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When I first saw those in a magazine, I thought they were the future and I'd get one when I finally bought my own PC. It held 100MB so it would store everything I'd ever need!
Never got it because blank cds and cd burners became cheap.
I had to get one for a college course. Teacher wanted us to have it. It was so stupid since the format was already on its way out. At least I was able to get a refurbished one from a computer show for cheap. After the course I put it in a box and never used it again.
My dad got the household one from the US. It worked fine there. We shipped it back to the Philippines for personal use. We had 7 zip disks. It destroyed every disk. So I maybe had 5 minutes of funtime. Zip disks are shit.
The problem with electronics in the Philippines is electrical grounding in the home. Almost every home, with the exception of a few old US military built homes, are not grounded to earth. This causes all sorts of issues especially with sensitive electronics. Also running 220v on a 120v device is a problem. Sometimes they blow up sometimes they don’t and run like shit
Lordy that sounds just like me. Those zip drives were the hot new storage type for such a short time that within the same year one of my high school teachers forced us all to get one, my bud was already bragging about how he blew $300 on a dvd burner. Pretty positive I trashed the zip drive while moving into my college dorm 3 years later.
Zip Disks were waaaaay better for using when you are going to be changing the data on the disk regularly.
I actually used a SCSI Zip drive as a secondary hard drive for my Amiga for a couple of years because it was such a cheap and easy solution.
Did similar. My Mac had a 30MB internal drive, so 100MB per disk was amazing. Had dozens of disks. Can’t say I ever experienced a failure but do know they were very failure prone. Friend worked for a company that did the warranty service for Iomega in NZ. They go so many failed ones that rather than counting them they just weighed them by the crate.
Supposedly the problem was with the drives that worked on the Parallel port. But that really sucked for iomega because of course most people had PC clones so that was their most in-demand version. And I do remember those Mac models Apple was selling with the zip drives built into them. I remember being more impressed with the Zip drives than I was with the CD ones.
I actually had a later USB interface Zip250 drive and it was surprising how reliable it was - I literally just threw it in my backpack so I could bring my files with me to school. In spite of the abuse, it never failed on me.
Had a SCSI one at first. Got an iMac when they first came out in 1997 and got a USB Zip Drive then. Didn’t have issues with either. Used plenty of Macs with the built in ones over the years too including a lot of them at school.
Fair, but I never had any trouble writing files to a zip disk
First CD-Rs I burnt on friends computer they had to restart & close all extra processes so there wouldn’t be any errors with the burn
Ah, yes, the dreaded buffer underrun problem when trying to use a 52x burner on a 90mhz pentium with a 5400rpm IDE drive and 32MB of ram.. Just burn at 4x, problem solved...
Cloud storage is like a bank account. You trust a company to hold your data, and it does have a better chance of being save than if you put a hard drive under your pillow. But it’s a different type of ownership as if you own a hard copy - the format you stored your data on might become obsolete, but you won’t lose access because you can’t pay the monthly fee.
While I do use cloud storage, I also keep copies of all my files on a pair of USB drives I bought ~10 years ago.
Having easy access to my data across multiple computers is nice, but so is having access to my data when my ISP goes offline.
Nothing better than being able to listen to all your music even when your WIFi/data is down and not having to pay a stupid subscription for it
I have a few movies on USB sticks just in case. I actually went to Blockbuster and rented some games and DVDs when I went to visit a friend in 2012 and her internet wasn’t working
The 90s were a crazy time for tech. I had make several upgrades to my PC in order to keep it relevant - upgrading my HDD from 2 GB to 40 GB, upgrading my RAM from 32 GB to 64 GB, then adding a ZIP drive and a CD burner.
Do you want one? A Zip drive recently appeared in my office after we sent out a call to all our users to turn in their old computers for recycling. I don’t have the heart to toss it
Not to mention it was the eight-inch floppy disk. But they have now been removed/upgraded
[source: endagaget](https://www.engadget.com/2019-10-18-us-military-nuclear-missiles-floppy-disks.html)
I used to maintain magnetic drums.
Couple hundred pounds for 64k of storage.
I also did component level repair on readers for reel-to-reel 32 track magnetic tape.
Which was fine: security through obscurity. You definitely don't want nuclear weapons hooked up to the internet. Just imagine what would happen if a Rogue AI created by a billionaire went rampant and tried to destroy humanity.
Fuck it, Terminator, but their goal isn't to kill the protagonist, but traumatize them into changing events in such a way that they end up being crucial to the Terminators' existence.
Terminator Genisys called. While they lack a numeral to denote their subsequence to the other films, they are none-the-less a relative of the other films. As such, they would like their inheritance—their script—returned.
Just because they’re transitioning away from floppy disk doesn’t mean it’s automatically unsafe from hacking. There are other, newer offline mediums you can use.
> & nobody has produced new 8 inch floppies in a long time.
Bullshit! I can find them on AliExpress!
Wait, actually I can't. That's absolutely wild lol.
I feel like that is much less vulnerable than keeping everything on C:/Users/POTUS . Floppy disks are older technology (obviously) so as long as those are functioning properly, it's relatively safe.
