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It's funny. Laugh. Japan Data Storage

Tokyo Police Lose 2 Floppy Disks Containing Personal Info on 38 Public Housing Applicants (mainichi.jp) 101

Posted by msmash from the 1995-called dept.
The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has lost two floppy disks containing personal information on 38 people, the department announced on Dec. 27. From a report: The MPD said the floppy disks contained personal data on 38 people who had applied for public housing in Tokyo's Meguro Ward. The ward office had provided the personal information to the MPD to check if the applicants were affiliated with organized crime groups. Police said no leaks or misuse of the information have been confirmed at this point. According to the MPD's third organized crime control division, the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men in their 20s to 80s who had applied for Meguro Ward-run housing were recorded on the floppy disks. None of them were apparently affiliated with gangs. The police division and Meguro Ward signed an agreement in 2012 to check whether public housing applicants were affiliated with crime syndicates. Police received the floppy disks from the ward in December 2019 and February 2021 to conduct background checks, and kept them in the division's locked storage. The loss of the disks emerged after a Meguro Ward employee made a new inquiry to the police division on Dec. 7 and police went back to the disks to return them. Police say the disks may have been discarded accidentally.
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Tokyo Police Lose 2 Floppy Disks Containing Personal Info on 38 Public Housing Applicants More

Tokyo Police Lose 2 Floppy Disks Containing Personal Info on 38 Public Housing Applicants

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  • LOLWUT??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Harold Halloway ( 1047486 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:28PM (#62128345)
    Floppy disks???

    • Re:LOLWUT??? (Score:5, Funny)

      by know-nothing cunt ( 6546228 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:33PM (#62128357)

      They're resurging in popularity. There's a warmth that you simply don't get with hard disks.

    • Re:LOLWUT??? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:35PM (#62128367) Homepage Journal
      This is the sort of thing that happens when specific technologies get enshrined in law (either in written law, or in case law). In America, all kinds of things have to be sent by fax, because a faxed signed document is a legally valid signed document, whereas a scaned-and-emailed signed document is just an interesting picture with no legal status.

      I don't happen to know what legal wrinkle has Japanese police still using floppy disks, but I can just about guarantee they do it for a *legal* reason rather than a technological reason.

      • typewriters are still used in some courts / by some cops and in prisons.

        • typewriters are still used in some courts / by some cops and in prisons.

          Typewriters and paper at least make some sense. At least they will continue working after the great solar storm that is to come or after a nuclear EMP attack. Floppy disks on the other hand?

          • A floppy disk would survive just fine. EMP, despite having the word 'magnetic' in its name, won't wipe a magnetic disk. A floppy disk drive, or even a hard disk drive, would very likely survive as well. The amount of current that would be sent through a conductor by an EMP is directly proportional to its size, and disk drives are just too small to receive any significant amount of that current, let alone enough to fry any of their components.

            Big conductors on the other hand, like the power grid infrastructu

      • That and it is generally easier to do thing the way it use to be done, then bring up how a law or regulation is so out dated.

      • And floppies are no more secure than a modern thumb drive.

          Maybe the purpose was so records could not be "lost" en masse in which case using floppies serves this well.

        • Sure they are, in that a thumb drive can be read on any computer, but to read a floppy disk you need to somehow track down a floppy disk drive that still works...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Guspaz ( 556486 )

          I remember floppy disks being terribly unreliable. Their meagre error correction didn't stop them from always developing bad blocks. For important stuff you'd need to use parity files or save copies on multiple disks. Thumb drives, on the other hand, have generally proved far more reliable.

          • TRACK 0 BAD - DISK UNUSEABLE

              That, and text files with d21Nzff+*fsx here and there on a disk that was recently full formatted and passed the bad cluster test. It's even more fun when d21Nzff+*fsx appears in script files.

            Can't say I miss that era, especially tward the end when floppy media was generally shit quality.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kellin ( 28417 )

        I've signed a bunch of legal documents in the last few years that haven't required the use of faxing. Everything was done digitally using docusign.

        • There isn't one universal legal requirement for every jurisdiction in the US as to what constitutes a valid signature. It will vary as to whether federal or state law applies; if the latter, which state law; and what kind of document it is. Electronic signatures are mostly for transactional documents, for example, though even that they are not valid in all jurisdictions or for all purposes. It's kind of a mess actually.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

        >In America, all kinds of things have to be sent by fax, because a faxed signed document is a legally valid signed document

        I haven't had to fax something in over 10 years. However, internet signing has become the rage, especially in real estate.

      • It's not that faxes are somehow mandated so much as they offer a lot more in the way of message integrity than email.

        Fax is typically over a switched circuit, which isn't very easy to MITM, and even if you had physical access, there aren't any tools readily available that can take over a fax in progress, and even if you had access to such tools, it would be very hard to know what one party was expecting to send and the other party was expecting to receive. Even if somebody sent a fax from a spoofed number (

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by jonadab ( 583620 )
          > It's not that faxes are somehow mandated so much as they offer a lot
          > more in the way of message integrity than email.

