My point is that the blog post is wrong, the BBC article gets its facts confused at best, and the Boing Boing article that seems to have started it all is an outright lie.

The restrictions only apply to their subscription service that lets you access the drive from the Internet like Back To My Mac. If you have that service set up and you have multiple users and one user uploads a file with one of the restricted extensions, other users won't be able to access it over the Anywhere Access. That user will still be able to access the file. The file will still be visible on the local network. For that matter, if you create a filesharing user, use that user to add the files, then give out the username and password to it, people on the outside will be able to see the files. They would also potentially be able to delete them or add new ones.

Again, if someone is depending on a device like this to serve out files to potentially paying customers, that person does not know what he's doing. I did some research into the system and it was apparently rather poorly executed. Lots of downtime, inconsistent results, and so forth. I would much rather just VPN into my router and access the volume as if it were local. That has worked for me for over a year and a half.

Turns out I was wrong about one major thing, though. The feature isn't a web portal on the drive. It's a web portal on what appears to be Western Digital servers that the drive connects to. At this point, it isn't particularly clear whether the filtering is being applied on those servers or on the drives themselves.

The issue is that Western Digital servers are directly involved in this feature to get around NAT (kind of like Skype or PC Anywhere). If they didn't do this, it's almost a certainty that the RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, etc. would all sue them. Western Digital doesn't exactly have Common Carrier or ISP status. They are adding as much of the feature as they can without opening themselves to absurd lawsuits. The alternative would be to have no such feature. It looks like the technical people wanted to do something cool and the lawyers went overboard just like they did with the Zune's 3/3 "squirting" or the Minidisc's bizarre encryption system.

I still own a Minidisc recorder because it was quite simply the best field sampler there was in terms of price and performance when I got it. Yes, it's a hassle getting my own recordings off of it, but that's what I have VMware for.

Zimmie-

Dude, you might want to actually *read* the blog post. "So if I use your drive the way you intend..." Thank you for playing, though.

The fact remains that a hard drive manufacturer is trying to implement incredibly restrictive DRM into their products, limiting legitimate uses simply because some people might do something wrong. Whether or not it actually prevents any wrongdoing is irrelevant (and believe me, no DRM has ever prevented any idiot with a Mac and Audio Hijack)-

Western Digital has declared that they don't just make drives, they control your rights to your data as well.

Dude, you might want to actually *read* the article. It only blocks from sharing the files over the Internet using the built-in web portal, Anywhere Access. It doesn't affect the actual network filesystem functionality. There's nothing preventing you from mounting it as /Volumes/EvilNAS, putting your Apache server's root directory onto it and sharing files that way, for example.

Anyone who trusts a NAS's web portal for sharing important files (like, say, ones that make money) doesn't know what he's doing, plain and simple.



This is almost as stupid as the morons who were shouting "Apple is going to be foisting Trusted Computing on users!" when they found out that the Developer Transition Kits has TCPA chips in them. People *still* think that every Intel Mac has a TCPA chip and were saying it was going to be required for Leopard. My shipping, production model doesn't, and I know a lot of people who would be very pissed if the brand new Macs Apple sold them wouldn't run the latest operating system they came with.

The same people who shouted that everywhere are probably the ones who believed that Apple was going to use Pentium 4 chips and a BIOS. That was even worse, because there was every indication that no, they wouldn't be using either Pentium chips or a BIOS. FireWire Target Disk Mode can't be properly implemented in a BIOS, and that's a big feature of Macs.

Simply put, no. Read the bloody facts. They disagree.

Thankfully (or maybe not), it only applies to their network-attached drives [more details: http://tinyurl.com/254z97]. External USB/Firewire and internal drives are as of yet unaffected, so my Airport Extreme network and Passport drives are safe -- for now.

Now, I'm not condoning what they're doing here. In fact, I'm with you that this is another dumb idea on the parade route of dumb ideas. No doubt someone in WD's management has had their ear tugged on by the likes of the Hollywood and/or Big Music.

Sadly, most of the people these devices are marketed to will not realize they've been duped until they face the frustration of why they can only listen to their music from the one computer that's 100 feet from the stereo.

From the sounds of it, I have purchased my last Western Digital drive.

Yea, I read this last week. Talk about a short sighted move. Pandering of this kind is sure to give your competitors a leg up. After all, we all know that all video and audio files are pirated right? What a stupid move.