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Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives
sehlat writes "Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. '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?'" Update: 12/07 03:28 GMT by Z : To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.
I hereby dub these crippled drives The (Western Digital) Ironside
Make it part of the vernacular, no amount of advertising $ can beat that.
Trolling is a art,
file types restrict you.
If you can't have media files on it, it might as well be 512 MiB.
<sig> </sig>
Seems simple enough. I'm downloading "The_Golden_Compass.pdf" or some such rubbish should take care of it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
All of the WD My Books that i own are flakey in one way or another. I personally like Seagate far better as a company.
1 TB of space is not expensive. If you need that much storage, by a drive or 2.
^Satire.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
from the drm-means-don't-read-disk dept.
should read
from the drm-means-don't-read-media dept.
I don't understand why all these corporations feel like they are suddenly in the business of policing for the RIAA/MPAA
government host your files for free +)
The question we need to be asking is - "How can I replace the firmware on that thing and make it my bitch?"
You should check out some of my .txt files
Metallica_Enter_Sandman.txt is a great "read"
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Not.
How are they determining whether a file is one of these formats? I guess the obvious answer is file extension (easy to get around), and the nonobvious one is actually examining the file (also not difficult to get around with a short script upon uploading and downloading). I'm really not sure how they would actually stop you from uploading any file.
Two hundred million files labelled like this:
Latest-Movie[axxo].txt (filesize 700MB)
Seriously, I don't know why they even try to bother any more. Regardless of your political position on piracy, it's a hole that they can't plug, no matter how many DRM methods they devise or U.S. senators they bribe.
Just thinking if it is possible to edit the firmware so that the restriction is gone.
How do I uncompress my MD5 archive?
We don't need no steenkin' customers!
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
shouldnt be to hard to set file extension associations and go on with life.
My_movie_name.divx.removethis works great too - then you can write a simple script to parse off .removethis from all the files once they are on your computer.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
mv *.avi *.av1
Or better yet, never buy another POS Western Digital product again...
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Sounds more to me like they just can't be shared via "WD Anywhere". Not that they can't be stored on the drive. I may misunderstand though.
*Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access. A list of the non shareable file types can be found here.
Or just never install MioNET in the first place. Either way, here's how.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
1) Someone might figure out how to get Linux to run on this thing (if it isn't already running Linux) or
2) Those who know will avoid this thing and get something else.
Does it restrict .rar files? :)
I heard a rumor WD will be teaming up with Ford and Microsoft to engineer a new line of cars. Every time you wish to transport passengers the doors will automatically lock just before they try to enter and the car asks "are you sure you want passengers?". All for your safety and security!
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
Or, just set associations so .REM files open with Media Player Classic.
Seen on the WDC page touting the uses:
Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while you're on vacation.Now how in hell is one supposed to do that when virtually all music type files are locked out? Stream them as a .WAV file?
(FWIW, .WAV files are not on the list)
Okay everyone is worried about file sharing I have to question how it'd affect the other primary use graphics and editing? I drag media files across a network all day long. If it restricts that then it's a paperweight. Not sure what the real limitations are but I'll guarantee you I'll avoid Western Digital unless I'm a 100% sure it's not an issue. Even with corporate use media files are a common way to communicate and provide training. Large drives that can't handle media files are virtually useless.
The limitation on the media files is when using the WD Anywhere Access. You can still backup and share your music files within your own network and even remotely. Not being totally familiar with the product, but I assume they have "guest" or anonymous sharing folders where you can "Offer your clients an easy way to access business documents, designs, and artwork." They probably also include some proprietary WD client program that lets you access your media files from remote locations so you can play your MP3's while at some hotel in Aruba. So the drive isn't an anchor, but it can't be popped on to the net and easily used to share MP3's with the world. Seems simple enough.
:)
Comcast would likely throttle down your Internet connection anyway once they saw all those MP3's being streamed.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
The article seems legit - which leads one to ask: "What's next?"
.doc, or .html files too -- better ban those as well.
Perhaps I shouldn't be able to save those types of files on internal hard disk either since they can't verify the media license.
I might have accidentally included some copyrighted material in one of my
ON THE PLUS SIDE: this could actually increase the value of older working disks which are non-DRM'd! I've got hundreds of old 40mb, 120mb, and 540mb hard disks laying around my house from puters past.. <dance:jig>I'm rich I tell you! Rich!</dance:jig>
It's easier to point out that you can't use these drives to share your movies and songs. People want network storage for the same thing they use YouTube for, movies of their kids and other fun for out of town friends and family. No avi == no sale.
