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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

#161

Post by snek_case »

cbfrench wrote: post #15

Criminals recover the disks but then are foiled in their dastardly endeavors because they can’t find a disk drive to load the floppies.

There's many options to buy affordable 3.5" USB floppy drives on Amazon and eBay. However, I haven't been able to find any obvious options to read 5.25" floppy disks on a modern machine.

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

#164

Post by Javantea_ »

WalterBright wrote: post #130
pxx wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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,…

Thank you for sharing your source code for Empire!

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

#166

Post by abakker »

lreeves wrote: post #154
reaperducer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as it’s not an M1. I tried recently to read some old CDroms that were formatted for OS9. Not a straightforward process to read those old file systems. And, if you have an M1, you then need to have a w OS that runs on the arm chip. Or, you can use qemu to install os9 in full emulation. What a PITA.

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

#168

Post by pc86 »

omoikane wrote: post #150

I am disappointed by all the comments being focused on the use of floppy disks, as opposed to questions about whether contents on these removable media were encrypted. Even the original news article doesn't mention what are the data security practices employed by these agencies, other than the physical storage was locked.

If you're using floppy disks in ~2022 you're almost certainly not encrypting the data on them.

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

#169

Post by pklausler »

DJBunnies wrote: post #29

1.44MB?

You mean "1.44MB", not 1.44MB :-) since they hold 1440 KiB (1474560 bytes), not 1509949, despite the name. Those disks sat on a throne of lies.

And the disks in this story were most likely Japanese "2.88MB" disks, whose true capacity I do not know.

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

#170

Post by incompleteCode »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #157
silverpepsi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Do you have any citations for this? I'd love to explore in depth what the lateral tech track looks like.
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