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US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

cnbc.com

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Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#41

Post by hodwik »

eru wrote: post #37
missed_out wrote: post #20

At one time, government engineers were in equal standing with contractor engineers. As defense spending dwindled down after the Vietnam war, defense contractors began to lobby for more control of defense workloads. On a contract, the government engineers would maintain the product and defense contractors did the development. Money set aside for documentation was devoured by the contractors so that only the contractor…

> The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract. Ideally, they would have even more expertise to make judgement calls, so that they could rely (in some sense) on the spirit of the contract and not just the letter. I guess comparisons to public sector and military procurement in other countries (and times) might be instructive.

I think they have just as much experience and technical know-how as their contractors, but have neither the funds or the go-ahead to implement this stuff themselves.

For example, Obama signed an executive order requiring the DoD to use electronic records management systems to store all of their classified data.

The tricky part is that the way it is written, they have to buy this, they're not allowed to write the system that holds their own data.

(See JITC 5015.2.)

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#42

Post by firethief »

excitom wrote: post #11
HillaryBriss wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's the difference between outdated technology which has never been documented online, and new technology which has never been documented online?

If you're using Windows 10 or MacOS, people know how to find their way around in the absence of documentation. How many people could figure out the command line interface to a 1970s era IBM Series/1 without docs?

If someone does something bad involving a nuclear mainframe, I don't think it'll be on a lark.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#43

Post by Pengwin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #23

Old storage media (floppies, CDs) have a big advantage over new ones (SD cards, USB sticks, hard drives) - they don't have firmware . Most people didn't notice how over the last decade or so we've moved from having a computer read out data directly from a removable medium to having two computers talking together over a low-level, high-privilege protocol. While there are many benefits to this evolution, it also opens…

My father worked for a very long time on traffic signal systems, and a lot of their old technology was a simple EEPROM chip which they wrote a program for the signals, burned to a chip that costed a pittance, and that was it. I remember him telling me when they changed to a new system based on (i think) PCMCIA interfaces and the complexity of deployment and cost were magnitudes greater for no real benefit.

If its an embedded system and the cost and work of supporting it is less than the cost and deployment of a new system, whats the point in updating it?

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#44

Post by cesarbs »

gene-h wrote: post #29
btgeekboy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along the same lines, you can visually inspect them. Now, perhaps there's a way to hide some sort of wafer-thin wireless reader and transmitter in a floppy disk that can somehow harvest enough electrical energy to be useful, but that's a long shot. As for SD cards, ones that are more than just storage (e.g. with wireless technology embedded) already exist.

Even if you could hide a wireless reader and transmitter in a floppy disk, you would still be able to pick it up on X-ray. It would be very difficult to differentiate an SD card with a malicious payload even if one X-rayed it.

Would X-rays corrupt the data on the floppy disk? Honest question, I have no idea.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#47

Post by missed_out »

hodwik wrote: post #41
eru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government at every level, just does not have the expertise to insure that contractors perform to the letter of the contract. Ideally, they would have even more expertise to make judgement calls, so that they could rely (in some sense) on the spirit of the contract and not just the letter. I guess comparisons to public sector and military procurement in other countries (and times) might be instructive.

I think they have just as much experience and technical know-how as their contractors, but have neither the funds or the go-ahead to implement this stuff themselves. For example, Obama signed an executive order requiring the DoD to use electronic records management systems to store all of their classified data. The tricky part is that the way it is written, they have to buy this, they're not allowed to write the syst…

This is what I observed at McClellan AFB during my time there. No matter how hard I fought to do the work as a government engineer, management continuously turned the work over to contractors. As to why? I was taken aside and given the most ridiculous reason. If the project fails or overruns, the manager just gets more money to give to the contractor. Being screwed by the contractor was acceptable. But if done organically and there were problems, the manager gets a ton of grief. But this is the government, what terrible fate will come down on the manager? I also noticed that a lot of these managers retired from government service ended up working for the contractors, and the process recycles itself. This came back to bite McClellan AFB in the arse later. Come BRAC time, the contractors made it an easy choice to close the base by taking the work back their sites at a much reduced cost.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#49

Post by etrevino »

randyrand wrote: post #33
draw_down wrote: post #16

Well, does it work? If so then what's the problem?

Did the article say there was a problem? If so, what did they say the problem was?

The article describes the IT systems as "creaky" and referred to the "jaw dropping" GAO report that inspired this article was described as "sobering". So, it would appear that the problem the article referred to is the obsolete systems.

Re: US military uses 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate nuclear force operations

#50

Post by donarb »

3327 wrote: post #5

There is more to this than "out dated" technology. There is tremendous espionage and malicious activity protection by using outdated technology. The schematics of these systems were never online, making and introducing malware is also prohibitively difficult due to the lack of domain knowledge and expertise on the technology. There are huge upsides to using outdated technology when it comes to nuclear warheards.

They say the best vehicle anti-theft device is a stick shift.
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