Monday, January 21, 2008

More Reason to Hate Western Digital

Western Digital, the new data police.



Western Digital's 1TB MyBook external hard drives won't share media files over network connections. Beyond the fact that Western Digital drives have a higher reported failure rate than other drives now they now prevent you from accessing media file formats across a network. These would be the very files people want to access over a network.

Western Digital assumes that you're a criminal. MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files are copy-protected formats if they choose to be.
The list of banned file types includes more than thirty extensions.

I hope they made a big investment in this technology. The next thing will likely be sending a list of files back to the RIAA for investigation. Also I find it interesting that WD has no respect for artists, photographers, writers, and programmers. Apparently the only content worth protecting is the likely the most worthless content in terms of its value to society.

Here a site with possible work around if you didn't know better and bought a Western Digital drive. Look for a tutorial on installing Samba as an option.
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/

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