File Sharing Blocked on Western Digital Storage Devices

[jeffy777]

"Western Digital got into some hot water a couple of years ago when customers realized that their storage hard drives didn’t store as much material as their advertised capacity suggested. Now the company’s capacity matches what it advertises but you might not actually be able to do what you intended to do with their storage devices. That’s because they have installed software into their devices to prevent audio and video file-sharing. This defeats a significant amount of the purpose that many people use the devices for."

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/F...-Devices-90072

EDIT: to be clear, it's just the software, but people should know about it, either way.

[Viper007Bond]

Your thread title is misleading.

What's going on is some software that comes with a particular external hard drive prevents you using it to do remote access on the drive with media files.

The drive itself is standard and from what I can tell, you don't have to use the software.

[phuckingduck]

The software is a propietary tool that WD provides so you can share over the internet. Theres one or two models where it's required, but most of the drives can be used as standard USB HDD's and then you can SAMBA share it for goodness.

[epp_b]

"Western Digital got into some hot water a couple of years ago when customers realized that their storage hard drives didn’t store as much material as their advertised capacity suggested.

Oh, come on, don't start this again. They advertise capacities as 1MB = 1000KB, etc., because it's a whole lot simpler than telling customers that 1MB is actually 1024KB and 1048576 Bytes because most customers are too dumb to understand this anyway.

Now the company’s capacity matches what it advertises but you might not actually be able to do what you intended to do with their storage devices. That’s because they have installed software into their devices to prevent audio and video file-sharing. This defeats a significant amount of the purpose that many people use the devices for."

Software, not firmware. As in, you don't have to install it if you don't want to.

Please, save the accusations for people who really deserve this kind of criticism.

[chaos386]

Originally Posted by epp_b

Oh, come on, don't start this again. They advertise capacities as 1MB = 1000KB, etc., because it's a whole lot simpler than telling customers that 1MB is actually 1024KB and 1048576 Bytes because most customers are too dumb to understand this anyway.

Not to mention having 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes actually follows the SI prefixes correctly. If you ask me, it's the OSs that have been incorrectly reporting the size of hard drives, not the hard drive manufacturers.

Only in the realm of computer memory do people use the stupid 1k = 1024 scheme. You don't see people suing Intel for their 2.4 GHz CPUs only having 2,400,000,000 Hz instead of 2,576,980,377.6 Hz.

[jeffy777]

Originally Posted by Viper007Bond

Your thread title is misleading.

All I did was copy and paste it from Broadband Reports

Originally Posted by epp_b

Please, save the accusations for people who really deserve this kind of criticism.

Yeah, I'm not accusing anyone. They made a big deal about it at BBR, so I thought it was kind of interesting.

Regardless of whether it's just the software, people should know about it, either way.

[epp_b]

OK, I've actually read a little further into the issue and I apologize to Jeffy for my initial reaction.

That hard drive makers have now bent over to take it from the content industry is just about the last straw on the camel's back. Hard drives are about the furthest thing from being specifically used en masse for storing and serving "copyrighted content". Even if they are, it's not HDD makers jobs to be Hollywood's thought police.

Although, they were pretty stupid with it you only need to change the file extension to get around it. Even if they were check the MIME-Type, you'd still only need to put it in an archive (zip, rar, tar, etc.) or encrypt it. But, man, this is a stupid move.

Question is, are there various server/daemon projects for running on NAS devices? If so, then I'm a bit less worried about about this precedent.

And, when is the consumer electronics industry going to grow a pair and tell the content industry to go screw themselves?