How To Get Around Western Digital’s Crippleware
Western Digital made waves yesterday when someone noticed that the “Access Anywhere” software that comes with the company’s NAS drives does not allow you to share audio or video files over the network. A lot of people were left scratching their heads and wondering what the point was of having a NAS drive that can’t share media.
Of course, as always, the name is important, after all it’s called “Access Anywhere,” not “Access Anything.”
We’ve written about setting up a home media server several times in the past, so I thought I’d add this tip: don’t use Western Digital NAS drives in your home network.
However, since I actually have one of these drives, it’s worth pointing out that the crippleware features are part of the included software, not some built-in hardware DRM. And to be honest, the “Access Anywhere,” software is one of the worst drive management interfaces I’ve encountered.
Since Western Digital NAS drives themselves aren’t going to prevent media sharing, and the software is junk anyway, do yourself a favor and set up your WD NAS as a Samba share — WD even provides some instructions for doing so.
Oh and a note to Western Digital: your peculiar form of self-destruction via crippleware is missing some key file formats — FLAC audio files seem to work just fine. And let’s not forget that copyright issues aren’t limited to multimedia files; you might want to add PDF, CHM, FB2, TEI, PS, LIT, PDB, LBR and EPUB to clamp down on sharing copyrighted books and consider TXT, RTF, HTML, HTM and other text file extensions since text files can include copyrighted materials.
In fact it might be easier, if you’re really worried about copyright issues, to just eliminate the included “Access Anywhere” software. It’s the first thing your users are going to do anyway.
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