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Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
- kube-system 5y ago> 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 5y agoHaha. That's what I noticed. Looks like it's a translation error.
- cbfrench 5y agoCriminals 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 5y agoThere'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 5y agoThere 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.
- wodenokoto 5y agoBusinessInsider, 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-floppy-disks-still-trying-to-phase-out-2021-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...
- dehrmann 5y ago> 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.
- jbluepolarbear 5y agoI always had the bad luck that 1 outta 10 ejects would tear the metal shield off.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoI've never had to do more surgery on my storage media to recover data than I did on floppy disks.
- hermitdev 5y agoNor 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoZip 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.
- DJBunnies 5y ago1.44MB?
- asddubs 5y agonot 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
- jrexilius 5y agoThe citizens are probably fine, because.. flopp disks!? Who can read those now? ;-)
- jhot 5y agoI 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.
- 83457 5y agoI bought a usb floppy drive last month off amazon to archive disks of historical value to my company. It was delivered in 1 day.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- woudsma 5y agoI 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.
- jacquesm 5y agoCool! Those things are indestructible. Very nice hardware.
- notRobot 5y agoI 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 5y agoI 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=/explore/collection/search%3Fedan_q%3DDilla%26edan_local%3D1%26op%3DSearch https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.139.1?destination=/...
- C19is20 5y agoI somehow remember some way of getting them to be read on an atari.
- dqpb 5y ago> 38 people The number of people whose info can fit on 2 floppy disks.
- ab_testing 5y agoSo less than 3MB of data.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoThere 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 5y agoED 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.
- ent101 5y agoNo worries. Nobody knows how to use floppies.
- megatoaster 5y agoyou think this is bad? https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf
- jpfed 5y agoTens of citizens' personal information may have been exposed.
- daebersold 5y agoAh, the nostalgia. Reminds me of hole-punching the side to turn it into a double sided disk.
- sosborn 5y agoInteresting contrast to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734021
- anigbrowl 5y agoThe 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.
- evilDagmar 5y agoNow, to be fair we did outsource that security clearance data to China... Why I have no idea.
- denton-scratch 5y agoHaven'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 5y agoEquipment to read floppies is readily available on eBay, and is not excessively expensive.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago2 what? Did they time-travel from 1992?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoI 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.
- ricardobayes 5y agoJust 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.
- desktopninja 5y agoIf the system/process ain't broke, don't fix it! #respect-oldtech :)
- omoikane 5y agoI 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 5y agoIf you're using floppy disks in ~2022 you're almost certainly not encrypting the data on them.
- k_ 5y agoForgot to add (1994), right?
- gautamdivgi 5y agoFloppy disks in 2022? Maybe Doc & Marty got lost in Tokyo :)
- monksy 5y agoLinux officially dropped support for floppy disk drives: https://techreport.com/news/3464145/linux-dropping-floppy-drive-support/ https://techreport.com/news/3464145/linux-dropping-floppy-dr... Why are they still using that?
- shmerl 5y agoI wonder how long ago did they stop using punch cards?
- stunt 5y agoIn 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 5y agoHow did your father react when you told him the trick? And after becoming the employee of the year?
- alanh 5y agoI 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
- mancerayder 5y ago> 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?
- anonu 5y agoReminds 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/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-fans-rally-to-defence-of-much-maligned-machine https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-f...
- textcortex 5y agoIs this from 2021?
- techolic 5y agoI 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.
- fegu 5y agoNorwegian Health Department sent floppies to doctors until 2016 on a large scale. See https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-disks-in-2015/ https://gundersen.net/functional-floppy-disks-in-2015/
- abruzzi 5y agoI 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.)
- evilDagmar 5y agoSomeone probably nicked them thinking they were novelty coasters shaped like save icons.
- aww_dang 5y ago3.5 inch diskettes ?
- zilchers 5y agoThese are the real questions
- oneplane 5y agoMaybe 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 5y agoMaybe they meant a SD card or USB drive, but translated it as "floppy".
- ronsor 5y agoThe Japanese version says "FD" multiple times, so it really is talking about floppy disks.
- Jorengarenar 5y agoJapanese version of the news also reports floppy discs (ロッピーディスク), what would make sense since leaked was "only" the data of 38 people.
- vmception 5y agomore 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 5y agoThe 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 5y agoSince 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-a-90s-compaq-laptop-to-work-on-the-f1/ https://tiremeetsroad.com/2017/12/19/no-mclaren-doesnt-need-...
- aww_dang 5y agohttps://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/10/22/us-nuclear-weapons-command-finally-ditches-8-inch-floppies/ 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 5y agodevops 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.
- evilDagmar 5y agoLuckily for well, everyone, those 8-inch floppies didn't really see a lot of use.
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- egeozcan 5y agoWill 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.
- sonicggg 5y agoInstead 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.
- TT-392 5y agoUsing floppies is apparently still pretty common in japan.
- onion2k 5y agoWill 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.
- walrus01 5y agoWouldn'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.
- rzzzt 5y agoMaybe HiFD or SuperDisk, Iomega something-or-the-other...
- tssva 5y agoI 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 5y agoI heard they were superfamicom cartridges
- jle17 5y agoI 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 5y agoI know it's security by obscurity, but this would secure the data a very decent amount lol
- scoopertrooper 5y agoNot quite obscurity given the attackers could measure the disk and do a quick Yahoo search. Maybe, security by antiquity?
- FloatArtifact 5y agoMakes me wonder how old the citizens are on the floppy disk ?:-)
- JamesMcMinn 5y agoFrom the 4th paragraph of the article > 38 men in their 20s to 80s
- bitigchi 5y agoOh Japan, never change.
- mdni007 5y agoThis makes me wonder what the top posts on HN would have looked like if it existed in 1995
- notadog 5y agoThis gives a glimpse of what it may have looked like: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1995 https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1995
- dahart 5y agoThe scariest part is how much hasn’t changed. ;)
- anikan_vader 5y agoTo 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.
- jacquesm 5y agoWe should send a dupe filter update using a time machine.
- pcurve 5y agoThe headline is borderline the Onion news material. I love it.