One of the world's largest hard disk manufacturers has blocked its customers from sharing their media files online that are stored on networked drives.
A good reason not to buy their external drives... internal ones are still fine.
Any comment on this EMW? :P
Submitted by byrn on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:04
No there's the principle of not support a company that decides this is a good idea. Boycot is what I say that will learn em.
Submitted by Dwain on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:08
Yeah. Given the vast majority of commodity hard drives go into OEM machines I doubt it would make a dent. Between the lot of us we probably buy less than 10 drives a year.
Unless a company starts committing actual atrocities, I'll buy the cheapest similarly specced drive regardless of manufacturer thanks...
Submitted by byrn on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:17
I don't think your taking Fish into account there. I was acutally joking if I had any type of moral's I'd not be drinking Coke.
Submitted by Dwain on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:23
OK, make it 20 then :P
Submitted by byrn on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:24
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Dwain on this one. ;)
I'm certainly not averse to boycotting a company whose policies I disagree with. I'm prepared to pay a little more for a principle. Given that I'm looking to build a new RAID array at the end of this week, WD have just lost themselves one potential sale over this. Not a big deal to them I'm sure, but if the whole readerships of slashdot, digg and reddit say the same thing, then I bet you WD will take notice. The majority of HDs sold may go into OEM machines, but the margins on those units are far lower than on anything consumers buy.
At the end of the day WD is a corporation; all they care about is profit. If this looks like taking even 1% out of their bottom-line, they'll back-pedal.
Submitted by AggroBoy on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:29
Oh. so, it's just me then. Damn simu-posting.
Still, I stand by what I said.
Submitted by AggroBoy on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:30
I'm not above boycotting if it sends a useful message back to the company. Boycotting in general, at best, sends back the message "people are pissed off at you". Boycotting their external drives sends back a more specific message.
Given the media reaction to this story, I'm not sure how much more of a message they need to realsie how unpopular this is...
Submitted by byrn on Mon, 2007-12-10 17:51
This is with their NAS product (network attached storage) which uses one of our chips (the ox800 I believe) but all the software is their own I've not worked on that so I have no insight on to what the deal is. I do know it is essentially a embedded linux running on an arm so for someone with enough knowledge probably childs play to hack round.
To be honest I wouldn't recommend that gizmo for for any serious user as it's performance is not brilliant for a nas box it is just very cheap compared to the alternatives still with this kind of proscription on media types makes it especially unattractive for anyone.
As for their other boxes the DAS ones (Direct Attached Storage ie usb firewire or esata) I've had more involvement and wrote some firmware for some of their newer devices though they changed the name so often I have no idea what the street name is. They don't have these filtering problems they just function as normal drives. I'm not aware of any additional filtering crap that they might ship with it though we rarely see the finished product so who knows but all you'd have to do is kill the WD software and let the normal microsoft drivers take over.
I have long suspected that none of these products are targeted at the people like us they are aimed at people too scared to open their machine up and shove a new drive in. If you can do that there are very few reasons for having an enclosure.
As for boycotting WD well then you are going to be buying Seagate/Maxtor or maybe at a pinch Hitachi or samsung there isn't a lot of choice in the market really. Having worked with both WD and Seagate I'm not sure which of them I'd choose for stuff knowing what I know, they all seem as bad as each other, though they keep food on the table ;)
Submitted by Evilmatt on Mon, 2007-12-10 18:36
One think that's worth knowing is that while WD's drive division are monolithic their external product teams are a lot smaller.
For example at WD's HQ in Lake Forest California USA they have drive testing rooms with shelving units stacked to the ceiling running as far as the eye can see. Imagine a supermarket with all the shelves occupied by PC's pressed as close as they can get and a load of hard disks and you'll have some idea what I'm talking about. By comparison their facilities for the external drives are more of the order of a small store room filled with PC's. The teams involved are also comparably smaller.
So a boycott may well affect these small areas of their business better than anything else. With naked drives WD just flog millions of drives to oem's, end users not buying is going to be a drop in the ocean. Since their external market is that much smaller (and indeed in some ways more competitive) they are likely to feel it more.
Submitted by Evilmatt on Mon, 2007-12-10 18:45
True, but we don't buy many NAS or external drives I reckon.
Boycotting something you weren't going to buy anyway is easy but fairly ineffective ;)
Submitted by byrn on Tue, 2007-12-11 13:28
indeed anyone that can install their own hard drive is unlikely to want to spend over the odds to get one in a fancy box.
We might well buy one or recommend one for others though
Submitted by Evilmatt on Tue, 2007-12-11 13:55
I quite tempted by a network drive just cos I can't upgrade my laptop. I however am currently poor.
Submitted by Dwain on Tue, 2007-12-11 14:28
It seems it's not quite as straight forward as the initial story made out
the problem is in mionet the app they use for internet sharing and the filtering only applies to publicly shared files if you log into the box as it's owner then you can get at the files OK. The Mionet thing is also only over the WAN or internet, locally I believe it functions as a standard samba network drive.
