7 ms·

EOL should be made to legally mean: opensource or something equivalent. If Windows isn't supported on my laptop, I can nearly always replace it with Linux and

EOL should be made to legally mean: opensource or something equivalent. If Windows isn't supported on my laptop, I can nearly always replace it with Linux and still keep it alive. With stuff like this, they can decide to never update it again or just turn off some critical service and render a device unusable. It's not just a thing about owning what you purchase and having the freedom to do what you want with it, it's also about the environment. Forcing things to become dangerous for use or just having the power to kill it remotely out of business interests means more electronic trash. https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/ goes in the right direction on a similar topic, but this should also start getting a bit of the limelight.

rbanffy 5y ago
This is an interesting point: there is an analogy to be made with unmaintained equipment that can become environmental hazards and making such equipment without proper warnings and recalls. I was thinking of getting one for myself, but I think I'll stick to USB-connected JBODs.
- greyhair 5y ago
  I live the hybrid life, connected media, with the essential data backed up to disconnected USB drives. 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.
megous 5y ago
The powerpc SoC in that drive is even supported in mainline Linux. And the code for original v2.6.32 Linux and some ancient U-Boot is available on WD website. So people could have made their drives secure after EOL. Some maybe even did.
- dividedbyzero 5y ago
  > So people could have made their drives secure after EOL. 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.
  - megous 5y ago
    So? The code is available, which is what the parent commenter wanted. Getting something FOSS running using something that's already supported in mainline Linux is a week long project, perhaps, if you suffer with outdated U-Boot. You can still download the code for this device even on WD's website. (That's quite something, because typically companies start violating the GPL shortly after the device stops being sold, or when they get acquired and redesign their website) This one would probably be harder, because there's not a ton of 32bit ppc distros around, and the storage is limited, so you'd have to setup some toolchain and build some ppc basis for the userspace, yourself. I don't think many people would root for some 11 year old WD's trashy userspace code, and would rather want to run current musl, busybox and samba on this, or whatever. Someone who likes these devices could have done the work and could have published it for others.
alisonkisk 5y ago
The free market soluton: Market experimentation is necessary for innovation. Now we've learned never to buy a product from WD (in case you forgot that last year they intentionally sold unfit SMR hard drives and lied about it). Also, always have backups (not just syncs!).
- minikites 5y ago
  Every brand proves themselves untrustworthy at some point, look at Seagate or every airline. The free market breaks down all the time and that's why government regulation is so necessary.
- tiagod 5y ago
  We learned that. But does my grandpa even know what WD is when he goes to the shop buy a disk and is sold this thing?
  - minikites 5y ago
    Exactly, so many "free market" arguments boil down to blaming the victim of corporate malfeasance.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  > Now we... 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.
cactus2093 5y ago
I find the environmental impact argument here to be very dubious. Even if a Linux-like alternative were available for this hard drive, the vast majority of people would be unaware of that or not willing/capable of figuring out how to work it and would throw the device away and replace it anyway. And even if they did save the hard drive, they might just use the money they saved by not replacing it to upgrade their computer or phone a little sooner instead. Hard drives are a particularly bad example too because the risk of failure goes up as the device ages, so people probably should replace them after a few years of heavy use regardless of software support. We live in a rich society, electronics are relatively cheap, and people like having shiny new things. We will inevitably continue having more and more electronic waste. Right to repair type laws are great for consumers for many other reasons, but I don’t think they’ll make any kind of meaningful dent in the reduction of electronic waste.
- myself248 5y ago
  Hard drives are a mediocre example, but I have exactly such an enclosure sitting around that I use as cold-storage because I know better than to connect it to a network. If I want to get data off it, I set up an isolated segment in RFC3927 space. 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.)
  - edgeform 5y ago
    > If I want to get data off it, I set up an isolated segment in RFC3927 space. Do you really not see how completely unrealistic this is for the average consumer, and honestly the majority of HN readers?
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      I get the impression they're only describing how they handle it (for the crowd here); I don't see any suggestion the OP thinks this is a reasonable expectation of ordinary consumers.
specialist 5y ago
re publiccode.eu Great link, thanks. Very encouraging. I've been saying "citizen-owned software". FWIW, I ran for office on an election integrity platform. Demanding that we own and operate our own elections. While "open source software" worked well enough (10+ years ago), everyone immediately understood "citizen-owned software". Transforms that bullet point into 90/10 (pro/con) issue. Edit: I should clarify something. FOSS isn't sufficient. Citizen-owned software means we control the repo, builds, distros, etc. Microsoft, RedHat, whomever can fork or whatever, for resale or whatever. But we always control the root.
- gunapologist99 5y ago
  > Edit: I should clarify something. FOSS isn't sufficient. Citizen-owned software means we control the repo, builds, distros, etc. Microsoft, RedHat, whomever can fork or whatever, for resale or whatever. But we always control the root. 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.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Exactly. "Citizen-owned" is half-right. FOSS gets you the rest of the way.
    - specialist 5y ago
      FOSS is the start. Then comes governance, culture, etc. Bryan Cantrill's "Power to Fork" thesis is relevant. http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-power-to-fork/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-p... Sadly, I lived that experience on another FOSS project. Wish I had heard Cantrill before I committed to that effort. I'm also deeply influenced by Pieter Hintjens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography Ditto Clay Shirky, eg Here Comes Everyone. Nadia Eghbal's research is on my reading list. https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ Having just skim read, it looks very insightful, cogent.
jrm4 5y ago
What, no "Stallman was right?" Okay. Stallman was right. I know it's cliche, I know he's weird. But I learned a LONG TIME AGO never to bet against the man's predictions and ideas on software. He called all of this, and quite a few people (especially HERE) would do well to get back to fundamentals and work on fixing it.
- ndesaulniers 5y ago
  You're not wrong, Walter, ...
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Imagine being that right, that often, on things that important - and being ignored / smeared / mocked for your trouble.
    - ndesaulniers 5y ago
      Forgive me, I forgot criticism amounts to sacrilege.
    - typhonius 5y ago
      Like a modern day Cassandra.
    - hedberg10 5y ago
      GNU/right, please
greyhair 5y ago
I know people that had these and later just opened them up and pulled the drives for use in a freenas box. So it isn't completely trash, the drives were still usable even though they were done using it as a MyBookLive device.

