Japan's Digital Minister 'Declares a War' on Floppy Disks:
Japan, a country known for advancing some of the world's most innovative and quirky tech, is preparing to launch an all out "war" against the humble floppy disk.
Taro Kono, the country's newly appointed Digital Minister, bellowed out his battle cry on Tuesday, via Twitter. According to Kono, floppy disks—along with other dated tech like CDs and MiniDiscs —are still required for around 1,900 government procedures.
Kono's vow to purge the government of the 50 plus year old floppy tech comes amid a broader effort to modernize the way people in Japan submit applications and other forms. The digital minister said his crusade has the backing of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, according to a press conference viewed by Bloomberg.
This isn't the first time Kono's lashed out at perceived inefficiencies weighing down Japan's government bureaucracy. He's previously taken aim at fax machines and traditional hanko carved stamps.
"I'm looking to get rid of the fax machine, and I still plan to do that," Kono said.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday September 04 2022, @02:19AM (4 children)
But it is REALLY required for some current government procedure? We were slicing up powerpoint presentations across a dozen 1.44mb floppy disks back in the mid 1990s.
Fax machines, in the US anyway, have had an odd legal status where one can legally send documents and have them somehow considered "official". E-mail won't do somehow, even though these days both of the "fax machines" are actually computers. Ha, had someone in a government office was rather surprised a couple years ago when I was actually able to send them a fax (via glorious Windows 95 and a USR FaxModem!).
I have a feeling most of these so-called procedures they are talking about are likely bypassed every single time and this is just bitching about updating some text in some old procedure documents. Needs to be done, but hardly a "war".
But lets hope they don't close the door on methods that are actually useful. Sometimes sending in good old paper forms is the best way for some people to do certain things.
He he heh, but now lets bring in a new set of huge bloated complicated "web portals" where people can submit documents (after completing the 9000-factor authentication) and jumping through extra hoops that were intended to be used but aren't now, and stuff that is only half implemented, jiggling the handle to get things done, and in a couple of years the entire things stop working as underlying technology becomes incompatible and nobody want to update it. Doesn't work? Eh, just text it to them like a dumb teenage girl because everyone has a smartphone, beh.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Sunday September 04 2022, @03:06AM (2 children)
My understanding is that some super-secure stuff in the US military is stored on the old 8" floppies. Part of that is the knowledge that your average bad guy can't even find an 8" floppy, much less produce one with the right data on it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Sunday September 04 2022, @03:11AM (1 child)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 5, Funny) by istartedi on Sunday September 04 2022, @04:06AM
A lot of military and aerospace stuff is like that because of the way it's been tested. Even if the test wasn't all that rigorous, it's been time-lined, approved, signed off on, inspected, certified, stamped, classified, documented, and verified. All of that is expensive. I can't tell you how expensive but we have top men working on it. Top. Men.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday September 04 2022, @03:57AM
Based on how the local town offices work, the relevant requests are being submitted by paper and the reason digitization isn't happening is that the people who'd you'd normally call for making all sorts of forms and tickets disappear/retroactively appear are holding back the process from modernizing beyond their reach.
That's a combination of the above as well as security needs of triple letter agencies to keep public ledgers modifiable so they'll be able to create and delete identities.
Regardless, none of this is specific to Japan. There's plenty of this sort of stuff all over the US federal and local governments as evident by how high rank public officials in the US tend to accidentally misplace email servers and boxes full of paperwork from the public records...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:00AM (7 children)
Great, get rid of floppy disks. Thought they were long gone, but figures government bureaucracy would still be using them. Now, how about file format lock in? Can we dump docx and go with odt? Heck, even fonts can be a problem, Quit using proprietary fonts!
Then there's PDF madness. Totally overused format. Bloated, too, which makes it harder to coexist with floppy disks. So often, need to edit the document, but PDF was explicitly not meant to be edited. And I guess that illusion of safety from change is one of the things liked most about PDF
Another messy one is signatures. I've seen even digital signatures made into a sad joke that proves nothing. Docusign? Bwahahaha! The ease with which a signature can be faked has barely changed from the proverbial rubber stamp, and the lack of additional trouble from that shows that signatures are vastly overused and overrated. They have eased up a bit on demanding that customers sign for every $5 charge put on a credit card, but they ought to go a lot further.
Finally, can we please, please finish off the paper receipt?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:21AM
Oh yeah, I can see what you'll want next [youtube.com]!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 04 2022, @07:16AM (4 children)
The advantage of PDF is that originally it was not possible to hide malware in it. Of course then Adobe decided to add more features to it, including JavaScript.
Anyway, I'm glad PDF replaced Word documents as standard format, as reading PDFs is no hassle on Linux.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Sunday September 04 2022, @05:15PM (3 children)
> reading PDFs is no hassle on Linux.
This. Even libreoffice can't handle odt files consistently across different versions and OSes. Portability is terrible in odt and docx and most other document formats. ascii, ps and pdf are the only portable document formats that I know.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 05 2022, @12:52AM (2 children)
Well, that's the first time I've heard that complaint about OpenDocument. As to consistency across versions, is that really a reasonable expectation?
