Re: Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network drives

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bill Williamson" <bill () bbqninja com>
Date: December 8, 2007 6:29:36 PM EST
To: dave () farber net, rsk () gsp org
Subject: 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 Forno
> Subject: Western Digital cripples (well, tries to cripple) network  
> drives
>
> Spotted on the excellent Boing Boing site, where Cory Doctorow writes:
>
>        Gary sez, "This is the most extreme example I've seen yet of  
> tech
>        companies 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
>
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