Japan Will No Longer Require Floppy Disks For Submitting Some Official Documents (engadget.com) 45
Japan is aiming to phase out floppy disks and CD-ROMs, which until now were forms of physical media required for submitting some official documents to the government. Engadget reports: Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to stop requiring businesses to submit information on outdated forms of physical media. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. "Under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods," METI said last week, according to The Register. After this calendar year, METI will no longer require businesses to submit data on floppy disks under 34 ordinances. The same goes for CD-ROMs when it comes to an unspecified number of procedures. There's still quite some way to go before businesses can stop using either format entirely, however.
Kono's staff identified some 1,900 protocols across several government departments that still require the likes of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and even MiniDiscs. The physical media requirements even applied to key industries such as utility suppliers, mining operations and aircraft and weapons manufacturers. There are a couple of main reasons why there's a push to stop using floppy disks, as SoraNews24 points out. One major factor is that floppy disks can be hard to come by. Sony, the last major manufacturer, stopped selling them in 2011. Another is that some data types just won't fit on a floppy disk. A single photo can easily be larger than the format's 1.4MB storage capacity.
Kono's staff identified some 1,900 protocols across several government departments that still require the likes of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and even MiniDiscs. The physical media requirements even applied to key industries such as utility suppliers, mining operations and aircraft and weapons manufacturers. There are a couple of main reasons why there's a push to stop using floppy disks, as SoraNews24 points out. One major factor is that floppy disks can be hard to come by. Sony, the last major manufacturer, stopped selling them in 2011. Another is that some data types just won't fit on a floppy disk. A single photo can easily be larger than the format's 1.4MB storage capacity.
just go back to faxing that data! (Score:4, Funny)
just go back to faxing that data!
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Too risky. Fax requires some sort of "connection" to the outside world.
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Japan has more fax machines than the rest of the world combined.
Every business has a fax. They are used for transmitting invoices, purchase orders, and other documents that the rest of the world has been emailing for decades.
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Japan has more fax machines than the rest of the world combined.
Every business has a fax. They are used for transmitting invoices, purchase orders, and other documents that the rest of the world has been emailing for decades.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
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Well at least CDs can be read-only! Submit data from the cloud when almost nobody seems to be able to learn how to digitally sign a simple email! 100% tampering proof!
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IIRC, Japan still uses faxes. :O
Some groups are a tad slow (Score:2)
In other news, the Catholic Church apologizes to Galileo. [newscientist.com]
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gullible conspiranut
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No, he's talking about the COVIDiots. You know, the ones who made lockdowns, and mask and vaccine mandates necessary because they wouldn't do it voluntarily when they had the chance because "MAH FREEDUMS".
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I agree that calling something from 1992 news is a bit slow :)
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Durable physical media has a point (Score:3)
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Do they accept punched cards?
As for paper tape, no. Whenever I used that the tape used to form knots and become unreadable, definitely not durable.
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You have a point with CDs but floppy disks are anything but durable.
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Re:Durable physical media has a point (Score:5, Interesting)
Digressing a bit, I wish the Japanese, or someone could get back into removable media. Tape is the only real inexpensive, archival-grade, high-capacity media that is maintained these days, and with ransomware being more common, having something that replaced Blu-Ray for backups would have a definite niche, especially if it can go for decades without a single error. The same techniques for adding density to hard drives can be used for MO drives.
Other than tape, we really have no high capacity storage media these days, other than trusting someone else that you can store stuff on their machines for a long while... which is great now, but if something happens to a data center, (like what happened to CloudNordic), well, the data is gone. Even Sony has stopped making high capacity optical drives for archiving video.
We really need a solid, archival-grade, relatively inexpensive format for WORM data. At most, we get promises of holographic storage, but we have had that since 1991 and Tamarack days.
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having something that replaced Blu-Ray for backups would have a definite niche...
At least for home use I feel like memory sticks work just fine. I just bought a 2TB one which will go along with my currently full 1TB one.
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Is that really a major issue if you're not using it all the time https://www.pcworld.com/articl... [pcworld.com] ? Do blu rays burned at home (which you mentioned as your old solution) not degrade as well https://www.canada.ca/en/conse... [canada.ca] ?
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having something that replaced Blu-Ray for backups would have a definite niche...
At least for home use I feel like memory sticks work just fine. I just bought a 2TB one which will go along with my currently full 1TB one.