ASCII may be the most portable of all, but it is extremely lacking in many, many other ways. The whole idea of the monospace/leading spaces combo to align columns is a real dog, on the same level as the C string library's use of null termination. CR/LF is another fiasco. The ANSI escape sequences add a few minor enhancements but do not in any way address those fundamental limitations. ASCII cannot do anything semantic. Took the lightweight markup languages to add that.
We do have other options. LaTeX, for one. There is also HTML and EPUB, though those are not really suitable for editing. Better than PDF for that, but still not great.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday September 05 2022, @03:46AM
For documents that you want to distribute? Definitely.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday September 05 2022, @07:07AM
Well, pdf is exactly consistent across multiple readers and versions. When reviewing a formal document, as I do very frequently, exact consistency is very important. "Word smithing" and text formatting is very important.
> LaTeX
I use latex to render pdf (as does half the scientific community). But pdf is what we read and edit. Some people prefer MS word or whatever the mac thing is. No one touches libreoffice. It doesn't help that libreoffice crashes most days for me (that is stock ubuntu libreoffice running on linux mint).
(Score: 1) by Nofsck Ingcloo on Monday September 05 2022, @01:47PM
>Finally, can we please, please finish off the paper receipt?
No, we can't. If I but something with cash I do not care to give the vendor my email address.
1984 was not written as an instruction manual.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @09:27AM (2 children)
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/huge-floppy-disks-and-other-old-tech-is-common-at-air-force-nuclear-missile-silos.html [slate.com]
No. Really.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html [nytimes.com]
Rest easy, people of Earth: The United States’ nuclear arsenal will no longer rely on a computer system that uses eight-inch floppy disks, in an update the Defense Department has cast as a step into the future but which some observers might be surprised to learn was required at all.
The system, called Strategic Automated Command and Control System, or SACCS, “is still in use today but no longer uses floppy disks,” David Faggard, a spokesman for the Air Force Global Strike Command, which manages the Air Force portion of the arsenal, said in an email. “Air Force Global Strike Command is committed to modernizing for the future.”
SSD? Oh ferk.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Rich on Sunday September 04 2022, @10:04AM
Likely one of these, or one of its relatives: https://hxc2001.com/ [hxc2001.com] :)
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Sunday September 04 2022, @02:30PM
They are replacing 8 inch floppy disks. They don't need a full SSD. Maybe someone had a warehouse full of old 128MB USB 1.0 drives, started a government contracting company, and sold them for $3000 each.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Sunday September 04 2022, @10:33AM
Roy:
Come on you crazy b*tch. Denholm's called a general.
Jen:
Oh no! Not another one.
Moss:
I bet he declares war on something. He loves declaring wars. [now in meeting]
Denholm:
I am declaring war. [the employees groan] I can see that got your attention. [camera points to his tight cycling trousers] What am I declaring war on?
Roy:
[sotto voce] My bollocks?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2juXB2t83s [youtube.com]
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2022, @07:46PM
But... which are current alternatives to these discs when security comes into consideration?
I'm not talking about surveillance devices, but PORTABLE MEDIA? Manufacturing and especially auditing memory cards like SD seems to be just an overkill. Floppy discs do not have autorun and have too less space to put a 150MB malware written in Electron :). It is also virtually impossible to drop a few transistors in to become transmitting devices, like it can be done with SD cards with their ridiculous power requirements.
The general workflow I assume is: I have a computer locked down in EM shielding, powered through the generator. I write the (poorly - as there are no open and easily auditable PCs) encrypted data to the disk, put the disk in a sealed briefcase, keys, handcuffs, messenger, who knows what else. Generally the disc lands in the second station with similar installation, like EM shielding, generator, noise transmitter outside.
Because we cannot audit the PCs, we take encryption as untrustworthy. So for a network, I would need a dedicated cable between two stations, with thick insulation against radio analysis and preferably guarded every meter or so. Poor investment.
OK, so maybe memory cards? A Chinese factory in financial crisis will get some extra money from who-knows-who, or get an offer which must not be refused, and they will drop a few circuits into the chip. Now, the card will happily infect the computers, steal all data, and work as RF transceiver when in transit. And of course it is cheaper to shred the floppy disk than the memory card after use.
In all these thoughts, the optical media seem to look reasonably nice. Well, let's see how many things can be put between the data, where the error correction bits can be...
In my country, moving the official data on floppy discs has been mostly replaced by encrypted archives sent by e-mail. Encrypted with social assurance number. This contains date of birth, checksum number and 4 other digits. This is crackable (brute-force) in a day with bash script, but nobody cares - this is "secure" because has a password. I hope Japan will not do something similar.
And the source of a whole problem is that PCs became proprietary boxes which cannot be audited no matter what except blackbox reverse engineering in which there can be a lot of double-purpose parts. By double-purpose I think about both working as intended and working as a backdoor.