Arcoarena

‘Surprised’ Western Digital to revisit multimedia file-sharing limits

A “very surprised” Western Digital Corp. (WD) may reconsider its decision to restrict certain types of file-sharing using its remote access software, a company spokesman said yesterday.

This appeared on our companies newsletter (they send out a summary of storage related news each week - gripping). I’d already seen the story before because it’s the kind of thing that the news sites I read like to get irritated about.

I do have a few questions that I would like WD to answer though

1. Why are they surprised? (”Here’s your new car, now you can only drive it at 20mph in case you break any speed limits”)
2. Why did they think it was their job to stop people illegally file-sharing? (do Ford feel responsible for all the ram-raids performed in Transits?)
3. What exactly did they think people would use it for?

Now the third point is interesting. Documents on the whole don’t take up much space and can be carried round on a USB stick quite easily (and cheaper). It’s only really video and music collections that are so large that they need an HDD (ignoring CAD files, databases etc. which are likely to be a company who shouldn’t really be using this product, the should probably be using this). So WD produce something that is only really going to be used for sharing video and music…..and then stop people sharing video and music. Nice one guys.

On a side note it’s interesting that nobody supports .ogg files as a rule but WD even stop you sharing those.

Merry Christmas

It’s becoming more and more obvious that I probably won’t get round to sending those Christmas cards I bought so….

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone. I’ve not got out and seen people as much as I should have next year so I shall endeavour to do so more next year.

I’ve got a large pile of things I need to do before Christmas so I’ll let you know I’m still not dead after.