WD My Book users wake up to find their data deleted

You can release patches 6 years after your device is EoL but there will forever be more security issues and people using your ancient product (think how long it takes some versions of Windows to truly reach less than 100k active machines. Hell I wonder if Windows 3.1 has really reached that number or not. The long tail is going to be loooong). Not to mention you've created a precedent that the device is still getting patches and can be used by users, only making the lifecycle issue worse.

You can release a version which severely limits the capability of the product or effectively disables it but this is just a guaranteed way of getting bad press and even more customers will be mad at you for killing a device early.

You can turn the device over to the community (if you can managed to get it through legal and 3rd party agreements) but that isn't actually going to solve anything as it's not a product for extremely tech savvy users, at best it buys deflection in the news report in exchange for the effort of doing this (if you can at all).

You can claim the lifecycle is over and years later and be technically correct but still get the bad press and user feedback anyways.

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Retrospective in this particular case it would have been really great for them to fix this particular issue but that's an extremely hard thing to accurately judge unless you're from the future. I mean what percentage of devices that are many years EoL you've heard get this bad of a publicity hit? I'm sure there are many individual cases to point to but it's nothing against the absolute deluge of devices that have been discontinued over the years quietly without issue.

Typical business life of a computer is 5 years. Typical service/support agreement is 1-3 years.

Try getting Apple to address a failed hard drive that's 12 years old. They'd laugh in your face.

The drives themselves and their function as a NAS on a LAN is still fine.

When "Live" EOLed, they should have turned off the servers and disabled the function. If they weren't going to service/support it anymore, then they should have been honest about it.

Of course, their consumers would have screamed, so they did the worst possible thing, kept the service running as-is and didn't make it clear that people were leaving themselves open to attack.

It's fun to control around from our phones but after 2 years it won't be much fun someone else controlling around

This really shouldn't have to be a consumer issue, it's wasteful to have to replace something like a router after the short EoL and inevitable vulnerabilities are found.

Perhaps we need more modularity, so core components can be swapped out to upgrade them.

People who are not rich enough to buy everything single purpose will have to pick and choose.

I refuse to buy any appliance that requires a connection to the internet. I look for things that are straightforward to repair and maintain.

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 in the winter.

To keep an eye on my vacation house I also have a camera that uses HomeKit Secure Video. Requires no infrastructure on my end except network.

And finally, like a lot of people I have Hue.

I control it all through HomeKit. I also keep everything on a couple of IoT VLANs, one for “trusted” devices (AirPlay, media, PlayStation, etc), and one for “everything else” with client isolation, filtered dns, IDS/IPS. No upnp/nat-pmp, no tunneling (if detectable), and no other dns servers but mine (until dns over https becomes a thing with IoT)

In the future however it might become more or less impossible to avoid. Our neighbors recently purchased a new oven, which of course comes with internet connectivity. Their new washing machine also has internet connectivity.

In the very near future everything will be connected under the pretense of providing useful feature, when in reality it’s all about pushing adds and gathering telemetry data.

This is my takeaway from the whole Peloton fiasco. If you spend thousands of dollars on a product, and after the purchase the company bricks the product, the company should legally owe you a full refund.

I'm leaning toward one of these as a basic NAS replacement: https://ameridroid.com/collections/single-board-computer/pro... Based on the Odroid XU4, it's a fairly speedy little SBC that runs Armbian, and has a heat sink that doubles as mounting for your hard drive of choice.

Convenience and resilience at the same time.

Also, you need at least two different USB drives, that you back up to in A/B fashion. I prefer to own two separate brands.

A very, very, very select few with the necessary skills could have. This is a mass-market device, if 1 in 10 000 buyers is able to do this, that'd be a lot, and then those would have a Linux machine on an ancient SoC with none of the original functionality.

In this case, "we" is probably a very small group of people. For starters, it's limited to folks who hear about this in the first place. Ars Technica isn't exactly a huge news site, and, while it might be mentioned on TV news, I doubt they'll be talking about it all day long, so only a subset of their viewers would hear about it. Then, beyond that, it's limited to the subset of those who believe that the appropriate response is to not buy WD products anymore. Which isn't everyone on HN, and might not even be half of them.

So maybe we're looking at 1% of the general population? Their opinion isn't going to make a big enough dent in WD's revenues to justify the cost of supporting a product like this past its commercial end of life.

I think that there is a free market answer to this, but it in no way involves successfully pressuring companies like Western Digital to support discontinued products in perpetuity. It's just good old-fashioned "caveat emptor", pure and simple.

Granted, we're talking about consumer tech, so the vast majority of emptors don't have the background knowledge to be able to successfully caveat for themselves. So that approach is sort of acknowledging that a bunch of people will be screwed.

