Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It can't look like a floppy but actually be a keyboard or trojan spyware device or whatnot. It doesn't get direct access to my bus. It generally doesn't have conversations with my OS when I'm not looking, and I can see and hear when it's doing stuff. IT never felt the need to glue the slot shut. It's straighforward in the way paper is straightforward.
If we're going dedicated disk storage, I'd prefer something better. We had eSata for a while, but nobody used that. With today's SSDs, I can see a market where small eSata SSDs (or a variant thereof, carry some kind of NVME connector) take stuff to and from devices.
Alternarively there's good old SD-cards. They work with phones, with laptops, with desktops, they're dirt cheap and they're available in huge sizes. They're also easy to lose, often made from the worst flash memory produced, and can be WiFi cards and other weird expansions, but the attack vector is probably much smaller than USB.
In terms of security, the only real benefit floppies probably have is the terrible speed and the tiny capacity. Insert a USB drive with an exploit and a device is compromised within milliseconds, insert a floppy and you're spending several seconds listening to the disk being read. If something funky is going on, you have some time to yank the disk out. It's not much, to be honest, but it's something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:Floppy...
were very floppy, you could bend it quite a bit!
One time, this was when I was 8, a friend was immensely frustrated with a game, just extremely pissed off, and grabbed a C-64 game and ripped the internal, softer floppy out of the shell (8" pic, but same idea):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#/media/File:8-inch...
He did this by grabbing it and ripping it out via the center hole. The external shell was untouched/damaged. He then crushed it into a ball, like crumpling up a piece of paper.
Of course, I was pissed. But amusingly I then took it, and flattened it out, and then shoved it with all its creases .. back inside the floppy shell after opening it by its top flap.
And it worked!
Talk about low read density.
Upgrading basically means full controller and PC upgrade. So, you are looking at 50% the price of a brand new system.
I keep a set of floppies and usb floppy readers around. They also make some usb to floppy interfaces that replace the reader in PCs.
The manufacturer had long abandoned the equipment and no alternative software was available.
The equipment would cost millions to replace and what they had apparently worked great. So the 386 chugged along.
I don’t buy this. Worst case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC using a proprietary hardware interface (say, an ISA card). It would cost far less than millions to hire a competent electronics engineer to reverse engineer the ISA card and the driver that talks to the ISA card, and fabricate a modern interface. Best case scenario, the microscope talks to the PC via a standard interface, and would be even cheaper to reverse, since you’d just need to worry about the software layer.
On the other hand, it would truly cost millions when the aforementioned ancient interface inevitably breaks and becomes impossible to reverse engineer, necessitating purchase of a brand new microscope.
>what they had apparently worked great
This is the real reason: because the scope works fine right now, nobody thought it prudent to invest the tens of thousands it would take to future-proof it. Exactly like companies that prioritize short-term profits over long-term success.
So now the department is down 100k for a hack. Does the hack even work? Probably not. The "engineer" probable over sold himself and got hired anyway because of the talent shortage.
So the uni is down $100k, the system chugs along with Win3.1 just fine, and every research group understand that when it finally breaks they'll all have to pitch in for a new one.
Btw, as to your comment on this department's myopia, the university is top 10. The department is top 5 world wide.
It seems disingenuous to assume the absolute worst case scenario is what will inevitably happen. The best case scenario is equally likely IMO: a reverse engineering genius undergrad will create a robust modern interface as part of a summer research project in the lab.
>Btw, as to your comment on this department's myopia, the university is top 10. The department is top 5 world wide.
That’s an appeal to authority fallacy. Just because you’re top 10 or top 5 or number one doesn’t make you immune to mistakes. Meta and Google are both at the top of their respective industries but make boneheaded decisions all the time.
If expensive essential apparatus you don’t have is available off the shelf, you buy it or go home.
If expensive essential apparatus you already have needs floppy disks or serial ports or twinax or a green screen terminal and a dot matrix printer or Indigo2 Maximum Impact with a black box hanging off the scsi port or whatever, you have a tech keep that shit running. If it breaks and would require serious PI time to manage reverse engineering and replacing components, you buy new apparatus if it exists to be bought!!! That’s what you do, or you get steamrolled by other labs that are doing research instead of running an equipment nostalgia club.
And the sensible way of keeping mission-critical legacy hardware running is to emulate everything that can be emulated using modern, interchangeable parts. An SD-card-based floppy drive emulator will be a lot more reliable than a decades-old combination of physical drive + floppies. An entire DOS or Windows 3.x computer can likely be replaced by modern industrial systems (also popular in the retro community) that reimplement i586 in SoC form.
