Crossposted from !worldnews@lemmit.online
The comment section is wild. So many people thinking that the Japanese government is somehow late to the floppy free party. Clearly they have no idea how dire the IT infrastructure situation is for the most critical systems of the world’s major super powers
If you think the US government is floppy free, let alone capable of going floppy free in the next 5 years, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya
Not only because the infra is bad but also because floppy is “safer”. It’s not "connected"amd no one can invade it.
Security through obscurity would be having a system connected to a network, but relying on a secret / unknown protocol to secure it.
Air-gapping a system is a real and very useful security method. That being said, it’s not enough by itself.
If you’re interested, have a look at past examples, like the recent work on breaking Tetra communication standard and Stuxnet.
That’s why I only communicate via poop/sparkle emoji Morse code
✨💩💩💩 ✨✨💩 ✨✨✨ 💩➿✨💩✨✨ ✨✨ 💩✨💩 ✨➿💩 ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨ ✨✨✨
Where are floppies used in the US government? Old mainframes are all over the place but where are floppies?
Japan just got an acute case of what a lot of western governments have - IT early adopter disease. These old systems were built using (at the time) revolutionary technology that was designed without much thought given to modularity or sun-setting.
Iirc literally the nuclear launch systems? I’ll see if I can find the article.
Edit: not anymore, but as recent as about 2019ish. Can’t imagine they’re the only ancient infrastructure still using this level of technology though. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
Tape makes an excellent, dirt cheap, large scale backup solution. You can get a 30 TB tape for 45 bucks.
Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.
Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has significant advantages in certain situations, such that you have to make specific design decisions if you don’t want people to use it: https://www.chia.net/2018/06/11/the-asic-resistance-of-proof-of-space/ https://chiaforum.com/t/lto-tape-drive-as-a-storage-option/12829/3
I will always remember stumbling upon this video (“HP Protecting your business data (or Disc vs Tape)”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHP_bKJx2xg
Its been a while since I used one but arent 3.5’s unreliable? I still remember having problems with data integrity way back then. I dont remember them as some rock solid tech and I’d rather put my faith into 650MB CDs if I had to choose.
Granted I’m too young to have handed floppys but from what I understand from my dad and other people the appeal of floppys today is not reliability but rather that normal people have moved on to USB and CDs and have long since thrown away their floppy drives and some people only know them as icon buttons making them pretty good spot to hide classified documents and government secrets
I can’t imagine that’s the main reason. You can buy a 3.5" floppy reader with a usb connection for like 20 bucks on amazon and anyone who wanted to get their hands on government secrets would not be deterred by that.
I think the simplest and most likely reason is that updating things and making changes in bureaucracies is hard on its own, and any time you start dealing with tech it’s all a house of cards where one system depends on another and so changing any one thing will either make it all fall down or bring along with it massive sweeping changes.
3.5 inch disks only held about 2MB on a good day. Reliable or not, you won’t get much on that disk these days.
Unless you are going to make your own backups and take them somewhere else, I would use a cloud solution. Yes, you have to trust the company you choose not to fuck with your data, but they are fault-tolerant solutions that will likely last longer than some random removable solution.
I somehow wouldn’t be surprised if certain parts of the US government still used reel to reel tapes.
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure even putinism didn’t stop Russia from being floppy-free
They still have a love affair with faxes though. Thank God you can fax from 7 Eleven. You can do pretty much anything from 7 Eleven.
Convenience stores in Japan are much more than the cigarettes and lottery tickets of North America. They have lots of ready-to-eat food, snacks, drinks as well as some banking services, bill payments, faxing and more.
Ours have that too, but it’s old hot dogs and ATM’s with fees up your ass.
Each 7-11 in Japan has one of those big business multicopiers. You can copy, print, scan, fax. The printing is sweet because it does photo printing on glossy paper, but also laser printing up to A3 size or even making custom post cards. They also have databases of paid content like sheet music and stuff you can print. I prefer Lawson/FamilyMart though since they also have sticker printing!
You have just convinced me to put “visit a 7-11” on my Japan bucket list*. I need to know what it feels like to print sheet music there.
*I may not ever get to go to Japan, but we can all dream
I drew a floppy disk as part of a workplace online Pictionary game, only to find somebody I work with has never seen one.
We work in IT.
The rest of us tried to explain what they were and he was like “did you use them in a GameCube?” and “was it like a USB stick?”
I mean it was a bit like a USB stick. Just nobody made the comparison back then because USB didn’t exist. But yes it is removable storage that is read/writable.
GameCube though…
Nintendo was planning on adopting floppies iirc, but they were too easy to copy from.
There was definitely a SNES floppy drive you could buy for piracy purposes. A few kids at school had them.
Not sure if it worked with larger games or Starfox which supposedly had an extra SuperFX chip to do 3D work.
Great job!
Although, using floppy disks has the advantage that everyone has to make sure their file sizes are small enough to fit on them. Which makes for much easier handling for those who don’t use floppy disks.
or… you end up with more smaller files to keep track of in order to carry the same information that could’ve been in one large file
How does small file sizes in floppy disks make it easier handling for those won’t use floppy disks? Genuinely curious.
Although, using floppy disks has the advantage that everyone has to make sure their file sizes are small enough to fit on them. Which makes for much easier handling for those who don’t use floppy disks.
What? How is that at all relevant in today’s age?
The lack of pressure leads to absurd file sizes for silly things.
A few weeks ago, I needed a vector company logo, so I asked our graphics team for one. The file they sent me was 6MB. While working with it, I noticed it was actually quite clean, so I exported it as an SVG and it came out to 2KB. 1/3000th the size for the exact same graphic.
I opened their file up in a text editor and found font configs for specific printer models (in a graphic with only filled curves), conditional logic, multiple thumbnails, and other junk.
Ok yea, but it’s 6MB, it’s inconsequential with today’s storage densities and a modern system can handle it with ease
On to Zip drives, then?
