• MsPenguinette@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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

    • MissJinx@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Not only because the infra is bad but also because floppy is “safer”. It’s not "connected"amd no one can invade it.

        • I_poop_from_there@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          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.

          • credit crazy@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            As another guy joked it’s really is genuinely more accurate to call floppy discs security by obsolescence because everyone doesn’t have the stuff required to manipulate/read floppy discs and there are even people who don’t even know what a floppy disk is and just think it’s a physical save button

        • Rubanski@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          That’s why I only communicate via poop/sparkle emoji Morse code

          ✨💩💩💩 ✨✨💩 ✨✨✨ 💩➿✨💩✨✨ ✨✨ 💩✨💩 ✨➿💩 ✨✨✨✨ ✨✨ ✨✨✨

    • nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • credit crazy@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        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

        • flerp@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          I can’t imagine that’s the main reason. You can buy a 3.5" floppy reader with a usb connection for like 20 bucks on amazon and anyone who wanted to get their hands on government secrets would not be deterred by that.

          I think the simplest and most likely reason is that updating things and making changes in bureaucracies is hard on its own, and any time you start dealing with tech it’s all a house of cards where one system depends on another and so changing any one thing will either make it all fall down or bring along with it massive sweeping changes.

      • WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        3.5 inch disks only held about 2MB on a good day. Reliable or not, you won’t get much on that disk these days.

        Unless you are going to make your own backups and take them somewhere else, I would use a cloud solution. Yes, you have to trust the company you choose not to fuck with your data, but they are fault-tolerant solutions that will likely last longer than some random removable solution.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Meanwhile I’m pretty sure even putinism didn’t stop Russia from being floppy-free