[HN Gopher] Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update
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Samsung Q990D unresponsive after 1020 firmware update
Author : ftufek
Score : 514 points
Date : 2025-03-14 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (us.community.samsung.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (us.community.samsung.com)
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Doesn't sound good. If at all.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| This will be really interesting to follow. Especially with
| respect to Tesla's love of pushing updates to clients. Could this
| be a harbinger of "you don't really own your property" by way of
| so many companies going down this route that enough collapses
| result in litigation and a massive readjustment? Time will tell.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| Just an ex-CoreOS person stopping by to smile and say "someone
| should really figure out how to do that safely."
| hashishen wrote:
| thank God mine is before they decided to add smart features to a
| speaker
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| If the damage is actually as bad as it sounds, Samsung is
| probably talking with their lawyers and is being instructed to
| maintain radio silence so as to better prepare for the class-
| action lawsuit.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Wouldn't radio silence increase damages to customers and result
| in increased liability?
| barbazoo wrote:
| Only if you connect the soundbar via Bluetooth /s
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Depends, radio silence will cost you money compared to just
| fixing the problem if that's feasible but it will save you
| money compared to accidentally admitting to liability in a
| rushed press release.
| zamalek wrote:
| Law is not logical and rarely makes sense. I'm not suggesting
| at all that they are doing the morally correct thing, but
| there are a bunch of ways that you can legally admit
| liability without meaning to.
|
| For example, little life pro-tip, never _directly_ pay for a
| loan that you aren 't liable for. Proxy it through the
| debtor, or not at all and get a lawyer if the debtor is
| deceased.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Remember when Crowdstrike crashed half the computers on the
| planet for a full day? Well, if you do, you're one of the
| few, because people are still using Crowdstrike, and the
| stock is still doing well overall.
| hhh wrote:
| It's still one of the best antimalwares on the planet.
| dmurray wrote:
| That's fair. In fact, you might say that for a
| competently set up fleet of computers, nothing beats it.
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| The only one that has 100% protection rate: indeed you
| can't get any malware if you can't turn on your PC.
| dwattttt wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me of the phrase "damning with
| faint praise"
| xp84 wrote:
| That's a phrase like "the most enjoyable cancers" or "the
| quietest seagulls"
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I'm guessing there are surveillance features (I don't know)
| and companies put up with it for that reason.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Which means, people don't care. Is this a sign of a
| cultural shift to the idea that sometimes things don't work
| and that's fine?
| observationist wrote:
| That's logical reasoning, not corporation reasoning.
|
| Nobody involved in the decision making cares about the
| customers. They only care about the potential hit to the
| bottom line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they
| don't care. Unless, of course, they decide that appearing to
| care and being responsive results in less of a hit.
|
| Silences like these are strategic and dependably predictable
| - engaging with customers on average costs more than
| remaining silent for whatever metric they've applied to the
| fix. If it takes longer than they thought, they might feel
| compelled to speak out, or they could just depend on the
| issue to fade into the 24 hour news cycle. Engaging with a
| customer runs the risk of them interacting with some
| threshold of people that will keep the negative story in the
| headlines for longer than it might otherwise be.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > They only care about the potential hit to the bottom
| line, and if that's perceived as callous silence, they
| don't care.
|
| I don't think that is true. I think people care a lot...
| just not about the consumers. People care about themselves
| - they also don't want to be fired. So the decision is
| punted up the chain, all the way to executives. And
| executives want to mitigate the damage to themselves first,
| their orgs second, maybe consumers third.
| rdtsc wrote:
| As soon as there is any hint of a lawsuit, it immediately
| switches to CYA mode: "don't apologize, don't admit guilt,
| keep PR on a tight leash with a legal team watching every
| word and punctuation".
| LoganDark wrote:
| That is at least, if their ToS doesn't contain the all-too-
| common provision that you are simply not allowed to sue.
| lurking_swe wrote:
| a TOS is not an ironclad legal agreement. Far from it.
| zaik wrote:
| Not sure about US legislation, but where I live clauses like
| this are void automatically, even if you agree to the
| contract.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| ToS doesn't override laws
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Luckily for them no one can listen to their radios now.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > so as to better prepare for the class-action lawsuit.
|
| I 100% guarantee everyone who uses one of these was railroaded
| into mandatory arbitration.
| knowitnone wrote:
| So glad everything's connected to the internet \s.
| tylerflick wrote:
| I have one of these systems. Not sure why anyone would ever leave
| it connected to the internet though.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _Not sure why anyone would ever leave it connected to the
| internet though._
|
| Most people aren't techies. They buy the thing, and use it as
| instructed.
