TOKYO, July 3 (Reuters) - Japan's government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernise the bureaucracy.

By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.

"We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!" Digital Minister Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday.

The Digital Agency was set up during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when a scramble to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination revealed that the government still relied on paper filing and outdated technology.

A charismatic figure with 2.5 million followers on X, Kono formerly headed the defence and foreign ministries as well as the COVID vaccine deployment, taking up his current role in August 2022 after a failed bid to become prime minister.

Japan's digitisation effort has run into numerous snags, however. A contact-tracing app flopped during the pandemic and adoption of the government's My Number digital identification card has been slower than it hoped, amid repeated data mishaps.

According to its conflict minerals report (CMR) for 2023, Amazon cannot rule out having sourced minerals from nine of ten African countries where human rights-violating militias finance themselves through mining. These countries are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and Angola. The other four members of GAMAM, a group synonymous with the moniker Big Tech, also potentially source some of the raw materials processed in contracted smelters from these regions.

Both Apple and Google’s parent company Alphabet reported that smelters integrated into their supply chains potentially processed minerals from six of the ten countries on the African continent mentioned above. Meta lists five of these countries in its report, while Microsoft claims to have reason to believe that minerals from two of the ten countries listed might end up in their products. However, the country list provided by Alphabet was last updated in 2021 and has been absent from their annual CMR since 2022. Additionally, Microsoft doesn't clarify if the countries listed in its report are merely those where smelters are located or if they are the source countries for potential conflict materials.

Contractors working for GAMAM companies are also active in extracting and processing raw materials in countries defined as CAHRAs, short for Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas. The extended CAHRA definition, which includes the extraction of minerals as well as other conflict resources, encompasses specific regions in Afghanistan, Mexico, Myanmar, and Yemen, among others.

According to Microsoft’s conflict minerals report, the company relies on "responsible sourcing" rather than restricting or avoiding the usage of the conflict minerals tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, known as 3TG, from these regions. Stopping operations in Covered Countries and CAHRAs would allegedly cause significant economic harm to the affected countries.

U.S. importers of raw materials have been required to disclose their sources for potential conflict minerals under the Dodd-Frank Act since 2010. A similar regulation has been in effect in the European Union since January 1, 2021, aimed at curbing the financing of violent militias, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding countries, where said groups control the mining of tin and coltan. In the 1990s, the term "blood diamonds" gained significant attention in this context, referring to gemstones mined in Sierra Leone and Angola and sold by rebel groups to finance their operations.

... research has now found that the vast majority of data stored in the cloud is “dark data”, meaning it is used once then never visited again. That means that all the memes and jokes and films that we love to share with friends and family – from “All your base are belong to us”, through Ryan Gosling saying “Hey Girl”, to Tim Walz with a piglet – are out there somewhere, sitting in a datacentre, using up energy. By 2030, the National Grid anticipates that datacentres will account for just under 6% of the UK’s total electricity consumption, so tackling junk data is an important part of tackling the climate crisis.

Ian Hodgkinson, a professor of strategy at Loughborough University has been studying the climate impact of dark data and how it can be reduced.

“I really started a couple of years ago, it was about trying to understand the negative environmental impact that digital data might have,” he said. “And at the top of it might be quite an easy question to answer, but it turns out actually, it’s a whole lot more complex. But absolutely, data does have a negative environmental impact.”

He discovered that 68% of data used by companies is never used again, and estimates that personal data tells the same story.

Hodgkinson said: “If we think about individuals and society more broadly, what we found is that many still assume that data is carbon neutral, but every piece of data whether it be an image, whether it be an Instagram post, whatever it is, there’s a carbon footprint attached to it.

“So when we’re storing things in the cloud, we think about the white fluffy cloud, but the reality is, these datacentres are incredibly hot, incredibly noisy, they consume a large amount of energy.”

One funny meme isn’t going to destroy the planet, of course, but the millions stored, unused, in people’s camera rolls does have an impact, he explained: “The one picture isn’t going to make a drastic impact. But of course, if you maybe go into your own phone and you look at all the legacy pictures that you have, cumulatively, that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.”

Cloud operators and tech companies have a financial incentive to stop people from deleting junk data, as the more data that is stored, the more people pay to use their systems.