I rely on SSDs mounted in USB enclosures for portable storage, but modern Flash has poor retention compared to optical or magnetic storage.
Burnable DVD and Blu-ray M-DISCs are suppose to be good for at least 1000 years. I have had good results with burnable DVDs if stored away from sunlight.
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The Japanese do in fact invest quite a bit in archival media. Tapes of course, but more popular now is archival Bluray.
The standard discs use organic dies, but those degrade quickly. Archival discs such as M-Disc and Verbatim (Mitsubishi) ones use non-organic metal layers that are ablated by the laser. They are expected to last at least a century, although obviously only accelerated testing has been done to prove that.
So far they seem to be holding up well. It's advisable to create some extra redundancy, su
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And relatively cheap compared to tape. I get most of mine for around 100 yen/disc, with 100GB/disc.
The cost is not the big concern, needing 80 of them to back up my not-even-that-big HDD is. The only reasonable way for a consumer to back up a sizable HDD today is with another HDD.
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Yeah, that's the issue, we are producing so much data now. LTO5 or 6 might work, but LTO6 drives are not cheap and neither are the tapes, and only offer about 2.27TB.
But realistically, for archival stuff like photos and video, you can store a lot on those 93GB discs.
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The same techniques for adding density to hard drives can be used for MO drives.
MO drives rely on the Kerr effect for reading using a focused laser so would be limited to the densities Blu-ray drives currently achieve.
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Nations losing Gigabytes of data (and not in the sense of "unintended sharing" but actually losing as in "no longer there") has already happened, and will happen again.
This has all happened before, and it will happen again. Have you heard of ChatGPT?
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Okay, but common consumer storage is not durable. Not floppy, not CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, not flash.
Could still be a problem for the future (Score:2)
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The vast majority of floppy drives use the same interface, so as long as you've backed up that floppy you can replace the drive with an emulator.
This is so stupid! (Score:2)
They obviously should require everything be submitted using MO disks! :)
Headline Icon (Score:1)
That icon on the /. headline -- the slant-eyed face with the surprised look on his face -- seems racist here.
A Step Back (Score:2)
You are now required to print and mail the hexadecimal encoding of your data (little-endian, please) in an approved font such as 8pt Courier New, with 1" margins and pages clearly numbered. ...Has anyone tried faxing QR codes?
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Has anyone tried faxing QR codes?
Yes.
Well not QR exactly, but I'm 99% sure I saw this in action in the 2000s at some point.
One of the systems generated some sort of 2D code with the contents of a form which was then printed and faxed. Nope not even sent with a fax modem.
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little-endian, please
Endianness is irrelevant for character (one-byte) data.
I still use floppy drives (Score:3)
As a hobby I refurbish very old computers (mid 70's to early 90's) for myself, friends, and the occasional eBay sale. Floppy diskettes are amazingly robust even when 30+ years old but they can't last forever. Even new old stock diskettes in the shrink wrap usually yield a few that simply won't format. Then there is the problem with aging diskette drives. The Teac models seem to last the longest because of their build quality but even they eventually die, usually by worn out mechanisms that are getting near impossible to source. As a poster above stated there really does need to be some sort of physical storage standard for archiving data for extended periods of time. Flash drives are unpredictable, CD and DVD too small (heck, even Blueray), SSDs not so much. Tape is about the only alternative today but it too will suffer from bit rot eventually. I have all of my diskette images from the past 40+ years saved on local NAS devices but that still requires me to update to new NAS drives every so often and copy everything over. I went from 2TB, to 4TB, to 8TB and now I'm looking at getting a 16GB+ NAS as my next purchase (each contain a minimum of 2 drives in RAID). I have also uploaded all of my driver diskettes to archive.org so others have access to them as well.
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Oops, I meant to say "and now I'm looking at getting a 16TB+ NAS"
The future (Score:2)
It's ironic. When I was at college in the 80s we had multiple professors and visiting professors who talked about how if you wanted to see the future you'd find it in Japan.
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We certainly saw a similar thing in the U
Printed in Triplicate (Score:2)
The pile of physical paperwork makes it easier to hide the $100 bills. (I kid, I kid.)
We also throw in a soft copy, usually a DVD-R. Or, since a lot of what we submit are pictures and videos of various tests, a whole stack of DVDs.