My "appeal to authority" was in response to this comment - this department has proven its ability to manage its affairs for far longer than the lifespan of the software running their equipment.
Windows 3.1 came out in the early 90s (late 80s?). How often have the driver APIs, the electrical buses, etc changed since? Should the department have bought new equipment at every change to be "up to date"?
This department did the right thing. They invested in other equipment and kept a couple thousand dollars of spares on hand.
I'd say if if you cannot replicate the system it's already time for some investment. But even before that people should have the foresight to keep systems up-to-date or at least bridged to contemporary systems.
And then, god knows if the device driver for the Ethernet card can coexist with all the other drivers and TSRs, or even if it's running a mainstream version of DOS. Maybe it has a DOS Extender that makes something fail in a non-obvious way.
Adding hardware to Old PCs isn't what you're accustomed to.
You could get it to work, probably, but do you want to explain to the boss why the mass spectrometer is dead because you didn’t like using the floppy?
Another way is to dump the data in hex to the serial port, and write a serial port reader for your modern machine. That's how I transferred files from my old PDP-11 to the IBM PC in the old daze.
Eventually, Data I/O made it an official part of the LogicPak.
It was a VT-100 terminal emulator for the PC, with a side feature of capturing the received data to a file, or writing the contents of a file to the serial port.
But the real, practical answer is that there are floppy drive emulators that speak (whatever protocol floppy drives speak) to the host, but which let you plug a USB Mass Storage device into the front:
https://www.amazon.com/Gotek-SFR1M44-U100-1-44MB-Floppy-Emul...
Just rip out the machine's floppy drive and put one of those in its place. Button on the front pages through virtual "floppies" stored as files on your USB stick. It's sort of like using a game-console flash cart.
They don’t actually emulate a floppy diskette, though. They have a signaling protocol that works through the floppy mechanism but they won’t just work in a floppy drive with the stock BIOS floppy calls. They need a driver to implement the host side of the protocol.
Though I suppose you don't really need to know where the head is. You could just have an array of very small magnetic transducers, with good magnetic isolation between each one, where each one is looping over a different track; and whatever track the read-head angles onto, it just ends up "plugged into" one of the transducers that was already there waiting for it. Kind of like how a "cassette adapter" for 8-track players would have to work, if one of those was ever made.
Bonus thought: try to imagine how a "cassette adapter" for VHS would have to work. Tape with conductive wire run through it in on a matching slanted raster, etc. There's a reason they never made them :)
No, the reason is that there are no situations where you'd want one. If you have a VCR connected to your TV, this means it has a video input, so why not just plug your video thing straight into that input?
https://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-virtual-floppy-for-isa-...
A floppy version of a "cassette adapter" would be a floppy disk on one end, and a USB cable on the other. You'd feed the adapter disk into a floppy drive; the cable would dangle out of the front of the drive; and then you'd plug the cable into a USB mass-storage device.
As with an audio cassette adapter, this would be a way to feed data into a device through the magnetic read head — making the drive believe for analogue RF reasons that there's a flux-recorded medium in there; one that reads off as whatever data you're playing down the line.
Surely someone could take one or those IDE/CF adaptors and add small (100MB) write only and read only partitions controlled by a chip like an ESP32. You'd get two drive letters, one you can use to push data to the WiFi server and one you can use to pull data from there. That way you don't even need to write much of a driver for the DOS system at all because there's no locking and filesystem corruption to deal with. The parts are worth a dollar at most, all you'd need to figure out is the interfacing with the file system. You can even do Linux style device control by exposing fake files to DOS that the system can try to write to for things like configuration.
Maybe someone in the legacy gaming space can work out an open source product for this! I think many people would love to transfer stuff through easier means and selling such devices to enterprises stuck with old hardware can be a significant business opportunity.
The serial port should generally be faster and more practical.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/military-replaces-floppy-dis...
At least for MO, it looks like they are nixing them earlier than floppy disks, as manufacturers are no longer making drives and discs for it.
There was a specification called MD DATA for this purpose, which could be used to store data in more ordinary way, however such discs could not be read by musical device, and had to be one of handful device specifically designed for this purpose -- while it was also used storing pictures from digital camera, as far as I know, it only showed limited use compared to MO as data medium. (Those MD DATA devices could also read musical media, but couldn't record them.)
