC 5015.2.)
- 5ilv3r 10y agoWhat's wrong with 8" floppy disks? They seem easy to manufacture (same as a VHS tape but cut differently), are pretty reliable if you keep them away from magnets (Which is common sense), and don't really have a shelf life problem until the plastic gets brittle. Hell, if they degrade, you can even retrieve the undamaged parts with no fuss. Who wins by moving to SD?
- hodwik 10y agoExactly, this isn't so far off from tape drives which most orgs still use.
- Grishnakh 10y agoThe problem is trusting such a critical function to ancient hardware that's bound to wear out at some point, and for which you can't buy a replacement. Disk drives don't last forever; they're fairly complex machines with moving parts.
- DrScump 10y agoMeanwhile, lots of present-day sites use a diskette icon to represent a "save" function. A diskette? Seriously?
- JupiterMoon 10y agoLanguage and symbols evolve. When that icon was first used it was a disk. Now it means save. Users know what it means.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoOld storage media (floppies, CDs) have a big advantage over new ones (SD cards, USB sticks, hard drives) - they don't have firmware. Most people didn't notice how over the last decade or so we've moved from having a computer read out data directly from a removable medium to having two computers talking together over a low-level, high-privilege protocol. While there are many benefits to this evolution, it also opens up many serious attack vectors.
- btgeekboy 10y agoAlong the same lines, you can visually inspect them. Now, perhaps there's a way to hide some sort of wafer-thin wireless reader and transmitter in a floppy disk that can somehow harvest enough electrical energy to be useful, but that's a long shot. As for SD cards, ones that are more than just storage (e.g. with wireless technology embedded) already exist.
- gene-h 10y agoEven if you could hide a wireless reader and transmitter in a floppy disk, you would still be able to pick it up on X-ray. It would be very difficult to differentiate an SD card with a malicious payload even if one X-rayed it.
- cesarbs 10y agoWould X-rays corrupt the data on the floppy disk? Honest question, I have no idea.
- daveguy 10y agoI think the answer is no. You have to have a magnetic field to induce changes on a floppy (don't get them near a magnet). An x-ray would require a curved flow to generate a magnetic field (think electromagnet) so the generally direct x-ray flux should be harmless. Of course the equipment and power requirements may make it difficult to avoid magnetic fields. Not an x-ray expert.
- deleted 10y ago
- zekevermillion 10y agoHey, if it ain't broke...
- powertower 10y agoIn the mean time, this thing will do Mach 20 (~ 7 km/s), and its already concidered as old-tech with a newer version being worked on - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTVgJ8Sb34E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTVgJ8Sb34E
- teh_klev 10y agoThe linked report is worth a scan: http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf Pages 15 to 19 are what the CNBC article picked up on: This system coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear forces. This system is running on an IBM Series/1 Computer—a 1970s computing system—and uses 8-inch floppy disks - from page 19 The IBM Series/1 isn't that ancient (well for me anyway) and was comparable to 16 bit Data General (I trained on Data General Nova 3's, 4's and Eclipse S/130's back in the mid-80's) and DEC mini's of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Series/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Series/1 As long as you keep up with the usual preventative maintenance (filter changing etc), these old boxes just keep on working. Sometime in the early 2000's a buddy of mine still had a preventative maintenance contract on a DG Nova 3 [0] attached some astronomy kit. John asked if I fancied a day out to see this machine and go along with him on his PM visit. I hadn't seen an old Nova or Eclipse machine since the early 90's, so why the hell not? When I asked why such an old machine (probably manufactured in '75 or '76) hadn't been replaced with a faster smaller box (e.g. top end PC server type of thing), the reason was at the time nothing could come close to the data channel speeds this old box could sustain when collecting data from their astronomy thing. If anyone from St Andrews astronomy department knows about this old machine I'd love to know what happened to it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_General_Nova
- mkhpalm 10y agoI wonder what the cost is to maintain uber legacy systems like that? Like at what point does it teeter over to being the most expensive thing like it? (while remaining less capable)
- lr 10y agoI'd rather have floppy disks and air-gapped systems for our nuclear arsenal than have them all connected to an insecure network (which is pretty much any network these days).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bhollan 10y agoI'll just put this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g
- spoiledtechie 10y agoThis blows me away. I think ignorance comes to those people who refer to comedian shows when talking about seriousness. This shows me ignorance, not John Oliver, but the person who chooses to use it to satisfy some valid and real point.
- bhollan 10y ago<cough>relevant username.</cough> I take the government's actions very seriously. I left the country, wife and kids and all, because I got tired of it. I respect Jon Oliver's work. I think he makes discussions about things like this more approachable to more people than any article cnbc will every publish.
- katzgrau 10y agoIn the words of Joel Spolsky, "code doesn't rust." Who cares how old the code or the medium is? If it's tested and working, and it's used for nuclear effing weapons, I'm happy to leave it in my pile of tech debt.
- sehugg 10y ago60 Minutes covered this in 2014: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tour-a-nuclear-launch-control-center/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tour-a-nuclear-launch-control-ce... They were surprised to see things like "an antique computer without a monitor."
- occsceo 10y agoLOAD "ENDOFTIMES", 8, 1