rbanffy 5y ago

This is an interesting point: there is an analogy to be made with unmaintained equipment that can become environmental hazards and making such equipment without proper warnings and recalls. I was thinking of getting one for myself, but I think I'll stick to USB-connected JBODs.

greyhair 5y ago
I live the hybrid life, connected media, with the essential data backed up to disconnected USB drives. 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.

megous 5y ago

The powerpc SoC in that drive is even supported in mainline Linux. And the code for original v2.6.32 Linux and some ancient U-Boot is available on WD website. So people could have made their drives secure after EOL. Some maybe even did.

dividedbyzero 5y ago
> So people could have made their drives secure after EOL. 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.
- megous 5y ago
  So? The code is available, which is what the parent commenter wanted. Getting something FOSS running using something that's already supported in mainline Linux is a week long project, perhaps, if you suffer with outdated U-Boot. You can still download the code for this device even on WD's website. (That's quite something, because typically companies start violating the GPL shortly after the device stops being sold, or when they get acquired and redesign their website) This one would probably be harder, because there's not a ton of 32bit ppc distros around, and the storage is limited, so you'd have to setup some toolchain and build some ppc basis for the userspace, yourself. I don't think many people would root for some 11 year old WD's trashy userspace code, and would rather want to run current musl, busybox and samba on this, or whatever. Someone who likes these devices could have done the work and could have published it for others.

alisonkisk 5y ago

The free market soluton: Market experimentation is necessary for innovation. Now we've learned never to buy a product from WD (in case you forgot that last year they intentionally sold unfit SMR hard drives and lied about it). Also, always have backups (not just syncs!).

