4 ms·
I 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 acc
by rkagerer 4y ago
I 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.
- jeroenhd 4y agoI love the older actual floppies for their floppiness. Today we're back to bending things like screens and phones but bendable tech has been with us for decades!
- mrtksn 4y agoHa, the big large one is made in Bulgaria(according to the label). It's funny how back in the day many countries produced IT hardware.
- gattilorenz 4y agoBulgaria was one of the biggest producers of computer hardware among then countries of the Warsaw Pact, actually
- NavinF 4y agoIf you have IOMMU enabled (like any sane platform does), no external devices have direct access to your bus. I know the DMA attacks you’re referring do and they don’t work in 2022.
- IYasha 4y agoYes, the sound! It's a very important security factor, allowing you to spot suspicious activity. I still use HDDs for important data for that reason too.
- TingPing 4y agoGoing by sound is not even helpful. A modern filesystem can log file access which is actually valuable for auditing.