Discussion
Here's the latest victory from the land of wallet-based elections: Synology, a leading maker of "network-attached storage" (NAS) devices, has done a quiet (but total) 180 on its enshittificatory policy of blocking third party hard drives from its products:
Network-attached storage devices are basically boxy computers with a bunch of slots for hard-drives and one or more network cards so you can connect them to your wifi or wired network.
2/
You fill them with hard-drives and plug them in, and they show up on your network as a file-server: any device on the network can connect to them and access their files. They're great for things like libraries of music or videos, which can be streamed to your TV or smart speakers. They're essential for people who work with very large files - musicians, photographers, video and sound editors, etc.
3
They're also great for home backups, a single storage system that everyone in your household can back up all their data to. The better ones also have some kind of "NAT traversal" that lets you connect to them from the road - just plug your NAS into your home broadband and you can access your files from anywhere in the world.
4
Synology doesn't just make NAS boxes, they also make hard-drives that go inside them. Earlier this year, Synology pushed an update to its devices that caused them to reject hard-drives manufactured by their rivals, including giants like Seagate. This was a blatant piece of rent-seeking, a page straight out of the inkjet printer playbook, where the company that made the box decided that this gave them the right to decide what you could put *in* the box.
5/
@pluralistic it is actually worse than this. Synology don't make harddrives, they take harddrives from Toshiba and other OEMs and change the firmware in them and slaps on their own sticker.
When your printer updates itself to reject generic ink, there's an implied threat: anyone who disenshittifies this printer - by making another update that restores generic ink support - risks prosecution under "anti-circumvention" laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These are laws that ban reverse-engineering, even for lawful purposes, like restoring generic printer ink support:
6/
@pluralistic you know what? I'm actually grateful to Synology for doing that. Their decision coincided with me looking for the first time to set up my own NAS and was one of the factors to push me to create my own server with my own hardware. And all the parts were one search away, and setting them up took not much longer then learning about it.