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WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

arstechnica.com

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Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#431

Post by mnw21cam »

lrem wrote: post #306
throwawayboise wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12 years? Typical business life of a computer is 5 years. Typical service/support agreement is 1-3 years. Try getting Apple to address a failed hard drive that's 12 years old. They'd laugh in your face.

As they should. A drive failing after 12 years is a successful outcome that only 50% of drives reach.

Yes, but there's a difference between the expected rate of mechanical failure, and the existence of a software bug.

The current fault erases everything on the drive. That can be equated fairly equally with mechanical failure. Let's imagine a different bug for instance, that allows anyone on the internet to read/write all the data on the drive. If one of these bugs emerged after 12 years, then there is a much stronger argument that the manufacturer should fix it, because it is a fundamental fault with the device.

Under the sale of goods act of 1979, the device must be suitable for the purpose for which it was sold, and there is no time limit on that, so any consumer with the device could demand that the person who sold it to them fix it. The device was unsuitable for the purpose for which it was sold from day one - it just took 12 years to find that out.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#432

Post by dtx1 »

objectivetruth wrote: post #251
goatinaboat wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree if't s a non-EoL products. This, not so much. A company should not be permitted to just declare something “EoL” if it is still in widespread usage. They made it, they support it as long as any customer still has it.

Products are sold with a warranty. If you want guaranteed support for X years beyond the warranty, pay for an extended warranty. If the product in question doesn't have an available extended warranty, then pick another product. Telling every hardware maker "you have to support every device you make forever" is ludicrous. I have some 15-year-old netbooks in storage that still power on, should eeePC have to "support" t…

> I have some 15-year-old netbooks in storage that still power on, should eeePC have to "support" them now? Should they have to maintain a repair depot with replacement parts forever? Should they have to just release their own version of Linux forever to support each model of hardware?

Yes, yes and yes.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#433

Post by Popegaf »

ivraatiems wrote: post #199

According to Western Digital[1], the CVE involved[2] has been public and unpatched since 2019. That's insane. There's "we don't support end-of-life devices" and then there's "we refuse to fix absolutely critical, crippling security vulnerabilities in devices just a few years old." This is well over the line. I smell (but have no idea of the merits of) a class action lawsuit. [1] https://www.westerndigital.com/support…

EOL should be made to legally mean: opensource or something equivalent.

If Windows isn't supported on my laptop, I can nearly always replace it with Linux and still keep it alive. With stuff like this, they can decide to never update it again or just turn off some critical service and render a device unusable. It's not just a thing about owning what you purchase and having the freedom to do what you want with it, it's also about the environment. Forcing things to become dangerous for use or just having the power to kill it remotely out of business interests means more electronic trash.

https://publiccode.eu/ goes in the right direction on a similar topic, but this should also start getting a bit of the limelight.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#434

Post by 3np »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #133
fallingknife_ wrote: post #125

Read this, then checked my old My Book Live. Sure enough... everything's gone. I just used it for continuous laptop backups over my LAN, so unless one of them crashes tonight, I should be good. But, this will certainly give me pause when considering WD products, and this type of product in particular. This is very bad, WD! Are your other products also vulnerable in this way? Why should anyone ever again trust your co…

> Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe? Because if you need a hard drive, your options are pretty much Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, and they've all had their own problems.

What did Toshiba do? I find them the most trustable in this range.

(Not that I would put anything like this past them; Japanese companies are notorious for leaving ancient buggy software at EoL)

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#435

Post by mnw21cam »

adolph wrote: post #162
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should anyone ever again trust your company to keep their data safe? Because if you need a hard drive, your options are pretty much Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba, and they've all had their own problems.

The affected model here, known as My Book Live, uses an ethernet cable to connect to a local network. From there, users can remotely access their files and make configuration changes through Western Digital cloud infrastructure. Western Digital discontinued the My Book Live in 2015. The support forum thread was first reported by Bleeping Computer. The affected product is not a drive but a NAS solution. In terms of be…

A NAS isn't actually distinct from a plain drive in that particular way. A plain SATA hard drive is a cheap computer with some attached hardware, just like a NAS. Literally, there's probably at least one ARM CPU core in there controlling everything and communicating over the link to your main computer.