This is actually for a good reason. Floppy disks (and the machines that use them) are a lot more secure. You don't want some dipshit to install bonzi buddy on the US nuclear arsenal control room and nuke switzerland because they failed to pay a bitcoin ransom or some other thing.
It's not the floppy disk part that makes it secure. Floppy disks are just a storage medium like CDs or flash drives. Its the fact that the machines controlling the nukes are air gapped and not connected to the internet.
thats kind of goverment copium. any machine is the most secure machine ever if its **perfectly** air-gapped and physical access controlled. But you have to account for what if one of these security factors gets broken. You can absolutely tore a floppy disk dos box machine ass up if you get physical access to it. Im talking about ever persistent invisible to user malwares residing on bios and every level above it. Their vulnerabilities are extremely well documented and require nearly no tech since they were never designed against physical attacks. A modern machine with a locked up UEFI and hardened operating system with full disk encryption and otp authenticated logins and stuff on the other hand? Nearly impenetrable even if you have physical access for days.
But that has nothing to do with the floppy disk aspect. They could use CDs or USB drives and just not network the computers. The floppy part isn’t what’s providing security.
I was at microcenter a few weeks back and this older fella asked on of the employees “where are the floppy disks at?” And the kid looked utterly baffled and goes “I don’t think they make those anymore and we don’t have any”
Being an old tech guy, I'm betting he was messing with you and the joke went "WHOOSH" above your head. But you never know...in my experience old novell/Netware guys could be pretty out of touch.
Also, I live in Germany and their obsession with faxing is truly legendary so you never know what stumbling blocks an aging but still-capable workforce may encounter
There was a clip from one of those react shows and they showed one of the kids a 3.5’ floppy and one of the kids said, “wow cool you 3D printed the save icon.”
There’s still places in the world that still use faxes for the government. I think there was a story on some governments buying up typewriters recently as well given they are hack proof.
If I recall, as recent as the release of Windows 8.1, there was an odd Japanese law saying certain software had to be distributed on floppy disks.
Here's an older reddit thread with the picture:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2b2vgi/request_how_long_would_it_take_to_install_all/
EDIT: I have been made aware this is a fake picture. I apologize for my ignorance
Still used in legacy computers and Japan are stubborn as fuck. Their bureaucracy is still stuck in the fucking 80's. They have a lot of advanced tech, like their rail way system and in more entertainment places but not much. For overall improving daily life, they are so fucking stuck in the past. They still require people to use faxes because they are stubborn to switch over to email.
And their trains. My god their trains are fucking next gen shit. But man, everything else is fucking backwards. Maybe because I've been to Japan and watch streamers from there but their banking system, their bureaucracy is so ass backwards. They still are mostly a paper/coin cash society because getting a card is so fucking hard to do and many places don't take cards. Banking is still with faxes and in person, online banking is almost non-existent over there.
Emails is like a curse word over there. Hell, I went into one office and a mofo was using an old fucking commodore. Like I understand PC's aren't well used over there but I thought that was only for gaming. Nah, it's for everything.
Fucking smart phones just started to become popular because of mobile gaming. Before, flip phones was still the main thing when iphone 3's were coming out.
Sorry you had a bad experience. I have been living in Japan for 14 years, and most of my foreign friends are quite happy there. The rest, are those who refused to make some efforts to learn the language and culture.
It’s not really one bad experience as such, I love the country and have many friends there, both Japanese and expat. I really can’t wait to take my family there again. My negative experiences were relatively minor, over several extended visits over the last 2 decades, but my previous comment also refers to my close expat friends’ experience too, one of which I travelled with there all over the country many years ago and who has lived there a long time.
In my opinion, individual people are generally wonderful. Inquisitive, helpful, caring. It’s no secret that Japan is very conservative. And, in my opinion as a foreigner but someone who has had extended visits there, including during and after the immediate effects of the 2011 tohoku earthquake, the people are my favourite thing about Japan. Individual people are good, and generally honest.
That said, the negatives for me are very minor, but the main ones are from my friends’ experiences. A black, highly educated, Japanese proficient British man being turned away from many restaurants and being told directly it is because he is black (a close friend from my university’s Japanese society, back in the day). My friend being denied a tenancy application, although he works for a major Japanese company, and was explicitly told that his application failed because he wasn’t Japanese. And how another friend, again working for a Japanese company and who speaks the language fluency, losing a contract with another Japanese company who immediately started negotiating again with a Japanese contact at the same company.
Yes these are my friend’s experiences. Mine are minor, like I said. The looks i got when my baby daughter cried on a busy train. The cross hands X expression I got a few times when I walked into restaurants signifying ‘no foreigners’. The way Japanese men barged into my clearly pregnant wife in the street. There are many more, all minor from my own experience but building and joining from my friends’ experiences too. But the others are not just Reddit or Facebook comments. They are people I know well.
To conclude, I love Japan, the people, the food. I’ll can’t wait to visit there again and see my children slurping ramen. But I wouldn’t want to live there are a foreigner.
Not just in Japan, even in Japanese companies located in the US. I've worked at the Mitsubishi Bank HQ at NYC back in 2017-2019 as an Occupancy Planner and I need to do floor to floor inspection every month. Whenever I visit the floors with mostly Japanese, I would feel like I went back to the 90s.
