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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

#611

Post by fps »

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.

remote pre-heating of the oven, remote alerts when the laundry is done. Non-connected versions of these appliances just make a really loud alarm sound when they need someone to pay attention to them, but a small notification on a phone would be more effective and less annoying.

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

#612

Post by verisimilitude »

midrus wrote: post #293

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?

I think what people do right now is an always-on Mac Mini with external drives connected. The Mac Mini strategy introduces a failure point at the USB->hard drive connection. Pretty low-maintenance, until the $3 USB thingy dies!

Apple's exit from the router business came at precisely the wrong time: they could sell an integrated smart home / mesh network / router / local+cloud backup that also provided macOS/iOS/tvOS software update caching / content caching. My guess is they didn't do it because they felt they could make more money charging for cloud-only services (they love their services revenue) rather than selling networking devices.

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

#613

Post by fencepost »

Algent wrote: post #371
andi999 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EOL is 3 years after purchase (if bought in 2015)? Just imagine a car and after 3 years no more spare parts? Personally everything below 10 years sounds ridiculous to me.

With modern high end smartphone it's the same issue. At best you get 2 years of patchs now, which is ridiculous because they really expect people to be able to afford >700€ phones that often.

This is why I'm partway through switching from Android to Apple as I replace devices. I could go with Android devices more likely to have third-party ROM support, but if I'm going to be concerned about security and patching why should I trust a pseudonymous person on a website forum to run my device?

As more security-related features get added in Android is also losing some of its differentiating abilities - e.g. wifi scanning isn't possible on iOS, but I think it's also been getting more restricted on Android in the last couple releases. That and the must-use-our-webkit browser restrictions on iOS are the only things that that have really annoyed me on iOS.

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

#614

Post by HotHotLava »

addingnumbers wrote: post #594
HotHotLava wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are comments in this thread from people who read about this in the news, checked their own device, and found it was wiped as well. This seems like it would be very unlikely to happen if this were just happening in isolated cases.

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

#615

Post by jcynix »

fps wrote: post #611
wycy wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

remote pre-heating of the oven, remote alerts when the laundry is done. Non-connected versions of these appliances just make a really loud alarm sound when they need someone to pay attention to them, but a small notification on a phone would be more effective and less annoying.

Remote preheating? I prefer a little more work-life balance, i.e. cook when I'm at home. And use the (rather short) time for preheating to look at the paper mail or mix a drink. Or stroll through the garden for some minutes.

Other appliances, e.g. our washing machine, tell me already how long they'll take. So I can set an alarm to not forget to care for them later. And if my fridge would alarm me because its door is not properly closed, I'd rather prefer a loud alarm over a small notification which I might overlook because a mobile device is someehere else.

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

#617

Post by dubya »

jasonkester wrote: post #443

So I have a Schroedinger's MyBook Live in front of me that I disconnected after reading this. I can probably live with it having been wiped, but what is the current wisdom on how I should proceed? These devices have no way to read from them via USB (which is why I never liked the thing), so the only way to peek in and see if my stuff is still there would be to plug it into the router and power it on. I presume doing…

I doubt a fix is coming. Just keep it from reaching the Internet long enough to disable the cloud features. A patch cable directly to the PC should work.

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

#618

Post by generj »

rswail wrote: post #455
majewsky wrote: post #438

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…

Managing an integrated grid using household solar and battery as part of the supply management is one thing. Adjusting people's usage for demand management is another. They need to be separated and managed differently. Instead of push adjusting HVAC for demand, they could use proper price signals with the appropriate local automation at the household that can be over-ridden by the consumer.

I agree price signals and local automation are the way to go. I would love to have my HVAC run according to the true cost of electricity, also minimizing CO2 emissions.

BUT giving the grid operators emergency control over demand is a useful tool when the grid is close to failure. Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high. When grid operators know people will die if their system goes down and it’s on the brink, people choosing to be 4 degrees cooler is such an immoral choice I’m OK removing that choice from them.

Also very helpful to reduce shocks to the system after any outages by temporarily limiting HVAC restarts.

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

#619

Post by gunapologist99 »

specialist wrote: post #572
Popegaf wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

re publiccode.eu Great link, thanks. Very encouraging. I've been saying "citizen-owned software". FWIW, I ran for office on an election integrity platform. Demanding that we own and operate our own elections. While "open source software" worked well enough (10+ years ago), everyone immediately understood "citizen-owned software". Transforms that bullet point into 90/10 (pro/con) issue. Edit: I should clarify somethin…

> Edit: I should clarify something. FOSS isn't sufficient. Citizen-owned software means we control the repo, builds, distros, etc. Microsoft, RedHat, whomever can fork or whatever, for resale or whatever. But we always control the root.

Who is "we"? That's the point of FOSS: "we", as "we control the repo, builds, distros, etc" is defined basically as anyone who wants to do it. The idea of forking is an incredibly important part of that, but it sounds like you're suggesting that "we" would be limited to a specific group and centralized control.

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

#620

Post by emodendroket »

Spivak wrote: post #607
emodendroket wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been a while since I’ve worked somewhere that actually did on-prem data storage.

I'm surprised since data storage, transfer, and compute are the things that you can absolutely beat every cloud provider on in terms of price. It was why we keep our storage in our own DC.

Gets harder when you take labor into account.
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