No Save For You

There's a fabulous mess erupting in slow motion all over the net about Western Digital blocking about thirty file types on their network drives, including AVIs, MPEGs and MP3s. The WD support database even has the nice full list, which has just about every common media file type on there. Obviously someone at WD has been kicked in the balls by a media company rep and gone crazy, implementing this braindead copy protection scheme and garnering his company a tornado of embarrassing publicity. It's a mistake on so many delicious levels too - legit AAC files bought from iTunes can't be stored, Quicktime movie trailers can't be saved, and AVIs from Grandma's camera are rejected. The device has no knowledge of whether a media file is authorized, so it blocks all of them. We've certainly seen other examples of hardware overriding a user's decisions, but never one so clumsy.