
Her Task Is to Wean the White House Off Floppy Disks - ftio
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/us/politics/her-task-weaning-the-white-house-off-floppy-disks.html
======
danjayh
Article jumped the shark for me with the following gem:

"... she uses a 2013 Dell laptop: new by government standards, but clunky
enough compared with the cutting-edge devices of her former life that her
young son asked what it was."

I'm sorry, but while other forms of technology are rapidly replacing laptops,
they are still the dominant mobile productivity workhorses (unless you count
things like tweeting and facebook as productivity tasks). This quote implies
that laptops are so out-of-date that the child of a well-off tech worker
wouldn't know what they are, akin to VHS players and cassette tapes.
Ridiculous.

Also, by whose standard _isn 't_ a ~1-2 year old laptop new?

~~~
AaronFriel
My guess is not that they are talking about just any 2013 Dell laptop, but
that she is referring to something that is not of "ultrabook" standards of
appearance and (probably) battery life optimization.

My impression of government hardware purchasing is that even while newer
_consumer_ models of laptops have managed to be lighter weight, have better
battery life, and so on, they haven't met the litany of requirements needed
for the government. She probably has a semi-custom Dell Latitude, which while
a workhorse, is big and clunky and has less than desirable battery life. Oh
and the screen resolution is probably 1366x768. Compare that to any ultrabook
one could acquire today with a greater than HD quality display.

My guess is that her son is confused because before then she probably did most
of her work with a Macbook Air, an ultrabook (perhaps even a Dell XPS), or
even a Chromebook Pixel. These are all thinner, lighter, and with greater
battery life. And they probably don't check the boxes the government wanted.

~~~
danjayh
That's a good guess ... but I still think there's a bit of hyperbole going on.
I'd think a gigantor-laptop would be similar enough to an ultrabook that the
kid would figure it out. If I recast the question of 'what it was' to 'what
_is_ that hunk-of-junk looking laptop?', then I guess I could believe it.

On that topic ... many of the chunky plastic boxes are actually _great_
machines. We have a choice from a few machines at work ... and almost no
engineers choose an ultrabook. While ultrabooks are good for some things
(watching videos, basic productivity like word, small excel workbooks, etc.),
I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one. I have a gigantic brick
of a 'laptop' at work (I think it's a Precision M6700), and I wouldn't trade
it for anything. It's nice to be able to slap it on and off a dock, to be able
to connect it to four monitors without any janky USB video cards, and to be
able to install tons of RAM.

~~~
pyre
> I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one

The number of laptop users that actually "compile an operating system" are
relatively small. This seems like a poor choice for an example.

~~~
bitwize
I compile operating systems on a 2010 ThinkPad.

It's not fantastic for today's standards, but it's not terrible either.

~~~
dekhn
I compiled operating systems (linux) on my clunky 486/100 MHz laptop 19 years
ago. Ditto.

------
fmitchell0
"I wish they had people in there for this last two years that could make the
trains run on time, not somebody who has big ideas"

We need both. The conundrum is that improvements are done through constant
iteration and ideation. Government implementation is plagued by fear of fiat
and fear of failure. The implementers need to be protected by the big idea
people from the skeptics.

------
m3talridl3y
Floppy disks actually provide a rather pleasant form factor. It's large enough
to feel meaningful, wide enough to not get lost between other objects, flat
enough to be included in a binder with printed material. The only downsides
are transfer speed, data capacity, and lifespan.

~~~
userbinator
They're also AFAIK the only removable magnetic disk format that has been
standardised (see ECMA-125), is completely open, and the drives are "dumb and
simple" so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB
drives, hard drives, and optical drives can. From the point of view of
openness and simplicity, the floppy has some advantages.

~~~
warfangle
>so they can't hide malware in the same way that the firmware of USB drives,
hard drives, and optical drives can.

Unless you boot the machine with the floppy in the drive. Oh, boot sector
viruses!

~~~
cbd1984
> Unless you boot the machine with the floppy in the drive. Oh, boot sector
> viruses!

That's a BIOS configuration issue.

And, if the attacker can control the BIOS, in the words of Bokosuka Wars,
"WOW! YOU LOSE!"

[http://darkscarfy.tripod.com/bokosuka/bokosuka.shtml](http://darkscarfy.tripod.com/bokosuka/bokosuka.shtml)

------
ObviousScience
What's wrong with floppy disks?

For certain kinds of highly sensitive information transport, a floppy disk is
probably a better idea than a flash drive.

I suppose you could use CDs, but floppy disks seem easier to destroy.

~~~
pixl97
What's not wrong with them? Terrible write speed. Terrible read spead.
Exceptionally low information density. High error rates. Short lifespan.

~~~
walterbell
For some communication channels, these are potential strengths. For the same
reason why some rooms have small doors and some rooms have loading docks.

~~~
Klinky
An encrypted flash drive is probably better than security through
inconvenience or unreliability.

~~~
walterbell
Error-correcting codes can help with reliability.

Rate-limiting is appropriate for some use cases.

Floppies don't have firmware to attack your PC:
[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191467-badusb-returns-
hac...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191467-badusb-returns-hackers-
publish-code-that-could-infect-millions-of-usb-devices)

------
devonkim
I find it funny how we're mostly nitpicking over something the author probably
didn't spend more than 3 seconds about and are missing what most of the
article's even about, including the usually inflammatory women-in-tech
initiatives she's trying to jump start in the region.

I don't think it's such a big deal for someone in her position to have such a
laptop mostly because she's not exactly going to fix the default constant of
failure in government IT and software by coding. She'll probably have a
docking station and she can probably afford a decent monitor from there.

Best of luck, but I really hate to see people thrown to the wolves like this
politically by being the first in a position with such little political
backing to support them. I'll say that she's done her job admirably well when
my mother in law knows about her position and staunchly opposes it (she'd vote
for a cat if it was Republican and Reagan was on a Democrat ballot, I think
she literally said that).

------
Quequau
This strikes me as a use case where something like the USB-Armory might be
really well suited. It was recently shown at 31.CCC:

[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6541.htm...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2014/Fahrplan/events/6541.html)

------
Rapzid
Meh, it jumped the shark for me in the first two paragraphs.

"We would never say that about reading.”

Now this is just a hunch, but I'm guessing most highly educated people have
used their reading skills on a regular basis since school as compared to, say,
what they learned in Calc III.

------
noir_lord
Interesting that the US now has a Digital Service similar to the "(UK)
Government Data Service" [https://gds.blog.gov.uk/](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/)

Those folks have done some _incredible work_ over the last few years with no
sign of letting up.

