Forgot to add (1994), right?
Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
151–160 of 222 posts
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
Won't help if the finder of the floppies has a Mac. I have a bunch of old floppy disks, but from what I've read online, you can't even hook a USB floppy drive to a Mac anymore. All that code is gone from the OS.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#153Earlier 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…
They are also tremendously slow
When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
Won't help if the finder of the floppies has a Mac. I have a bunch of old floppy disks, but from what I've read online, you can't even hook a USB floppy drive to a Mac anymore. All that code is gone from the OS.
You can install VirtualBox and pass the USB floppy device through to any OS that can read it.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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).
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.
I think stray magnetic fields were more of a problem back then. Fridge magnets, magnetic clasps on wallets and bags, magnetic clasps on notebooks and binders, etc. There were lots of hidden opportunities for corruption.
These days, nobody worries about the mag stripe on their credit card getting wiped. But it was an active concern back then.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Or safeguard nuclear weapons. America's nukes got hacked literally the same month they proudly announced that they had modernized away from floppies. You'd think that'd be more newsworthy than a couple public housing applicants in Japan having their privacy invaded but nope. https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/#footnote6
> America's nukes got hacked literally the same month they proudly announced that they had modernized away from floppies.
You're conflating two entirely different things. US nukes were not hacked, that's a massive exaggeration.
"Shaylyn Hynes, a DOE spokesperson, said that an ongoing investigation into the hack has found that the perpetrators did not get into critical defense systems."
"They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE."
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/17/nuclear-agency-hack...
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#157Will 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.
Japan isn't backwards. It's more accurate to describe them as "sideways". They just don't follow the same tech track as everyone else.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.
Alright then, we're upgrading to ZipDisk for added security through obscurity.
Re: Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
#159Will 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.
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.
The Japan you and I know from personal experience isn't anything at all like the imagined futuristic cyberpunk image that the chattering internet has created.