US Military Uses 8-Inch Floppy Disks To Coordinate Nuclear Force Operations (cnbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via CNBC: A new report reveals the U.S. Defense Department is still using 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces. The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Governmental Accountability Office report. The report shows how outdated IT systems are being used to handle important functions related to the nation's taxpayers, federal prisoners and military veterans, as well as to the America's nuclear umbrella. "Federal legacy IT systems are becoming increasingly obsolete: Many use outdated software languages and hardware parts that are unsupported," the report found. "Agencies reported using several systems that have components that are, in some cases, at least 50 years old." From the report: "GAO pointed out that aging systems include the Treasury Department's 'individual master file,' which is the authoritative data source for individual taxpayers. It's used to assess taxes and generates refunds. That file 'is written in assembly language code -- a low-level computer code that is difficult to write and maintain -- and operates on an IBM mainframe,' the report said." The report also mentioned that several other departments, such as the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Health and Human Services and the Veterans' Administration, "reported using 1980s and 1990s Microsoft operating systems that stopped being supported by the vendor more than a decade ago."

Comments

Well...

[Arkh89]

I hope they don't click the red cross... or we are all fucked...

Re:Well...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It was all pretty monochrome; but some surprisingly early GUIs existed. SAGE had them(with lightguns rather than mice, since it predated those by a fair bit); among various other flavors of 'it's actually pretty impressive what you can do with vacuum tubes if you have a lot of smart people and nigh-unlimited money' style tech.

Security through obscurity, that might work...

[crypTeX]

We really should applaud them. Imagine how hard it will be to figure out how to write code to hack this.

Re:Security through obscurity, that might work...

[Geoffrey.landis]

The bad news is that it's not a very secure operating system. The good news is that the hackers are having trouble figuring out how to get the 2600 baud acoustic modems to ARPAnet to download the malware...

It's hopeless

[realmolo]

This kind of "back-end" software is EXACTLY the kind of thing that contractors DREAM of. Nobody knows how it works, and the general public never has to see it, so they can't complain about it being a piece-of-shit that they paid for.

It's just like the air traffic control system "upgrade" they've been working on for nearly 30 years. The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product. Much better to keep in in development forever.

I'm not one of those "government can't do anything right" people, but this is one of those things that is just a tailor-made pork-barrel disaster. I see why they don't want to even bother trying.

Re:It's hopeless

[holophrastic]

Seems like a good investment to me. Operational for fifty years, and never been hacked. Seems like your government did everything right -- oh how I wish that had continued to be true.

Re:It's hopeless

[ShanghaiBill]

The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product.

I have worked on tech projects both as a government employee and as a contractor. Most projects were disasters for the reasons you list, but I have seen a few successes. Here is a quick checklist:

1. Do NOT use a contractor. They have a vested interest in bloat and delay.
2. Use your own subordinates so they have skin in the game, and their future raises and promotions depend on the success of the project.
3. Make sure they are a small team that has worked together successfully in the past on similar projects.
4. Starve them of resources, so they have no choice but to implement a clean and simple design, with only basic functionality.
5. Avoid hyping or even announcing the project until you have something working. If you hype it early, you will get demands for every feature, including the kitchen sink, thrown at you, and you will get politically connected contractors forced on you.

So What?

[plopez]

They've been stable for decades. I'll take master files on floppy disks and programs written by people who cared over "eventually consistent" databases developed by "just good enough" monkeys any day.

Re:So What?

[nuckfuts]

Yes and no. I would not advocate changing operating systems simply because they "stopped being supported by the vendor more than a decade ago". After all, if your needs have been met for decades by something like MS-DOS 6.1 or Windows 3.11, what "support" would you looking for from Microsoft today?

Physical devices are a completely different issue, however. Floppy drives and floppy disks WILL wear out and fail. Maybe these agencies have a stockpile of spares, or maybe someone is still manufacturing 8" floppies to sell to the government for an arm and a leg, but barring that, good luck sourcing replacements for your antique computer hardware when it fails.

So if...

[dfsmith]

If I notice a quantity of 8" floppies dropped around a parking lot next to an inconspicuous government building, can I assume that some sort of Stuxnet cyber attack is under way?

More like

[fred911]

Security through obsolescence.

Re:So it's air gapped. That's good, right?

[thinkwaitfast]

There's probably more rationale here than many realize.

I'd doubt it. More like,

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

It ain't broke, is it?

[WheezyJoe]

Sounds to me like tax-payer dollars well-spent on equipment that keeps on giving.

Maybe your typical gamer has to upgrade every coupla years because the latest Doom doesn't run well on a 4-year old GeForce. Maybe Macy's needs to upgrade their mainframes because they have way more inventory to deal with and want to offer more sales online. And maybe we all need to upgrade off Windows XP (looking at you, banks, with your hackable ATM's) because it was a lousy, full-of-security-holes platform in the first place.

But as Microsoft tries to force me off my perfectly workable Windows 7 for no damn reason, I wonder why a machine bought by a government department, that does the job and does it really well, needs to be upgraded or swapped out for something new that may or may not work because of something non-related to whether the damned thing does the job and does it really well. Replacing such a system is not easy, particularly when there are consultants circling overhead, hungry for a fat government contract so they can build a complete clusterfuck out of overpriced commodity hardware that does nothing approaching what the old system did. And needs to be upgraded all over again in 2-3 years.

Yes, on the one hand, holy shit! those are old floppy drives. On the other hand, holy shit! they still work and do the job after all these years. Why have we grown so accustomed to throwing shit out every coupla years? Seems to me, government (state and federal) is one of those areas where shit oughta stay the same for a while so people can focus on getting the job done, rather than re-learning and re-tooling every few years just because some software vendor wants to sell another release of something.

And here's the full GAO report

[Guy Harris]

Here's the actual Government Accounting Office report, if you want to read it instead of a Slashdot story about a news story about the report.