It’s already tough to keep track of the pace of news in 2024—but we’ve got your back. IT Brew rounded up three of January’s most interesting tech news stories from around the world.

RIP floppy bureaucracy

It’s time once and for all to stop copying those floppies. The government of Japan is dropping requirements that citizens and businesses use floppy disks when submitting forms for around 1,900 government procedures.

In 2022, Digital Minister Taro Kono declared war on the government’s widespread use of floppy disks for bureaucratic procedures as part of a wider govtech modernization initiative. According to Ars Technica, the latest announcement also covers similar requirements mandating the use of CD-ROMs. Floppy disks and standard CD-ROMs max out at 1.44mb and 700mb of storage respectively.

According to The Register, one of the only remaining businesses that sells floppy disks is the US-based Floppydisk.com, which more or less relies on finding abandoned stocks in warehouses across the globe. Owner Tom Persky told the site he didn’t see the Japanese government decision as a threat, as there are a “significant number of hobbyists and industrial users that will continue to use floppy disks over the next years.”

Read more here.—TM

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected]. Want to go encrypted? Ask Tom for his Signal.

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If you’ve found yourself thinking about the security of new tech lately, you’re not alone.

AI and cloud computing have surged in importance across the tech world over the last year, trends reflected in a report from learning company O’Reilly Media last month.

The report found a staggering 3,600% increase of interest in GPT generative AI model units in 2023 on the O’Reilly platform and a 175% increase in use of the “cloud native” topic, indicating the surge in curiosity on the part of users and professionals. O’Reilly noted that the information comes from the platform’s “units viewed” metric, a way that the company analyzes how its content is digested by its audience.

“Remember that these ‘units’ are ‘viewed’ by our users, who are largely professional software developers and programmers,” the report cautioned the reader. “They aren’t necessarily following the latest trends. They’re solving real-world problems for their employers.”

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Like your autographed napkin from that Elvis impersonator, some signatures are less valuable than others.

On Feb. 2, remote desktop application AnyDesk reported a compromise of its production environment and said it revoked “all security-related certificates.”

The potential packaging of malicious code with false authenticity badges means security operation center (SOC) analysts must be watchful, one industry pro said.

“That means that that payload may look a little more legitimate to a cyberdefense product than it would otherwise,” Matt Kiely, a principal researcher at cybersecurity company Huntress, told IT Brew.

“Now, what that also means is that the serial number and the specifics of that potentially stolen cert are well understood,” Kiely added. “And so threat hunters and SOC analysts should zero in on those details.”

What happened? On Friday, Feb. 2, AnyDesk noted its immediate remediation actions following discovery of a production-environment hit, citing activation of its response plan with the cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike; a precautionary pulling of passwords to its portal; and notification to authorities of the event, which, according to AnyDesk, is not related to ransomware.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $1.1 billion. That’s the amount of ransomware payments made in 2023, according to a study by Chainalysis. (Wired)

Quote: “As cryptocurrency mining has increased in the United States, concerns have grown about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its effects on the US electric power industry.”—the US Energy Information Administration, in a report on its new mandate to survey commercial cryptocurrency miners (Ars Technica)

Read: A new policy from the US State Department will soon impose visa restrictions on those using or benefiting from commercial spyware. (Reuters)

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