Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/japan-declares-war-on-floppy-disks-for-government-use/

by carride • 4 years ago

99 130 4 years ago

mikestew• 4 years ago

I know that there must exist adults working in the software industry that have never seen a floppy disk. Because I'm old, and it's been probably fifteen years (to be conservative) since I've held a floppy disk in my hands. I can understand a resistance to change, as we all know how well moving it "online" can go versus a working system, but where in the hell were users even supposed to find these disks even, say, five years ago?

As an off-topic peeve, why is "Nix" capitalized in the title when nothing else is?

hulitu• 4 years ago

There are a lot of old measuring equipment that uses floppy disks.

DerekL• 4 years ago

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.

toast0• 4 years ago

I know that there must exist adults working in the software industry that have never seen a floppy disk.

Almost everyone has seen a save icon. Floppy disks are just 3d printed save icons ;p

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

floppy disks are still sold in Japan in stores.

tragomaskhalos2• 4 years ago

Indeed, and it'll be interesting to see if the little floppy icon that has become the universal pictogram for 'save' in applications survives into a time when even the hoariest devs and designers have never seen such a thing in the flesh. I suspect that it will, as the symbology has taken on a life of its own, divorced from its origins.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

It's not a floppy disk, it's a save-icon magical artifact.

grapescheesee5• 4 years ago

I still work on several old DOS systems. The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader.

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.

webmobdev• 4 years ago

God, why!?

brnt• 4 years ago

I worked on an old but perfectly functioning device that scanned medical samples. The only way to get its data out was by way of floppy. Upgrading the device would cost far more than the time savings of cutting out the floppy transfer.

grapescheesee5• 4 years ago

Well in short, if it works don't change it. But, it's the story of industrial, and difficult to replace (technically) components.

tinus_hn3• 4 years ago

You could use a serial connection to transfer data to a modern computer.

cout• 4 years ago

Can you not find an ISA Ethernet card and copy the files over the network? There are plenty of TCP stacks out there -- I was even able to use ssh when I tried it years ago (though I had to use ssh v1 and increase the handshake timeout since my 386SX was struggling to keep up).

bombcar5• 4 years ago

Fighting with DOS Ethernet is way harder than using a floppy and a USB floppy drive.

oneplane2• 4 years ago

Will the next system you get have the same problem? Or will this issue be taken into consideration.

walrus01• 4 years ago

i wouldn't say the only way, though not fast, if you don't want to implement ISA 16-bit 10BaseT ethernet, you could use a rs232 serial port and something like 57600 8N1 connection and serial cable to a nearby linux system. at least then there would be no need to physically move media between systems.

WalterBright3• 4 years ago

The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader.

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.

assttoasstmgr• 4 years ago

Why would you do such a thing when you can use something like Kermit (which has been around for over 40 years)....

derefr4• 4 years ago

I'm surprised nobody ever manufactured the floppy-disc equivalent of those audio-to-casette-player adapters. Making one would be a fun project...

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.

EvanAnderson2• 4 years ago

Re: the floppy equivalent of a “cassette adapter” does exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

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.

iancmceachern2• 4 years ago

Someone did, https://www.ebay.com/itm/353764891956?hash=item525e07dd34:g:...

dtx1• 4 years ago

Arent there IDE to Compact Flash Adapters?

bombcar5• 4 years ago

They’re often not happy about being swapped live (because DOS isn’t a huge fan of hard drives disappearing).

autoexec• 4 years ago

Got any recommendations for a good IDE HDD reader? I've seen some cheap USB ones on amazon, but all the reviews are full of people who either got non-working hardware or lost data using them. Seems like a fairly simple device, but it's like you either get garbage under $5 or something that sells for hundreds with little in between.

zozbot2343• 4 years ago

IDE/SATA converters are widely available, and you can use them to connect an old drive to any modern system.

candiodari• 4 years ago

Why not just run the old DOS system as a VM and sidestep the entire problem? I doubt performance will be a problem ...

