Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernize the bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one…
The comment section is wild. So many people thinking that the Japanese government is somehow late to the floppy free party. Clearly they have no idea how dire the IT infrastructure situation is for the most critical systems of the world’s major super powers
If you think the US government is floppy free, let alone capable of going floppy free in the next 5 years, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya
Not only because the infra is bad but also because floppy is “safer”. It’s not "connected"amd no one can invade it.
Security by obscurity
Security through obscurity would be having a system connected to a network, but relying on a secret / unknown protocol to secure it.
Air-gapping a system is a real and very useful security method. That being said, it’s not enough by itself.
If you’re interested, have a look at past examples, like the recent work on breaking Tetra communication standard and Stuxnet.
That’s why I only communicate via poop/sparkle emoji Morse code
✨💩💩💩 ✨✨💩 ✨✨✨ 💩➿✨💩✨✨ ✨✨ 💩✨💩 ✨➿💩 ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨ ✨✨✨
✨✨ 💩✨💩➿💩 ✨✨✨✨💩💩 ✨✨
Security by obsolescence
Where are floppies used in the US government? Old mainframes are all over the place but where are floppies?
Japan just got an acute case of what a lot of western governments have - IT early adopter disease. These old systems were built using (at the time) revolutionary technology that was designed without much thought given to modularity or sun-setting.
Iirc literally the nuclear launch systems? I’ll see if I can find the article.
https://www.wired.com/story/san-francisco-muni-trains-floppy-disks/
I’m not sure about government but I am aware of test equipment in commercial aerospace that still use floppy disks, soooo…
US gov isn’t even tape free
Tape makes an excellent, dirt cheap, large scale backup solution. You can get a 30 TB tape for 45 bucks.
As long as you test restoring those backups, which is where many entities fail.
Wish smaller scale tape storage was more viable for home use (homelab scale). Would love to have tapes instead of spinning drives for something like a home media server.
Last time I looked into it I didn’t even know where to start. Is it more feasible now? I’d imagine power consumption would also be better than keeping disks spinning all the time.
Tape is not great for things you actually want to access like media
Yes, but it’s great for your emergency backup copy of media.
My thought process is that in the case of media I’m not accessing the same files over and over, at least not for most of the files. For a media archive it would make sense, to me at least. I’m not familiar with modern tape storage, I’m sure there’s many good reasons why this isn’t done (yet?).
Would be good for self hosted offsite backups too I’d imagine.
You don’t get fast random access. So you have to read the whole tape if it’s near the end.
The tape drives are found were really expensive. But as others mentioned, it’s not really suitable for media anyway. Only cold storage backup.
Hell yeah brother
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has significant advantages in certain situations, such that you have to make specific design decisions if you don’t want people to use it: https://www.chia.net/2018/06/11/the-asic-resistance-of-proof-of-space/ https://chiaforum.com/t/lto-tape-drive-as-a-storage-option/12829/3
I will always remember stumbling upon this video (“HP Protecting your business data (or Disc vs Tape)”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHP_bKJx2xg
Amazon and Facebook probably aren’t tape free either. Tape is crazy cheap and reliable. It’s just really slow.
Its been a while since I used one but arent 3.5’s unreliable? I still remember having problems with data integrity way back then. I dont remember them as some rock solid tech and I’d rather put my faith into 650MB CDs if I had to choose.
Granted I’m too young to have handed floppys but from what I understand from my dad and other people the appeal of floppys today is not reliability but rather that normal people have moved on to USB and CDs and have long since thrown away their floppy drives and some people only know them as icon buttons making them pretty good spot to hide classified documents and government secrets
Meanwhile I’m pretty sure even putinism didn’t stop Russia from being floppy-free
it would be pretty hilarious if sanctions push them to ditching floppies
Flopoies aren’t used at all AFAIK. But email is. And USB tokens.
I somehow wouldn’t be surprised if certain parts of the US government still used reel to reel tapes.
…punch cards. My money is on punch cards.