Tens of citizens' personal information may have been exposed.
Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
91–100 of 222 posts
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#92Will 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.
So 3MB of personal information? That's well under 1 byte per citizen how bad can it be?
/s
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#93I use floppy disks for my Akai S2800 sampler :) Originally built around 1992 it still works (and sounds) great! Modding it to support USB is too expensive, and I quite enjoy some of the limitations it brings. You have to get creative for some things.
Cool! Those things are indestructible. Very nice hardware.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#94Earlier 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 was on a 3 hour Shinkansen trip that was 2 minutes late and the staff profusely apologized when we arrived. I have also been on a cross US Amtrak trip that was literally 30 hours late and they rationed food and the staff became increasingly rude and unhelpful.
It's easy to apologize profusely for something that is well within expectations.
On the other end of that spectrum, I can also empathize a bit with an increasingly unhelpful crew of a 30 hour late train. Yeah, you don't have to be rude about it, but at some point, there's simply a decreasing amount of help that can be given.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#95Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m under the impression it’s a similar thing in Sweden regarding trains. I heard they give you money to cover a taxi if the train is late by a few minutes or something.
I heard they give you money to cover a taxi if the train is late by a few minutes or something. LOL. If that was true the Swedish train companies would have been bankrupt decades ago. Swedish trains are extremely unreliable. As someone who used to take the Stockholm-Gothenburg train a lot for work I was happy every time I arrived less than an hour late.
In Finland you can claim money if the train is late 25% with 60 minutes and 50% at 2 hours... Also taxis are done sometimes, but people really need to know their rights and demand it.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!"
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2019/10/22/us-nuclear-weapo... "US nuclear weapons command finally ditches 8-inch floppies" >And yet, such a computer system ranks as one of the most important in the world – so critical in fact that nobody has wanted to change or upgrade it since it was built nearly half a century ago.
devops will eat me alive for this, but my 2c is if it's critical infra, and if it's working, don't touch it. Sure write a new one in parallel, but don't change or upgrade it.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 real…
I constantly had failed floppies.
I started using them as a kid, but probably after the world had moved on (I liked to tinker, and usually free computers were old computers)
Part of me wonders if the quality was "A shaped", where early disks were experimental, then reliable but expensive disks became common, then cheap but maybe not as reliable disks became even more common
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#99Will 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.
In Europe notifying of leaks is mandatory. And when police is doing it it tends to leak, so better do it themselves too.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#100Earlier 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…
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 avo…
> prone to media decay
Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.