Symbiote• 4 years ago

It is probably running some specialist scientific equipment or similar.

grapescheesee5• 4 years ago

The systems are running RTX setups. Realtime motion planning and commands. I am sure it can be done in VM's (with some heavy engineering time) but its really beyond it's planned or expected life.

snvzz2• 4 years ago

The only way to get anything off off it is with a floppy or an IDE HDD reader.

The serial port should generally be faster and more practical.

unsignedint2• 4 years ago

I think this article's mention about MiniDisc is wrong -- they are probably talking about MO disc instead. (MiniDisc wasn't widely used as data media as it required a less available unit for writing those. MO, in other hand saw big adaptation in Japan, at least as much as ZIP disk did elsewhere.)

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.

CountHackulus• 4 years ago

MiniDisc in an MO media. And I'm not sure about Japan, but judging from what came over to North America and the UK, writing to MD was SUPER popular. Though that might be because the major use case in export markets was as a more compact CD player/writer.

unsignedint2• 4 years ago

MiniDisc, at least in Japan, was mostly used for writing musical data (and it required proprietary software to write in special ways, and wasn't mountable as a file system. (e.g. you couldn't just copy over .mp3 file and listen to them, so it had to be converted/encrypted/recorded onto MD in a way it is not readable in ordinary means.)

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.

nmz3• 4 years ago

its interesting to note that floppy disks are still more secure than anything usb. what can you move on to that is both secure and cheap?

samatman2• 4 years ago

Since it's Japan we're talking about, they could revive the MiniDisc.

I've always had a soft spot for that medium.

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

The MiniDisc was horrible because everything around it was proprietary. No thanks.

bobsmooth2• 4 years ago

How so? Storage is storage isn't it? Floppy disks can have autoexecs on them.

klodolph3• 4 years ago

USB isn’t just storage, it’s way more than that. If you plug a USB stick into your computer you have no way of knowing beforehand what the device actually is or what it does. Is the device a normal USB flash drive? Or is it actually something far more malicious?

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.

bombcar5• 4 years ago

USB is way more than storage. No floppy disk keyboards exist.

ArrayBoundCheck• 4 years ago

USBs usually have a CPU inside that sits between the storage and PC. This way the PC doesn't need to know a thing about the storage and the CPU can do whatever it needs to implement the USB protocol. However the CPU can be malicious and modify files

hjkohfg• 4 years ago

Create a USB adapter which only allows mass storage USB profile forwarding?

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.

nmz3• 4 years ago

Can you actually tell the OS something like that?

wmf• 4 years ago

CD-RW?

nmz3• 4 years ago

I guess this is the answer... but honestly would hate having something that barely fits in my pocket around... I suppose sdcards are the new floppys but they are much too small, not to mention that they could stop being writable at any moment, but I guess its better than both...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

One advantage of floppy disks is that the threat surface is much less than a usb drive.

jzdziarski• 4 years ago

Literally read this while loading an old Famicom disk game into a Nintendo disk drive. Thirty years and it not only still works, it was more capable by its design. Nothing wrong with magnetic media, but good luck on your modernization effort.

klodolph3• 4 years ago

Floppy disks are not manufactured today. Maybe there is nothing “wrong with magnetic media”, but there is definitely something fishy about running your business on equipment that can only be replaced with used stock & the various supplies of NOS floppies.

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.

bin_bash• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with 1.4mb of storage?

shakna• 4 years ago

The ATtiny85 is still an incredibly popular little chip in manufacturing. It comes with a grand total of 8KiB flash memory.

So, no. There's not much wrong with 1.4MiB of storage - depending on the purpose you're using it for.

out_of_protocol• 4 years ago

1.4MB is okay, not being able to reliably read it is not okay

askvictor• 4 years ago

The thing that's wrong with magnetic media (specifically the floppy disc and audio tape) is that the head is in contact with the medium, which slowly wears it out. It only has a certain number of uses before it dies (also, the plastics will probably disintegrate at some point). Hard disks are much more reliable for longevity. Not sure about flash (or backup tapes - I assume they've been designed with longevity in mind)...

andrewstuart• 4 years ago

Are floppy disks still manufactured?