Which might be the best you can get. This is an area with no perfect solutions. More consumer product regulation might curtail events like this, but at the cost of more regulatory costs, possibly stifling innovation, and the risk that the legislative body (few of whom really understand these issues themselves) will just deliver us the latest heinously misdesigned law in a long series of heinously misdesigned law. Leaving things as they are might avoid all of that, but would guarantee that things like this keep happening more-or-less unchecked. Which kind of solution someone prefers is perhaps more a matter of political leaning than any practical consideration.

Markets can only behave reactively, but some harms need to be mitigated proactively.

As a result, I've bought a new NAS-type device which does have supported software and which I can put on a live network with only minimal worry. (I still take backups of course, but not as thoroughly as I should.)

That's a direct waste impact of the device being out of support. I like the form factor. I like the capacity. I wish I could just run Openwrt or something on it. (It's a Marvell SOC inside, so that's the likely target if I had porting skills.)

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.

Edit: To be clear, it was my mistake, my post made no sense before I fixed it. The parent doesn't deserve the downvotes.

But I might be reading too literally. And personally, I do intend to continue purchasing Western Digital hard drives, just nothing internet connected, because I agree they're different products with different risks.

The difference is the protocol that goes over the link. In a NAS, it's SMB/NFS access to files over ethernet/wifi, and for a SATA drive it is the SATA command set accessing blocks. The difference is small.

Aha! It was $600k in dogecoin in 2014

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2364120/hacked-synology-nas-...

That’s worth around $125m today (assuming straight hodling).

I suppose you mean the other way around? Otherwise, what's the problem with selling a higher RPM device as a lower one? Isn't higher RPM better? (Genuine question, I don't know much about HDD).

Getting the exact panic would unfortunately mean to have to get it down from the shelf where it lives, and plugging it into a monitor to replicate. It doesn’t make it out of low-res text mode when it does.

Most of the time, I’m usually in a rush to get it back up as my family wants lights and Plex to work normally.

I do my best not to reboot to keep the peace!

It's a NAS. Backup isn't the only thing you can do with it. A personal cloud (aka dropbox) is also a valid use case, and requires internet access to work.

https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=160849&start=450...

For this particular attack (assuming c2 server compromise?) that might not matter, but ultimately there is a massive difference in attack surface when comparing “direct” with “NATed”

Shouldn't we design systems that are hard to break by default? Shouldn't the OS assume that terrible things are going to happen anyway, and provide protection from bad faith actors in case the OS is indeed left unpatched for 10 years while being fully exposed to the internet? Is it even possible to design a system that provides this level of security so that we can get away with near-zero additional security expertise from product designers who build on top of it?

I think that, first of all, it's Western Digital's responsibility that things went south here. But shouldn't we build systems that provide bomb-proof security for the many companies that build on top of it? Is it even possible? And if so, how? In the end we would be doing ourselves (as consumers) a favor.

You go on-prem for the same reason you work does. Because the software licensing plus the amortized cost of hardware is less than the subscription.

I keep hard drives around for data I don't care about like games and movies but my personal data like photos is all in the cloud and it costs me next to nothing to store it.

I am pretty sure no security update are being provided to iPhone 4s.

If my backup harddrive is in the same house as my main storage and my house burns down, I'm fucked.

If I'm fancy, I may have multiple backend storage providers, too. Lot easier to do that then to have multiple houses. I wanted to use a safe deposit box in the past, but last time I called banks near me, they didn't even have safe deposit boxes available to rent! I can ask some friends, but then will be limited in frequency of updates, still.

4. My crypto exchange disappeared/went bankrupt/was a scam and now my crypto is all gone.

I swear, some people never learn.

This very story is just that - people had their own hard drive and it wasn't maintained for security so it got erased. At least this article needs to be added to your mental list of failures of local storage to balance your news-driven bias.

If you care about your backups, a single cloud vendor/account vanishing isn't going to be a problem, in exactly the same way that if you care about your backups,m a single drive failure will not be a problem. They are both predictable and mitigable risks.

Obviously customer support is a finite resource.

That's why companies need to start paid/premium customer support: when you lost access to your account, you should be able to pay 10, 100, 1000 of money to talk to a real person who understand how the system works and where there a mistake was made.

Like a hacker stole your account and you cannot take it back? A special person will to do a background check (e.g. call your employer) to verify that you is actually you.

Robot erroneously blocked your account because of misclassified spam-like activity? Your account is restored, and you are fully refunded.

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, ZFS, Btrfs and ReFS offer strategies to deal with various forms of data degradation, although it appears as if ZFS is still king.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation

I also use it for music files, in the past too many mp3s got broken.

http://md5deep.sourceforge.net/

Nonsense. Any robust backup strategy has multiple copies, and multiple locations. Cloud is a sensible component to this.