          LOLWUT?

          > Fax is typically over a switched circuit, which isn't very easy to MITM

          There wouldn't be any point in doing an MITM attack on a fax machine, you can just send anything you want, and claim it's coming from whoever/wherever you want to claim. As with unencrypted email, there's no authentication mechanism of any kind, and the from field, although it usually _defaults_ to th

          • LOLWUT?

            You're retarded, that's LOLWUT.

            Yes, if someone takes the trouble to call up the phone company and investigate, they can typically find out whether a call was made from that number to a given recipient at that time or not, that's true. But absolutely nobody bothers to do this check before assuming that a faxed signature is valid.

            Usually because nobody disputes it. However, if they do, they have a concrete means of validating it that would meet the preponderance of evidence standard. However, no such option exists for email in most cases.

            With email you at least have the *option* to cryptographically sign something with a known keypair.

            Sure, if the public key is well known, or at the very least had a chain of trust to follow. But in practice that doesn't ever happen.

    • I love how the summary just states this as though data on floppy disks is perfectly normal.

    • A friend of mine used to work for an ISP and told me about a time a customer was being surveilled by the FBI (with warrant) and they were required to capture all their traffic and burn it to CD to hand it over. The internet is RIGHT THERE.

    • I saw this on the news when the image of two big 3.5 floppies popped up on the screen. I thought it was another nostalgia trip (there seem to be a lot of those in Japan), since it was the end of the year, until I started paying attention to what they were talking about.

  • Pity they don't specify which size... (Score:5, Funny)

    by berchca ( 414155 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:29PM (#62128349) Homepage

    3.5 inch?
    5.25 inch?
    Dare we even hope for the original 8 inch?

  • That's right (Score:4, Funny)

    by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:33PM (#62128361)
    If somebody gave me floppy disks, I throw them away too.

  • Security through neglect (Score:3)

    by GoJays ( 1793832 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:34PM (#62128363)
    They are so far behind with technology it is now becoming a security benefit. Storing records on a floppy disk is probably more secure than storing it on an Internet facing server. How many people have a floppy drive lying around in 2021?

    • I have a USB one in the desk "just in case", but frankly even when I used to use them on the regular a 3.5" floppy was so unreliable that I wouldn't trust anything useful to come back off from them after a few years.

    • Here's an article from October 2020 listing the best 3 external USB floppy drives on the market: https://nerdtechy.com/best-external-usb-floppy-drive [nerdtechy.com] It features such well-known brands as Dainty, Raayoo, and Zmarthumb.

      To answer the question you actually asked, I'm not personally aware of anyone I know having a floppy drive, although there's a guy at work who's into old tech stuff—I wouldn't be surprised if he has one. I feel outdated using blu-rays for backup...

      • Re:Security through neglect (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @02:09PM (#62128673)

        I have a 3.5" and a fresh stack of floppies I use to transfer Gcode to my cnc mill. I would like to replace the controller with an Arduino running Grbl and a modern Gcode sender but haven't bothered yet. It still makes parts.

      • A little surprised I don't see mention of the greaseweazle on here yet. Yeah, old tech is still a thing for some people.

        https://github.com/keirf/greas... [github.com]

      • I see articles like that all the time when doing searches on the internet. Does anyone actually write those articles, or are they just computer-generated?

        Anyway, looking at the photos, I'm pretty sure the Dainty, Raayoo, and Zmarthumb are all the exact same cheap Chinese drive with different logos on it. It wouldn't surprise me at this point if there is only one factory still churning out USB floppy drives, and every one on the market is a badge job.

      • Use M-Discs for backup. They are better than blu-ray and SSDs/thumb drives will lose data after they are unpowered for around a decade.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Aren't manual drive cars the least likely to be stolen too?

      • My last car was a stickshift. (My current car is too.)

        Some people stole it and used it to run drugs across the border, but they apparently weren't so good at shifting. They didn't break the clutch, but they broke the linkage between the shifter and the gearbox. I had never thought too much about how this was engineered, but apparently there's a chain running between them, and these folks managed to fuck it up.

        The thing snapped completely while I was in a drive-through, leaving me stuck in neutral with a bun

      • I still drive stickshift cars and had an interesting incident with valet parking a few years ago; went to a restaurant in Los Angeles, where valet parking is a fad at nearly every eatery, and it turned out the kid playing valet that evening could not drive my car. I had to park it myself, and later retrieve it myself. Felt sorry for him so I gave him 2 bucks tip for just holding on to the keys during my dinner. I rarely fear my car being jacked on the street, none of the gang bangers is likely to know how t

  • In a country that has cube hotels and used women's underwear vending machines, they can't afford to keep this data and exchange it with authorized third parties in a safe and efficient manner?

