Western Digital Service Restricts Use of Network Drives 315
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.
Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
personal firmware (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I wouldn't. This is as stupid as it gets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wouldn't. This is as stupid as it gets. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.