Hacker News Reader

Comment by petee | Hacker News Reader

One users quote:

"The WD MBL log files indicate a script issued “FactoryReset” command to users all over the world. I don’t use Cloud Storage so I don’t understand how this can happen?"

Oh boy... plus side is other users said data seems to be potentially recoverable

View on HN

IoT once again proven to be a horrible idea. Hardware OEMs can't be trusted with security. They can hardly make a product that holds up to normal use, let alone malicious attacks.

If only they would give into open firmware. Less work for them, probably better software in the long run.

I agree with your point however I’m sure there’s some analyst or someone who thinks they’d be losing out on services revenue or something equally short sighted

Say your going to open your firmware, and who ever stands up to oppose it, fire them! There standing in the way of progress.

On a serious note though, it's kind of a double edge sword, you still have to provide firmware "I bought this device and I can't even use it without downloading something from the internet...!!!" or "The firmware I downloaded off the internet stole my wife and burned down my house!"

The wild and still somewhat enduring success of the linksys wrt54g seems like it would be enough to get some companies to do it.

For this product class, just build something that OpenWRT runs on; yes even for a NAS. If chips support / blobs / etc aren't there, get them on the way to being up-streamed and public.

This was fairly obvious a decade ago, and today it should be planly obvious.

I went through this process. Got a little nas device that had linux support. Unfortunately the performance was not good enough for SSHFS and it didn't have enough performance to run any kind of web ui like nextcloud. Eventually got a full power server which could run nextcloud but the hassle of keeping it running, managing backups, and just the cost of the power usage to keep it running made it much more cost and time effective to just use google drive and have all of these problems solved for me.

Google may not be the most trustworthy but I at least trust my data is backed up and safe from hackers.

The fact that these are decade old devices that haven't had a firmware update in over five years yet are still so integral to their owners' lives that people are keenly feeling their loss suggests to me that they were not a horrible idea, nor poorly engineered. I have a WD MyBook World (not connected to the internet) that's probably the oldest still operating piece of computer technology I own--outlasting many computers, phones, tablets, etc. My family uses it to listen to music or watch movies all the time, and the fact that it "just works" and supports simple IoT/UPnP protocols is the only reason that's viable--no way could I convince my spouse or kid to use it if they had to go through the same pain I experience trying to stream something from my laptop.

>I don’t use Cloud Storage so I don’t understand how this can happen?

Sounds like for at least some of them, the IoT part was purely a negative as it's solely responsible for their lost data.

The storage is effectively integral to all of them, yeah. Not necessarily the IoT.

Imagine running `rm -rf` and not just wiping out your data, but all of your customer's on remote devices too.

I would just sell everything I own and go try to survive in some large forest where no one can find me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com