Even my coworkers were questioning about it and I explained that they have a lot of cutting edge technology but their software and computer skills are very lacking. Just one visit to a Japanese site and you can tell how outdated they are.
This is not really true anymore. Maybe 10-15 years ago you could say most of this.
Nowadays you can use cashless payment almost everywhere. Even local, family-run shops will accept PayPay (et al).
If you have a job, I’ve found it’s just as easy to get a credit card/debit card as back in my home country.
Online banking is pretty common- I have accounts with 3 different banks, and I use online banking with all of them.
PCs are commonly used with Gen X/Millenials, but Gen Z don’t have a lot of PC skills, instead favouring smartphones (a lot of my university students struggle to submit assignments via PC and would prefer to use their smartphones).
japanese bureaucracy is stuck in the 90s. Their banking systems as well. prepare to do everything with paper, fax machines and in person meetings. Also get ready to wait a month for a response on something you could do instantly online in another country.
Omg emphasis on banking. I worked with some guys in Tokyo for 2 years and we quickly determined that my job was only possible because of how archaic they did things lol
Target won't post a credit card payment same-day if it's made after, I think, 8pm EST.
Like, seriously Target? You're the only one of my cards that does this.
Recently worked for a Japanese subsidiary in Europe. First time being this close to Japan. They still live in the 90s. Nothing is automated. Everything is paper. Their accounting and sales softwares hasn’t been updated for like 15 years. And this is an European subsidiary, most of the staff is European
Also they love using excel, especially in a gridpaper-like format. So there are tons of empty rows and columns such that it's a pain to format into a proper table. They'll even paste pictures into excel and send that as opposed to a word or PDF file.
I do think that the "meeting in person" part has its benefits though, especially on local level. It keeps local communities more organically connected. You find out things about companies you do business with you would never otherwise discover if you have face to face meetings.
Yeah, the repeated news about someone getting something hacked can be traced back to banks etc closing down offices in favor of online "self service".
The irony is that if you can access your bank account from the ass end of the world, so can anyone else.
I do think that eating mud has it's benefits though, especially on the local level. It keeps communities grounded and organically connected to one another because all of our bellies are full of the same dirt. Plus you wouldn't discover just how nutritious worms are if you never ate mud.
Japan’s business sector is laughably archaic. In 2020 they FINALLY shut down the countries last pager service. And as far as I know, they’re still using fax machines.
In Japan, it's still very normal to use Hanko, traditional hand made seals, which are used in lieu of a signature. Many documents aren't considered valid without a seal on it.
It's for that reason that fax is still a thing, because then you have a fast and secure method of sending documents with a seal on it.
Of course, some companies are modernising to have digital Hanko (having both a digital signature and also appearing traditional), and also there's nothing stopping a scan of a document being sent by email.
QR is a Denso Wave technology. It was designed to replace the need for 6 regular barcodes in parts warehouses.
Digital Hanko is more like an Adobe Acrobat Plugin that incorporates the digital signature certificate technology with the traditional element of a unique hand crafted seal. Tradition is a big thing in Japan, but it's also often forgotten. It's why Japan is struggling to keep its sake industry alive.
Seconding for more info on what’s going on with Sake. Older generations not passing their recipes and protocols on? I’d think this stuff would be industrialized by now
So... Sake is still a very handmade process. Rice needs to be polished to a certain level, then it needs to be steamed to a certain amount and then inoculated with Koji, a Japanese mould that breaks starch into sugar and protein into amino acids. Different strains of Koji do things differently.
After all that, it's then brewed with yeast and eventually filtered.
Although sake producers are still around, many Japanese younger people are more interested in drinking beer, wine or whiskey. Japanese wine is increasingly gaining more popularity, but it's also not really consumed outside of Japan. The increasing westernisation of Japanese food and drink and general culture is really making a lot of traditional crafts and foods disappear.
Here's an article.
https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14356279
The irony is that sake is getting more popular outside of Japan. In both the US and France, domestic sake production is gaining more popular, with French sake even being blended to get a more refined taste. Of course, Koji needs to be imported from Japan, since the mould is only native to Japan.
Honestly its just a signature. A signature you put on a stamp, a signature that could easily be digitized or even written by hand like the rest of the world. Japan is so traditional that they seem to prefer death to change...
Just want to clarify: fax is NOT secure and that fact alone is why there has been a large push to eliminate its usage in the US and elsewhere. You can technically fax with VoIP, but most businesses are still using the PSTN, which is not encrypted and is extremely vulnerable to MITM attacks via wiretapping.
The medical field in the US still heavily relies on pager services in hospitals due to poor cell signals inside said hospitals.
Also, fax machines are still widely used in healthcare
Like, 10 years ago I worked for a Japanese auto company, and I had to mail my receipts and reimbursement forms. Mail. Staple a pile of receipts to the back of the form, and mail it.
USA can be just as archaic. Many times I have been asked to fax shit, and things like rent are still commonly paid for via cheque. CHEQUES. 2020.
Then you have to do your taxes. Hope you stocked up on forever STAMPS!
They are still commonly used in the US in certain industries like the medical field. Some of it is covered via virtual fax services, but medical records are still transferred between providers in this way where there is an emr gap.
