Western Digital network drives crippled -- no serving any multimedia files
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?"
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(Thanks, Gary!)
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Note to self: Don't buy a Western Digital product for the next 20 years.
Simple. Just name the file filename-mp3.txt...
We have three options here...
1. Think something like "damn that sucks" and move on with our lives
2. Be capitalists, and boycott Western Digital (my preference)
or
3. Let WD know that this is not acceptable.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1048
Sparrowhawk: Rename all my thousands of media files due to ridiculous and bogus limitations? No thank you.
I'll just not buy it, thank you very much.
Also, I've put a review on the Amazon product page that notes this issue (it won't show up for a bit). Hopefully this will keep too many people from buying this broken product.
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication" Western Digital is not a content provider, why do they need to verify media? Does my iPod need to verify my MP3s? I think the legal team got a little too overzealous. When people find out they can't access their multimedia files, they'll be returning them to the stores in droves.
Gee. Aren't they concerned that someone might have pirated text files? (I hear that's a big problem.) Or someone might try to share some pornographic jpgs. Someone useing their storage could be sending out trojans in .exe files.
I think that in good conscience they need to prevent their hard drives from connecting to computers.
Yay! I can share with myself!
Do you have to load the "WD Anywhere Access" to connect the drive to a network?
cop
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
not that they can spell..
MPV2 - MPEG Audio Stream, Layer II
OOG - OOG Bitstream
OKT - Oktalyzer Tracker Module
The WD anywhere access is not required for access to the device on your local network. You configure the device with a normal SMB share and Windows machines can see.
I bought one of these a couple months ago, and returned it 2 days later. It was crap. Very slow, the software for remote access requires a paid subscription, something that is not mentioned in any of the marketing.
I believe the remote access software allows the owner to see all files. The restriction is on allowing public sharing. That was my understanding anyway.
What a gobsmackingly stupid idea.
I've got a Western Digital 250Gb drive from a few years ago that I am planning to upgrade as it's nearly full. Guess which company I'm not getting that upgrade from?
I've no use for a storage device that will decide on it's own behalf what is or is not acceptable content. Western Digital can't presume to know whether I'm infringing a third party copyright by storing a given MP3 file, or whether the file is specifically CC licensed, or whether I recorded it myself?
It's deceptively marketed as being able to store up to 250,000 MP3 files (* will not operate correctly with MP3 files)
Western Digital realises it's got around five years to a decade to extract money from Hard Drive sales before they're made obsolete by flash storage, energy costs and MRAM, right?
Are there no be shareholders or employees at Western Digital who want to keep their company profitable and avoid a public relations melt-down?
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this just prevents the SHARING of any multimedia files through remote internet access with people other than the original uploader? And this is only when using the remote-access "WD Anywhere Access" program.
From what I can tell, it's run on a user-based system, and 1 user can't access those filetypes that other users uploaded. The original uploader can access whatever they want on the drive from wherever they are, so COOP, everything they're saying there is true.
If you don't use the WD Anywhere Access software, there's no restrictions on anything.
This is from about 30 seconds of research, but is this right?
Stupid Question, but can't you just reformat the drive and use your own networking apps?
To clarify - I still think this is pretty ridiculous, but it's not like it's not really really really trivial to get around.
Few things infuriate me more than my own systems telling me I'm not allowed to do something perfectly reasonable. (share my own video files with my local network for instance) The tech industry love-affair with DRM needs to stop, and unless WD changes this I'm not likely to ever purchase their products again.
That said, I think the limitation is a function of their bundled software, not the drive itself. (I've sent their customer service/tech support guys an email asking for clarification to be sure)
I own one of these and use it to host my 800gbs of MP3s. Frankly, its a piece of shit. Getting ready to replace it with a different NAS enclosure.
Saying you can't share MP3s would require that the WD Anywhere software actually worked, which it doesn't most of the time (in fact they had a complete outage of the system for several weeks a few months back).
Western Digital:
private company
free market
they can do what they want
why all the whining and sniveling?
start you own gosh-darned hard drive company
Western Digital:
hard drives
now suck ass
we can not buy from them
*sob sob sob*
i guess if you want something done right, make your own hard drives from scratch. Preach it, Father.
While this does have a certain farcical quality about it, I don't think the lawyers were necessarily being over-cautious.
If, as DarrylB says, a subscription is required for shared remote access, then a WD server is obviously in the loop during data transfer. That means WD would be at least as liable to legal action as a torrent tracker if they didn't cover themselves.