Fact: if these people had been running to a decent cloud service, they'd probably still have their data. Really "don't connect backup to the internet" is like, fractally stupid. The more one digs the more stupid angles turn up recursively similar to higher level stupid. "Don't connect backup to the internet" means what to you? What about the computer itself making the backup? If that is connected it could get infected as well, now what? Everyone is just supposed to give up on all networks entirely because "hurr durr nothing on a network is secure"? Which is wrong anyway since security an economic equation, not some ethereal absolute. I hope you never give this advice to anyone IRL.

What I was alluding to but didn't make clear was that physical switches are easily defeated by human laziness or mistakes. Why have a physical switch on drives you're copying if you might accidentally switch the wrong one or eventually stop bothering? This already happens with warning popups in Windows when you try to run an untrusted program, for instance. People get trained to bypass the security because it's just a tedious obstacle.

You personally might be careful enough to forever set the switch correctly, but people who didn't even know their hard drive was years-un-patched and internet connected yet left it there to get hacked also wouldn't reliably set the switches every time either.

Regarding accidentally copying in the wrong direction, I think a safer way than a physical switch is to show some details of what will get deleted. Maybe previews of images, tiny snippets of text from the files, a graphical view of the space they occupy, etc. Make it more visceral, like throwing away an actual book where you can see how many pages it has and what the picture on the cover is.

As opposed to what? I think you've got too much faith in your method.

(Data transfer charges not included)

My data is much more important than a 50$ rebate on a storage device.

If the product in question doesn't have an available extended warranty, then pick another product.

Telling every hardware maker "you have to support every device you make forever" is ludicrous.

I have some 15-year-old netbooks in storage that still power on, should eeePC have to "support" them now? Should they have to maintain a repair depot with replacement parts forever? Should they have to just release their own version of Linux forever to support each model of hardware?

Accumulation of benefits, shifting of responsibilities, the American way.

There's a good middle ground. Perhaps, like the 10 years for cars, it needs to be legislated. Perhaps this is what we consumers have decided to accept, that once the warranty runs out, that's it.

I am sure there are Windows NT machines still in service. I think my Dad has one in his basement. Should Windows forever support NT?

I should note, however, that it seems the drive is built in and not easily user replaceable/swappable, so it's not really "however many terabytes you want".

Turns out that if you wanted your data to actually be safe, you had buy a new device every time Western Digital dropped support and stopped releasing security updates (3-4 years after launch), copy your data across and throw out the old device.

An on-site backup is A backup, but it shouldn't be the ONLY backup. Typically you want a hierarchy of backups, one of which is on-site and on-line but a different machine, another of which is off-site but on-line, and possibly one or more offline backups. But on-line backups are fine, IF (and only if) they're copy-on-write/append-only.

Of course if the data can be deleted or overwritten too soon (even tape drive backup systems have some period over which they start re-using tapes) it's worthless. But that's an entirely separate concern from whether it's always-on or internet-connected or on the same national power grid segment as the original.

Take it to the extreme and everything is connected somehow at some point, thereby making a True Backup by your definition physically impossible, even off-site. The point where the backup is made could have a zero-day propagate to the tape machine, killing it and the tape by spinning up the motors. A blueray drive could have the firmware pwned.

If not even incremental snapshots synced to a remote count as backups, you are probably the only one to harbor this interpretation of the word and it arguably loses its usefulness as a word.

The law is complicated and the details are extremely important - but intent is a pretty big factor.

Also - I'd strongly advise someone who is deciding between buying an external hard drive or using a third party for backup to use the third party. There are definitely risks that remain, but their SLA is likely going to end up being a lot stronger than your hard drive's reliability.

Telling people that any redundant copy that isn't 100% reliable (i.e., everything) isn't a backup is not a good way to get people to take backups.

Everything else is secondary and can be covered by both. The chance of your redundant data center burning down at the same time as your primary is also low. If one burns down, you just bring up another. Likewise for smaller-scale users, where the chance of your cloud provider being down when your house burns down is also incredibly low.

So it's really the versioning or snapshot nature that's the key aspect of backups as opposed to simple redundancy.

I back up to Dropbox and an external hard drive next to my machine. I've used both to restore my data on hard drive death.

I can't imagine the amount of time and/or money it would take to do what you want. It certainly doesn't seem like it is something most computer users would do.

I can set anyone up with a (for example) iCloud + time machine backup with very little work, and it will keep ticking over, backing up. What's your suggestion exactly?

Is there anyone out there with $$$$ who will stop at nothing to part you, a rando, from your old data? Probably not. Are there sophisticated attackers who will burn a couple 0-days to build a botnet for the sole purpose of randsoming NASes AND attached cloud accounts AND the origin systems, accounting for tons of possible configurations? Still pretty unlikely — this is NotPetya level stuff with small payoff.

If you find yourself in the crosshairs of a sophisticated, dedicated attacker (perhaps one in possession of a 0-day), you’re pretty much done. Offline write-only backups stored offsite are the only defense.

However, is there a bug lurking in Hyper-backup that might accidentally wipe stuff from Azure storage, and the bug hits a month before your house gets struck by lightning? Maybe…