minikites 5y ago
Every brand proves themselves untrustworthy at some point, look at Seagate or every airline. The free market breaks down all the time and that's why government regulation is so necessary.
tiagod 5y ago
We learned that. But does my grandpa even know what WD is when he goes to the shop buy a disk and is sold this thing?
- minikites 5y ago
  Exactly, so many "free market" arguments boil down to blaming the victim of corporate malfeasance.
mumblemumble 5y ago
> Now we... 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.

cactus2093 5y ago

I find the environmental impact argument here to be very dubious. Even if a Linux-like alternative were available for this hard drive, the vast majority of people would be unaware of that or not willing/capable of figuring out how to work it and would throw the device away and replace it anyway. And even if they did save the hard drive, they might just use the money they saved by not replacing it to upgrade their computer or phone a little sooner instead. Hard drives are a particularly bad example too because the risk of failure goes up as the device ages, so people probably should replace them after a few years of heavy use regardless of software support. We live in a rich society, electronics are relatively cheap, and people like having shiny new things. We will inevitably continue having more and more electronic waste. Right to repair type laws are great for consumers for many other reasons, but I don’t think they’ll make any kind of meaningful dent in the reduction of electronic waste.

myself248 5y ago
Hard drives are a mediocre example, but I have exactly such an enclosure sitting around that I use as cold-storage because I know better than to connect it to a network. If I want to get data off it, I set up an isolated segment in RFC3927 space. 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.)
- edgeform 5y ago
  > If I want to get data off it, I set up an isolated segment in RFC3927 space. Do you really not see how completely unrealistic this is for the average consumer, and honestly the majority of HN readers?
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    I get the impression they're only describing how they handle it (for the crowd here); I don't see any suggestion the OP thinks this is a reasonable expectation of ordinary consumers.

specialist 5y ago

re publiccode.eu Great link, thanks. Very encouraging. I've been saying "citizen-owned software". FWIW, I ran for office on an election integrity platform. Demanding that we own and operate our own elections. While "open source software" worked well enough (10+ years ago), everyone immediately understood "citizen-owned software". Transforms that bullet point into 90/10 (pro/con) issue. Edit: I should clarify something. FOSS isn't sufficient. Citizen-owned software means we control the repo, builds, distros, etc. Microsoft, RedHat, whomever can fork or whatever, for resale or whatever. But we always control the root.

gunapologist99 5y ago
> Edit: I should clarify something. FOSS isn't sufficient. Citizen-owned software means we control the repo, builds, distros, etc. Microsoft, RedHat, whomever can fork or whatever, for resale or whatever. But we always control the root. 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.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Exactly. "Citizen-owned" is half-right. FOSS gets you the rest of the way.
  - specialist 5y ago
    FOSS is the start. Then comes governance, culture, etc. Bryan Cantrill's "Power to Fork" thesis is relevant. http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-power-to-fork/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/08/03/opensolaris-and-the-p... Sadly, I lived that experience on another FOSS project. Wish I had heard Cantrill before I committed to that effort. I'm also deeply influenced by Pieter Hintjens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens#Bibliography Ditto Clay Shirky, eg Here Comes Everyone. Nadia Eghbal's research is on my reading list. https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ https://nadiaeghbal.com/oss/ Having just skim read, it looks very insightful, cogent.

jrm4 5y ago

What, no "Stallman was right?" Okay. Stallman was right. I know it's cliche, I know he's weird. But I learned a LONG TIME AGO never to bet against the man's predictions and ideas on software. He called all of this, and quite a few people (especially HERE) would do well to get back to fundamentals and work on fixing it.

ndesaulniers 5y ago
You're not wrong, Walter, ...
- mandmandam 5y ago
  Imagine being that right, that often, on things that important - and being ignored / smeared / mocked for your trouble.
  - ndesaulniers 5y ago
    Forgive me, I forgot criticism amounts to sacrilege.
  - typhonius 5y ago
    Like a modern day Cassandra.
  - hedberg10 5y ago
    GNU/right, please

greyhair 5y ago

I know people that had these and later just opened them up and pulled the drives for use in a freenas box. So it isn't completely trash, the drives were still usable even though they were done using it as a MyBookLive device.