The difference is the protocol that goes over the link. In a NAS, it's SMB/NFS access to files over ethernet/wifi, and for a SATA drive it is the SATA command set accessing blocks. The difference is small.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#436

Post by chris11 »

broknbottle wrote: post #247
R0b0t1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seagate mitigated their most famous problems. They were a good bargain buy for a while after that as they tried to rebuild their brand. Issue is now they're too proud of themselves, you're better off buying something else. They might still be the cheapest per GB for certain sizes, just look at the backblaze stats.

Seagate Exos drives are solid. All of HDD drives intended for consumers are 1 year warranty bottom of the barrel shit

One option is shucking a high capacity external. Those are more likely to be high quality. Some are rebranded enterprise drives. But the hd model isn't guaranteed, and warranty support might be iffy.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#437

Post by akie »

Legion wrote: post #318
boardwaalk wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't appear to have anything directly to do with Linux, just crappy software written by WD running on it. Please be a little more careful with your criticism.

I don’t think the commenter was criticizing Linux. Seemed more a comment on the manufacturers who lazily slap these products together with minimal effort. Taking a free OS, sprinkling a thin layer of their software on top, and then abandoning their responsibility to maintain the full software stack being a common example of that minimal effort. So, yes, essentially you end up with a bunch of devices running vendor-sp…

I agree, but it also makes me consider what the role of software engineering (as a discipline) is in this disaster.

Shouldn't we design systems that are hard to break by default? Shouldn't the OS assume that terrible things are going to happen anyway, and provide protection from bad faith actors in case the OS is indeed left unpatched for 10 years while being fully exposed to the internet? Is it even possible to design a system that provides this level of security so that we can get away with near-zero additional security expertise from product designers who build on top of it?

I think that, first of all, it's Western Digital's responsibility that things went south here. But shouldn't we build systems that provide bomb-proof security for the many companies that build on top of it? Is it even possible? And if so, how? In the end we would be doing ourselves (as consumers) a favor.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#438

Post by majewsky »

pope_meat wrote: post #412
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as most products become connected you will have to pay a premium for products that are not - especially as companies try to make profits from tracking (as in SmartTvs). People who are not rich enough to buy everything single purpose will have to pick and choose.

Personally I hope ecological collapse nips this black mirror future were tumbling in to. Things feel bleak.

If anything, ecological collapse might hasten this future.

Just last week, there was this news about the Texas power company that remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power and avoid brownouts/blackouts. This predictably caused public outrage as people discovered what was in the fine print that they signed without reading, but from the perspective of the power company, everything worked as intended, so I absolutely expect to push these remote-controllable thermostats even harder moving forward.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#439

Post by sokoloff »

jimmyswimmy wrote: post #261
goatinaboat wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would agree if't s a non-EoL products. This, not so much. A company should not be permitted to just declare something “EoL” if it is still in widespread usage. They made it, they support it as long as any customer still has it.

I can't agree strongly enough with you, though I'm not sure about the term you recommend. On the one hand, imagine if your car were end of lifed after a couple years. On the other hand, imagine if it took 20 years. The first would ensure you are screwed, the latter would encourage serial corporate bankruptcy. There's a good middle ground. Perhaps, like the 10 years for cars, it needs to be legislated. Perhaps this is…

Average age of a car in the US hit 12.1 years last year: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/averag...

In the case of car service parts, there’s a burgeoning after-market network of suppliers. I can probably find 5+ parts from different suppliers for brake wear parts for even 25 year old cars sold in significant volume. As someone wrenching on very much not-new cars for the family (and occasional friend), I don’t think we need a legislative solution for car parts.

Re: WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

#440

Post by dageshi »

alias_neo wrote: post #409
sharken wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like a business failure as in the decision to discontinue the devices were taken prematurely. But really as pointed out above, any IoT device will eventually have a security flaw discovered if updates are stopped. As a consumer the best bet is to switch to a supported device or disconnect the device from the internet.

As a consumer, this is the reason I have boxes with hundreds of £s worth of routers which I've taking out of commission, because the manufacturer stopped updating them. This really shouldn't have to be a consumer issue, it's wasteful to have to replace something like a router after the short EoL and inevitable vulnerabilities are found. Perhaps we need more modularity, so core components can be swapped out to upgrade…

Seems like the real answer is, you have to pay for ongoing support or the base cost of the device has to go up a lot or you roll your own with pc hardware and you're responsible for updating and making sure everything still works.
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