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

mainichi.jp

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

#121

Post by _aavaa_ »

howdydoo wrote: post #117
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.

I think using floppies is a great way to safeguard privacy. Even if someone finds those disks, they won't be able to read them

The same could be said about an encryption

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

#122

Post by WalterBright »

wolrah wrote: post #110
WalterBright wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prone to media decay Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.

My old floppies are great. The newer ones, starting around 2000 or so, are mostly junk.

I haven't bought a floppy since 2000, so I wouldn't know!

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

#123

Post by jfim »

crispyambulance wrote: post #120
onion2k wrote: 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…

> [...] and you can design your own format if you want to. Is the Tokyo police going to "design" their own floppy format? Why!? This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades. Floppies in 2020? Really? Maybe this will be embarrassing enough that they'll upgrade. It happens though, there was a story some…

> This is most likely the effect of some luddite in a leadership position that simply can't handle change but has been able to force everyone to comply for decades.

It's much more likely that they have an established set of procedures on how to handle day to day operations that involves floppies, and that they didn't see the point of changing the procedures that already work for them.

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

#124

Post by denton-scratch »

Haven't seen a floppy disk for 20 years. Haven't seen an 8" floppy since about 1988.

Floppies got bitrot quite badly; I doubt they're readable without forensic equipment (come to think of it, even without the bitrot, equipment for reading floppies isn't common).

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

#125

Post by mlyle »

pxx wrote: post #107
WalterBright wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prone to media decay Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.

... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by taking them for a five minute walk a block away. 40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.

I just recently went through around 300 floppy disks -- 3.5" HD mostly, but also some 5.25" 360k and a few 3.5" DD. All dating to 1985-1995.

Overwhelming majority of the disks were readable. I have about 15-20 that aren't... and many of them may be formatted Mac 800k which I am not able to read out right now, rather than corrupted.

This even includes many DD disks that were formatted as HD by my PS/2 that just didn't care. Was a slight hassle to get newer drives to ignore the absence of the density hole and read them out.

The bigger problem is that almost all the interesting data I'd want from that era was generally overwritten by dumb stuff. Why keep old papers and source code from when I was a "baby", when a friend was offering a copy of a game?

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

#126

Post by laumars »

WalterBright wrote: post #100
jandrese wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So have I. But I also remember plenty of floppies that I’ve written data to not even surviving the 30 minute cycle to college back in the 90s.

Maybe consumer floppies were of a lower quality than published ones? I don’t know if that’s true but I do remember having a really low success rate with consumer floppies (it got so bad I’d often write two floppies just in case).

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

#128

Post by 14 »

howdydoo wrote: post #117
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.

I think using floppies is a great way to safeguard privacy. Even if someone finds those disks, they won't be able to read them

Well might stop someone who does not care but someone like me would be highly curious finding a floppy disc this day and age and may spend the 20$ on amazon for a reader.

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

#130

Post by WalterBright »

pxx wrote: post #107
WalterBright wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prone to media decay Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.

... and I have had 3.5" floppies that have lost data by taking them for a five minute walk a block away. 40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.

I have many 3.5 inchers. None of them lost data, either.

Although as a precaution, I long ago copied them en masse to CDROMs. Later, the CDROMs got copied to hard disks.

I gave away my PDP-11 long ago, but not before I copied the 8" floppies it had (circa 1980). But one day I realized I had neglected to copy a critical file. I had the floppies, but no way to copy them. Then I remembered a friend of mine, Shal Farley, might still have an -11. Calling him up, sure enough, he had it but hadn't fired it up in years and was about to dispose of it. I mailed him the floppies.

He fired up the -11, it still worked fine, and the floppies all copied perfectly. My entire box of floppies, every byte.

A big thanks to Shal and his company, Cheshire Engineering.

(The missing file was one of the source files to Empire for the PDP-11, which I have now backed up on https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )

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