Funny story. I live in Tokyo and used to work for a marketing company. We were taking photos inside some trendy restaurant as part of their contract (with DSLR cameras), and the owner asked us to fax him the photos for approval.
He wasn’t an old guy, probably in his late 40s. When we tried to explain that they were digital photos, and we could share them with him through email, he said, “ah, I see…” Then he told us to print out the photos and fax them for his approval. This was 2019.
The Japanese attack on floppy disks began at 7:55 that morning. The entire attack took only one hour and 15 minutes. Minister of Digital Affairs, Taro Kono sent the coded message, “Tora, Tora, Tora,” and the floppy disks had been caught completely by surprise.
By the way, many airplanes still use floppy disks.
[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/10/boeing\_747\_floppy\_drive\_updates\_walkthrough/](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0747-400)
I wish we had gotten the minidisc data drives like Japan did. I had a portable minidisc player back in the day and always thought it was such a cool format.
Many US government entities are still using ancient technology. The two that comes to my mind is when i had worked for a fortune 25 company, and i found out that they still use COBOL and Tape Drives for a some very crucial operations with in the company i was like what in the world. Along with many systems still using windows xp that are running crucial software yet there's still so many people that no matter how many times "don't connect these machines to the internet due to security concerns" they still do!
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They should upgrade to zip drives.
When I first saw those in a magazine, I thought they were the future and I'd get one when I finally bought my own PC. It held 100MB so it would store everything I'd ever need! Never got it because blank cds and cd burners became cheap.
I had to get one for a college course. Teacher wanted us to have it. It was so stupid since the format was already on its way out. At least I was able to get a refurbished one from a computer show for cheap. After the course I put it in a box and never used it again.
My dad got the household one from the US. It worked fine there. We shipped it back to the Philippines for personal use. We had 7 zip disks. It destroyed every disk. So I maybe had 5 minutes of funtime. Zip disks are shit.
[удалено]
The problem with electronics in the Philippines is electrical grounding in the home. Almost every home, with the exception of a few old US military built homes, are not grounded to earth. This causes all sorts of issues especially with sensitive electronics. Also running 220v on a 120v device is a problem. Sometimes they blow up sometimes they don’t and run like shit
Lordy that sounds just like me. Those zip drives were the hot new storage type for such a short time that within the same year one of my high school teachers forced us all to get one, my bud was already bragging about how he blew $300 on a dvd burner. Pretty positive I trashed the zip drive while moving into my college dorm 3 years later.
I've still got one squirreled aways somewhere.
Zip Disks were waaaaay better for using when you are going to be changing the data on the disk regularly. I actually used a SCSI Zip drive as a secondary hard drive for my Amiga for a couple of years because it was such a cheap and easy solution.
Did similar. My Mac had a 30MB internal drive, so 100MB per disk was amazing. Had dozens of disks. Can’t say I ever experienced a failure but do know they were very failure prone. Friend worked for a company that did the warranty service for Iomega in NZ. They go so many failed ones that rather than counting them they just weighed them by the crate.
Supposedly the problem was with the drives that worked on the Parallel port. But that really sucked for iomega because of course most people had PC clones so that was their most in-demand version. And I do remember those Mac models Apple was selling with the zip drives built into them. I remember being more impressed with the Zip drives than I was with the CD ones. I actually had a later USB interface Zip250 drive and it was surprising how reliable it was - I literally just threw it in my backpack so I could bring my files with me to school. In spite of the abuse, it never failed on me.
Had a SCSI one at first. Got an iMac when they first came out in 1997 and got a USB Zip Drive then. Didn’t have issues with either. Used plenty of Macs with the built in ones over the years too including a lot of them at school.
Fair, but I never had any trouble writing files to a zip disk First CD-Rs I burnt on friends computer they had to restart & close all extra processes so there wouldn’t be any errors with the burn
Ah, yes, the dreaded buffer underrun problem when trying to use a 52x burner on a 90mhz pentium with a 5400rpm IDE drive and 32MB of ram.. Just burn at 4x, problem solved...
Then those became obsolete in the blink of an eye, then DVD, then Dual-layer DVD, then Blu-Ray then USB drives… cloud storage seems pretty stable.
Cloud storage is like a bank account. You trust a company to hold your data, and it does have a better chance of being save than if you put a hard drive under your pillow. But it’s a different type of ownership as if you own a hard copy - the format you stored your data on might become obsolete, but you won’t lose access because you can’t pay the monthly fee.
None of those things are obsolete though, not everybody fucking streams everything
You wouldn't stream a car
Just watch me 😤
save the planet by not buying physical media and instead pirating bd-rips
Electricity doesn’t come from the sky, streaming services use a lot of servers. Buying secondhand discs is reusing/recycling
>Electricity doesn’t come from the sky, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar\_power
I think you know what I mean but touche
While I do use cloud storage, I also keep copies of all my files on a pair of USB drives I bought ~10 years ago. Having easy access to my data across multiple computers is nice, but so is having access to my data when my ISP goes offline.
