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

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

#81

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.

I guess I was lucky. Our pile of Castle Wolfenstein/Doom/Infocom disks made it all around the neighborhood with nary a flipped bit.

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

#82

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.

My understanding is that quality varied a lot, and that near the end (when USB thumbdrives were starting to take off) manufacturers started cutting a lot of corners, with the result that everyone remembers floppies as being more unreliable than they actually were, or at least could be.

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

#84

more questions than answers, I love how the article provides no information on why floppy disks were being used as if it occurred in 1995.

The typical reasons costs a lot to upgrade tech for large organizations, existing supply lines to get the equipment, the pro/cons being well understood at this point, etc. Oh, and of course our good old friend "well we've always done it this way!"

Since the nuke one was filed here I add as a sibling comment that the McLaren F1 no longer needs a particular 1990s Compaq laptop.

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2017/12/19/no-mclaren-doesnt-need-...

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

#86
post #25

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.

Japan has been known to apologize publicly when a train runs a couple minutes late.

Japan has also been known to cram passengers into trains during rush hour.

I imagine this practice has probably been fervently deprecated due to covid19.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ

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

#87

So less than 3MB of data.

There were 2.88MB floppies, or... I think that was actually an encoding thing? That is, I think you could take a "standard" 3.5" floppy and use special software to format it up to 2.88MB. (Maybe it just changed the track sizes or something, and hoped your disk was high enough quality to take that)

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

#88

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.

This is Japan. If someone finds an item on the street it will be dropped off at the nearest Kōban box (small police station that are everywhere). I lost a pair of sunglasses once that were $$ that I cared about them. I had a rough idea of were I lost them. The next day I went to the local Kōban and sure enough they had them. Lots paperwork to get them back as it is Japan. https://jref.com/articles/koban-japanese-poli…

> If someone finds an item on the street it will be dropped off at the nearest Kōban box

Unless it's an umbrella. For some magical reason, umbrellas are excempt from this rule and can be taken from wherever by anyone. I lost a cheap umbrella like this during a trip, and read about it and apparently it's the one item it's definitely not safe to leave unattended in Japan. Go figure!

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

#89
post #72
post #63

Earlier 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.

> Very fun times storing your home-work on a disk, bringing the disk to school and being unable to read it. Very common problem.

I never had that while growing up. Used floppies for ~6 years, since school computers were ancient, no usb, and the cd drives always struggled to read home burned cds.. Floppies worked 100% regardless of brand or drive.

In 6 years I had 1 floppy suddenly die on me.. which I thought was really weird.. Otherwise I'd carry around in my backpack 1-3, until they'd get physically damaged or start making new noises, that's how I knew it's time to replace them.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't surprise me if they did: cold storage on obscure storage formats.
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