[1/2] visited a thrift store with some friends today, and spotted this: a SanDisk "ibi" (ee-bee) networked photo/video storage Thing. you use some app (that'll *totally* still exist in 7 years) to access it. right off the bat, not interested seeing as I know what acronyms such as "SMB" and "NAS" refer to.
but what caught my eye, and what ultimately made me take the $20 plunge was the "2TB" marking on the back of the box. it also helped that it was still sealed (can you believe no one bought this?). I assumed it was just a standard SATA laptop disk plugged into some fancy board on the inside, and sure enough, it was.
curious, I attached the disk to my desktop, just to see what came on it from the factory. I was immediately bombarded with a shit ton of partitions; for those that still have access to my old twitter, this is starting to sound familiar...
[2/2] the story took a different turn once I started exploring the auto-mounted partitions. unlike the 4K media player, which had some bespoke sony OS on it, this one felt... a little bit familiar. then I saw the jars. it might not be a surprise to those familiar with WD's "My Cloud" range of horrible little devices, but it was to me: this runs android. an untouched version from (presumably) 2018.
originally I was going to use the disk as an extra backup for my NAS, but now I want to play with the device itself. I'm a bit clueless when it comes to android, but I'm sure there's some way to get in and root it- especially if it's an outdated install. first I'll have to figure out the best way to grab an image of the disk without wasting 2TB of space... maybe later
did a bit more searching and found some new info:
• according to a reddit comment, it runs Android Things, not *full* Android. curiously, they also mentioned that a later update *switched out the entire OS* for some other linux-based system. no specifics on what version or when. based on recent events, I'm assuming WD doesn't readily provide old firmware updates, which makes searching for that specific update nigh-impossible for me. I don't think you can even update it to specific versions anyway, because...
• I had suspicions that connecting this thing to the internet would be a *bad* idea if I wanted to retain the ability to hack into it. my suspicions were proven correct once I found patchnotes for the ibi client; recent versions will forcibly update the thing before you can even finish setup.
• I'd like to change my "7 years" prediction to "5 years", because they're already getting rid of a client
still haven't backed up the disk, will do so when I find the time :v
