Posts by Colin W.

WD My Cloud NAS devices have hard-wired backdoor

I can't log in

I have firmware version 2.10.310 but I'm not able to log in via the web interface, and FTP, SSH and Telnet ports are all refusing connections.

That seems strange. Shouldn't I be able to log in with this old firmware?

Actually I have some quite low opinions of this system for other reasons. When I first got it and tried logging in remotely using a mobile phone and the official software from WD, it worked super slow for a little while, before the entire device just crashed and I was not able to use it any more until I came home and rebooted. I was pretty disgusted and never tried to use it again after that. I suppose I might have some better luck now with a new firmware (this happened about two years ago) but how can a big company release something in such a poor working state?

Britain’s forgotten first home computer pioneer: John Miller-Kirkpatrick

I missed those days

I got my first computer on Christmas day 1984 (a VZ200 - an Australian rip off of the TRS-80) so I missed those really early days. Nowadays I work in the embedded industry and it is really like it is still in the 1970s! There is not much available in terms of operating systems and it is all about banging the hardware registers directly and every thing is interrupts, interrupt and more interrupts! It is amazing just how little things have changed in 30+ years. The hardware is much more capable but the concepts are all the same.

But I have always felt that I missed out because in those "old days" you could be a single engineer and make a whole product yourself. These days projects are huge and you will only ever be a member of a team working on something and thus have only limited impact on the design and implementation of the product. I always enjoy reading about people like John Miller-Kirkpatrick (not to mention other trailblazers like Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry) and feel a little bit jealous of what they did!