This is related to a rather specific feature of the device, it's not like you can't put any file you like on there (except it's larger than 1TB ;-) and make it accessible to anyone. Which makes this restriction all the more silly. User-hostile (read: customer-hostile) DRM would be bad enough, but this is just random crippling of usability and does nothing about 'digital rights' whatsoever. Note to self: Don't buy a Western Digital product, ever. I'm dead serious about that.
If this is only on the MyBook drives, why not just purchase the bare drive and an external enclosure of your own choosing?
I have never bought anything other than WD hard drives because of their reliability. I don't see myself changing brands over one product line. If those aren't selling, they'll either discontinue them or remove the restrictions.
Vote with your wallet, but consider all the options first.
Father Brown@18:
One of the most persistent misunderstandings of the workings of a free market economy is the bizarre belief that people who are disappointed with the quality fo goods or services shouldn't talk about it. Free markets rely on customers who are well informed about the quality of vendors' wares so that they can pick the good ones and therefore punish the bad ones.
Writing about bad products discourages people from buying them, which discourages manufacturers from making them, which improves the market.
What you're describing has nothing to do with the market. In the market, customers have a remedy beyond "start your own superior company" -- that remedy is "don't buy shoddy wares and help your neighbors avoid them, too."
...What sucks about this is that WD is pretty much the only drive manufacturer I trust these days WRT drive longevity. Seagate has a history of fab contamination - they can't keep from hiring undocumented workers as janitors who in turn can't read the "Do not use this solvent!" warnings in the clean rooms - which renders their drives unto boat anchors within 18 months guaranteed, and since they bought Maxtor, that leaves Fujitsu as the only halfway-safe alternative. WD drives may not be the fastest, but they last a lot longer. I've got a pile of all the drives that have crapped out on me over the past 20 years, and out of the 22 all but THREE are Seagates, and only -ONE- is a WD.
...That being said, rest assured someone'll issue a patch to get around this crap within a week. Stay tuned to Boing Boing for further updates :p
It's far cheaper just to by a bare drive and stick it in a sub-100 dollar PC (running OSS), than to buy one of these over-priced 9and now we know) crippled POSes. Especially if you're spending your Company's money.
No <strike> tag? tsk. ;)
The wording of this is a bit misleading...
After actually reading the information about this product- this makes sense. It has nothing to do with whether or not you can access your own files. They simply won't allow you to share them with anyone else. Their system allows file sharing over the Internet for other files. They just don't want to be sued by the RIAA and MPAA, or by an idiot that shares their media files and gets sued.
In short- if YOU plug this drive into your network- YOU can access all of YOUR files using YOUR login credentials from anywhere. That's pretty much what you want from NAS anyway. There are lots of other options if you want to plug a drive into the Internet and let anyone access it. If you really want to do that- the folks at PirateBay would probably like to talk to you, with the RIAA and MPAA close behind.
You can do more for less money with an older or cheap bare-bones laptop, a couple of 500GB SATA drives in USB2 enclosures, and Open Source software anyway.
WD is one of the few companies I'll still buy drives from, and I don't think they have done anything deceptive or wrong here.
Whats even odder is the fact you cant share any of the tracker formats.. Are people that worried about synth rips off old paula abdul tracks?
What? All those *.txt files are pirated ebooks anyway!
Finally a good argument to transcode everything to OGG Vorbis/Theora files.
That or encode everything in PGP container files.
Every time the MAFIAA pushes these things they just make transfer and sharing that much more robust.
What happens when drives no longer contain avi, divx, mp3, mpeg etc. files for the MAFIAA to scan for?
look dorks - those things are too expensive anyway
get a $40 case with a $60 mobo/cpu combo add in 512MB ram and add hard drives. install debian linux stable / or ubuntu for newbies and you have a much more functional box - 130-140 for the box/ps/mobo/cpu/ram and spend the rest on hdd's. 4TB worth should be fairly cheap - 800 bucks about?
BEAT THAT WD
@ Father Brown:
Ah yes, the free market objection. There's one in every crowd.
Let's set aside the unrealistic and somewhat farsical suggestion to "start your own gosh-darned hard drive company" and look at the other alternative pointed out by Cory, namely going somewhere else for the product.
This assumes, of course, that there IS somewhere else. Sometimes there is, sometimes there ain't. And demand may produce supply; then again it may not. An alternative also may not appear for years.
