Hacker News Reader

Comment by howdydoo | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

I had to break this to you, but you can definitely find an affordable USB Floppy drive in Tokyo.

Haven't checked lately but I bet Yodobashi still has a dedicated Floppy section.

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.

IIRC, really old Macs got extra storage out of a floppy by spinning the disc faster when the read/write heads were on the outer tracks. Made them a wee bit difficult to read on any other hardware.

Alright then, we're upgrading to ZipDisk for added security through obscurity.

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...

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.

I still have a functioning zip 250 drive. Step.

Functioning until the clic of death arises, you mean.

That's why iomega released the Clik! disks. You don't have a Zip! drive anymore, you have a Clik! drive.

A brutal trip down memory lane

The same could be said about an encryption

Punched tape, OTOH, is too easy to read.

Was thinking the same thing, like theoretically it's better than encryption :D

"Security by obscurity [of medium]"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com