More devices will be like this until they are legally mandated. This is the kind of network the MAFIAA wants to build. It looks a lot like the old network that served them well. You are only invited to purchase. Government will be happy that way too. YouTube is bad enough for them. If people could simply share through their own equipment, censorship would be impossible and the terroris^H^H public good would win. Watch out for the Next DMCA type act to outlaw general purpose computing access to networks. ESR predicted stuff like this three years ago:
Expect Microsoft to ally even more closely with the RIAA and MPAA in making yet another try at hardware-based DRM restrictions and legislation making them mandatory. The rationale will be to stop piracy and spam, but the real goal will be customer control and a lockout of all unauthorized software. Two previous attempts at this have failed, but the logic of Microsoft's situation is such that they must keep trying.
I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.
ESR had some good ways to fight this loss of freedom, but the easiest is to let people know that restricted devices don't do what they want to them to do.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
My Book(TM) World Edition(TM)
What it holds:
Up to 285,000 digital photos
Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 25,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 400 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 100 hours of HD video
Seriously. There's no way in hell I would buy this thing. The last thing in the world I need is my hard drive deciding what files are and aren't okay to store. Are they on drugs, or what?
Here is a complete list of file types it cripples the functionality for.
The funniest part is the "What it holds" section at the bottom:
Why do that when you can just not buy this junk in the first place?
It's not like this is high tech or anything. There are probably at least 20 chinese manufacturers that will gladly sell you something with the same functionality, but none of the restrictions.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
That's a much better suggestion :)
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Come to think of it, same goes for the .jpg files, too. Hmmmm....
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Well that is useful.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
How about not buying a crippled product in the first place?
Developers: We can use your help.
Here's a good one: the product description page for the drive lists its approximate capacity for storing different media types. They specifically state that it can hold approximately: 500,000 songs (MP3) 800 hours of DVD quality video Then, in their list of restricted files, it states that you cannot share MP3 or VOB files. Seems to me that this borders on fraudulent advertising: "You can use this device to store and share as much data as 500,000 MP3 songs, but you can't actually share MP3 songs." Granted, they have a bullet-point which indicates that common media formats cannot be used, but then why are they using those same formats to illustrate the capacity of the drive?
Western DIgital Cripples Network Drives... just by using Western Digital drives.
The mybook we II runs Linux, and it's trivial to get shell on it. You can make it do whatever you want.
If you really want to know the travesty about the internet access to it, read up on the web. It's a java-based system called Mionet which requires a special client on your windows machine that you'll use to access it remotely. Did I mention the $50/year that you pay a 3rd party to access your own files? Mionet inexplicably forces you to go through their server to get to your files. Do a google search to find horror stories of Mionet being down and people being unable to reach their own files for more than a day. I'm a programmer - I know of no reason to create it this way other than to extract ongoing revenue from those who don't know better. Using dyndns and an open port will let you get to your files reliably from anywhere.
As for mine, I got shell, disabled the mionet stuff, made sure sshd was coming up every time, and I use it as a really slow Linux machine with a large disk. Be forewarned, it's dog slow. It has a gigabit ethernet port on it that typically pumps out about 50Mbits/sec. Seriously, a 100Mbit port would be half-wasted. Let's not even talk about write speeds.
If you buy one, note that you also don't need to use their windows setup utility, it has a complete web interface.
I paid $300 for a 1TB drive, which, frankly, was little more than I would have paid for a plain external drive at the time. Bonus is that I can connect another usb drive into it and share it on the network.
And one other bonus - it comes with a complete toolchain on its 3GB linux partition, so you can build software on it without having to install other toolchains on another linux machine. The 200MHz processor isn't the fastest at building, but it does fine.
Do you have ESP?
How on earth are they going to block these formats when they can't even spell them?
I hope the device genuinely blocks the extensions 'dvix' and 'oog' instead of 'divx' and 'ogg', that would be too funny.
Renaming every single file you have to something different gets to be a pain in the ass.
I currently have to do it with only one operation (zips via gmail) and its just annoying.
Why not just get a device from a vendor who doesn't fuck with their customers?
liqbase
In a sarcastic sort of way. Here's a comment that someone left:
According to the WD site one of the benefits of the drive is that you can:
"Listen to the music on your My Book World Edition drive while you're on vacation."
and it can hold:
Up to 571,000 digital photos
Up to 500,000 songs (MP3)
Up to 50,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
Up to 100 hours of Digital Video (DV)
Up to 800 hours of DVD quality video
Up to 200 hours of HD video
See for yourself at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=340
Just FYI, Win NT/2K/XP/Vista doesn't restrict you to 3 character extensions anymore, and therefore sees .removethis as different than .rem.
.removethis to get it to work.
You would have to associate
What about backing up media files?
I don't see anything about restricting .IFO, or .VOB files. Also, I don't see any restriction on .OGG or .OGV. So, basically its the major media sharing formats - theres nothing against ogg vorbis, or any number of other filetypes.