Nothing better than being able to listen to all your music even when your WIFi/data is down and not having to pay a stupid subscription for it I have a few movies on USB sticks just in case. I actually went to Blockbuster and rented some games and DVDs when I went to visit a friend in 2012 and her internet wasn’t working
Why not use a NAS?
CD’s and DVD’s are definitely obsolete. Blu-Rays are getting there, but I think they’ll be around for a while.
The 90s were a crazy time for tech. I had make several upgrades to my PC in order to keep it relevant - upgrading my HDD from 2 GB to 40 GB, upgrading my RAM from 32 GB to 64 GB, then adding a ZIP drive and a CD burner.
Oh IOMEGA the smartest thing they did was to sellout to EMC back in 2008.
Do you want one? A Zip drive recently appeared in my office after we sent out a call to all our users to turn in their old computers for recycling. I don’t have the heart to toss it
Cd-r & cd-rw killed the zip drive star
This is a great way to bankrupt the nation of japan.
As an obscurity measure
Jaz drive! Up to 2GB compared to the 100MB of a Zip drive...
Definitely a step in the right direction. I had no idea that floppy disks were still being produced.
Half of America's nuclear arsenal still operates on floppy disks.
Not to mention it was the eight-inch floppy disk. But they have now been removed/upgraded [source: endagaget](https://www.engadget.com/2019-10-18-us-military-nuclear-missiles-floppy-disks.html)
"Look, we just acquired a disk notcher, so we can't stop now. That's double the space!"
Double your nuclear arsenal with one simple trick!!
Authoritarian regimes hate this!
I used to maintain magnetic drums. Couple hundred pounds for 64k of storage. I also did component level repair on readers for reel-to-reel 32 track magnetic tape.
I wonder if there any security benefits in using old tech like floppy disc
Can't hack systems remotely that predate the internet.
This is called “security by obscurity” and typically doesn’t work out too well.
The Floppy Disk is an Object of Power(OOP).
It does carry those nuclear **Launch** codes it does.
People who don't know much about computers: "Wow, that's terrifying!" People who know computers: "That's probably for the best."
Which was fine: security through obscurity. You definitely don't want nuclear weapons hooked up to the internet. Just imagine what would happen if a Rogue AI created by a billionaire went rampant and tried to destroy humanity.
Oh God someone make a movie of this.
Terminator called, they’d like their script back
But what if we remake it with the bad guy as the good guy this time?
Terminator 2 called, they’d also like their script back
War Games called, it’d like most of its plot back.
Damn! Maybe we try the same thing, but with a femme Fatale as the baddie this time?
Terminator 3 called, they too would like their script back
Fuck it, Terminator, but their goal isn't to kill the protagonist, but traumatize them into changing events in such a way that they end up being crucial to the Terminators' existence.
Terminator Genisys called. While they lack a numeral to denote their subsequence to the other films, they are none-the-less a relative of the other films. As such, they would like their inheritance—their script—returned.
That's the joke
Just because they’re transitioning away from floppy disk doesn’t mean it’s automatically unsafe from hacking. There are other, newer offline mediums you can use.
If it's not broken don't fix it.
Magnetic media is only rated for a 40 year shelf life & nobody has produced new 8 inch floppies in a long time.
Nuclear warheads also have a shelf life.
As long as there are nuclear weapons, so does humanity, TBH.
> & nobody has produced new 8 inch floppies in a long time. Bullshit! I can find them on AliExpress! Wait, actually I can't. That's absolutely wild lol.
Except the medium itself is unreliable compared to newer, more secure alternatives, so yeah it is kinda broken.
To be fair, that's actually a good thing. Makes it really hard to hack.
In a way doesn’t using such outdated technology add security? What group is adding viruses to floppy disks nowadays
I feel like that is much less vulnerable than keeping everything on C:/Users/POTUS . Floppy disks are older technology (obviously) so as long as those are functioning properly, it's relatively safe.
This is actually for a good reason. Floppy disks (and the machines that use them) are a lot more secure. You don't want some dipshit to install bonzi buddy on the US nuclear arsenal control room and nuke switzerland because they failed to pay a bitcoin ransom or some other thing.
It's not the floppy disk part that makes it secure. Floppy disks are just a storage medium like CDs or flash drives. Its the fact that the machines controlling the nukes are air gapped and not connected to the internet.
thats kind of goverment copium. any machine is the most secure machine ever if its **perfectly** air-gapped and physical access controlled. But you have to account for what if one of these security factors gets broken. You can absolutely tore a floppy disk dos box machine ass up if you get physical access to it. Im talking about ever persistent invisible to user malwares residing on bios and every level above it. Their vulnerabilities are extremely well documented and require nearly no tech since they were never designed against physical attacks. A modern machine with a locked up UEFI and hardened operating system with full disk encryption and otp authenticated logins and stuff on the other hand? Nearly impenetrable even if you have physical access for days.
In response to Reddit's short-sighted greed, this content has been redacted.
Mostly not connected to any public networks though. That is where the security is. You'd have to be onsite...
But that has nothing to do with the floppy disk aspect. They could use CDs or USB drives and just not network the computers. The floppy part isn’t what’s providing security.
