Western Digital network drives crippled
Found on Boing Boing on Wednesday, 05 December 2007
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?
WD can already stop shipping those, since they will sell like rotten donuts. It won't let you share 38 different filetypes, most of them audio and video formats. However, the amount of holes in this system are incredible. First, they disable sharing, so if you just let your friends use your login, everything works fine. Next, they seem to restrict by checking the file extension, so a simple blockbuster.avi.removeme file should share perfectly. If their software does check the file content, you can always store your files in archives (with passwords if they decide to check the archive content too). Plus, at some point there will be most likely a firmware hack to turn this piece of junk into something useful. Incredible that WD didn't whack the guy who had the idea instead of producing it.