PS: I notice you used "gosh-darned" instead of "Goddamned," but have no compunction about using the insulting words "whining and sniveling." Feel free to self-edit some of those terms from your posts, too, please. Thank you.
@ WolfWitch
Misleading/inaccurate article summary on BoingBoing?!?!
say it ain't so!
@#31: I think you're expected to read the source material and decide for yourself. Or did you just read the headline?
NickD,
I did read the source material and decide for myself (see Comment #13). Now who's commenting without reading OH SNAP.
really though, I was only teasing. jumping on a story half-cocked is the internet way! the headline/summary IS really misleading, though! I supposed it's technically true, but the way it's worded doesn't really describe the entire actual situation
I think TubMan makes a really interesting point about the possible legal reasons behind this, and I wonder if we'll get some kind of official response at some point now that the "story" "broke".
WolfWitch - that's exactly right. The crappy internet sharing app restricts the outside sharing of most media. Which is stupid, because the only way another user of the service can see your files is if you add them to the access list. It's not public sharing.
What I find especially hilarious is that it doesn't appear to restrict any truly risky file types. So yeah, if you want to share your media with others, you can't. If you misconfigure it, they are free to browse thru personal documents, saved passwords, cookies...
but yeah, did anyone RTFA before ranting about it?
It was a rhetorical question, Pete. My point was that we shouldn't get too caught up in semantics.
I think the key thing here is that if you went to your local ComputerMart and picked it up off the shelf, there's no way you're gonna know that this restriction exists.
Quoted from the side of the box (2TB version);
"A simple and secure way to share data, pictures, music at home, in the office, and anywhere in the world - even when your computer is off".
There is no indication that you have to sign up for some sort of subscription service (you do) or that there are any rectrictions on the product (there are).
That's why this sucks.
coop
Now that the recording industry is sueing garages where the mechanic plays music loud enough for the customers to overhear, I can imagine a similar debate over stereos that won't play music over a certain volume...
"Did anyone READ the article? You can listen to any music you want. It's only when you SHARE the music by turning the volume up that it cuts out. They didn't want to be sued by the RIAA. A stereo that won't play loud is perfectly reasonable!"
yikes.
I'd say DRM like that is a dealbreaker on principal alone, even if you don't fileshare. What's next, they'll prohibit even storing files they don't approve of?
If one found themselves stuck with one of these bricks, I bet changing the offending file extension or placing it in a .zip or .rar would do the trick.
FWIW, batch renaming and changing extensions is pretty easy if you use something like MRename.
What "Father Brown" appears to mean by a "free market" is one in which businesses can do whatever they please, and anyone who criticizes them is condemned as "whining and sniveling."
There are many words to describe a society organized according to those principles, but "free" is not among them.
"free market"
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
ha ha ha
ha
Simple. You just zip or rar the files you want to share. Didn't see zip or rar on that list anywhere. Sheeesh--people get all up in arms about things like this that pretend to do something but actually provide no protection at all.
@ all the people suggesting a smallish computer with a couple of drives:
- energy cost (your wallet)
- ease and simplicity of setup
- energy cost (your kid's environment)
THAT's why.
Wait a minute, only audio and video are covered by copyright? I thought all file extensions could be copyrighted. After they fix this bug in the next firmware update, it will be a perfectly good file server that will serve anything except *.*
You could just hack it. mybookworld.wikidot.com
Folks, read the full WD page before typing:
Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the following file types cannot be shared by different users using 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.
You can still access locally and you can still use it as an external drive that hooks up to another system that then manages the sharing of files.
It's the "WD Anywhere Access" that is crippled, NOT the drive itself.
Oh for fuck's sake.
Another reason these drives suck:
2 MB Cache, sometimes when 8 or even 16 are advertised on the box. It's a crapshoot on what you actually get.
IDE native interface connected to A)USB 2.0 (defaults to 1.1) or B)Firewire C)Cat5 (I have seen all three versions at my local WalMart)
7200 RPM instead of 10,000 RPM like it should be (again a crapshoot, some actually ARE 10,000 RPM, and some have even measured out at 5400 RPM)
Buggy drive controller circuits (This is a problem with WD drives above 320 GB - it's almost like they hacked on the ability to deal with anything over 320 instead of designing a new controller)
The network controller interface on the enclosure is set to work at only the minimum connection rate on most home wireless routers that have NAS capability - 1/2 instead of 10/100/1000 via ethernet.