I think its because advanced aliens are against file sharing. If we don't have good copyrights, then the planet will be vaporized, as advanced civilizations basically sell travel books to each other. Piracy threatens the Galactic economy. You do know that the original Cylon - Human dispute was over DRM?
This is my sig.
Here's a much better idea: buy Seagate, Hitachi, or Samsung instead. Why on earth would you want to reward a vendor for doing the wrong thing?
Dammit! It looks like they won't let me share my .oog files...
This guy's the limit!
Really, WD?
Is it your place to be the cop here? Shouldn't I - as a fully aware (or not, the law doesn't make a distinction) adult - have the freedom to share whatever type of file I wish?
Wouldn't (and shouldn't) it be my butt on the line if I'm sharing my 19 volume set of "The Best of Barry Manilow" all willy-nilly across the Internet?
Please get your industry-browned nose out of my business, and let me worry about the repercussions if I get caught violating copyrights.
If you're going to pick sides on the media's "war on the public", you had better be on the same side. I for one will not be buying any more Western Digital products. I don't recall giving them permission to censor what I choose to store on a hard drive. I hope this comes back and bites them in the face.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Look at the list of file types it refuses to share! I mean any mp*, AVI, AIFF, MOV?
Think of how far out there, mentally, you have to go to equate simple file formats with "unverifiable licensing"?
Seriously, these small but deliberate attempts to "narrow down" the ability to share information, except where and when the puppet masters dictate, are quite disturbing. This product/company needs to fail.
Wtf is a hard drive company doing in deciding which files you can serve? Me thinks a boycott is called for...
Where in TFA does it say that the system is that, "dumb"? I figure it'd atleast be smart enough to read the first hundred bytes of the file and check for headers... then again this is WD we're talking about.
>>> A reader noted that the media files are only restricted between users of the same drive. Not quite as bad as originally pitched.
I still wouldn't buy one. Furthermore I'd demand a refund including shipping costs on any product I accidentally bought that didn't make this functionality VERY clear on the packaging, and also on the web-page if I bought it online.
"Western Digital restricts sales of network drives"
ggself
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Hacking is fun in itself, but when something is painfully broken as this, it's more of a chore. I'd much prefer to buy a drive that shared all files to begin with.
I'm the guy behind most of the disposable digital camera hacks (to allow people to get their pictures), and there are some parallels with this product. It would have to be heavily discounted or offer some other unique novelty before I'd touch it.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I don't understand why all these corporations feel like they are suddenly in the business of policing for the RIAA/MPAA
Cause they don't want to get sued.
Do those trigger the self-destruct feature or something? Who in the hell do they think they are?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I think the QNAP devices are far nicer, though they will be more expensive in the long run. They even run linux and are customizable (people run all sorts of different server services from them).
:)
Here is a bunch of their different devices (newegg.com link).
I'm considering getting the TS-209 (or the PRO, haven't made up my mind), personally. I have two 320gb SATAII drives sitting around not doing anything since I've stopped running WHS and could really use a nice low power device to replace the computer I was using for this task.
bork bork bork!
The answer is obvious. Vote with your wallets. Don't implement work-arounds. Just don't buy it. If enough people do that they will get the message.
For those of you who can't read the updates. WD restricts access to media (in a half-assed way) when shared, essentially, "to the public". In fact they probably have to do this. Joe user dumps his MP3's on the disk, connects it to the net, then later wants Jane to have access to some other files. Oops, Mp3's shared - Joe has illegally shared copyrighted material. Both record companies and Joe can sue WD.
So nothing evil here, outside of the fact that WD probably has to do this to CTA (cover their asses).
My_Encrypted_Volume.dmg
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Someone at wd asked the question, "Could we be liable for hosting illegal content on our devices?"
Which should read - "Could we be liable for 3rd parties storing illegal content on their devices?"
Bigwigs answer - "Yes"
Management, in their infinite wisdom, "Take it down"
Was it Shakespeare that said, "First, we kill all the lawyers"?
I was thinking about getting a "My Book" for someone this Christmas, but if this is the sort of shit they're up to....
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Are you friggin serious? They're really saying "if you call your data something dot mp3 we won't take it but if you call is data something dot someting else it works fine"?
Really?
Oh well. Their drives are banned here for near universal premature and catastrophic failures anyway.
Figgers.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Use FUSE and a shim module that renames files.
There. Two quick ways to get around this.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I make quick time and flash movies along with podcasts for the software I write.
Needless to say, it can take up some disk space.
Thanks for the tip on what NOT to buy!
I've been trying to get WDC to honor their warranty on one of these very drives for over a month now.
