26 ms·
Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use
- mikestew 4y agoI know that there must exist adults working in the software industry that have never seen a floppy disk. Because I'm old, and it's been probably fifteen years (to be conservative) since I've held a floppy disk in my hands. I can understand a resistance to change, as we all know how well moving it "online" can go versus a working system, but where in the hell were users even supposed to find these disks even, say, five years ago? As an off-topic peeve, why is "Nix" capitalized in the title when nothing else is?
- hulitu 4y agoThere are a lot of old measuring equipment that uses floppy disks.
- DerekL 4y ago> As an off-topic peeve, why is "Nix" capitalized in the title when nothing else is? Good question. The entire title is original, even though the article title (“Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use”) is clear and concise.
- toast0 4y ago> I know that there must exist adults working in the software industry that have never seen a floppy disk. Almost everyone has seen a save icon. Floppy disks are just 3d printed save icons ;p
- ekianjo 4y agofloppy disks are still sold in Japan in stores.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoIndeed, and it'll be interesting to see if the little floppy icon that has become the universal pictogram for 'save' in applications survives into a time when even the hoariest devs and designers have never seen such a thing in the flesh. I suspect that it will, as the symbology has taken on a life of its own, divorced from its origins.
- zozbot234 4y agoIt's not a floppy disk, it's a save-icon magical artifact.
- grapescheesee 4y agoI still work on several old DOS systems. The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader. Upgrading basically means full controller and PC upgrade. So, you are looking at 50% the price of a brand new system. I keep a set of floppies and usb floppy readers around. They also make some usb to floppy interfaces that replace the reader in PCs.
- webmobdev 4y agoGod, why!?
- brnt 4y agoI worked on an old but perfectly functioning device that scanned medical samples. The only way to get its data out was by way of floppy. Upgrading the device would cost far more than the time savings of cutting out the floppy transfer.
- bitwize 4y agoMy ophthalmologist had a peripheral vision testing machine that recorded data on floppies -- 5 1/4" floppies -- as of the mid-2010s.
- chrisseaton 4y agoDo you not worry that it's obviously going to stop working at some point, and it'd be better to get onto a newer system while you have the time now and you aren't doing it when it's actually broken?
- bombcar 4y agoYou’re often better running the old one into the ground - the new one will be just as expensive when it comes time but you’ll be getting the current model at the time.
- deleted 4y ago
- unsignedint 4y agoI think this article's mention about MiniDisc is wrong -- they are probably talking about MO disc instead. (MiniDisc wasn't widely used as data media as it required a less available unit for writing those. MO, in other hand saw big adaptation in Japan, at least as much as ZIP disk did elsewhere.) At least for MO, it looks like they are nixing them earlier than floppy disks, as manufacturers are no longer making drives and discs for it.
- CountHackulus 4y agoMiniDisc in an MO media. And I'm not sure about Japan, but judging from what came over to North America and the UK, writing to MD was SUPER popular. Though that might be because the major use case in export markets was as a more compact CD player/writer.
- unsignedint 4y agoMiniDisc, at least in Japan, was mostly used for writing musical data (and it required proprietary software to write in special ways, and wasn't mountable as a file system. (e.g. you couldn't just copy over .mp3 file and listen to them, so it had to be converted/encrypted/recorded onto MD in a way it is not readable in ordinary means.) There was a specification called MD DATA for this purpose, which could be used to store data in more ordinary way, however such discs could not be read by musical device, and had to be one of handful device specifically designed for this purpose -- while it was also used storing pictures from digital camera, as far as I know, it only showed limited use compared to MO as data medium. (Those MD DATA devices could also read musical media, but couldn't record them.) Later in MD lifecycle, specification like Hi-MD did allow data featured storage class support (which you could write like 300MB of data to standard MD discs, and 1GB on Hi-MD media) this was very late in the MD lifecycle. MiniDisc used as MO technology at its base, but it was definitely not used interchangeably, and MiniDisc was really specific media (mostly) used to music.
- nmz 4y agoits interesting to note that floppy disks are still more secure than anything usb. what can you move on to that is both secure and cheap?
- samatman 4y agoSince it's Japan we're talking about, they could revive the MiniDisc. I've always had a soft spot for that medium.
- ekianjo 4y agoThe MiniDisc was horrible because everything around it was proprietary. No thanks.
- samatman 4y agoSure, that's why it failed, but it's bizarre to me to focus on something metaphysical like that. If something can go from horrible to something else without changing a single atom, just Sony publishing some things under a license? What was actually horrible about it at that point, how did you let the circumstances overshadow the object? That tells me something about you, but nothing about MiniDisk. Which was a cool little futuristic cartridge thingy.
- bobsmooth 4y agoHow so? Storage is storage isn't it? Floppy disks can have autoexecs on them.
