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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
✨💩💩💩 ✨✨💩 ✨✨✨ 💩➿✨💩✨✨ ✨✨ 💩✨💩 ✨➿💩 ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨ ✨✨✨
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.
Edit: not anymore, but as recent as about 2019ish. Can't imagine they're the only ancient infrastructure still using this level of technology though. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html
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.
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.
They still have a love affair with faxes though. Thank God you can fax from 7 Eleven. You can do pretty much anything from 7 Eleven.
You... can fax from 7-11? I need to know more about this!
Convenience stores in Japan are much more than the cigarettes and lottery tickets of North America. They have lots of ready-to-eat food, snacks, drinks as well as some banking services, bill payments, faxing and more.
Ours have that too, but it's old hot dogs and ATM's with fees up your ass.
Each 7-11 in Japan has one of those big business multicopiers. You can copy, print, scan, fax. The printing is sweet because it does photo printing on glossy paper, but also laser printing up to A3 size or even making custom post cards. They also have databases of paid content like sheet music and stuff you can print. I prefer Lawson/FamilyMart though since they also have sticker printing!
You know, since e-mail is a fucking wasteland of unread messages and spam, faxing doesn't seem so bad.
I drew a floppy disk as part of a workplace online Pictionary game, only to find somebody I work with has never seen one.
We work in IT.
The rest of us tried to explain what they were and he was like "did you use them in a GameCube?" and "was it like a USB stick?"
I mean it was a bit like a USB stick. Just nobody made the comparison back then because USB didn't exist. But yes it is removable storage that is read/writable.
GameCube though...
Yeah, I'm starting to doubt he'd ever seen a GameCube either.
On to Zip drives, then?
Maybe now they can switch to the magneto-optical disks like in Mission: Impossible.
The funny thing was 1.44mb is probably enough to store a really really long list of names and codenames so...they could have used a normal floppy disk lol.