US nuclear force 'still uses floppy disks'

bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36385839

>The Government Accountability Office said the Pentagon was one of several departments where "legacy systems" urgently needed to be replaced.

>The report said taxpayers spent $61bn (£41bn) a year on maintaining ageing technologies

>The report said that the Department of Defence systems that co-ordinated intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft "runs on an IBM Series-1 Computer - a 1970s computing system - and uses eight-inch floppy disks".

>"However, to address obsolescence concerns, the floppy drives are scheduled to be replaced with secure digital devices by the end of 2017."

What are the repercussions of this, Sup Forums?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
myredditvideos.com/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

That such coordination has always been garbage and thankfully we've never needed to make use of it. After the upgrade it will continue to be garbage and hopefully still not needed.

we really need to get windows 10 on those systems. just let the cloud take care of it

How powerful do nuclear weapon computers need to be exactly? Most of the tech is in the missiles themselves, I think. The computers basically handle the launch authorization, no?

At least they're so old nobody can accidentally catch Locky on them.

What's wrong with floppies? Aren't they more reliable than optical media?

At least they're immune to viruses.

slow as sin, but that isnt an issue since they aren't handling particularly heavy bandwidth

Everyone knows that it's 000000.
And now I'm on all of the watchlists ever.

That they're said to "co-ordinate" gives me the impression that these systems are more about asset management than actual weapon operations, as you surmised.

>What are the repercussions of this, Sup Forums?
The floppy gets copied.

youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

>yfw this music video had a bigger budget than most modern game DRM

Probably more effective, too.

What's stopping them from upgrading to newer tech
I mean shouldn't flash based memory cards be better?

Read the article.

the system is pretty much unhackable.
Almost nobody except for enthusiasts and the people that have to work with the system would know how to operate it.

So?
If it ain't broke don't fix it

I read it already, it says they use it just because it still works, but wouldn't you expect something as important as nuclear arms to be upgraded to the latest possible tech often?

When it comes to hacking ICBM software of the US DoD, I imagine the people tasked with "hacking" would begin by familiarizing themselves with its operation. I don't mean Ivan and his fucking bird in Siberia, but those employed by their governments to do this professionally.

What about Matthew Broderick?

WOPR was a brand new system and closer to what was common at the time.
C64's DOS machines are a lot less common today.

Not really.

Read it again.

>but wouldn't you expect something as important as nuclear arms to be upgraded to the latest possible tech often?
haha. no.

like said, the fact that they use such old tech that predates the internet makes it basically impossible to hack, it should be viewed as a good thing desu

>ends up breaking at some point
>it's now too old to find parts

>Global thermonuclear war
reading those words always gives me the chills - knowing the always and never approach to the weapon systems.

I don't think they're connected to the internet, user.
Hell, I doubt even if they were upgraded, random usb flash drives wouldn't be allowed near it in case of a stuxnet.

What's wrong with this? Why would they need to upgrade it? Don't they know that newer tech is so much more fragile?

>if it ain't broke, don't fix it

but what if it breaks and then you cant fix it?

MY AMIGA NEVER BREAKS

This
ALL nuclear arms are have their own closed networks limited to only the control room of their facilities.

Did you guys think nuclear missiles had a nice node.js web UI in Obama's office or something

>implying they use those small shitty 5 1/4" disks.

>Aren't they more reliable than optical media?
Floppy disks are probably the most unreliable removable media format in existence.

Read the article.

Why won't you be able to fix it?

What sort of break are we talking about?

>whoops, a nuke went off in the computer room

depends. optical doesn't like being around mold. floppies don't like being around magnets. The 3 1/2 floppies were really shitty toward the end there, but that was a manufacturing issue.

>What are the repercussions of this, Sup Forums?
Nothing? Data storage is data storage, many nuclear plants are still running on PDP-11s too.

As long as they keep their shit backed up and the drives in good working order, I'd trust that shit just fine.

Read the article yourself or even read the copied green text from the OP. They used reliable 8" disks.

That's compact cassettes.
Maybe punched tape but I never had to work with that.

This. Capacitors and floppy disks have a limited lifespan, God help us all if this system fails and the russkies attack.

Joking aside, nuclear weapons should require insane amounts of up to date security. This is one system where security through obscurity won't work.

