Came home today and couldn’t access my cloud. After plugging out the power and waiting for ages for it to Initialise it finally gave me the blue light. Had a flashing white light for half an hour. Anyhow when I logged back in noticed the new firmware had been applied even though auto updates was turned off. How the heck can this have happened?
AFAIK, the drive will continue to check for updates regardless of settings. You are only really disabling the auto installation. My guess is the drive did it’s daily check, saw corrupted settings, and just said “screw it, let’s update.”
From a security standpoint, blocking updates is a terrible idea especially with people exposing these devices to the internet. The amount of NAS drives you can access via a plain google search should scare you enough. SSN, addresses, scanned documens, health records, etc of people’s NAS’s are incorrectly put online. I can’t even imagine what a quickly spreading exploit could do to these drives. So I don’t blame proactive update checking at all.
From a security standpoint, blocking updates is a terrible idea especially with people exposing these devices to the internet.
That would be nice if the firmware upgrades didn’t regularly screw up so much advertised functionality of the device; Twonky media server, for instance, is not a ‘seamless upgrade’, since firmware upgrade entirely trashes the Twonky settings. This really is a laughable attitude on WD’s part, due to terrible integration with the Twonky server, and is the main reason why I have auto-upgrade turned off. You can hardly blame users for disabling auto-upgrade, when allowing it to do so requires them to use Linux admin skills (in some circumstances) to restore the operation of their DLNA media server. If you’re going to mandate auto-update, it really, really, REALLY should be transparent to the user.
Then again, I disable auto-‘upgrade’ on my Android devices, since many app ‘upgrades’ are actually retrograde, especially Google’s efforts… I read user reviews carefully before I upgrade apps.
I don’t have anything stored on my MyCloud that I wouldn’t want in the public domain. This is an attitude I’ve adopted having seen the, frankly, ■■■■-poor firmware running on the MyCloud. Given how poor the firmware seems to be, I wouldn’t trust WD to secure my data, and have disabled cloud access, and use the thing purely as a local NAS. A shame, as the personal cloud access was part of what made me buy it. I’d hate to think how badly the system would fare if subjected to a decent security analysis…