| acdha wrote:
| Also the vendors increasingly push you to put them online to
| use devices. Samsung tries really hard to make you think that
| your TV setup needs a mobile app on your phone running in the
| background with high precision location tracking, and 99.9%
| of buyers are going to leave that setup so they're not blamed
| for problems in the future.
| lopis wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if HN folks are purposefully obtuse or so
| deep in their bubble that they don't understand how 99% of
| people think and operate. The average user will always favour
| convenience over some invisible concept like privacy.
| jisnsm wrote:
| If you don't know how to operate some piece of technology you
| shouldn't be using it. Same as you wouldn't operate a car
| without knowing how to drive.
| ziddoap wrote:
| This is an absolutely ridiculous take, on multiple levels.
| ellisv wrote:
| I'm not familiar with this product but it would make a lot of
| sense if it supports direct streaming for Chromecast/Google
| Cast.
| hi_hello wrote:
| Airplay (and presumably Cast) support require a WiFi
| connection. I explicitly blocked external connections to mine.
| staticman2 wrote:
| There's a feature to make every connected speaker in your house
| play the same Spotify song at once which is kind of fun.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| See you on Louis Rossman later today!
| carra wrote:
| One of the first things I thought of when reading the title.
| crtasm wrote:
| List price $2,000. What was the update supposed to improve/fix?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Someone's promotion packet?
| mcs5280 wrote:
| Probably some new AI/tracking/ad delivery features
| jakeydus wrote:
| Few things over the past few years have infuriated me as much
| as tracking and advertising being introduced at the OS level,
| especially on TVs. I'm looking at you, LG! I will gladly pay
| more for a TV that doesn't try to advertise Roku's streaming
| service to me or track my kids' watch history. Seems like
| they are few and far between, though.
|
| The best thing we have been able to come up with is leaving
| the TV itself disconnected from the WiFi and using an Apple
| TV for smart features/streaming. I'm sure they're still
| gathering data but it's at least not as blatant. It's a real
| crapfest for the consumer at the moment.
| vosper wrote:
| > I will gladly pay more for a TV that doesn't try to
| advertise Roku's streaming service to me or track my kids'
| watch history. Seems like they are few and far between,
| though.
|
| Plug in an Apple TV?
| RUnconcerned wrote:
| That's... not a TV, it just has TV in its name.
| freedomben wrote:
| This just swaps one locked-down company for another.
| You're still at the mercy of a giant corp, and worse it's
| unlikely to work well with my linux laptop and Android
| phone whereas at least Samsung _tries_ (and often fails).
| A better solution is needed. I buy Sceptre TVs when I
| can, though for a "big screen" there aren't great
| options.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Apple TV is just as bad (and in the context of the OP's
| statement, would be the same as a Roku box or an Amazon
| Firetv).
| jakeydus wrote:
| Yeah, we do use Apple TV because at the very least if
| they are collecting our data, they're not using it to
| advertise directly to us on the same device. My parents
| have a Roku TV and the number of ads it serves up
| directly on the device leave me feeling nauseous.
| whatwhaaaaat wrote:
| This is sound advice for keeping yourself free from malware
| as well. Many of these TVs end up running super vulnerable
| junk that doesn't get updated and has known exploits.
|
| I've had two devices end up with malware like this. A Sony
| blue ray player that was uploading 2gig a month before I
| caught it and a Samsung tv.
|
| It's worth mentioning you have to block or change WiFi
| credentials. The device with malware may attempt to connect
| to any known wifi even if you disable it on the device. I
| get 45000 auth attempts a day from my tv.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Anyone who uses smart tv features and connects one directly
| to the internet is insane.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| Id extend that to all smart TVs and all 'smart' devices
| as such.
| grishka wrote:
| It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly
| have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
| nemomarx wrote:
| Insert ads into the music the customer is playing, using AI
| to find pauses, and track what songs they're playing for
| data gathering?
| grishka wrote:
| Yeah but why would anyone actually buy that then?
| paradite wrote:
| You are asking the right question, but to the wrong
| person.
| timewizard wrote:
| > using AI to find pauses,
|
| You can just use regular math to do this. We've been
| doing it for 30 years now. You don't need a trumped up
| overpriced garbage LLM to do anything for you here.
| ww520 wrote:
| Broadcast high frequency tunes in the background for other
| devices to pick up to identify you.
| grishka wrote:
| Dogs hate this one simple trick
| genewitch wrote:
| on android you can install SoniControl Firewall to "see"
| the ultrasonics in your house. Try it with all tvs and
| things off, then try it with the TV on, youtube videos,
| and so on.
