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Comment by m3talridl3y | Hacker News Reader

Floppy disks actually provide a rather pleasant form factor. It's large enough to feel meaningful, wide enough to not get lost between other objects, flat enough to be included in a binder with printed material. The only downsides are transfer speed, data capacity, and lifespan.

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They're also AFAIK the only removable magnetic disk format that has been standardised (see ECMA-125), is completely open, and the drives are "dumb and simple" so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives, hard drives, and optical drives can. From the point of view of openness and simplicity, the floppy has some advantages.

>so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives, hard drives, and optical drives can.

Unless you boot the machine with the floppy in the drive. Oh, boot sector viruses!

> Unless you boot the machine with the floppy in the drive. Oh, boot sector viruses!

That's a BIOS configuration issue.

And, if the attacker can control the BIOS, in the words of Bokosuka Wars, "WOW! YOU LOSE!"

http://darkscarfy.tripod.com/bokosuka/bokosuka.shtml

>so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives, hard drives, and optical drives can.

There's a reasonable chance that many of these floppy drives are USB devices, so they'll have all of the disadvantages that come with USB drives.

Another approach could be to build a device that sits between a host and a USB drive and verifies that only mass storage operations take place, which should stop some of the badUSB attacks.

And the relative rarity of floppy disk drives in machines in the last 10 or so years.

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