I have a two-disk version and one of the disks failed. It should be pretty simple to replace it under warranty, right? Oh, hell no.
Never again will I buy another WDC product if I can help it.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Just do as the v-1=@+g_r.A spammers do when it comes to file names.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Gmail currently does not restrict *.rar files (nor does Gmail scream at you for what file types your compressed RAR volume might contain). Use WinRAR for free. http://www.rarsoft.com/download.htm
It works in: Pocket PC, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and MS DOS. I love it so much I *GLADLY* PURCHASED IT! ($29) So call me a WinRAR fanboy.
It is a superior replacement to WinZIP (and other zip clones) with better compression algorithms (and you can also encrypt your compressed files AND their filenames WITH authenticity verification plus it handles everything WinZIP does).
The only question is weather they bowed to pressure from the RIAA/MPAA or if they were just too cheap to actually provide that much online storage and bandwidth. I'm guessing the latter, since the RIAA and MPAA would probably rather let people store "pirated" movies and music so they could collect info about thousands of so-called criminals all in one place.
I noticed that they didn't list the ogg container or any of the flac, theodora, or vorbis codecs. Users take note - open source pays.
That means nothing to me! How many Libraries of Congress, please - a relevant unit of measure if there ever was one.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Hey, I didn't see Ogg Vorbis on the list. I demand Linux equality!
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Right, because I am absolutely going to buy a device that requires me to rename all my files before I can actually use them. /sarcasm.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
So, apparently, because Western Digital can't determine whether or not I have the correct license to share my files, from a device I own, I'm not allowed to do it?
Crazy.
Whatever happened to "substantially non-infringing use"?
One could imagine an archive of freely redistributable video. I would have a use for such a device.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Or, just set associations so .REM files open with Media Player Classic.
:-)
Oh sure that works great for "Shiny Happy People".REM. But then you need "Sunday, Bloody Sunday".U2 and so on - imagine the size of the file association list!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Things like this make my buying decisions easier.
"NOPE!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Let's say you and your wife have a music system.
You throw a CD in it and play it while you're both in the same room. Or you watch a DVD movie together.
By Western Digital logic, you've just violated copyright!
This is the same idea - prevent two people from accessing music at the same time - even if they're both on the same local network in their own home.
It's utterly idiotic.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Can't be that good - it's still by Metallica.
Or the makers of kitchen knives, screwdrivers, chainsaws, bullets are in a lot of trouble. Fuck WD.
Zip the files. Or Rar them. Or 7z them.
There is no way to reliably identify digital media. Even if they were to develop a $500m fingerprinting technique, it can be easily defeated by simply XORing the files.
And yes, I just verbified a bunch of nouns. But at least I didn't worsify it by verbifying adjectives.
Buy them again?
;)
Copyright violating scum.
err....you mean Metalband_Enter_the_Sand_Dude.txt right?
You expect a lot but apparently don't really bother reading TFA. That would deny you the chance to tie this into the evil Microsoft, and that's probably unacceptable.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
these 3 links are the only three i found regarding hacking the WD mybook i linked all three here: http://nas-central.org/ALL_COMMUNITIES/Collection_of_NAS-Hacking_communities.html#http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/ take a look at http://nas-central.org/ALL_COMMUNITIES/Collection_of_NAS-Hacking_communities.html i tried to find all NAS-hacking communities that currently exist. i hope it helps you all. -- mindbender
Usually these filtering methods are so dumb that they go by file extension. So I have a .jpg 2Gb in size.
Why on earth would WD even do this to one of their products?
I can't imagine that they, a device maker, fear being sued by the RIAA / MPAA.
So i guess that includes media that is legal to share.
Nice move, selling defective products by design. ill be sure to avoid WD products in the future.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or even truecrypt for those not able to use fuse.
Why would I buy such a large drive if I don't intend on using it for media.
It really isn't WD's place to restrict filesharing.
This is truly a troubling precedent. The problem is that by building a device which automatically attempts to enforce copyright law, they build a precedent which can be used against them in the future:
Electronic devices don't decide what's legal and illegal - the courts do. When people think that they are capable of doing so, two key things are going to happen:
It is really unfortunate when our fear of what someone might do with technology overrules the good that they are doing with it.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I've lived in Eastern Europe for a couple of years now, so I know exactly how this works.
You make the laws so impossible to comply with that everyone _has_ to break them in order to live a normal life .. Then you make sure it's easy to break them. That way noone accuses you of being totalitarian anymore because you're essentially letting people get on with their lives, but you always have a lot of broken laws and bureaucracy to fall back on if you want to a) screw some poor little man or b) show everyone else what awesome laws you have.
WD have been very clever with this.
