Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing personal info on 38 public housing applicants

1991 called . . .

Floppy disks?!?!

That's hillarious! Never thought I'd see a headline like this in modern times!



-J.

They are making a comeback. They are warmer and fuller than USB drives.

Seriously?

I haven't bothered with floppy disks (3.5in) and/or Zip disks since the early 2000's. I have three USB sticks next to my laptop, and one in my car full of music.

-J.

No, I am making a Vinyl record joke. That you obviously didn't get.

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-J.

Okay, I get the U.S. Defence Department using really old, antiquated computer systems for its nuclear launch system since they're almost impossible to hack with modern technology. I could also understand a Second or Third World country using floppy disks because of their limited resources. No shame in any of that.

But this is friggin' Tokyo, the capital of one of the richest countries on Earth. And these people are still using floppy disks for keeping track of citizens' information?

The Japanese have a dedication towards hard copies of anything in a way that doesn't exist elsewhere in the developed world. There are still tons of record stores, for example, in Japan and those have gone entirely extinct pretty much everywhere else except for the occasional small used-LP stores that can still be found here and there.

Don't laugh, we still use microfiche.

And our governments force us to use faxes because they refuse to accept any signed & scanned documents sent through e-mail. Unbelievable. Sounds like the goddamn Spanish Inquisition. The doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney!

I don't think we will ever get rid of faxes. There is no convention that can get around the sacrosanctity of a signature. They looked at a ton of different options but no one will agree upon the same format. If the feds adopted a standard I am sure the provinces would follow suit but that would require leadership.

Actually, that's something I really admire. I still have all my old class notes, essays, handouts and readings from university, as well as the research work I did for the local museum after I graduated. They've come in handy more than once.

The thing about old technology like faxes and paper money is that sometimes it's all that's available. When I worked for the province's child support program as a policy guy, we'd have situations like a payor needing his pastor to fax us some paperwork from the church because he couldn't afford full time Internet access. Some of our clients were barely making ends meet, so we had to accommodate a lot of different situations.

Hell, I still prefer paper books to electronic ones.

Nuclear launch codes stored on punch cards so they could never get hacked.
Every morning during the Trump administration Pvt. Mellon's job was to shuffle them.