Later in MD lifecycle, specification like Hi-MD did allow data featured storage class support (which you could write like 300MB of data to standard MD discs, and 1GB on Hi-MD media) this was very late in the MD lifecycle.
MiniDisc used as MO technology at its base, but it was definitely not used interchangeably, and MiniDisc was really specific media (mostly) used to music.
It's a fun piece of media that projects a future that didn't happen, and even more interestingly, was really the opposite of what happened.
The book played on fears of American inferiority to the rise of eastern nations, and is a great reminder that no matter what we may think of as true now may not be the case in the future.
Hearing about how far Japan has fallen behind in the technology race really brings to mind the fact that at one point, everyone was afraid that Japan would take over the world with its high tech industries.
Worth a read just for how wrong Crichton really got it.
https://www.barrons.com/news/drunk-japan-cop-loses-investiga...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/asia/japan-amagasaki-usb-data...
As an off-topic peeve, why is "Nix" capitalized in the title when nothing else is?
Good question. The entire title is original, even though the article title (“Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use”) is clear and concise.
Almost everyone has seen a save icon. Floppy disks are just 3d printed save icons ;p
This surprises me because I thought they were not even available to buy new anymore unless you can find new old stock.
This is a video tour of the facility (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tENHe19gk
My life experience: be in another country, have electronic documents on flash pendrive, bring to government facility, have recepitonist read it, take back home, discover sophisticated trojans on the drive. After that, I only bring DVDs.
Can be useful for security, but is not a wise way to use the hardware resources.
Opening bank accounts felt like I would imagine opening bank accounts was in the 1980s here in Germany. FAXes are still a huge thing. People buy CDs and DVDs. The architecture looks like it stopped developing somewhere in the 70s or 80s. Work culture is archaic, from absurd hierachies, to protocols (who sits where, who speaks first, who is allowed to speak louder, who must speak quite), to outdated offices (even for the most modern companies that i visited), tower computers, black suits with ties... puh, it was a nightmare. I dont want to start on the society and its outdated values (compared to where we are in the West): how they understand democracy, how they treat minorities, how they deal with their nazi-past.
I wonder every single time when media is reporting on the war against China and that Japan and Korea are our friends because we have the same values. Neither Korea nor Japan share most of values with us, in my opinion. Japanese and Korean friends agree.
There were other things that felt modern, but those were mainly driven by those state-sponsored and protected engineering companies that were founded during the post WW2 times.
Overall I would say: I did enjoy my time there, but I hated the racism, the work-culture and the bureaucracy.
Who to blame? I blame Raegan (Trump's big hero) who became president prior being a TV star and Raegan's slogan "Let's make America great again" and his campaign against Japan as he believed that he must destroy the Japanese threat by launching a trade war against them and by fighting the currency. Basically 1:1 what Trump copied 1:1 - just against China.
In this context, it just says that Japan and Korea are both in western democracy camp.
Floppy disks are also extremely difficult to repair, and realigning a misaligned head requires equipment and media that is difficult to find and expensive to acquire. If you never had to adjust the head on a floppy disk—well, let me tell you—you have to get a special floppy disk to realign it and use an oscilloscope to read the signal test pattern from the special disk while you realign it.
“Not manufactured for over a decade” and “requires specialized equipment and training to repair” is a bad combination.
To be clear, there are a lot of scenarios where floppies make sense today. You may have an old CNC machine or an old chemical sample analyzer that takes floppies, and it may cost five or six figures to upgrade.
So, no. There's not much wrong with 1.4MiB of storage - depending on the purpose you're using it for.
I've always had a soft spot for that medium.
That tells me something about you, but nothing about MiniDisk. Which was a cool little futuristic cartridge thingy.
There are USB sticks, in the wild, which impersonate a keyboard. When connected to a computer, at some point, they will send keyboard commands to the computer in an attempt to fire up PowerShell and run commands that install malware.
In general, you should not use a USB stick unless you know its provenance. Consider them highly dangerous. Be especially suspicious of USB sticks that you find “lost” near your business, since somebody may be targeting your business—this is a common technique both for pentesters and for actual criminals.
You plug it in between the computer and the USB stick.
Alternatively the OS should allow setting some USB ports to be set to recognize just storage profiles.
But trying to fit things on them was fun. Was a fun way to learn dd and how boot sectors work. And what new technology can double capacity with a hole puncher? None I tell ya.