Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants
mainichi.jp
mainichi.jp
One day, out of curiosity, I opened every single file of the application that they were using to convert and extract data to see if I could make sense of anything. I accidentally found out that there was a config file that had a destination path for copying converted files. It was hard coded to drive A (floppy drive).
I changed the path, tested the application, and it worked. I shared the trick with my father and he shared it with his organization. He became the employee of the year for that discovery.
Floppy disks were expensive on the scale that they were using them, and they often had to deal with a lot of data loss accidents. Their IT team even had a data recovery team specialized to recover data from broken floppy disks because usually it meant they had to send a team back to redo the work. The storage on the devices they were using was very limited, so often during their week-long operations, they had to extract data before they could continue their work, only to realize later that some chunks were missing from the first part, and then they had to redo that part of operation again.
https://www.businessinsider.com/japan-government-tokyo-flopp...
This was not my experience.
Thumb drives weren't common or cheap, yet, though I did have a Zip Drive, as did nearly all of the school's lab computers. I never had a corruption problem with Zip disks, but man, floppies? Seemed like if I walked near them, they'd get corrupted.
USB flash drives were a massive leap forward in sneakernet data shifting.
They were so incompetent, they didn't make the slot in the case of Jazz drives big enough to accommodate for thermal expansion of the cartridge. On top of that, the eject transport had weak cheap plastic parts that would be destroyed if the cartridge couldn't move. Result: if you used your Jazz drive for copying a bunch of data and then tried to eject it without letting the cartridge cool down first, the drive would make a very expensive snap noise and not only did you have a broken drive, you had a stuck cartridge and no way to read the cartridge even inside the drive it was stuck in.
Iomega seemed to only be good at making a product just barely good enough that people couldn't successfully sue them.
Unfortunately stuck disks were often corrupted if mechanical failure occured during r/w. Sometimes I was still able to use recovery software to get data off, but plenty of times it was gone.
They just haven't figured out opportunity cost due to poor capabilities, or how much lost productivity there is because of the old system.
Amateurs. In the USA we can do that kind of thing for 38 million people. with the advances in private sector we're on track to do so for 3.8 billion any day now.
Looks like they leaked their sex a second time.
There really is something distinctive from the golden age of hip hop where you were limited sample size and really had to flip and combine many different samples to produce a beat. J Dilla came a little later, but he was certainly influenced by the sound and I think it should be no surprise that his Akai Sampler (MPC3000, which also had a 3.5" disk drive) would be included in the Smithsonian collection [0].
0 - https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.139.1?destination=/...
For a brief period, I kept a copy of my /etc/passwd and keyfiles on a HiMD disk with an RH1.
Oh, and of course our good old friend "well we've always done it this way!"
I also imagine that we've made at least 10x as many DVDs by now, than all the floppies that were ever made, regardless of the floppy disk size.
"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.
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2017/12/19/no-mclaren-doesnt-need-...
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 imagine this practice has probably been fervently deprecated due to covid19.
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 20s earlier than scheduled. Source: https://www.mir.co.jp/assets_rti/pdf/2017.11.14.pdf
Computer control is more of a safety issue than a reliability enhancer. Computers are pretty good at stopping trains before they crash into another train or rocket off of a curve some idiot took at 80mph, but not so good at driving the train at its safe limits. Ever ride BART? It's been fully automatic since its inception (in normal operation, drivers have an e-stop button and make announcements) and it isn't setting records for on-time performance.
I think the fascination with Japan's on-time record is a little overblown. I went to high school in Tokyo and I was late plenty of times due to train problems. Snow? Schedule is fucked for the entire day; trains canceled, trains late. Someone falls in front of a train? You're not going anywhere for an hour. As a rider of the New York subway system during the "meltdown", I can tell you that you can absolutely do worse than Japan. But the MTA was still happy to hand out vouchers explaining why I was late to work.
I don't know if they do this, but I'd imagine if they built in buffers and then controlled the train speed based on arrival/departure times they could get pretty accurate. If a run's maximum average speed (mouthful) is 120 km/h then plan on 100 km/h which gives you +20 buffer to play with in order to make sure the time is right. A computer would allow that +20 to be evenly spread so passengers aren't aware of it.
That, of course, has much less to do with computers and more to do with planning and eliminating and accounting for unknowns as much as possible.
It can, if the door slam shuts instead of attempting to reopen and close.
The high punctuality isn't necessarily without its faults; it creates a high-stress environment to adhere to schedule. 106 people died in a train crash that is hypothesized to have happened because the train was 60 seconds late. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_derailment
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.
For intercity routes you get 25% off the ticket after 1h delay and 50% after 2h delay.
Yes, if they screw you over you might get a taxi ride. But most probably you'd just have to wait for several hours and get up to 50% of the ticket price as a voucher for the next trip.
Trains are one of the most embarrassing part of Sweden. And we are probably going to spend and absolute fortune on new tracks and new slow trains (slow because costs have already spun out of control).
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.