- klodolph 4y agoUSB isn’t just storage, it’s way more than that. If you plug a USB stick into your computer you have no way of knowing beforehand what the device actually is or what it does. Is the device a normal USB flash drive? Or is it actually something far more malicious? There are USB sticks, in the wild, which impersonate a keyboard. When connected to a computer, at some point, they will send keyboard commands to the computer in an attempt to fire up PowerShell and run commands that install malware. In general, you should not use a USB stick unless you know its provenance. Consider them highly dangerous. Be especially suspicious of USB sticks that you find “lost” near your business, since somebody may be targeting your business—this is a common technique both for pentesters and for actual criminals.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoOne advantage of floppy disks is that the threat surface is much less than a usb drive.
- jzdziarski 4y agoLiterally read this while loading an old Famicom disk game into a Nintendo disk drive. Thirty years and it not only still works, it was more capable by its design. Nothing wrong with magnetic media, but good luck on your modernization effort.
- klodolph 4y agoFloppy disks are not manufactured today. Maybe there is nothing “wrong with magnetic media”, but there is definitely something fishy about running your business on equipment that can only be replaced with used stock & the various supplies of NOS floppies. Floppy disks are also extremely difficult to repair, and realigning a misaligned head requires equipment and media that is difficult to find and expensive to acquire. If you never had to adjust the head on a floppy disk—well, let me tell you—you have to get a special floppy disk to realign it and use an oscilloscope to read the signal test pattern from the special disk while you realign it. “Not manufactured for over a decade” and “requires specialized equipment and training to repair” is a bad combination. To be clear, there are a lot of scenarios where floppies make sense today. You may have an old CNC machine or an old chemical sample analyzer that takes floppies, and it may cost five or six figures to upgrade.
- bin_bash 4y agoNothing wrong with 1.4mb of storage?
- shakna 4y agoThe ATtiny85 is still an incredibly popular little chip in manufacturing. It comes with a grand total of 8KiB flash memory. So, no. There's not much wrong with 1.4MiB of storage - depending on the purpose you're using it for.
- out_of_protocol 4y ago1.4MB is okay, not being able to reliably read it is not okay
- askvictor 4y ago
- andrewstuart 4y agoAre floppy disks still manufactured? This surprises me because I thought they were not even available to buy new anymore unless you can find new old stock.
- klodolph 4y agoNo, they are not manufactured. The last manufacturer (Sony) ceased in 2011 or so. Some entrepreneur bought a ton of stock and is still selling it, there was an article around about this which I read recently but I can’t find it at the moment. A lot of customers who buy floppies are buying them for various government equipment, or shops with CNC machines programmed by floppy, etc. If you imagine that a CNC machine is designed to last decades and costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then buying floppy disks makes a lot of sense. If your government ministry requires floppy submissions because nobody bothered to update the rules then it makes less sense.
- krasin 4y agoThat's correct. The aforementioned entrepreneur runs https://www.floppydisk.com/ https://www.floppydisk.com/ This is a video tour of the facility (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tENHe19gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tENHe19gk
- okonomiyaki3000 4y agoWatch your back, fax machines.
- jscipione 4y agoThe US Department of Defense moved away from using 8" floppy disks for its nuclear missile command in 2019. They were replaced by a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution" [0] which sounds like code for a floppy to SD card adapter. [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/military-replaces-floppy-disks-used-to-control-nuclear-weapons-2019-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/military-replaces-floppy-dis...
- jumboshrimp 4y agoThe article only makes a quick mention of one case of data insecurity, but I feel like it's the real driver for this change. There have been several data loss incidents just this year, and data storage and portability like the fax machine in Japan are anachronistic reminders that data privacy and security only move forward after damage is done. https://www.barrons.com/news/drunk-japan-cop-loses-investigation-docs-with-400-people-s-details-01660539607 https://www.barrons.com/news/drunk-japan-cop-loses-investiga... https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/asia/japan-amagasaki-usb-data-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/asia/japan-amagasaki-usb-data...
- 0x20cowboy 4y agoI miss floppy disks. They were fun.
- gizajob 4y agoInstalling things that were spread across 30 floppies wasn't fun though:(
- snvzz 4y ago... a fact that helped prevent bloat.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoThe last Visual Studio that I had to install from floppies needed to be transported in a couple of sturdy shopping bags - something definitely had to give. Maybe p-code would have got a second wind to reduce the amount of space software binaries needed, but as it was CDs rode in to rescue us (and bloat!)
- 0x20cowboy 4y agoTrue. Please insert next disk. But trying to fit things on them was fun. Was a fun way to learn dd and how boot sectors work. And what new technology can double capacity with a hole puncher? None I tell ya.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoA date which will live in infamy...
