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Who at this group still uses floppy discs?

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: May 27, 2016, 06:47:51 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The real reason America controls its nukes with ancient floppy disks

By BRIAN FUNG | 1:20PM EDT - Thursday, May 26, 2016

A 1970s-era 8-inch floppy disk lies underneath a ZX Microdrive from the 1980s and an SDHC card from the 21st century. — Photograph: David Smith/Flickr.
A 1970s-era 8-inch floppy disk lies underneath a ZX Microdrive from the 1980s and an SDHC card from the 21st century.
 — Photograph: David Smith/Flickr.


AMERICA's nuclear arsenal depends on a surprising relic of the 1970s that few of us may recall: the humble floppy disk.

It's hard to believe these magnetic, 8-inch data storage devices are what's propping up the most fearsome weapons humanity has ever created. But the Department of Defense is still relying on this technology to coordinate key strategic forces such as nuclear bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to a new government report.

The floppy disks help run what's known as the Strategic Automated Command and Control System, an important communications network that the Pentagon uses to issue launch orders to commanders and to share intelligence. And in order to use the floppy disks, the military must also maintain a collection of IBM Series/1 computers that to most people would look more at home in a museum than in a missile silo.

This isn't the first time we've heard about the military's reliance on seemingly archaic tech: back in 2014, U.S. nuclear warriors showed CBS's “60 Minutes” one of the top-secret floppy disks that helps it store and transmit sensitive information across dozens of communications sites. So to hear from the Government Accountability Office that the Pentagon has still not phased out the technology — and doesn't plan to until the end of fiscal year 2017 — is remarkable.

Still, there is a major reason — other than simply being behind the times — for the military's continued use of floppies: Sometimes, it says, low-tech is safer tech.

That may come as a surprise at a time when digital technologies have almost completely superseded analog ones — heck, some companies literally give away USB flash drives these days because they're so cheap. It highlights the yawning gulf between consumers and government.

President Obama has highlighted that as a problem he wants to solve. The White House has pushed strongly to use technology more widely in government. From opening up stores of public data to creating a whole website for Internet petitions, President Obama has tried to make government more tech-savvy. And yet it's still not enough. Speaking at the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin earlier this year — marking another first for the White House — Obama's pitch to geeks and coders was simple: Join us.

“The reason I'm here is really to recruit all of you,” he said.

Data from Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology show how difficult it is for government to attract top tech talent. In 2015, only 1.1 percent of MIT graduates took jobs in government. Of that year's graduates at Carnegie Mellon, only a handful took jobs at government agencies — and all of those were abroad, in places such as Singapore and South Korea.

Colleges and universities are also coming up short in terms of training America's next generation of digital warfighters. Information security training is not required at any of the nation's top-10 computer science programs. The sluggish talent pipeline doesn't make the Pentagon’s task of tripling the U.S. Cyber Command's workforce any easier, either.

The military's investments in cybersecurity illustrate how some parts of the Department of Defense have made deep commitments to technology, even as other parts, such as America's nuclear forces, have lagged behind. The U.S. Navy and Air Force are both highly interested in autonomous drones. Unmanned vehicles have the potential to lurk quietly underwater and survey the enemy, or to supplement human pilots in the air.

But high-profile examples have also arisen showing how the military can regard technology too optimistically, revealing some of the risks of embracing it. For example, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was envisioned as a flexible, all-purpose craft that could suitably serve every branch of the U.S. military. Instead, it's become a costly, time-consuming experiment that — according to multiple reports over the years — doesn't even work. Its parts wear out before they're supposed to. It can't defeat older planes in dogfights. It's vulnerable to hacking. And that's before the fighter has ever encountered any real enemies.

There are parallels here to fiction, which can be just as instructive. In the 2004 hit TV series “Battlestar Galactica”, humanity comes under assault from robots that it created. Much of the human space fleet is taken by surprise, crippled by a robot-built computer virus that spreads from ship to ship thanks to the sophisticated networks linking the crafts together. The Galactica, an obsolete warship due to be mothballed, is one of the few to survive the initial surprise attack. Why? Because the Galactica's systems were not part of the humans' IT network, sparing it from the virus that disables the rest of the fleet. The lesson seems clear: Sometimes, newer is not better.

As it happens, a similar logic underpins the U.S. military's continued use of floppy disks. The fact that America's nuclear forces are disconnected from digital networks actually acts as a buffer against hackers. As Major General Jack Weinstein told CBS's “60 Minutes” in 2014:

Jack Weinstein: I'll tell you, those older systems provide us some — I will say huge safety when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.

Lesley Stahl: Now, explain that.

Weinstein: A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network. Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure on the way it's developed.

Stahl: Meaning that you're not up on the Internet kind of thing?

Weinstein: We're not up on the Internet.

Stahl: So did the cyber people recommend you keep it the way it is?

Weinstein: For right now, yes.

In other words, the rise of hackers and cyberwarfare is exactly why even technologically obsolete systems can still serve a valuable purpose.

The Pentagon aims to install upgrades to its systems over the next year. And there are good reasons — even seemingly obvious ones — for doing so. But just as upgrading your laptop's operating system on the first day can come with unexpected bugs, our nuclear commanders appear to take a similar caution to embracing the latest and greatest. Perhaps that's for the best.


• Matt McFarland contributed to this article.

• Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecommunications and the Internet. Before joining The Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at The Atlantic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/26/the-real-reason-america-controls-its-nukes-with-ancient-floppy-disks
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guest49
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« Reply #1 on: May 28, 2016, 09:40:28 am »

I found and ran a swag through the de-magnetizer a week or two back, and trashed them.  I no longer have anything that accepts a floppy.
CDs are becoming dated tech now and will be the next to vanish.
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« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2016, 10:55:02 am »


Several years ago, I purchased an “outboard” floppy disc drive which plugs into a USB interface and is powered from it. I still have the originals of a large number of files on floppy discs, although everything on them was copied to other media many years ago but I keep those floppy discs as the most original backups of those files. I've installed the drivers for the floppy disc drive to every computer I've owned since then (including the current one) just in case.

However, as noted in the article, sometimes the earliest technology can be the most secure. It's interesting that movie director James Cameron (who is a resident of South Wairarapa) refuses to use smart-phones because of the security issues and instead uses an old-fashioned flip-phone which is actually considerably more secure than more modern devices.
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« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2016, 01:41:26 am »

they would need to keep their military nuke missile floppy disks in an emp proof bunker

explode a couple of nukes above the us and it's lights out and back to the stone age and then all their nuke reactors will go critical as their cooling systems all fail, then they will all melt down, then its game over man.

it's an unwinnable insane game

nukes are a really silly idea lol
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« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2016, 10:53:39 am »

Re message # 1:

The disks in the story seem to be huge - 8 inches. If I remember correctly mine were 4point 5 inches .

Of course they'd be secure way back in the late 70s. A computer was the size of a small room then... It was in the early 80s that you could fit one on your kitchen table.

We were learning while moving from Dos to the World Wide Web and the criminals among us were just realising and learning the possibilities of the new Cyber Intelligence Roll Eyes medium.





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guest49
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« Reply #5 on: May 29, 2016, 12:19:28 pm »

your modern laptop is acres more powerful than all the computers driving the moon missions.
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« Reply #6 on: June 05, 2016, 11:56:15 pm »

Re message # 1:

The disks in the story seem to be huge - 8 inches. If I remember correctly mine were 4point 5 inches .

Of course they'd be secure way back in the late 70s. A computer was the size of a small room then... It was in the early 80s that you could fit one on your kitchen table.

We were learning while moving from Dos to the World Wide Web and the criminals among us were just realising and learning the possibilities of the new Cyber Intelligence Roll Eyes medium.


My first computer had 8" floppy disks. It was still working 15 years ago and I couldn't give it away. I finally put it in a skip for the rubbish to collect and wish now I'd kept it. It might have been worth something now.



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« Reply #7 on: June 06, 2016, 10:03:41 am »

I recall tv programs in the 60's that had state of the art computers with magnetic tape reels spinning back and forth and lots of lovely lights blinking across the front of a room size panel.
What I reflect on occasionally, is the hundreds of thousands of years of humanities technical progress lurching forward one or two innovations per century until a hundred years ago when it started a compound acceleration.
Currently, the sum of mankind's knowledge is doubling every 12 months.  An IBM paper postulates that it will stabilise at every 12 minutes.

Universe, here we come! 
[that is, unless the 14th century barbarians, drains on society and outright thugs the West keeps feeding and provoking into action, succeed in outbreeding contributing members of society]
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« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2016, 06:31:39 pm »

I recall tv programs in the 60's that had state of the art computers with magnetic tape reels spinning back and forth and lots of lovely lights blinking across the front of a room size panel.

J Wattie Cannery in Hastings had a computer like that during the 1960s. It took up most of an entire floor of their office block.
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« Reply #9 on: June 07, 2016, 05:29:03 pm »

I recall tv programs in the 60's that had state of the art computers with magnetic tape reels spinning back and forth and lots of lovely lights blinking across the front of a room size panel.
What I reflect on occasionally, is the hundreds of thousands of years of humanities technical progress lurching forward one or two innovations per century until a hundred years ago when it started a compound acceleration.
Currently, the sum of mankind's knowledge is doubling every 12 months.  An IBM paper postulates that it will stabilise at every 12 minutes.

Universe, here we come! 
[that is, unless the 14th century barbarians, drains on society and outright thugs the West keeps feeding and provoking into action, succeed in outbreeding contributing members of society]

They were still using tapes to back up the computerised telephone exchanges (NEAX 61) when I left Telecom in the early 90s. The scary part is that most of those exchanges are still in service all over the country including Auckland.
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« Reply #10 on: June 07, 2016, 05:35:42 pm »


Several years ago, I purchased an “outboard” floppy disc drive which plugs into a USB interface and is powered from it. I still have the originals of a large number of files on floppy discs, although everything on them was copied to other media many years ago but I keep those floppy discs as the most original backups of those files. I've installed the drivers for the floppy disc drive to every computer I've owned since then (including the current one) just in case.

However, as noted in the article, sometimes the earliest technology can be the most secure. It's interesting that movie director James Cameron (who is a resident of South Wairarapa) refuses to use smart-phones because of the security issues and instead uses an old-fashioned flip-phone which is actually considerably more secure than more modern devices.


The most secure computer is one not connected to the Internet or any other computer for that matter.

I have even heard advice recently that it is ok to write down your passwords and keep them in your desk. Your accounts and computerised data is more likely to be hacked online than by any thief breaking and entering and typing in your password.
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The way politicians run this country a small white cat should have no problem http://sally4mp.blogspot.com/

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