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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.
^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"
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?
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
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
Or, just set associations so .REM files open with Media Player Classic.
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
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:
With regard to option 1, here's a good site
How about not buying a crippled product in the first place?
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
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
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?
>>> 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.
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!
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 ?
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).
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.
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
What if Joe created the mp3, and has owner rights?
What if Joe has Worldwide distribution rights?
How does Joe explain to his hard drive that he's not a criminal by default?
Why does Joe have to explain to his hard drive that he's not a criminal by default?
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
So, why doesn't the media companies sue MS for letting Kaza run on Windows? Same logic. Or what about Dell for selling computers that can function as a server?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
What kind of sad world is it when a manufacturer makes a device that can share files on the Internet. Joe puts his files on there and puts it on the Internet. Jane (and everyone) can access all of Joe's private files because he was too lazy/ignorant to bother securing them. Joe and record companies sue product maker because product performed AS EXPECTED!
There's been a lot of using the legal system to get compensation for people's own stupidity lately. It's sad that it's spilled over to products that now carry spurious warning labels (the frisbee that says "do not throw toward people") or functionality so limited as to make it not worth buying in the first place.
Of course, this whole post is based on the postulation that WD have implemented this blocking of files to cover their asses from legal action.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
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.
http://www.freenas.org/ ...You know you want to anyway.
>> Practice Safe Hex
But that could be applied to any number of things. For example, the purpose of a VCR recorder is to record things, Sony however won a case in which they proved that because the VCR had legitimate uses, it could be sold (that was before Sony became an arm of the *IAA and started making rootkits). A kitchen knife can have many uses, but they are still cutting and slicing, however, it would be utter stupidity to start making knives that automatically dulled whenever there was human presence. Or think of BitTorrent, there are many legitimate uses for it, I can download Linux ISOs and other Open-Source software, or I can download "protected" music and movies, however, if we started filtering .iso files from BitTorrent because I can send an image of a new game with it, that would be the same thing. There are Many, Many, Many other uses for sharing .MP3, WMA, OGG, AVI and other files via a network other then "unauthorized use" for example, you might want to send a MP3/OGG/WMA of someone in your family singing a song, however this would be blocked because it could be "unauthorized use" of it. Western Digital has gone to extremes to make sure that no one can use a 1 TB hard-disk as intended, to store and share media files, (I don't happen to have 1 TB of just text files.....) it is yet another product defective by design.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
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.
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.
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.