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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

#591

Post by wycy »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #540
brobdingnagians wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I never jumped on the “everything IoT” bandwagon, but recently I’ve relented a bit. I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”. I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc. I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient…

How could an oven or washing machine possibly be useful remotely?! I'm a fan of connectivity, but that just seems absurd for those appliances.

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

#592

Post by adolph »

pessimizer wrote: post #336
SOMA_BOFH wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they said the same thing about tylenol in 1982.

Somebody actually poisoned Tylenol. People realize that all the food they eat could have been poisoned in the grocery store. There's no easy mapping to "every external hard drive manufacturer could stop updating their products and your data could spontaneously delete itself."

True, a small computer running an Internet connected general purpose operating system should have a prominently labeled expiration date of some short time after the last patch. Use after that date is not recommended and potentially dangerous. WD sold something that looked like a toaster to the consumer but was actually a lump of cheese.

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

#594

Post by addingnumbers »

HotHotLava wrote: post #503
dannyw wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone didnt just figure ut out, it wss dislosed as a 9.8 CVE in 2019 .

That CVE only shows how to factory-reset a single MyBook to which you can connect and send HTTP requests. There's still something missing to explain how it could happen to seemingly all MyBook's at once, including those behind a NAT.

> explain how it could happen to seemingly all MyBook's at once

Explain what makes you think this happened to all of them at once. That's a huge leap

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

#595

Post by I_dev_outdoors »

majewsky wrote: post #438
pope_meat wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

These programs are opt-in and normally come with incentives like a $75 gift card or a free thermostat.

It's possible that people are using thermostats that are still provisioned to the previous tenets electrical bill.

It's a important technological achievement to be able to shift and schedule loads so that we can switch to more efficient energy sources. Requiring the power generation companies to service the upper percentage of usage is a lot of expensive environmentally as well as economically.

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

#596

Post by Nursie »

alisonkisk wrote: post #585
Nursie wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference - my 13 yr old BMW just got a recall repair due to a potential problem with the air conditioning system.

That's an interesting case. BMW knew about that back in 2012 but covered it up for 5+ years before finally agreeing to a recall. They perhaps are covering their butts against lawsuits due to thirty negligence. And they wouldn't want a new fire triggering extra attention to an old fire, and also they want to burnish (ha!) their brand image, unlike WD who has practically no competition. https://www.forensicdjs.com/blog…

Really? Huh. It's the second recall it's had in the last 4 years or so, the first one was a power connector of some sort...

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

#597

Post by elkos »

wycy wrote: post #591
8fingerlouie wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never jumped on the “everything IoT” bandwagon, but recently I’ve relented a bit. I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”. I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc. I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient…

How could an oven or washing machine possibly be useful remotely?! I'm a fan of connectivity, but that just seems absurd for those appliances.

Can connect with Google Home or Alexa or Siri and do phonetic commands like start program or stuff like that I guess.

I'm a new dad and when we both are busy with work, chores and the baby I find myself wishing I had IoT devices to automate a couple of stuff home.

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

#598

Post by belval »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #580
riffraff wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-technical users don't really buy hard drives individually, they would at most ask their computer-savvy friend or go to a shop who will replace it for them. I highly doubt the average non-technical user even knows who produced the hard drive they own.

Internal drives, you're right, likely wouldn't be bought by a non-techie alone. But THIS affected type of drive is specifically marketed to a very non-technical user, and I can certainly confirm my non-technical friends and family have bought products in this segment independently, whereas my techie friends steer clear. It's a NAS that's made to look like a drive. My techie friends would never buy it - they'd get Syn…

Your slight editorial opinion reminded me of this HN hot-take from the DropBox announcement:

> For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#599

Post by alias_neo »

xoa wrote: post #555
alias_neo wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I'm not opposed to any of those plans. 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 r…

> PC hardware isn't ideal because you lose the benefits of specialised offload capabilities. Just so you know, this isn't true. Nothing stops hardware offload from being put in a PCIe slot (that's where it tends to have started actually). And indeed that's a fairly standard thing on decent NICs, which don't have to be particularly expensive if you buy used. I've switched to OPNsense for routing functionality at all s…

> Just so you know, this isn't true.

Given my statement, you're correct, but what I meant to say was; I can't just take a random PC (-like) device and expect hardware offload or other similar capabilities, I still have to buy specialised hardware, a suitable NIC, e.g Intel. I make a point of buying Intel NICs for this purpose.

> But I'd caution against depending on them for routing

I agree. I've been running Ubiquiti for 5+ years now at home. At the time nobody was recommending against them, quite the opposite in fact. I use EdgeMax/EdgeSwitch/EdgeRouter + UniFi APs.

> VyOS or the like aren't quite as nice to manage I'm quite happy with VyOS/Vyatta, I'm not interested in fancy UIs, which made me _less_ interested in UniFi.

I've considered getting a PCEngines device because of the open/libre bootloader (uboot), when the EdgeRouter finally kicks it. It's nice and compact like a router, I can stick in my 12u network rack cabinet, and I'll be able to keep it up to date for longer as well as integrate it better with the tools I use.

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

#600

Post by bcrosby95 »

wycy wrote: post #591
8fingerlouie wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never jumped on the “everything IoT” bandwagon, but recently I’ve relented a bit. I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”. I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc. I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient…

How could an oven or washing machine possibly be useful remotely?! I'm a fan of connectivity, but that just seems absurd for those appliances.

Being able to remotely preheat my oven could be useful. But not enough to justify the risk of someone else remotely preheating my oven.
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