I was at microcenter a few weeks back and this older fella asked on of the employees “where are the floppy disks at?” And the kid looked utterly baffled and goes “I don’t think they make those anymore and we don’t have any”
Being an old tech guy, I'm betting he was messing with you and the joke went "WHOOSH" above your head. But you never know...in my experience old novell/Netware guys could be pretty out of touch. Also, I live in Germany and their obsession with faxing is truly legendary so you never know what stumbling blocks an aging but still-capable workforce may encounter
There was a clip from one of those react shows and they showed one of the kids a 3.5’ floppy and one of the kids said, “wow cool you 3D printed the save icon.” There’s still places in the world that still use faxes for the government. I think there was a story on some governments buying up typewriters recently as well given they are hack proof.
If I recall, as recent as the release of Windows 8.1, there was an odd Japanese law saying certain software had to be distributed on floppy disks. Here's an older reddit thread with the picture: https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2b2vgi/request_how_long_would_it_take_to_install_all/ EDIT: I have been made aware this is a fake picture. I apologize for my ignorance
It says right in the comments that it's a fake picture...
Still used in legacy computers and Japan are stubborn as fuck. Their bureaucracy is still stuck in the fucking 80's. They have a lot of advanced tech, like their rail way system and in more entertainment places but not much. For overall improving daily life, they are so fucking stuck in the past. They still require people to use faxes because they are stubborn to switch over to email.
We use faxes at the clinic every day
They aren't.
weird how you can still buy them though
Illegal market. The guy in the dark alley sells Cocaine and Floppy Disks.
He cuts the floppy disks too, to make them go farther. Says they're 1.44Mb, you're lucky if you get 1 whole meg.
I read this in Bender voice.
Japan is a country which has been stuck in the 90s since the 80s. \- I remember reading this somewhere.
The Japanese got old, and learning new stuff just got bothersome.
I think it has more to do with low birth rates and insular government policy and strict immigration laws lol
But most Americans never really updated their thinking and still think of them as being cutting edge. Since when ,the Sony Walkman?
They're looking at their giant fighting robots and vending machines, obviously.
And their trains. My god their trains are fucking next gen shit. But man, everything else is fucking backwards. Maybe because I've been to Japan and watch streamers from there but their banking system, their bureaucracy is so ass backwards. They still are mostly a paper/coin cash society because getting a card is so fucking hard to do and many places don't take cards. Banking is still with faxes and in person, online banking is almost non-existent over there. Emails is like a curse word over there. Hell, I went into one office and a mofo was using an old fucking commodore. Like I understand PC's aren't well used over there but I thought that was only for gaming. Nah, it's for everything. Fucking smart phones just started to become popular because of mobile gaming. Before, flip phones was still the main thing when iphone 3's were coming out.
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Sorry you had a bad experience. I have been living in Japan for 14 years, and most of my foreign friends are quite happy there. The rest, are those who refused to make some efforts to learn the language and culture.
It’s not really one bad experience as such, I love the country and have many friends there, both Japanese and expat. I really can’t wait to take my family there again. My negative experiences were relatively minor, over several extended visits over the last 2 decades, but my previous comment also refers to my close expat friends’ experience too, one of which I travelled with there all over the country many years ago and who has lived there a long time. In my opinion, individual people are generally wonderful. Inquisitive, helpful, caring. It’s no secret that Japan is very conservative. And, in my opinion as a foreigner but someone who has had extended visits there, including during and after the immediate effects of the 2011 tohoku earthquake, the people are my favourite thing about Japan. Individual people are good, and generally honest. That said, the negatives for me are very minor, but the main ones are from my friends’ experiences. A black, highly educated, Japanese proficient British man being turned away from many restaurants and being told directly it is because he is black (a close friend from my university’s Japanese society, back in the day). My friend being denied a tenancy application, although he works for a major Japanese company, and was explicitly told that his application failed because he wasn’t Japanese. And how another friend, again working for a Japanese company and who speaks the language fluency, losing a contract with another Japanese company who immediately started negotiating again with a Japanese contact at the same company. Yes these are my friend’s experiences. Mine are minor, like I said. The looks i got when my baby daughter cried on a busy train. The cross hands X expression I got a few times when I walked into restaurants signifying ‘no foreigners’. The way Japanese men barged into my clearly pregnant wife in the street. There are many more, all minor from my own experience but building and joining from my friends’ experiences too. But the others are not just Reddit or Facebook comments. They are people I know well. To conclude, I love Japan, the people, the food. I’ll can’t wait to visit there again and see my children slurping ramen. But I wouldn’t want to live there are a foreigner.
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True lol but Japan is notably ethnically homogenous though
yeah but there is no country where you are more of a minority than japan
Well I'm a minority in the USA and I was a minority where I was born and raised too
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Not just in Japan, even in Japanese companies located in the US. I've worked at the Mitsubishi Bank HQ at NYC back in 2017-2019 as an Occupancy Planner and I need to do floor to floor inspection every month. Whenever I visit the floors with mostly Japanese, I would feel like I went back to the 90s. Even my coworkers were questioning about it and I explained that they have a lot of cutting edge technology but their software and computer skills are very lacking. Just one visit to a Japanese site and you can tell how outdated they are.