Anyone with enough brainpower to plug the thing in properly can work out how to get around this 'protection' in some way or another, and that's _not_ including the inevitable crack+hack that just eliminates the stupid problem in the first place. If a consumer wants network shareable storage, then only Richard Stallman would go elsewhere on moral grounds .. Everyone else is going to buy this thing regardless of its crippleware, disable or get around the crippleware, and get on with their lives.
...But when the RIAA or MPAA come knocking on WD's door, asking where they get off making terabytes of data available over the internet, WD can throw their hands up and say they employed every possible means of stopping potentially copyrighted materials (which, as it happens, is probably true) and that anybody circumventing that protection is in breach of the EULA we can assume will be lying at the top of every newly opened box.
I think it's completely brilliant.
... even if I am standing right behind Stallman.
Holy crap, did anyone look at the list of unsharable file types?
AAC Advanced Audio Coding
AIF Audio Interchange File
AIFC Audio Interchange File
AIFF Audio Interchange File Format
AMF DSMIA/Asylum Module File
ASF Advanced Streaming Format
ASX Advanced Stream Redirector
AVI Audio Video Interleave
CDA CD Audio
DVI DivX AVI
DVIX DivX AVI
FAR Farandoyle Tracker Music Module
IT Impulse Tracker
ITZ Impulse Tracker
KAR Karaoke MIDI
MDZ Cubic Player/Cross-View Music Module Description
MOV QuickTime Video
MP1 MPEG Layer 1 (Audio)
MP2 MPEG Layer 2 (Audio)
MP3 MPEG Layer 3 (Audio)
MP4 MPEG Layer 4 (Video)
MPA MPEG Audio Stream, Layer I, II or III
MPE MPEG Video
MPEG MPEG Video
MPG MPEG Video
MPGA MPEG Layer 3 (Audio Stream)
MPV2 MPEG Audio Stream, Layer II
OOG OOG Bitstream
OKT Oktalyzer Tracker Module
PTM PTM - Poly Tracker Module (Audio)
QT QuickTime Video
QT1 QuickTime Video
VOB Video Object (DVD Video)
VOC Creative Labs Sound
WM Windows Media Audio or Video
WMA Windows Media Audio
WMV Windows Media Video
You've gotta be f*&^ing kidding me. I have _dozens_ of Western D drives around here, none of which have failed in almost 20 years. But their reputation just went straight to the gutter.
Wow. Just... wow.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=381619&cid=21599579
of text!?! I can finally publish my thesis!
[1] You won't believe how clever my trick was for restoring them at the other end.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
restricting the types of files the drive will serve up.
How difficult would be to rename a file even for a typical average windows lamer?
There you are, staring at me again.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php
Contact their service and support line and politely let them know you will no longer purchase any WD products which are defective by design. Especially let them know if you have purchasing authority for IT departments. If a few hundred do this, or better yet a few thousand then they might just get the message.
My rights don't need management.
http://textfiles.com/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
After purchasing a MB 500MB unit a while ago I was fairly impressed with the device... Now they can stick their latest incarnation where it belongs.
there will always be some japan or china based company that WONT build this crap into their products.
and i will buy them.
the day the stuff i buy doesnt do what *I* want. is the day it gets turned into a paperweight.
in short. fuck you western digital. i sure wont ever buy your shit again. you're nothing but the media mafias bitch. western digital sucks and swallows.
i dont even like the idea that wd thought this up. let alone did it. western digital sucks dick.
did i mention fuck you western digital? let me say that again. FUCK YOU WESTERN DIGITAL!
That's because they misspelled it OOG. Or is that some other filetype I've just never heard of?
I know more than you drink.
...and therefore seesWhen things differ, they differ from one another.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
In the WD FAQ it lists OOG, not OGG.
Interesting.
Or, you could use something besides yet-another-proprietary-format and use tar + gzip/bzip, or 7zip.
As a matter of fact, 7zip has good support for them...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
So if you make your own videos and edit them with Movie Maker or iMovie or whatever, you can't put it on this device? If you are using GarageBand or have an actual Garage Band you are also out of luck. (I think a pretty significant number of people are in a band or have been in a band in the past).
they might as well just scrap the entire project if customers will be unable to use the device.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This means that I will have to zip my files before illegally posting them up on the internet. That is way too much inconvenience so I just won't do it.
Can it share zip files?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
The word you're looking for is snuck.
Or just use 7zip. http://www.7-zip.org/
Better compression than RAR, and Open Source!
Runs on and probably your toaster.
http://www.freenas.org/ ...You know you want to anyway.
>> Practice Safe Hex
Argh, I did a witty < insert your list here > joke that got eaten :( (after "Runs on")
You could save a lot of money buying crippled stuff.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The NFSU2? I had read about it as a linux server.
