I think that we need to separate the life of the hardware (WD My Book) and the life of the cloud service (the "Live" bit).
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.
> I think that we need to separate the life of the hardware (WD My Book) and the life of the cloud service (the "Live" bit).
That makes me think of the internet radio owners (Grace Digital, Yamaha, etc.) that all had their products brick because the underlying look-up service just up and went away. No problem. You just have to buy another hunk of plastic and microprocessor.
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.