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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 o

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.

sonicggg 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Shhh, you are giving ideas to the crypto banks.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    I wouldn't surprise me if they did: cold storage on obscure storage formats.
TT-392 5y ago
Using floppies is apparently still pretty common in japan.
onion2k 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
silverpepsi 5y ago
>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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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.
  - incompleteCode 5y ago
    Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
    - LeoPanthera 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Thank you!
    - mcguire 5y ago
      They have flying cars. See the documentary Red Sun (1993) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)). :-)
np_tedious 5y ago
So 3MB of personal information? That's well under 1 byte per citizen how bad can it be? /s
- kahrl 5y ago
  If they are 5.25" 1.2MB high density floppies, that's a max of 64k per person. What the what?
  - np_tedious 5y ago
    I had used total city population as denominator. Oops
howdydoo 5y ago
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
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Was thinking the same thing, like theoretically it's better than encryption :D
- _aavaa_ 5y ago
  The same could be said about an encryption
- 14 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
  - marban 5y ago
    Haven't checked lately but I bet Yodobashi still has a dedicated Floppy section.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      You can install VirtualBox and pass the USB floppy device through to any OS that can read it.
cosmodisk 5y ago
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
grishka 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Isn’t the most sensitive information here that they applied for public housing?
spicybright 5y ago
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.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  In Europe notifying of leaks is mandatory. And when police is doing it it tends to leak, so better do it themselves too.
- everydaybro 5y ago
  it's a level of honesty that we are not used to it
- tux3 5y ago
  Japan has been known to apologize publicly when a train runs a couple minutes late.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
    - Zircom 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Yes, people willingly got on the train and the platform stewards helped.
- jen20 5y ago

sonicggg 5y ago

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 5y ago
Shhh, you are giving ideas to the crypto banks.
- iszomer 5y ago
  I wouldn't surprise me if they did: cold storage on obscure storage formats.

TT-392 5y ago

Using floppies is apparently still pretty common in japan.

onion2k 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.

silverpepsi 5y ago

>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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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.
- incompleteCode 5y ago
  Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
  - LeoPanthera 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Thank you!
  - mcguire 5y ago
    They have flying cars. See the documentary Red Sun (1993) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(film)). :-)

np_tedious 5y ago

So 3MB of personal information? That's well under 1 byte per citizen how bad can it be? /s

kahrl 5y ago
If they are 5.25" 1.2MB high density floppies, that's a max of 64k per person. What the what?
- np_tedious 5y ago
  I had used total city population as denominator. Oops

howdydoo 5y ago

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

lnxg33k1 5y ago
Was thinking the same thing, like theoretically it's better than encryption :D
_aavaa_ 5y ago
The same could be said about an encryption
14 5y ago
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 5y ago
I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
- marban 5y ago
  Haven't checked lately but I bet Yodobashi still has a dedicated Floppy section.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    You can install VirtualBox and pass the USB floppy device through to any OS that can read it.

cosmodisk 5y ago

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

grishka 5y ago

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 5y ago
Isn’t the most sensitive information here that they applied for public housing?

spicybright 5y ago

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.

Ekaros 5y ago
In Europe notifying of leaks is mandatory. And when police is doing it it tends to leak, so better do it themselves too.
everydaybro 5y ago
it's a level of honesty that we are not used to it
tux3 5y ago
Japan has been known to apologize publicly when a train runs a couple minutes late.
- iszomer 5y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ
  - Zircom 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Yes, people willingly got on the train and the platform stewards helped.
jen20 5y ago