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CIA wanted a way to copy 3.5“ floppy disks ”in a covert manner“ in 2013

wikileaks.org

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Re: CIA wanted a way to copy 3.5“ floppy disks ”in a covert manner“ in 2013

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume too much. Bit rot was the driver towards anything-not-floppy, if I recall the 90s correctly. "Can't break" and "floppies" is an oxymoron - oh God, now I have that horrible sound of a floppy read error (yes, you could actually hear most types of read errors) stuck in my head. (Perhaps the 8-inch floppies are still in use as their lower density gives higher resilience?)

What I meant was if you expect them to die, and discard them on some regimented schedule instead of expecting them to last forever. Flash-based USB storage (and even platter-based HDDs ) suffer degradation and/or bitrot, just at different rates/probabilities. Even optical media only has a few years of expected lifetime.

Of course there's bit rot everywhere, just that floppies were notoriously unreliable because of it.

OTOH, the only way to actually preserve data is to keep rolling them forward to new physical media as the old ones die off (this is of course abstracted away in cloud solutions).

Re: CIA wanted a way to copy 3.5“ floppy disks ”in a covert manner“ in 2013

#62

Just to be clear, they actually made this. Not only that, but it appears like they had 3 different versions.[0] [0] https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_1179700.html

With a nice error in flashLeds.bsh

  #Turn on blue LED for 2 seconds and then turn it off
  echo 0 > /sys/class/leds/fxi-ccandy\:blue\:/brightness
Should be

  echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/fxi-ccandy\:blue\:/brightness
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