461–470 of 701 posts
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Connecting a hard drive directly to the internet is probably never a good idea.
The thought of enabling internet/outside access to my Synology DS218+ always made my skin scrawl. It will never happen.
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> 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…
Hopefully this flushes out the elephant in the room of the irresponsibility of manufacturers selling devices like this and then leaving the software unpatched / unupdated within a year or two of selling it. Unfortunately this needs to become regulated. Either commit to "lifetime" updates (at least 10 years) or be forced to put a massive warning on the label advising the secure period for which the product can be used…
That just effectively means a subscription. So your hard drive will be $100 + $10 a month.
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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.
PC hardware isn't ideal because you lose the benefits of specialised offload capabilities.
I'd be willing to pay a nominal annual fee for devices which are important to get firmware updates; router, WiFi AP, phone, etc.
To an extent I've partly achieved the modularity I speak of; after becoming fed up with decommissioning WiFi routers every couple years, I moved to router, switch, AP (Ubiquiti gear).
The dual RAID hard drive just started clicking one day, and no data could be read after that. Apparently using only one drive was not possible on hard drive failure or the controller failed. (I did not physically try to remove the other drive as the drives were somehow coupled, maybe mirrored RAID mode was not even possible)
This was about ten years ago. I would not touch another Western Digital product after that.
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I am trying to get rid of any smart devices in my life. I need less things connected to the internet not more. I bought Bruce Shneier's "Click Here to Kill Everybody, and that just convinced me even more. Software is a weak point, and I'd rather have the least amount possible in my "mission critical" everyday life gadgets. I want single-purpose, purpose built devices that do that one thing very well, without connecti…
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.
Regulation also helps, e.g., in the UK LG's smart TVs have a toggle to enable content fingerprinting, and it's off by default.
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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.
Tracking and ads. Now that your TV menus have ads embedded, it’s a small leap from there to have to watch a commercial before you can start your washing machine
No surprise. WD My Book was the worst purchase of my life. The dual RAID hard drive just started clicking one day, and no data could be read after that. Apparently using only one drive was not possible on hard drive failure or the controller failed. (I did not physically try to remove the other drive as the drives were somehow coupled, maybe mirrored RAID mode was not even possible) This was about ten years ago. I wo…
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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 fr…
The fact that there is after-market suppliers is more that manufacturers haven't worked out how to stop that on purely mechanical parts.
They would much prefer to tie you to their own maintenance network and parts if they could.