|
| Pixel tracking works better if the TV is connected to the
| internet. I remember samsung as one of the companies,
| where, if your TV was not ever given a wifi connection,
| it would attempt to connect to any open network to do
| what it needed to do. This sounds unlawful, so i don't
| know the veracity, but anyhow - if the TV is online, it
| can just send a half dozen pixels at known locations back
| home and there is a database of "content pixels at
| timestamps" and they match the half dozen pixel values to
| the database and know what you're watching to some degree
| of certitude.
|
| but for things like dumb panels older TVs and the like,
| ultrasonics still work.
| gruturo wrote:
| > It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it
| possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
|
| To recognize what you listen to, build a profile, feed it
| back to Samsung, which will use it in deciding what crap to
| display on your Samsung TV (and any other devices)
| associated to the same profile. For all we know it's even
| listening to your conversation in the room, I mean, it's
| Samsung - they literally do this:
|
| https://entertainment.ie/trending/yes-your-samsung-smart-
| tv-...
|
| https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/samsungs-warning-our-
| smart...
| onemoresoop wrote:
| How much benefit could that bring versus burning
| reputation and losing it all? These companies are so big
| and powerful but time and time again they keep on
| forgetting that they can't exist without the users and
| when users start leaving it's hard to reverse that trend.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| The idea of people getting upset at their tech spying on
| them is almost laughable at this point.
| wcfields wrote:
| Burning Reputation?
|
| It's so out in the open if you know, or more likely,
| worked in media advertising.
|
| Their competitor, Vizio, owns iSpot[1] which is, in my
| opinion, the best in the space.
|
| Samba TV[2] is it's nearest competitor and they have
| their hooks into 24 Smart TV brands globally[3]. These
| brands are listed on their website as Philips, Sony,
| Toshiba, beko, Magnavox, TCL, Grundig, Sanyo, AOC, Seiki,
| Element, Sharp, Westinghouse, Vestel, Panasonic, Hitachi,
| Finlux, Telefunken, Digihome, JVC, Luxor, Techwood, and
| Regal.
|
| [1] https://ispot.tv/
|
| [2] https://www.samba.tv/
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_TV#Customers
| gruturo wrote:
| There is no reputation to burn, they're well known to do
| this kind of stuff by anyone bothering to look it up, and
| nearly nobody looks it up anyway.
|
| It's a pity because I liked some of their hardware in the
| past (an NX camera I still have, hard disks back in the
| IDE stone age, 3 LCD screens back from when they were a
| novelty - they only had a VGA connector) but I just stay
| away from them now. But 0.01% of their customers staying
| away is completely insignificant when they consider the
| profit opportunity of violating our privacy.
| ashirviskas wrote:
| Come on, did you read more than just the headlines?
|
| > Samsung's spokeswoman continued: " Should consumers
| enable the voice recognition capability, the voice data
| consists of TV commands, or search sentences, only. Users
| can easily recognize if the voice recognition feature is
| activated because a microphone icon appears on the
| screen."
|
| So it is not like it was listening without your
| knowledge. Only when you use the voice features is the
| data being sent over. Like with every other online
| service. As much as I don't like samsung, this is a
| bullshit reason to hate them.
|
| And why provide two links basically saying the same about
| the same story?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Because customers love AI! /s
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Use the speakers as a microphone! WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY!
| thiagobbt wrote:
| They usually already have mics to do automatic EQ
| calibration
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Didn't know that, thanks. Then speakers are actually a
| pretty big data source. I bet most people don't assume
| their speakers can be listening. I wonder if you can get
| internet connection over bluetooth aux or what'd be the
| best way to get someone to let you send data home on a
| speaker.
| genewitch wrote:
| i did some cursory digging, but i don't really want to
| read the A2DP or AVRCP specifications to see how much
| data is allowed in the non-audio payload. Besides, PAN
| exists, but i imagine you have to do something on your
| phone to allow it.
|
| Most of these expensive things also have wifi, though,
| don't they?
|
| > Connect your devices and control everything with our
| soundbar that integrates your favorite voice assistants
| and smart services like Built-in Alexa2, Chromecast3,
| Airplay 24 and more.
|
| > 802.11ac
|
| https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/home-
| the...
|
| yeah, they have wifi, so they don't even need bluetooth
| hacks.
| wcfields wrote:
| Their competitor, Vizio, owns https://www.ispot.tv/ which
| is used for ad delivery _tracking_.