I happen to use an Apple Airport Extreme myself, because I can hook any usb hard disk/storage device to it (even though a hub) and share it over the network. It has the ability to have unrestricted access, guest access for the 'public' portion, accounts with passwords and their own private shares (sorry, no quotas, but I think you can setup partitions directly on a computer and it'll work fine). Works with Mac and Windows easily, and probably with Linux since it works with Windows. I personally like it a lot, and freedom of drive model/manufacturer choice is nice.
For context, click Parent.
Except that there's no such restriction. Somebody has confused a software feature called "Anywhere Access" with the drive itself. AA is a feature that lets you pull your files over the web. WD, not wanting to waste a lot of effort dealing with takedown notices, won't let you use AA to share media files with other people. (You can use it to access your own media files.) You don't use AA to access files over LAN, so restrictions built into AA don't apply to local access.
This is the thing I hate most about the blogosphere. Some idiot gets his facts wrong, and everybody passes the story along as gospel, without taking 5 minutes to check the facts. Cory Doctorow is particular bad that way, which is why I no longer subscribe to BoingBoing.
Agreed. Grandparent lends credence to the stereotype that RAR is a warez format.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
But without the other features, the thing seems pretty much like an array of hard drives to me, ho-hum. One of the things that would set it apart is the built-in extra functionality. If I just wanted hard drives, I'd go out and just buy hard drives and probably save myself some cash in the process. If I want the built-in extra functionality... Well, I'd still go out and just buy hard drives, because I don't want it deliberately crippling and denying me the legitimate use of those capabilities because of some imagined illegal behavior that I haven't and wouldn't engage in.
It would be a little like buying a GPS unit with built-in maps. The catch is, though, that because someone might rob a bank on Main Street, no streets beginning with the letter M will be shown on the maps.
No thank you.
And if you made those files yourself and you need those backups?
Good job assuming everyone's a cheat. Which record company or movie studio do you work for?
i am a soviet space shuttle
Just slap a .TXT extension on the end and suddenly, your files are legal!!!
Have gnu, will travel.
I lost you at "Windoze" and "M$". Try again?
How not to sell overpriced whitebox hardware. WD's home NAS hardware line might have fallout on their internal drive sales if they are not careful. Somebody probably needs a new job after Xmas when the angry users show up.
As such, they cripple that option in order to maximize drive life time and make sure its REAL primary use is back ups.
It is utterly useless for backups unless you are happy to have random file extensions excluded from you backups or restores when performed remotely.
OK unclear parent post,
My point was that the music industry need you to buy your music again and again and again to maintain their profits, digital copies prevent this, therefore surely you shouldn't be allowed to make backups, and if WD is worried about the legal implications then you certainly shouldn't use one of their drives and put them at risk!!.
Didn't the word 'scum' give it away? I didn't think it was a word in general use outside of satire.
To be totally clear, I think backing up stuff you have bought is sensible and should be legal (it isn't in some areas), I think format shifting media you have bought should be legal (it isn't in some areas), I also think that copyright terms should be reduced. The entertainment industry needs to shape up and stop treating customers like criminals. However, I do think that *real* copyright violations should be punished (in a civil court) with appropriate penalties depending on the kind of violation.
Rename song.mp3 song.xxx
copy song.xxx WD:song.xxx
Profit!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Western Digital suck.
Always have, always will.
Why is another bad product a surprise?
à_à
Uhh... Why not rar or zip these things up? Even with no compression at all... Something like zlib allows random access into a compressed file without having to first decompress the entire thing... I fail to see the problem
and associate pvi with your media player.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Just delete it.
Objection! Your honour, he's wearing a tinfoil hat.
Beeep Beeep Beeep
:p
The sound the RIAA money truck makes when it is reversing into WD's office to deliver the payola
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Or, send them an email to let them know how much they suck: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php
I decided to spend a little more and get much more space, by building my own.
...and it sucked. Therefore, all these comments are moot, because it was absolutely the worst hard drive or SAN solution I've ever purchased by far. The drive access speed, despite being on a simple gigE network was atrocious, less than 300k (computer-to-computer speeds on this network often go near 40x that speed). The MioNET software itself seems to be compatible only with M$ Windows, and the shares management interface sucked. Also, although this particular issue never happened to me, I've read stories about people permanently bricking the thing - if you hack its filesystem too much, there's (supposedly) no way to recover your data from the thing. Yikes. Back to CostCo...
Thinkingman.com New Media
why bother buying one in the first place . Use your old or new box as a LAMP server edit the httpd.conf to only allow user/password from friends and family( or as a normal server ) and be done with it .
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
Welcome to the world of Treacherous Computing.
Don't restrict me bro!
Partial restrictions some people can get around are no less odious. The intent is the same and they are designed to get you used to a restricted world.