And yes, Japanese trains are crazily accurate. Not only are they (almost) always perfectly on time, they also stop exactly at the position that is indicated on the platform, so you can line up and wait right in front of the train door.
Pretty awesome watching the train you've been waiting for just sort of keep going :D. (The magic of newtown Wales!)
The worst is tho running and rushing and then finally making it into train car that turns out to be going completely wrong direction.
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.
Is it because of language? Religion? Genetics? Isolation? What is the reason?
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!
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 storage options.
They're definitely not something you'd want to keep around as archival media or anything but they served very well for the best part of 3 decades, and the main reason we moved on was because users started needing to store large images and video. I still rather like floppy disks.
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.
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
In general, failed floppies weren't a weekly occurrence or anything like that. But a floppy that couldn't be read or at least developed bad sectors was not rare either.
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 avoid cross contaminating data. The workflow is very straightforward, burn the disc, run it through the dedicated virus scanner, copy the data on the target platform, toss the disc in the shredder. The cost of each disc is negligable, especially if you start counting the man-hours wasted waiting on that incredibly slow floppy interface.
Not in my experience. I have floppies 40 years old that haven't lost a byte.
40 years indicates you're probably using 5¼" (or larger!) media which is slightly better at media decay due to lower densities.
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?
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 )
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 do remember cassettes had different quality magnetic strips but I don’t know if the same was ever true for disks too… so it’s probably bonkers. I’m just throwing some ideas around without much thought. :)
It might just be a case that college kid me was less careful with his disks than you were.
More recently though, I have unboxed my old collection of 3” (not 3.5” but literally 3 inch) floppies for the Amstrad CPC 464 and they almost all worked despite being nearly 40 years old. So I definitely believe you when you post about your success rate.
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.
I'm more annoyed when a store doesn't take Apple Pay. The clerks always seem embarrassed when I ask because I'm sure I'm the 900,000th person to inquire. I find it so odd that the Krogers in two cities I've been to recently don't do contactless payments at all.
When you're only reading 1.44 megs of data, speed isn't that big a deal.
And if you don't want to use USB... well good luck finding a modern motherboard with a floppy disk interface. These days you obviously have to use a USB floppy disk readers. The argument of not using USB doesn't make a lot of sense, USB is not dangerous, it's how the OS is configured. Also how do you plug in mouse and keyboard, with PS2? And by the way, if you don't want to use USB at all you can use an SD card (you can find readers that are PCI express and thus don't require USB), or a CD ROM with a SATA reader, or a SATA HDD with an hotswap caddie, etc.
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 years back about an HVAC filter company (Sparkle) that ran much of their business operations on late 1950's IBM hardware that used plug-boards. Plug-boards! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14121527
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.
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.
Some things are futuristic and obvious improvements (e.g. Suica and ApplePay NFC support in 2016/2017) and others are stubbornly in the past (e.g. cash only, physical media, place and structure of society).
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.
Japan has a great culture of precision engineering and quality (although software is a bit of a different story). On the other hand decision making is very conservative and change is often blocked by vested interests.
Also they invested heavily in a lot of cutting edge infrastructure during the bubble, but now have been slow to replace it.
The most likely answer as to why the MPD still use floppy disks is there is no funding for a total system upgrade. The most likely reason there is no funding is a combination of conservative decision making combined with a politically well connected vendor that makes big bucks of supporting the existing infrastructure.
/s
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...
And I don't see anything wrong with floppies, besides them and drives no longer being produced. USB sticks are too expensive, and optical media are too delicate, often single-use and an overkill for this purpose.
Fortunately, most synths no longer really need the floppy since most of what it gets you is easily replaced with MIDI SYSEX, and dump requests. Samplers on the other hand, while many did implement MIDI SDS, dumping digital audio at 31.25kbps is an exercise in boredom. Some of the later samplers have SCSI, so saving off to SD cards is easy (thanks to the SCSI2SD boards) but for some, I still have to save off to floppy.
* While there are newer devices of this type available without the floppy dependancy, each musical instrument is a unique creation with its own sound, so just because there is something new it doesn't mean that new thing is a replacement for the original thing (just as a trumpet isn't a relacement for a violin.)
Why are they still using that?
Hanko are the red stamps that people require for official paperwork. Fax machines are still in vogue, probably related to the fact that Hanko are needed to complete official paperwork.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/hanko/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/07/japanese-fax-f...
Putting aside the "floppy disk" question, I have to say they seem a hella lot more polite and regretful for the lost data than the constant and more extreme breaches and loss of PII that seem to get stolen regularly here in the U.S. Equifax?
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).
The number of people whose info can fit on 2 floppy disks.
> 38 men in their 20s to 80s
You'd think that the duration or lifespan of equipment is written down somewhere, and that when stuff expires it's transferred to a replacement. But even in Japan that doesn't seem to apply to governmental bodies.
Small benefit of this case: it can't be that much data, unless it's a private key to a server that actually contains everything.
And the disks in this story were most likely Japanese "2.88MB" disks, whose true capacity I do not know.