Miguel Lombana

A couple of months ago I decided to ditch my Tivo units which I had been using to play movies from my media server and opt for a new (non-subscription based) device from Western Digital, the WD TV Live Media Player (WDTV Live Plus). This saves me money since I don’t have the $ 25 dollar a month recurring billing that I had with the Tivo, it plays back almost any format including .ISO that I toss at it and gave me the opportunity to re-purpose an old PC into a media server.

All seemed well until this past weekend when I checked out my firewall and found that this nifty little box was sending out packets and slamming my firewall every 3 seconds trying to find a way out of my private network and on to the WWW to send whatever information it’s been programmed to send to a site named GeoBytes which is a data collection warehouse that does IP targeted advertising.

The concern that I have with this is that this is obviously privacy, I wasn’t aware that my WD Live was talking out to a site, I don’t know what information that site is collecting about me and had it not been for my firewall showing the persistent (every 3 seconds) attempts, port by port, trying to find a way out, I would have never known it.

GeoBytes is a marketing firm, but to market you need to know what I’m interested in, so this box on my network could in theory be sending out a message that I’m in Phoenix and I’m watching a copy of Little Mermaid and selling this information to another site and the next time that I log on to say Facebook (another privacy issue laden site) I may see a banner ad that says “Disney Movies on Sale for $ 5 dollars at the WalMart 2 miles from your home”. I can almost deal with that but what I can’t deal with is what other information the box may be sending out and to who!

The box could very easily be sending out information that I have 100 movie titles on my media center and sell that list to the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) or that I have 500 MP3’s and sell that list to the RIAA who then want to see if all my movies and songs are legal.

This is a privacy issue and until I get a really good answer from Western Digital as to why their box is doing this, my firewall will remain blocked and I am now seriously considering taking these units back to Best Buy for a full refund!

From my Firewall

Making major changes to the home network, the TIVO boxes are out (no more recurring fees), replaced with Western Digital WDTV Live units. Now all my local VOD stuff is seamless and painless. No more servers running pyTivo or Tiversity consuming 450 watts from their PC power supplies.

Also dropped 1 of the DirecTV DVRs in favor of 2 receivers and 1 DVR, thanks to the new ‘Whole Home’ DVR that I was part of the Beta group, I can view any show in any room and don’t have the recurring cost for the bigger unit.

This weekend I’ll commence work on a new IP plan for all these boxes since everything has a CAT5 cable plugged into it. Overall it’s a real pain but changing everything to static IPs will make life much easier.

This does bring up a question, “How often does a home network need a Visio drawing to keep track of it!” LOL