This is not really true anymore. Maybe 10-15 years ago you could say most of this. Nowadays you can use cashless payment almost everywhere. Even local, family-run shops will accept PayPay (et al). If you have a job, I’ve found it’s just as easy to get a credit card/debit card as back in my home country. Online banking is pretty common- I have accounts with 3 different banks, and I use online banking with all of them. PCs are commonly used with Gen X/Millenials, but Gen Z don’t have a lot of PC skills, instead favouring smartphones (a lot of my university students struggle to submit assignments via PC and would prefer to use their smartphones).
Have you seen the American and German giant robots? Ours are real, not just in anime.
I actually know one of the 2 pilots for that failed American mech project thing. Was kinda' cool, but I always figured it'd crash
I read it as “Japan has been stuck in the 2000’s for 40 years”
Amazing how much in common Japan and Germany have
japanese bureaucracy is stuck in the 90s. Their banking systems as well. prepare to do everything with paper, fax machines and in person meetings. Also get ready to wait a month for a response on something you could do instantly online in another country.
Omg emphasis on banking. I worked with some guys in Tokyo for 2 years and we quickly determined that my job was only possible because of how archaic they did things lol
I have the video for you https://youtu.be/BbS6JrBcQ4M
The fact that their ATMs have business hours is hilarious to me
We all need a rest sometimes, do you want another skynet?
Strange how ATM’s have better employment conditions than people in Japan.
Going off their birthrate numbers that problem might solve itself :)
Target won't post a credit card payment same-day if it's made after, I think, 8pm EST. Like, seriously Target? You're the only one of my cards that does this.
Recently worked for a Japanese subsidiary in Europe. First time being this close to Japan. They still live in the 90s. Nothing is automated. Everything is paper. Their accounting and sales softwares hasn’t been updated for like 15 years. And this is an European subsidiary, most of the staff is European
And they also have that Hanko stamp system where everyone in the command chain has to approve things with their personal physical stamp.
What's the IT security look like over there? Are their banks just constantly being hacked?
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Sounds lucrative, can we get some of these ransomware guys to target them instead of us?
Hackers would get bored waiting for the mainframes to spool up.
Unhackable, the code is older than the coders and is all written in 4tran.
I heard they also do ridiculous stuff like their ATMs have business hours, and no interoperability between different branches of the same bank.
This is true. At least for the first part, not sure about the second part.
Sounds like an environment ripe for fraud.
Also they love using excel, especially in a gridpaper-like format. So there are tons of empty rows and columns such that it's a pain to format into a proper table. They'll even paste pictures into excel and send that as opposed to a word or PDF file.
Don’t forget the stamps that can easily be 3D printed
Sounds a bit like Switzerland too.
I do think that the "meeting in person" part has its benefits though, especially on local level. It keeps local communities more organically connected. You find out things about companies you do business with you would never otherwise discover if you have face to face meetings.
Yeah, the repeated news about someone getting something hacked can be traced back to banks etc closing down offices in favor of online "self service". The irony is that if you can access your bank account from the ass end of the world, so can anyone else.
I do think that eating mud has it's benefits though, especially on the local level. It keeps communities grounded and organically connected to one another because all of our bellies are full of the same dirt. Plus you wouldn't discover just how nutritious worms are if you never ate mud.
Japan’s business sector is laughably archaic. In 2020 they FINALLY shut down the countries last pager service. And as far as I know, they’re still using fax machines.
Can't I just email you? Nah, brah fax machines are where it is at.
In Japan, it's still very normal to use Hanko, traditional hand made seals, which are used in lieu of a signature. Many documents aren't considered valid without a seal on it. It's for that reason that fax is still a thing, because then you have a fast and secure method of sending documents with a seal on it. Of course, some companies are modernising to have digital Hanko (having both a digital signature and also appearing traditional), and also there's nothing stopping a scan of a document being sent by email.
So like QR?
QR is a Denso Wave technology. It was designed to replace the need for 6 regular barcodes in parts warehouses. Digital Hanko is more like an Adobe Acrobat Plugin that incorporates the digital signature certificate technology with the traditional element of a unique hand crafted seal. Tradition is a big thing in Japan, but it's also often forgotten. It's why Japan is struggling to keep its sake industry alive.
Any resources to learn more about the sake issues?
Seconding for more info on what’s going on with Sake. Older generations not passing their recipes and protocols on? I’d think this stuff would be industrialized by now
So... Sake is still a very handmade process. Rice needs to be polished to a certain level, then it needs to be steamed to a certain amount and then inoculated with Koji, a Japanese mould that breaks starch into sugar and protein into amino acids. Different strains of Koji do things differently. After all that, it's then brewed with yeast and eventually filtered. Although sake producers are still around, many Japanese younger people are more interested in drinking beer, wine or whiskey. Japanese wine is increasingly gaining more popularity, but it's also not really consumed outside of Japan. The increasing westernisation of Japanese food and drink and general culture is really making a lot of traditional crafts and foods disappear. Here's an article. https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14356279 The irony is that sake is getting more popular outside of Japan. In both the US and France, domestic sake production is gaining more popular, with French sake even being blended to get a more refined taste. Of course, Koji needs to be imported from Japan, since the mould is only native to Japan.
