The citizens are probably fine, because.. flopp disks!? Who can read those now? ;-)
I bought a usb floppy drive last month off amazon to archive disks of historical value to my company. It was delivered in 1 day.
Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
71–80 of 222 posts
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#72Will 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.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storag…
Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other.
Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#73Will 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.
>Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? This is Japan, no pretending needed. They're waaaay backwards, internet there tends to be 20 years behind the times for starters ... Thought this was common knowledge.
When I visited I described this as "one foot in the future and one foot firmly in the past"
Some things are futuristic and obvious improvements (e.g. Suica and ApplePay NFC support in 2016/2017) and others are stubbornly in the past (e.g. cash only, physical media, place and structure of society).
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#74Will 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.
Instead of encrypting the data, maybe they are relying on the fact that nobody else today has a reader for floppy disks, so the data is safe.
Shhh, you are giving ideas to the crypto banks.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storag…
Speed. And, while they can be robust they are often not. One of the problems are misaligned drives. Where you will have robust use of them on one machine, and robust use on another machine. But if you take a disk written in one it can't be read in the other. Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.
Back when I still used these I remembered they had horrible life span - I would take a new disk out from the box, wrote some files to it, then months later when I tried to read the disk I was unable to do so, with the disk drive making constant cricket sound.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#76Will 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.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storag…
They are also tremendously slow, somewhat fragile, prone to media decay, and extremely difficult to source replacement media in 2021. Replacement drives are also somewhat hard to find.
Most people with security constraints have long since moved on to optical media (CDr and DVDr), but even those are starting to become hard to find. Optical media has the advantage of having write-once modes which makes it easier to avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here in Canada. I used to take the train between Montreal and Toronto frequently and I don't actually remember it ever being on time. It usually was 30-60 minutes late, since Via Rail shared rail with freight trains, but had a lower priority so it often needed to wait.
I must commend the Berlin transit system. Except for the occasional strike, I found it to be extremely efficient, clean, and rather polite. Especially the trams.
Did you and I live in the same Berlin??? The S Bahn is literally always late.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#78Will 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.
Will we pretend that the usage of floppy disks is normal in almost 2022? What's wrong with them? They're reasonably robust for short term shortage, easily copyable, and you can design your own format if you want to. The space limitation is only a problem if you need to actually store more than 1.4MB or so. And if you want to lock down an environment so USB devices can't be used there aren't many other portable storag…
Extreme unreliability, terrible speed, tiny storage, dearth of available equipment. The reasons not to use floppy disks for anything that matters are numerous and clear.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here in Canada. I used to take the train between Montreal and Toronto frequently and I don't actually remember it ever being on time. It usually was 30-60 minutes late, since Via Rail shared rail with freight trains, but had a lower priority so it often needed to wait.
I must commend the Berlin transit system. Except for the occasional strike, I found it to be extremely efficient, clean, and rather polite. Especially the trams.
I've heard very many complaints about Deutsche Bahn though. On the other hand here in Switzerland trains are crazy good, perhaps not as much as Japan, but if you have a 5 minutes connection you can normally assume you'll make it.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wonder why the Japanese culture is like that. Obviously, some other nations could use the same precision and keeping companies (and governments) to high standards. But out of all countries, I can only think of Japan that does that. Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
Heavy laws and discipline?