...Yes. 8", not 5 1/4".

I guess its to keep the cylons out of the system.

Then replace the capacitors and have new disks produced, the supply chain of the U.S. nuclear arsenal isn't a clearance aisle at the local Staples.

That old shit's probably actually easier to keep running than new hardware anyway which is full of BGA and all kinds of proprietary surface mounted shit you can't easily source a replacement for. Given the market placement of the Series/1, it's probably all 7400 series logic and other discrete components, maybe one of those trademark IBM silver chips every so often, though I'm not really familiar with that series.

>implying thats a bad thing
>wanting iNuke
>wanting facebook share button on your nukes
I bet the moment they upgrade all their shit gets hacked .all comps in the silo display tranny porn and someone installs doom on the nukes.

Wonder if they used GCR or MFM encoding...

It's 2016, come on people!

>share button on your nukes
legitimately keked

>tfw you lose first strike capabilities against the sovs because windows forced your launch computer to update to Windows 14

>This is one system where security through obscurity won't work.
Not obscurity, the fact that this shit cannot be activated over a network makes this unhackable.

>Just tap on the map to launch the nuke
Tfw the unintuitive interface saved us from nuclear holocaust

>News: ISIS immobilized the US's nuclear forces
>what first thought to be a state of the art EMP bomb turned out to be a huge ass magnet.

Everything's connected through the sneakernet. That's how the Iranians had one of their test reactors blown up.

>someone installs doom on the nuke

On second thought, how could I be so naive?

I wonder what made them choose these systems over DEC hardware which as far as I know was 7400-based through and through, unless this was set up in the later PDP-8/11 era.

>if it's old it's bad
why do normies think this?
they have a good reason to keep using giant floppies

That was USB and MS Windows auto-run install virus feature.

>newer can be better
Why can't Sup Forums pseudoluddites accept that ?

If I ever work for rockstar, and a user tries to get around securom, that music will play on a loop forever.

newer can be better, but in this case you have to be damn sure it's even more reliable and secure than the old tech
which is hard to do when you're dealing with missiles made in the 70's

Yes. The type of media and OS were irrelevant to the point I was making.

Why do you always assume that because someone doesn't shit themselves every time they see something old means they automatically think it's the end all be all and best way to do everything?

New ways can bring improvements, but just because you can improve upon something doesn't mean that something is irredeemable shit, for this particular use case I can't really see a justification to upgrade the system to something new and not as "trustworthy" as long as it performs to expectations and can be easily repaired.

I would like to think that the "Government Accountability Office" has done some research and wouldn't spend a few millions just to endanger everyone.
>mfw I realised as I typed this that this is happening because some guy is probably brokering a deal with MS/IBM or some shit

>baby's first thread/click bait

>computer does what is has to do,and has dont it for years.

why are the outdated man!!! arm cores are cheap

>most advance computer at the time of installation for security have now 360'ed in to security by obscurity

why is this bad

analogue systems are more reliant and easier to maintain than digital systems

They're holding onto them in case John Titor needs one of them.

>analogue
britcucks

Computer technology has always been digital. However, older computer tech is more reliable in certain aspects. For example, older computers are less prone to overheating issues.

>normies
>baby's first thread/click bait

Did you fuckers even read the article ?
>report came from the Government Accountability Office
>Pentagon official states that they're indeed bound to be replaced/update

Here's a picture with words.

Here in Germany several branches of the government bought extended support for win XP instead of switching in time. Most politicians are retarded as fuck

>Computer technology has always been digital.

m8...

Good goyim! Upgrade your nukes to the River Trail JavaScript engine with our new Intel Active Management Technology technology!

It's a fundbait article. They pretend that (inter)national security is at stake if they don't get more money.

>US DoD has to pretend they need money
lol

If they ever had, I'd be glad to make the design for it... Nice blinking bomb icons that are more annoying than Warez-site-ads: "click me!"

Yeah better upgrade that shit so Obama can launch a nuke with an iPhone app.

nigger the whole nukes activation is run on shitty old computers article is old,for like 3 years or more this is clickbait/fundbait

You'd think those would be on 24/7, how long do CPUs even last of 24/7 being on?