It sounds a bit like WD are caught between a rock and a hard place if they made the box share avi/mp3 files publicly over the internet RIAA MPAA would sue them back to the stone age as soon as someone put a selection of rips on a box.
Comments
A good reason not to buy their external drives... internal ones are still fine.
Any comment on this EMW? :P
No there's the principle of not support a company that decides this is a good idea. Boycot is what I say that will learn em.
Yeah. Given the vast majority of commodity hard drives go into OEM machines I doubt it would make a dent. Between the lot of us we probably buy less than 10 drives a year.
Unless a company starts committing actual atrocities, I'll buy the cheapest similarly specced drive regardless of manufacturer thanks...
I don't think your taking Fish into account there. I was acutally joking if I had any type of moral's I'd not be drinking Coke.
OK, make it 20 then :P
I never thought I'd say this, but I'm with Dwain on this one. ;)
I'm certainly not averse to boycotting a company whose policies I disagree with. I'm prepared to pay a little more for a principle. Given that I'm looking to build a new RAID array at the end of this week, WD have just lost themselves one potential sale over this. Not a big deal to them I'm sure, but if the whole readerships of slashdot, digg and reddit say the same thing, then I bet you WD will take notice. The majority of HDs sold may go into OEM machines, but the margins on those units are far lower than on anything consumers buy.
At the end of the day WD is a corporation; all they care about is profit. If this looks like taking even 1% out of their bottom-line, they'll back-pedal.
Oh. so, it's just me then. Damn simu-posting.
Still, I stand by what I said.
I'm not above boycotting if it sends a useful message back to the company. Boycotting in general, at best, sends back the message "people are pissed off at you". Boycotting their external drives sends back a more specific message.
Given the media reaction to this story, I'm not sure how much more of a message they need to realsie how unpopular this is...
This is with their NAS product (network attached storage) which uses one of our chips (the ox800 I believe) but all the software is their own I've not worked on that so I have no insight on to what the deal is. I do know it is essentially a embedded linux running on an arm so for someone with enough knowledge probably childs play to hack round.
To be honest I wouldn't recommend that gizmo for for any serious user as it's performance is not brilliant for a nas box it is just very cheap compared to the alternatives still with this kind of proscription on media types makes it especially unattractive for anyone.
As for their other boxes the DAS ones (Direct Attached Storage ie usb firewire or esata) I've had more involvement and wrote some firmware for some of their newer devices though they changed the name so often I have no idea what the street name is. They don't have these filtering problems they just function as normal drives. I'm not aware of any additional filtering crap that they might ship with it though we rarely see the finished product so who knows but all you'd have to do is kill the WD software and let the normal microsoft drivers take over.
I have long suspected that none of these products are targeted at the people like us they are aimed at people too scared to open their machine up and shove a new drive in. If you can do that there are very few reasons for having an enclosure.
As for boycotting WD well then you are going to be buying Seagate/Maxtor or maybe at a pinch Hitachi or samsung there isn't a lot of choice in the market really. Having worked with both WD and Seagate I'm not sure which of them I'd choose for stuff knowing what I know, they all seem as bad as each other, though they keep food on the table ;)
One think that's worth knowing is that while WD's drive division are monolithic their external product teams are a lot smaller.
For example at WD's HQ in Lake Forest California USA they have drive testing rooms with shelving units stacked to the ceiling running as far as the eye can see. Imagine a supermarket with all the shelves occupied by PC's pressed as close as they can get and a load of hard disks and you'll have some idea what I'm talking about. By comparison their facilities for the external drives are more of the order of a small store room filled with PC's. The teams involved are also comparably smaller.
So a boycott may well affect these small areas of their business better than anything else. With naked drives WD just flog millions of drives to oem's, end users not buying is going to be a drop in the ocean. Since their external market is that much smaller (and indeed in some ways more competitive) they are likely to feel it more.
True, but we don't buy many NAS or external drives I reckon.
Boycotting something you weren't going to buy anyway is easy but fairly ineffective ;)
indeed anyone that can install their own hard drive is unlikely to want to spend over the odds to get one in a fancy box.
We might well buy one or recommend one for others though
I quite tempted by a network drive just cos I can't upgrade my laptop. I however am currently poor.
It seems it's not quite as straight forward as the initial story made out
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/12/wd-makes-big-mistake
the problem is in mionet the app they use for internet sharing and the filtering only applies to publicly shared files if you log into the box as it's owner then you can get at the files OK. The Mionet thing is also only over the WAN or internet, locally I believe it functions as a standard samba network drive.
It sounds a bit like WD are caught between a rock and a hard place if they made the box share avi/mp3 files publicly over the internet RIAA MPAA would sue them back to the stone age as soon as someone put a selection of rips on a box.