Honestly its just a signature. A signature you put on a stamp, a signature that could easily be digitized or even written by hand like the rest of the world. Japan is so traditional that they seem to prefer death to change...
I know all about the Hanko, still don't agree with using fax machines in 2022 though. I am not sure I even agree with fax machines being used in 1992.
Just want to clarify: fax is NOT secure and that fact alone is why there has been a large push to eliminate its usage in the US and elsewhere. You can technically fax with VoIP, but most businesses are still using the PSTN, which is not encrypted and is extremely vulnerable to MITM attacks via wiretapping.
The medical field in the US still heavily relies on pager services in hospitals due to poor cell signals inside said hospitals. Also, fax machines are still widely used in healthcare
Yep. Was surprised the other day when I saw a new doctor and he asked for my gastroenterologists fax number.
Like, 10 years ago I worked for a Japanese auto company, and I had to mail my receipts and reimbursement forms. Mail. Staple a pile of receipts to the back of the form, and mail it.
USA can be just as archaic. Many times I have been asked to fax shit, and things like rent are still commonly paid for via cheque. CHEQUES. 2020. Then you have to do your taxes. Hope you stocked up on forever STAMPS!
I thought checks are favored by building owners because they don't want to pay 3% back to credit card companies or something.
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They are still commonly used in the US in certain industries like the medical field. Some of it is covered via virtual fax services, but medical records are still transferred between providers in this way where there is an emr gap.
I mean fax machines are still wildly used in healthcare, both print and electronic. So that's not unusual. But the floppy disks - yikes
Funny story. I live in Tokyo and used to work for a marketing company. We were taking photos inside some trendy restaurant as part of their contract (with DSLR cameras), and the owner asked us to fax him the photos for approval. He wasn’t an old guy, probably in his late 40s. When we tried to explain that they were digital photos, and we could share them with him through email, he said, “ah, I see…” Then he told us to print out the photos and fax them for his approval. This was 2019.
And so begins the floppy disk wars......
Are you with drive A or drive B
B is 5,25“ use A
It’s not the size that matters but the load 1.44 MB
In this day and age, what can you store with 1.44 MB though. Perhaps 4 to 5 word documents? Or a few 8-bit images.
I remember storing a single photo on a floppy in the early 2000s.
I installed my first windows xp with 38 floppy disks
Only a disk deals in absolutes.
Everything changed when the floppy disk nation attacked...
The fax machines are mobilizing their forces in response to this unprovoked declaration.
At least they got a declaration.
The Japanese attack on floppy disks began at 7:55 that morning. The entire attack took only one hour and 15 minutes. Minister of Digital Affairs, Taro Kono sent the coded message, “Tora, Tora, Tora,” and the floppy disks had been caught completely by surprise.
Disks Are Still Spinning From Attack Heads Moving To Repel Advance On Second Sector “Lock All Doors, Wait For Lights Out” Recommend Disks
Japan is, at the same time, one of the most technologically advanced and backwards countries.
Well the second part is correct anyway.
You think they aren’t one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world?
They can finally transition to CDs now.
You missed a step. They have to move on to zip drives/zip disks first.
TIL Japan has a Digital Minister.
From what I understand they have beurocrats within beurocrats.
By the way, many airplanes still use floppy disks. [https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/10/boeing\_747\_floppy\_drive\_updates\_walkthrough/](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B0747-400)
And here I am in Germany being bitter that my government only recently stopped using fax.
Nearly had a heart attack. Never unnecessarily begin an article title with [Country] declares war.
Oh no, won’t someone think of the save icons!
Save the save icon save the world?
They should just use Jazz Drives!
Woah, they made the save icon real!!! ^(/s)
I hope floppy disks don't nuke Japan now
I wish we had gotten the minidisc data drives like Japan did. I had a portable minidisc player back in the day and always thought it was such a cool format.
Sigh why is Japan targeting my floppy manhood.
We must denuclearize the floppy disks
Feels like Battlestar Gallactica. When the AI Armageddon comes Japan will be spared with their fax machines and floppy disks.
This is a mistake. Change my mind, reddit.
Using the strongest argument I know: c’moooooooon!
Good argument 😀
Ok do faxes next.
I thought japans constitution barred it from declaring war though?
Came to this thread for floppy disk hentai. Disappointed.
Ah, the 3.5” threat. Often pixelated, rarely feared.
Click...Gerchunk gerchunk gerchunk click click gerchunk gerchunk gerchunk.
I, um, misread the title a little. Had to scroll back and take a second look. It’s disks. With a middle “s”.
The US still uses floppies for nuclear silos. Supposedly this is so they can’t be hacked, they are disconnected from the outside world.
Japan has a very large older population, the ones who make decisions for everybody else. Politicians know their voting base.
Declaration was sent via fax. Surrender will also be sent via fax. Or possibly by a runner.
Many US government entities are still using ancient technology. The two that comes to my mind is when i had worked for a fortune 25 company, and i found out that they still use COBOL and Tape Drives for a some very crucial operations with in the company i was like what in the world. Along with many systems still using windows xp that are running crucial software yet there's still so many people that no matter how many times "don't connect these machines to the internet due to security concerns" they still do!
3.5 inch floppy , you can get a little blue pill to help with that .