>the notion that something is old had been around ever since that thing was considered old
alrighty

They control nuclear weapons really the last thing you want to fuck up. What do you want them to do, employ some node hipsters so they can store their configuration on Dropbox?

Everyone's not even talking about the important bits

How fast can that computer go? Can it even compute a sha1 hash? I doubt it can even do blowfish hashing with a reasonable level of iteration

That means that the nuclear launch codes in that system, are either unprotected or weakly protected. And security through obscurity never works in the long run. Meaning those codes will be created

Irrelevant when the facility is protected by modern security, as well as guys with really big guns.

We've all seen The Rock, user. We shouldn't be taking any chances.

they have modern 1970s computers

This is supposed to be the final wall to stop nuclear warfare. When designing systems. You always have to think of "What If?"s. What If the base gets overthrown by the Chinese army?

Yes, and I'm very certain they've thought of those situations.

>all comps in the silo display tranny porn and someone installs doom on the nukes

>How fast can that computer go? Can it even compute a sha1 hash? I doubt it can even do blowfish hashing with a reasonable level of iteration
It's not like they're using a Trash-80 or some other bottom of the barrel shitbox, nor that they would need to encrypt a ton of data to get the job done should the need for some reason arise. Modern encryption methods were invented around this period by researchers that were probably using very similar hardware, at least in market placement.

>And security through obscurity never works in the long run. Meaning those codes will be created
And how exactly would they go about this on an obscure, airgapped proprietary IBM platform running undocumented software that has never actually been used and demonstrated?

Even if you somehow could generate valid launch codes, what good what it do for you, exactly? You would have to have someone (or probably a team of conspirators) on-site and even then the most they could probably do is launch maybe one or two ICBMs if that.

This is the government we're talking about.

SHA1 was published in 93. MD5 in 92. MD2 in 89

This machine is from 1970s.

> You would have someone ( or probably a team...

And I'm sure a massive organization would have the resources to occupy a base for as long as they want. Russia, China, for example

Governments are pretty good at what they do, despite memes. Private industry isn't the bastion of efficiency and competence, either.

Really. Governments are good at securing a nuclear silo for 50 years when they can't even secure Clinton's emails?

You know. Those 50 years where technology grew at supposedly double the rate every two years? Meaning modern computers would have grown by 2^25 times by then?

MD5 took 15 years to get broken. What kind of security would we have after 50 years?

If the base got overthrown, then that means it's game over, since many of the missile silos are hidden deep in the maiand

The government wasn't securing Clinton's emails, ya dingus.

why did you post a pic of kalousek?

>Sup Forums gets tasked with upgrading the nukes
>after a few weeks the job is done, everyone is happy
>suddenly ancient aliens awake and the nukes are needed as the only way to stop them from destroying human civilization!
>1
>2
>Fizz

It's a reaction image used to show my feelings towards silly statements.

>And I'm sure a massive organization would have the resources to occupy a base for as long as they want. Russia, China, for example
Let's not even get started on how absolutely stupid and improbable a ground invasion of the US would be.

Let's instead look at it from this angle;

You send a contingent to take over one or maybe even up to a dozen silos...

You somehow don't get shot out of the air,

or you somehow manage to make it on foot through kilometers upon kilometers of some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth after a coastal invasion of the most highly populated (and defended) areas in a country where there are more guns than people,

against all odds, you have somehow managed to successfully make it through the one of the most powerful military forces on Earth, some of the most defendable land on Earth, and you capture some silos...

And instantly, you are destroyed by a counter-attack either by conventional military force, or the thousands of other silos the US still controls.

Along with your entire country.

And potentially the world.

All over enough ordinance to maybe destroy a medium-sized city in a flyover state.

What a great plan! You should become a general.

these images are cringe

That's the point dingus

No. Some very good ways to block everything. They'd have to rip off all the existing machinery down and stock their own. Which could take months

Who says that China can't just take state by state until they reach the silo?

I still rather not risk the "What If" test. You'd make a horrible sysadmin.

So how was it the government's fault when they didn't own those servers? It's the Clintons' fault.

So if they get rid of the systems,
Do you think I could buy them?
Always wanted a IBM Series-1.

I wonder if my Middle School still has a copy of Don't Copy That Floppy on Laser-Disc...