It's clear that WD was advertising the device people want but delivering something else. This WD page promisses:
It even has pictures of music on the beach and images flowing to multiple houses, but this page lets you know that you can't share anything with "unverifiable media license authentication" and lists every media type but text and still images. Copyright warriors want to know why WD hates poets, the press and photographers. Normal people are feel ripped off because getting around this dissapointment is beyond the average user. Other people have voiced their anger at the restrictions as described and described in detail how they suck beyond the description.
Anyone who thinks restrictions like this are OK needs to take a step back and ask themselves why a hard disk should not give you back your media on demand. If it does less than that, it's defective. Media propaganda continues to market restrictions as necessary and enabling. They are nothing of the sort. Digital media and networks are enabling. Restrictions just suck.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Well, it wasn't mp3s, but...
They were Windows NT and 2K machines on an NT domain.
There was a domain-wide policy banning students from using certain EXEs -- cmd.exe, among other things. There was also no Flash installed, and no way to install Firefox plugins. I don't remember if the policy was inclusive or exclusive.
What we did:
Portable Firefox+Flash on USB drives. Also, legacy Doom on USB drives, and really any program we wanted, so long as we were careful to, ahem, avoid the EXE restrictions, which were based entirely on filename (excluding path). I should mention that Notepad.exe is a bitchin' game... I mean a perfectly valid alternative to Word for working on our Senior Thesis.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
We are free today because thanks to GNU, Linux and other projects we can run our personal computers and our business machines on free software that we trust.
This was easy because the only thing that keeps you away from freedom when using closed-source software is a few hours work to write down your own code and share it...
But it was all possible because currently most hardware is still open and obeys the user. What will we do if X years from now hardware becomes predominantly filled with DRM? How will free people cope? Hardware is already closed-source and you cannot find technical documents, and this actually does limit our freedom (we want to run hardware on GNU/Linux or *BSD but manufacturers don't give technical documentation, so people rely on reverse engineering etc). Interestingly, in the past hardware was much more open, for example every home micro computer came with nice manuals explaining many technical details about your shiny new hardware baby or even books teaching you programming... Nowadays when people buy a PC or laptop they get a Windows-infected machine, with a manual explaining only how to connect the cables, and instead of compilers and programming languages (Even BASIC qualifies) they get games. To people who got used to computers from a young age, our era seems like a dark age of computing, as if the whole world became stupid within 2-3 decades.
So, to return to what I wanted to say, that's why we need open hardware (or free hardware). if the hardware is closed then it defeats the purpose of free software. We need more people to join efforts to design processors and other hardware under the GPL. At least this will solve the closed-source problem. We will still face the manufacturing problem (now, if someone could design a cheap 3D printer capable of fabbing chips). But hopefully if we design successful hardware using the GPL, more big manufacturers will notice it and start producing it. Otherwise, I suppose that free people will have to rely on homebrew computers or old hardware (by the way you will be surprised how long old computers can last... but the modern computers often break up after a few years, and this happens even with the modern HDDs that seem to break more often than older HDDs as well, as if they are engineered to make people buy new ones every few years).
Sadly when trusting technology development to a few big names (eg Intel etc), users end up being just that, users. They are denied the freedom to play and really own their machines. You can't be a truthful owner of our machine unless you understand every tiny detail about its operation, and this is only possible when you get up to start hacking it, breaking it, fixing it, and finally building your very own machine. This McDonaldisation of computers, both hardware and software, really makes me sick... I mean, where do people see the joy in using machines that do not express their own personality? Everyone runs the same software, the same OS, the same CPUs, the same beige boxes... Nobody feels any curiosity as to what is inside that beige box anymore. Nobody feels any urge to be true owners of their machines, to customise their machines, or to build their own machines. Yes, the free software movement is very good, but we need more than that. We need a more massive homebrew or free hardware movement. If you have kids, please teach them how to play with electronics and how to build stuff, and try to make them express their personality by building their stuff. Otherwise, if all kids learn is how to chat on MSN, then after the last amateur heroes die the whole society will be completely submerged in shit.
Chances are, you already own a DVD player/DVD drive that decides for you what types of DVDs aren't okay to read/play.
Is this any different? It is also possible that the next hard drive you buy will restrict the type of files, that can be stored on it and it won't be mentioned anywhere in the specs.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Obvious, like simply renaming the files?
Most systems of this type i've seen don't restrict by file type, just by file extension. If your using an OS that doesn't care about trivial things like file names, then you have no problems.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
In other news, Ginsu announced today that their knives will no longer be able to cut anything but butter. They were unable to verify that when their knives were used for cutting they were not being used for murder, so they started dulling all of them.
