Western Digital Restricts Use of Network Drives

[Kilroy]

"Via BoingBoing comes the news that Western Digital's My Book(TM) World Edition(TM) II, sold with promises of internet-accessible drive space, is now restricting the types of files the drive will serve up. 'Western Digital is disabling sharing of any avi, divx, mp3, mpeg, and many other files on its network connected devices; due to unverifiable media license authentication. Just wondering -- who needs a 1 Terabyte network-connected hard drive that is prohibited from serving most media files? Perhaps somebody with 220 million pages of .txt files they need to share?'" Update: 12/06 22:38 GMT by Z : A reader noted that the media files are only restricted between users of the same drive. Not quite as bad as originally pitched.


Sources...http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/12/06/2119240.shtml

[ja3hawk]

There has to be some way around this? Are you thinking of buying one of these... You could always just share out a 500gb USB drive.

Also.. I was just thinking... this is fucking silly. How is this any different the sharing media from an internal hardrive on your machine? Post up an FTP server let the world grab what they want from your internal hard drive... granted its not the same but, same concept.

[eclyps]

There has to be some way around this? Are you thinking of buying one of these... You could always just share out a 500gb USB drive.

Also.. I was just thinking... this is fucking silly. How is this any different the sharing media from an internal hardrive on your machine? Post up an FTP server let the world grab what they want from your internal hard drive... granted its not the same but, same concept.
they're screwing themselves over. It may look good in the eyes of other businesses, but to the consumer it's a really bad move