This surprises me because I thought they were not even available to buy new anymore unless you can find new old stock.

klodolph3• 4 years ago

No, they are not manufactured. The last manufacturer (Sony) ceased in 2011 or so. Some entrepreneur bought a ton of stock and is still selling it, there was an article around about this which I read recently but I can’t find it at the moment. A lot of customers who buy floppies are buying them for various government equipment, or shops with CNC machines programmed by floppy, etc. If you imagine that a CNC machine is designed to last decades and costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then buying floppy disks makes a lot of sense. If your government ministry requires floppy submissions because nobody bothered to update the rules then it makes less sense.

krasin• 4 years ago

That's correct. The aforementioned entrepreneur runs https://www.floppydisk.com/

This is a video tour of the facility (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9tENHe19gk

okonomiyaki3000• 4 years ago

Watch your back, fax machines.

Kamq2• 4 years ago

Fax machines have legal status, they aren't going anywhere.

numpad0• 4 years ago

This is about removing such statuses, so they’re on their way out as well.

jscipione• 4 years ago

The US Department of Defense moved away from using 8" floppy disks for its nuclear missile command in 2019. They were replaced by a "highly secure solid state digital storage solution" [0] which sounds like code for a floppy to SD card adapter.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/military-replaces-floppy-dis...

jumboshrimp• 4 years ago

The article only makes a quick mention of one case of data insecurity, but I feel like it's the real driver for this change. There have been several data loss incidents just this year, and data storage and portability like the fax machine in Japan are anachronistic reminders that data privacy and security only move forward after damage is done.

https://www.barrons.com/news/drunk-japan-cop-loses-investiga...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/24/asia/japan-amagasaki-usb-data...

0x20cowboy2• 4 years ago

I miss floppy disks. They were fun.

gizajob2• 4 years ago

Installing things that were spread across 30 floppies wasn't fun though:(

snvzz2• 4 years ago

... a fact that helped prevent bloat.

0x20cowboy2• 4 years ago

True. Please insert next disk.

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.

dudeinjapan• 4 years ago

A date which will live in infamy...

rkagerer• 4 years ago

I love that a floppy is always a floppy.

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.

jeroenhd3• 4 years ago

Perhaps the worst thing about the floppies still in use is that they're not even that floppy. You can't bend them without breaking them!

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.

b112• 4 years ago

Older, 5 1/4" floppy disks:

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.

NavinF3• 4 years ago

If you have IOMMU enabled (like any sane platform does), no external devices have direct access to your bus. I know the DMA attacks you’re referring do and they don’t work in 2022.

IYasha4• 4 years ago

Yes, the sound! It's a very important security factor, allowing you to spot suspicious activity. I still use HDDs for important data for that reason too.

TingPing• 4 years ago

Going by sound is not even helpful. A modern filesystem can log file access which is actually valuable for auditing.

88840-8855• 4 years ago

I lived and worked in Japan and I was shocked how outdated the country was in many areas.

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.

iamacyborg• 4 years ago

I’m not sure why buying cd’s and dvd’s is a bad thing. Those things are great.

NavinF3• 4 years ago

480p looks terrible if you’re under 70

fomine3• 4 years ago

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.

In this context, it just says that Japan and Korea are both in western democracy camp.

pvaldes• 4 years ago

One of the problems of floppy disks IMAO is that they need to use a lot of plastics for storing tiny amounts of information. We don't live in that cheap one-use plastic utopia anymore

Can be useful for security, but is not a wise way to use the hardware resources.

daniel-cussen• 4 years ago

Ultimately every medium is incompatible with every other medium.

phist_mcgee• 4 years ago

As a sort of related piece, I recently read the book Rising Sun by Michael Crichton (1993). In the book he describes a future where the Japanese effectively become global hegemon, dividing American industry into pieces that are easily bought by Japanese conglomerates, all of whom are years ahead of the Western world in regards to technology.

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.

IYasha4• 4 years ago

Don't touch my floppy disks!!

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.

Japan declares war on floppy disks for government use

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