Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

mainichi.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 222 posts

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#31

Post by qmarchi »

spicybright wrote: post #10
egeozcan wrote: post #6

Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? Or perhaps the news value comes from this fact, but then, they don't make any comment on it... Weird. I also love that they seem to be taking this seriously, even when it's just 38 people, while all over the world, governments (cough Turkey cough) don't even apologize when they leak the personal details of ALL of their citizens. Well.

Why even publish this tbh? I mean it's good they're doing that, but advertising a leak with so few people affected seems weird to me.

Japanese culture is very strict about being being precise and having high expectations of each other and of companies in general.

Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders.

The easiest one I could find was from 2017 where a train left the station 20s earlier than scheduled. Source: https://www.mir.co.jp/assets_rti/pdf/2017.11.14.pdf

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#33

Post by Jorengarenar »

aww_dang wrote: post #9
oneplane wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the 8" ones? I guess we'll end up creating more questions and not getting any answers any time soon. You'd think that the duration or lifespan of equipment is written down somewhere, and that when stuff expires it's transferred to a replacement. But even in Japan that doesn't seem to apply to governmental bodies. Small benefit of this case: it can't be that much data, unless it's a private key to a server that…

Maybe they meant a SD card or USB drive, but translated it as "floppy".

Japanese version of the news also reports floppy discs (ロッピーディスク), what would make sense since leaked was "only" the data of 38 people.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#34

Post by dahart »

notadog wrote: post #27
mdni007 wrote: post #17

This makes me wonder what the top posts on HN would have looked like if it existed in 1995

This gives a glimpse of what it may have looked like: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1995

The scariest part is how much hasn’t changed. ;)

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#35

Post by dehrmann »

wodenokoto wrote: post #20

BusinessInsider, October 2021, "The Japanese government is still trying to phase out floppy disks a decade after Sony stopped making them" https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...

> The disks "almost never broke and lost data," Yoichi Ono, who is in charge of managing public funds for Meguro ward, told the Nikkei.

This was not my experience.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#37

Post by tssva »

walrus01 wrote: post #7

Wouldn't it be interesting if the floppy disks lost were 2.88MB and also only commonly readable in japan, where that rare format of drive was very slightly more popular in the mid 1990s.

I remember in the mid-90s a customer had just prior to my contract with them starting deployed some 3COM enterprise core routers. They were having issues with connectivity to their Banyan Vines servers which I tracked down to an issue with the routers. 3COM had a bug fix but the routers required the use of 2.88MB floppies to upgrade them. Neither the customer or I had a 2.88MB floppy drive to write the upgrade to. It took 2 full days of searching to find anyone who could get me one in less than a month.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#38

Post by hereforphone »

walrus01 wrote: post #7

Wouldn't it be interesting if the floppy disks lost were 2.88MB and also only commonly readable in japan, where that rare format of drive was very slightly more popular in the mid 1990s.

I heard they were superfamicom cartridges

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#39

Post by anikan_vader »

dahart wrote: post #34
notadog wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives a glimpse of what it may have looked like: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1995

The scariest part is how much hasn’t changed. ;)

To be fair those posts are only mostly a few years old, so they’re being upvoted by the same HN crowd that generally decides what makes it to the front page.

Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants

#40

Post by neom »

qmarchi wrote: post #31
spicybright wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even publish this tbh? I mean it's good they're doing that, but advertising a leak with so few people affected seems weird to me.

Japanese culture is very strict about being being precise and having high expectations of each other and of companies in general. Some may not know this, but trains, and railcars in Japan are accurate _down to the second_ and if there's any deviation from that, the management company for the line will generally offer an apology to the riders. The easiest one I could find was from 2017 where a train left the station 2…

I presume then they are computer controlled? If so, how does one actually leave early or late?
Post reply on HN