  • No worries (Score:4, Funny)

    by ylleKnaD ( 1826388 ) on Thursday December 30, 2021 @12:38PM (#62128375)

    The data is perfectly safe. Nobody will be able to find a working drive to read them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gabest ( 852807 )

      Nobody would even consider picking up lost items.

    • Plus the fact that looking at them in the wrong way is sometimes enough to corrupt the data.

    • After moving about 10 times across three countries I can finally declare that I donâ(TM)t have any AOL floppies anymore!
    • Damnit, you beat me to it, almost word-for-word.

    • And not only that, even if someone picks up the disks, if they are not taken care of reasonably well, the data may get wiped (how much random EM waves are being put out by all our mobile devices, etc?). Or get fungus/mold growing on the media. Or get scratched. Or any of the many other possible problems.

  • This is the most momentous news I've ever seen on SlashDot?!!!! It makes 9/11 seem like a slow news day! There will be podcast after podcast about the "day the Tokyo police lost some minor data on a handfull of people"! It will live on in the gestalt, a piece of us as a society the world over for eons!

    • So what is going on in Science and Technology news that you feel needs to be covered on Slashdot that is being rejected, so we can show this article?
      A quick check on the commercial media channels, there isn't much in terms of Science and Tech with the following exceptions.

      James Web Telescope opening its lenses. Which is basically the whole story right now.
      COVID related stuff, where in this day in age is not as much about Science, but politics

  • "Don't be sloppy with your floppy!"

  • They're floppy discs in almost the year 2022. No one will be able to find a floppy drive that'll be anything other than complete crap, even if new out of the box, they won't be able to read it.

  • They claim that the disks contained "names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men" and it took TWO floppy diks?
    Something smells fishy.

  • That old-fashioned gummint computer that still has floppy disks is an unwitting security measure. Nobody who finds these is going to be able to read them.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A post-millenial probably wouldn't even recognise it as computer-related.

  • In the US, the cops straight-up kill so many people in cold blood that we hardly even hear about it anymore unless they do it on camera, or it's an especially egregious case like gunning down a 14-year-old girl doing nothing but trying on clothes.

    Japan's police screw up by merely losing a bit of PII on a few dozen people, and it makes the international news.

    • I'm not sure The Mainichi qualifies as 'making the international news' - or did I miss something?

      I can't find any mention of this story in major European/US news outlets, but maybe my DuckDuckGo-fu is weak.

      Another thing to consider is that this is - yknow - a tech site, and a story about a major first world economy using floppy disks is interesting/funny. Judging by your ID you already knew that? There's plenty of stories about American police brutality everywhere else, if that's what you want to read about

    • with an JFK level of skill shot

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by kellin ( 28417 )

        JFK was shot through drywall? The idiots of the LAPD aren't that good, it was just a combination of really poor decision-making and bad luck. After all this time, our police are still trained wrong.

  • Wait, someone is still using floppy disks in Japan??!?!? Encryption by obsolescence?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      They'll form a committee to study the problem, and conclude that all future floppy data should be encrypted.

  • Tokyo population: 13,96 million of people. So only 0.00027 % of residents are involved. Not a lot to worry about...

  • Stuck to the side of a metal filing cabinet with a magnet.

  • I've read about nuclear missle silos using 8 inch floppy disks, and 1970s era computer equipment because of the security that it offers. Who would carry around an 8 inch floppy vs a flash drive?

      But for government welfare offices..seriously WTF?

    • An 8" floppy will fit nicely in between the pages of a notebook.

      I prefer 5-1/4" floppies myself, in fact I still have a dual disk unit that combines a 5-1/4 and 3-1/2 drive to fit in a standard disk drive bay. Some time ago when cleaning up some old boxes in the office, I found a box with a bunch of 5-1/4 disks that held some backed up files from the mid 1980s... yes, I am a hoarder

      • Do you know what's on them? There are a lot of retro gaming and software groups that are intetested in old games that are out of print and can't be found anywhere on the internet.

          I'll leave the legal details up to you.

    • I'm sure any half decent Q branch could put together a sticker that could be attached over the slot on the disk and read/write information in emulation of the spinning disk surface, act as a MitM even.

  • the names, dates of birth, and sex of 38 men

    You can achieve perfect compression when saving the sex of any number of men, and reduce it to 0 bytes.

  • According to some articles it would seem that in 2012 the government and an organized crime informer made an agreement about profiling municipal housing applicants. Since the last 3.5 inch FD drives were sold through popular shops in Japan in 2013 this seems likely. The floppies were kept in storage and then went missing. Perhaps a floppy disk represents a good mix between enough storage (1.4 or maybe 2MB), big enough not to lose in a hole in your pocket, and not so huge that you are going to risk massive d

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