There's some other issues people mentioned as well, such as faulty software. Cooling is a big issue with these NAS devices from WD. They run hot.
My best guess is, on the manufacturing line, they are using surplus notebook drives as well as the normal hard drives they should be and claim that they are using. No offense to manufacturing stuff in mainland China, but this happens more often now that production takes place there instead of in Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan where WD used to have their drives made.
Another note: They do 1 TB by putting in dual 2.5" 500 GB drives and the controller in the enclosure reports them as a single drive to your system. Don't let them fool you. I've taken a few of these apart so I could scavenge the drives and toss the junk enclosure.
@#48
Some could argue that the drive itself is crippled...after all, it is from Western Digital. The same HDD company that only offers a three year warranty, whereas their major competitor (Seagate) offers a five year warranty for the same price.
Pete @15: "To clarify - I still think this is pretty ridiculous, but it's not like it's not really really really trivial to get around."
That they tried and did a really bad job of restricting how you use the device you paid for is not a mitigating factor.
If a house guest tries to steal your valuables, you don't invite them back just because you easily thwarted their attempt.
I'm certainly no DRM apologist (quite the opposite, actually) but headlines & summaries like this do the anti-DRM cause a gross disservice. Cory consistently comes off as a raving nutjob whenever DRM is mentioned, and writes grossly misleading headlines & summaries. This makes it much easier for the general public to dismiss the anti-DRM cause. In my estimation, Cory has set back our cause years by not playing straight.
Cory: If you want to criticize DRM (and you should) then you should really consider taking the moral high road. To publish what amounts to outright lies hurts us all.
Zieroh, if that is your real name, wtf? Name me three other people who've done more to inform people about the problems with DRM, and they can't all be Larry Lessig.
Ted - Your question is simple misdirection, and ignores the point that I made: In any situation, if one wants to criticize the opposition, doing so by what amounts to lying is sure to set back one's cause.
DRM is a huge threat to free information. No doubt about it. I fully support Cory in calling attention to the problem. However, writing breathless and incendiary headlines that aren't actually true, or are otherwise substantially misleading does the cause more harm than good.
In this case, the hard drive does *not*, in fact, prevent the user from storing, retrieving, or even sharing *any* file type on the local LAN. It just doesn't. To say so, or even suggest so, damages Cory's reputation and makes it easy to ignore everything else he says, even when he's not being deceitful.
Don't you think that's harmful to the cause?
If Cory can't refrain from sneaky, underhanded, deceitful summaries, maybe he should just STFU and let someone with higher moral standards do the talking.
Headlines with a loose fit to the facts of the story can cause a shrill effect of unaccountability, countering the reporting therein.
I think Cory is on the right side. I think Western Digital needs to fire their legal department.
boingboing and Cory are foremost in my Net education and tutoring as a cyperite. I just would prefer that Cory tighten up headlines. Best to err on the side of sounding reasonable when point out someone else lack of reason.
Western Digital will probably remain my favorite hard drive although I will be asking lots of questions prior to future purchases.
I am open to suggestions if this discussion is still active.
Thanks for the heads up, I was going to buy one of these tomorrow.
Now I'll go looking for a non-WD brand instead.
THE UNUSUAL SUSPECT: I purchased a Maxtor external drive and it has performed rather well. Yes, I know Maxtor drives aren't the highest quality, but this drive hasn't died within the first month like the rest I've purchased. I think they might actually be using higher quality drives in their externals than they offer for their internal stuff. Probably due to the fact that they can charge more for the external as internal drives are viewed as commodity parts nowadays.
Strangely enough just today a friend was describing me his experience with a WD drive that failed. He took it back to the shop and the techs could not even open the case to get to the drive itself.
nly nv dps wld use an external drive with pre-installed software....
nywy , Wndz srs wh dn't r-frmt vrythng vry wk dsrv wht thy gt ! - ctlly thy dsrv wht thy gt fllstp- hr hr hr...
DRM may be seen as a big deal in some professional environments , but it's just a minor inconvenience in a world of mass, wholesale copying. Break 'em down , folks! There is really nothing these desperate penny-pinchers can do to stop people from copying and sharing. And part of the reason for this is because the penny-pinchers are stupid.
Anyway, remix, mashup and all that is already passé , everyone knows the best stuff is original artwork that does not need to directly steal or copy anything.
After reading the advertising bumph of this drive and buying one. Shurly Not fit for the purpouse of which it was intended, springs to mind. and as for having to buy extra software for remote oporation smacks of profiteering.