511–520 of 701 posts
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The most reliable backup avaliable to a common man seems to be burning blueray disks and then posting to different friends/family
And then because that is so cumbersome and expensive, it gets done only once and when you have a disaster, you can restore your backup from a few years ago.
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…
I am afraid to buy WD drives since the mid 2000s. I used to store all my media in them, and with WD every 1 to 2 years, my drive would be corrupted to the point that it’d need formatting. Having to rebuild my collections multiple, with always “improved” WD models moved me away from them forever. I don’t even buy server grade WDs.
Backblaze does a survey every quarter, here is the latest one https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1...
They are all in the same ballpark, with Seagate a bit worse than the others but not terrible like it was a few years ago. WD tends to be consistently in the middle of the pack.
The latest fail from WD (as a hard drive manufacturer) was when they sneaked inadequate SMR technology into "red" consumer-grade NAS drives. But others did more or less the same. Now, all manufacturers are transparent about the technology used and newer "red plus" drives from WD are CMR.
So I'd say, for now, I'd say WD is as good (or as bad) as any other and I would let price decide. For reliability, that's what RAID is for. And in any case, RAID or not, and no matter how reliable your disks are, if your data is precious, you need backups too.
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…
From what I can find, this particular device was launched around 2011, and went end of support pre-2016. (Although potentially something that in hindsight WD would have wanted to patch anyway - assuming end users patch things). And maybe highlights that support lifecycles for IoT devices should be longer. Correction: End-of-Support appears to be last manufacture date (2015) + 3 years, so assuming 2018.
Four-year support for a device that is connected to the Internet is ridiculous. I bought a Synology device in late 2012 and it's still getting major release updates.
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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 des…
I highly doubt it, at least not with 100% certainty. We build bridges to last and to stand weather. These are enormous constructions with large safety margins, teams designated just for security (against weather, earthquakes etc) with peoples lives on the line. Yet, we need to inspect them on the regular to make sure no assumption broke, no safety system was triggered and nothing unexpected happened.
If we can't make this work at this scale, I have no hopes that software for comparatively cheap consumer devices manages to achieve this.
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Wow. Back door accounts are just totally inexcusable these days - manufacturers should be held to account if their back doors end up getting exploited by threat actors. (Granted, you could argue it’s hard to distinguish between a really terrible bug and a back door, sometimes, but “intent” should cover this difference…) Would you happen to have a write up/article about this series of events that isn’t a sanitized ser…
Try this: https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=160849&start=450...
The actual backdoor looks like the `jisoosocoolhbsmgnt` session ID [1] that was removed in the update [2]. It looks like a hardcoded session ID used for tests [3]. Leaving something like that hardcoded and active in the production code is inexcusable.
[1] https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=160849&start=495...
[2] https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=160849&start=555...
[3] https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=160849&start=495...
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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 int…
>remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power why would raising temperatures save power? probably a silly question but I'm confused.
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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 int…
>remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power why would raising temperatures save power? probably a silly question but I'm confused.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 int…
>remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power why would raising temperatures save power? probably a silly question but I'm confused.
Explanation for those wondering why this needed explanation: Most thermostats set the lower threshold before heating comes on, so turning it up would use more energy.
Is there any modern, reliable replacement for the old "Time Capsule" from Apple? I have a home server with samba, etc where I'm pushing Time Machine backups, but I'd prefer something standalone that doesn't require much setup. What are others using for this?