Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 04:45:46 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: "Bill Williamson" <bill () bbqninja com> Date: December 8, 2007 6:29:36 PM EST To: dave () farber net, rsk () gsp orgSubject: Re: [IP] Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives
This description has nothing to do with reality unfortunately. WD runs a "access your hard drive from anywhere" service. Call it a poor man's VPN with data-only access. You access this service by logging into WD's site with credentials. The transfers use their site as an intermediary so that you don't have to open your firewall up to the internet. So if you: -buy one of their NAS appliance hard drives -sign up for the service -load up a bunch of movies -give the password to 50000 of your closest friends Suddenly WD is a willing, and perhaps even legally encouraging, partner in copyright infringement. All that this is about is "WD Anywhere" service, not what you can and cannot do with a HD you buy on your own network. NOTHING here stops you from accessing the files via SMB/NFS/XYZABC on your local network. Nothing here stops you from creating your own mega-bittorrent-software which runs locally on the NAS (you can run linux on it) and shares every media file you've come into contact with. On 12/7/07, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
________________________________________ From: Rich Kulawiec [rsk () gsp org] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 10:30 PM To: David Farber; Richard FornoSubject: Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drivesSpotted on the excellent Boing Boing site, where Cory Doctorow writes:Gary sez, "This is the most extreme example I've seen yet of techcompanies crippling data devices in order to please Hollywood:Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg,and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication'. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?" And sure enough, it's right on WD's own web site: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1495 ---Rsk ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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Current thread:
- Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives David Farber (Dec 07)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives David Farber (Dec 09)
- Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives David Farber (Dec 09)