According to this list you can share ogg-files. However, you can't share oog, whatever that is ;)
OOG SUSPICIOUS. OOG KNOCK WD ON HEAD.
(oog defeat lameness filter with caps lock.)
A WINRAR IS YOU
Oh, except that 7zip does exactly the same thing and is free. Whoops.
Impulse Tracker?!? Oktalyzer?!? They're restricting demoscene tracker modules...
Now THAT is funny considering almost everybody who composes these files means to share them. There are huge repositories of them on the web. And why do they include only a few of these obscure formats and not others? What about fasttracker? I can share those but not IT?
Okay - somebody is definitely on crack over there.
>Use WinRAR for free.
:-D
For 30 days... "Free" like a Tim Horton's Roll Up The Rim To Win car.
I noticed on the page listing the filetypes - .wav is missing. Wonder why? Does no one rip CD's to .wav? I do all mine like that (then convert to another format for my ipod).
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
western digital has been making garbage for some time now.
stop buying.
"To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary."
No fucking way! On Slashdat???
To clarify, it actually seems as though this is a bad summary. The MioNET service that WD packages with the networked drives is responsible for the rights of users via the network. There are a few (obvious) ways to get around that.
A bad summary? Written by Cory Doctorow? How could that be?
Seriously, Cory's penchant for breathless & misleading headlines puts slashdot (and pretty much every other media outlet) to shame. By consistently writing such misleading summaries, he does himself and boingboing a gross disservice. On top of that, he makes it far too easy for ordinary non-tech types to completely dismiss him as a raving DRM-hating nutjob, and that does everyone who cares about free information a disservice.
Cory has single-handedly set back the anti-DRM cause by several years, in my estimation.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I make videos, legally. I have a camera. I take those videos and share them as .avi's.
Why should I pay for something so big, and so useless. Sure, I need space, all videographers need plenty of hard drive space. So rather than restrict it for the people making films, why don't they finally come up with a way to view movies for free legally? They've done it for TV shows on several larger networks websites. All it took was some advertising? This and the article about copywrite cops got me mad enough where I might just make a film about the whole thing. I'll call it "Jack Valenti: Back from Hell's Prison"
Peace to p2p users everywhere. Keep downloading, we'll keep shooting.
On a *ubuntu or other Debian-related system:
sudo apt-get install rar
And you have it for free.
/* No Comment */
From a link in the article (well, I removed some arguments from the URL) on "What files cannot be shared by WD Anywhere Access?"
"If these file types are on a share on the WD My Book World Edition system and another user accesses the share, these file will not be displayed for sharing. Any other file types can be shared using WD Anywhere Access.
File Extension File Description
AAC Advanced Audio Coding
AIF Audio Interchange File
AIFC Audio Interchange File
AIFF Audio Interchange File Format
AMF DSMIA/Asylum Module File
ASF Advanced Streaming Format
ASX Advanced Stream Redirector
AVI Audio Video Interleave
CDA CD Audio
DVI DivX AVI
DIVX DivX AVI
FAR Farandoyle Tracker Music Module
IT Impulse Tracker
ITZ Impulse Tracker
KAR Karaoke MIDI
MDZ Cubic Player/Cross-View Music Module Description
MOV QuickTime Video
MP1 MPEG Layer 1 (Audio)
MP2 MPEG Layer 2 (Audio)
MP3 MPEG Layer 3 (Audio)
MP4 MPEG Layer 4 (Video)
MPA MPEG Audio Stream, Layer I, II or III
MPE MPEG Video
MPEG MPEG Video
MPG MPEG Video
MPGA MPEG Layer 3 (Audio Stream)
MPV2 MPEG Audio Stream, Layer II
OGG OGG Bitstream
OKT Oktalyzer Tracker Module
PTM PTM - Poly Tracker Module (Audio)
QT QuickTime Video
QT1 QuickTime Video
VOB Video Object (DVD Video)
VOC Creative Labs Sound
WM Windows Media Audio or Video
WMA Windows Media Audio
WMV Windows Media Video"
What? They disallow that, but you can use vaguely similar formats, eh? They disallow IT, ITZ, FAR, AMF, OKT, PTM, but you can use S3M, XM, MOD, MTM, 669, PSM.. BMX, PSY.. etc. apparently?
They disallow OGG, MP3, AIF, VOC, but I don't see FLAC, WV, WAV, and AU in the list.
If they're going to block files on that service/whatever, they should block every last format under the sun.
"The following types of files are not supported by WD Anywhere Access (cannot be moved to a share):
File Extension File Description
TMP Windows temporary files"
Let's hope nobody needs to share any file with a TMP extension for some legitimate reason.
Well...guess this is yet another reason to NOT buy WD drives...
F all the drm zombies and their overlords in the RIAA!