- rkagerer 4y agoI love that a floppy is always a floppy. It can't look like a floppy but actually be a keyboard or trojan spyware device or whatnot. It doesn't get direct access to my bus. It generally doesn't have conversations with my OS when I'm not looking, and I can see and hear when it's doing stuff. IT never felt the need to glue the slot shut. It's straighforward in the way paper is straightforward.
- jeroenhd 4y agoPerhaps the worst thing about the floppies still in use is that they're not even that floppy. You can't bend them without breaking them! If we're going dedicated disk storage, I'd prefer something better. We had eSata for a while, but nobody used that. With today's SSDs, I can see a market where small eSata SSDs (or a variant thereof, carry some kind of NVME connector) take stuff to and from devices. Alternarively there's good old SD-cards. They work with phones, with laptops, with desktops, they're dirt cheap and they're available in huge sizes. They're also easy to lose, often made from the worst flash memory produced, and can be WiFi cards and other weird expansions, but the attack vector is probably much smaller than USB. In terms of security, the only real benefit floppies probably have is the terrible speed and the tiny capacity. Insert a USB drive with an exploit and a device is compromised within milliseconds, insert a floppy and you're spending several seconds listening to the disk being read. If something funky is going on, you have some time to yank the disk out. It's not much, to be honest, but it's something.
- b112 4y agoOlder, 5 1/4" floppy disks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy_disk_2009_G1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy... were very floppy, you could bend it quite a bit! One time, this was when I was 8, a friend was immensely frustrated with a game, just extremely pissed off, and grabbed a C-64 game and ripped the internal, softer floppy out of the shell (8" pic, but same idea): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:8-inch_floppy_disk_-_IZOT,_Bulgaria_-_inside.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:8-inch... He did this by grabbing it and ripping it out via the center hole. The external shell was untouched/damaged. He then crushed it into a ball, like crumpling up a piece of paper. Of course, I was pissed. But amusingly I then took it, and flattened it out, and then shoved it with all its creases .. back inside the floppy shell after opening it by its top flap. And it worked! Talk about low read density.
- 88840-8855 4y agoI lived and worked in Japan and I was shocked how outdated the country was in many areas. Opening bank accounts felt like I would imagine opening bank accounts was in the 1980s here in Germany. FAXes are still a huge thing. People buy CDs and DVDs. The architecture looks like it stopped developing somewhere in the 70s or 80s. Work culture is archaic, from absurd hierachies, to protocols (who sits where, who speaks first, who is allowed to speak louder, who must speak quite), to outdated offices (even for the most modern companies that i visited), tower computers, black suits with ties... puh, it was a nightmare. I dont want to start on the society and its outdated values (compared to where we are in the West): how they understand democracy, how they treat minorities, how they deal with their nazi-past. I wonder every single time when media is reporting on the war against China and that Japan and Korea are our friends because we have the same values. Neither Korea nor Japan share most of values with us, in my opinion. Japanese and Korean friends agree. There were other things that felt modern, but those were mainly driven by those state-sponsored and protected engineering companies that were founded during the post WW2 times. Overall I would say: I did enjoy my time there, but I hated the racism, the work-culture and the bureaucracy. Who to blame? I blame Raegan (Trump's big hero) who became president prior being a TV star and Raegan's slogan "Let's make America great again" and his campaign against Japan as he believed that he must destroy the Japanese threat by launching a trade war against them and by fighting the currency. Basically 1:1 what Trump copied 1:1 - just against China.
- iamacyborg 4y agoI’m not sure why buying cd’s and dvd’s is a bad thing. Those things are great.
- 4y ago
- pvaldes 4y agoOne of the problems of floppy disks IMAO is that they need to use a lot of plastics for storing tiny amounts of information. We don't live in that cheap one-use plastic utopia anymore Can be useful for security, but is not a wise way to use the hardware resources.
- daniel-cussen 4y agoUltimately every medium is incompatible with every other medium.
- phist_mcgee 4y agoAs a sort of related piece, I recently read the book Rising Sun by Michael Crichton (1993). In the book he describes a future where the Japanese effectively become global hegemon, dividing American industry into pieces that are easily bought by Japanese conglomerates, all of whom are years ahead of the Western world in regards to technology. It's a fun piece of media that projects a future that didn't happen, and even more interestingly, was really the opposite of what happened. The book played on fears of American inferiority to the rise of eastern nations, and is a great reminder that no matter what we may think of as true now may not be the case in the future. Hearing about how far Japan has fallen behind in the technology race really brings to mind the fact that at one point, everyone was afraid that Japan would take over the world with its high tech industries. Worth a read just for how wrong Crichton really got it.
- IYasha 4y agoDon't touch my floppy disks!! My life experience: be in another country, have electronic documents on flash pendrive, bring to government facility, have recepitonist read it, take back home, discover sophisticated trojans on the drive. After that, I only bring DVDs.