|
| It's much more reliable and precise than the familiar
| Nielsen ratings: since you know the total audience of X% TV
| households in a zipcode (which you know demographics of
| race/income/household size based upon), and Vizio TVs
| account for Y% of all TVs sold for households with incomes
| between A and B, and C and D you can get a confidence
| interval of how many people ACTUALLY saw your TV
| advertisement.
|
| Samsung was/is probably trying to do something similar: All
| sound in your TV pipes through their home theater system,
| so they can "Shazam" whatever media you're watching,
| regardless of the source (OTT, OTA, hell even YouTube or a
| Downloaded Torrent on your laptop hooked up via HDMI) and
| phone home.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| You're not thinking like a true capitalist.
|
| Sure, you got your $2,000 out of the customer. But what
| about the money you could be making between now and the
| next time the customer buys something?
|
| You're giving up on tens of dollars a year by not
| tormenting the people who gave you money already and might
| do so again.
| jcmfernandes wrote:
| Isn't the answer always "bugfixes and increased stability"? :)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The laziness that's become now-standard for release notes is
| insane.
| mnau wrote:
| It's not laziness, it's a tactic.
|
| You don't want to provide more info than absolutely
| necessary, that could be bad from security and legal
| perspective.
|
| Also, if you don't include more info, people tend to ask
| you less questions to clarify.
| aequitas wrote:
| Bricking a device does make it really stable and bugfree.
| Sadly also featureless.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| All the bugs they had no time to fix to bring it to market
| faster ;)
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Isn't that a bit insane for a soundbar? How can those things
| produce any decent bass without volume?
| thimabi wrote:
| It bothers me that many devices are so easily remotely bricked
| and that keeping them offline is the only way to avoid such
| issues.
|
| Automated updates were supposed to give us peace of mind instead
| of having us worried about what bug or enshittification will
| follow.
|
| I'd wager that, for most Internet-connected appliances, keeping
| them offline or disabling autoupdates have way more pros than
| cons.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| If you think about it, keeping them offline is a huge security
| improvement even without the risk of bricking update, so in
| ways an automated update regime that convinces you to keep your
| device offline _is_ giving you peace of mind. In a way.
| grishka wrote:
| If it allows _anyone_ to remotely execute arbitrary code on a
| device without the user 's consent, it's called an RCE
| vulnerability. About as serous as software vulnerabilities go,
| needs to be patched yesterday.
|
| But if it only allows _the manufacturer_ to remotely execute
| arbitrary code on a device without the user 's consent, it's
| called an automatic software update mechanism and most people
| somehow consider that it's totally fine.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Automated updates are a way for companies to push updates on
| you without having to first convince you that the updates are
| good.
| freedomben wrote:
| Also allows them to ship unfinished/buggy and poorly tested
| software and "fix it later OTA."
| lostdog wrote:
| Damaging or removing features should reopen the return window.
| Then they will be more careful about what they change.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I agree but it's a headache even if you are able to return.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Ironically the 2022 Samsung soundbar model I have hasn't gotten a
| single firmware update since January 2023. I bought it new from
| Samsung after that day.
|
| I am moderately surprised that they even update their firmware on
| some models.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My bluray player has an ethernet port on the back, but I never
| ever connect it to the internet.
| ajaimk wrote:
| Really glad I never connected mine to wifi
| tomstokes wrote:
| Two important features I insist on for products I develop:
|
| 1. Staged rollout of firmware updates. It's common practice for
| apps and software but for some reason it's less common with
| firmware. Rolling out to 1% (or less, depending on scale) of
| devices and waiting a day is cheap insurance. Side note: Build a
| good relationship with customer service people so you hear about
| these things immediately.
|
| 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some sequence
| that resets the device completely back to the way it was when it
| came out of the box, firmware included, as a last resort. In
| conjunction, your automated tests need to confirm that every
| factory firmware you've ever released can update to the latest
| firmware.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Indeed a golden factory firmware version that will be booted
| automatically if all else fails and that provides minimum
| connectivity is crucial.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| I wonder if that opens a threat vector from a security point
| of view? If an attacker knows that the golden firmware has
| some critical vulnerability which they can exploit easily,
| they can activate it at will by bricking the device and
| waiting for it to restart.
| stego-tech wrote:
| They could, and that's been a way for attackers to
| "jailbreak" devices and load custom firmware in the past.
| Though for the sake of reducing eWaste and enabling device
| repurposing and reuse, I do think this is the best path for
| firmware-updatable devices.
| csomar wrote:
| The golden firmware should reset to the old/first firmware
| of the device and nothing else. Keep it as simple as
| possible and restore the customer device back to an
| operational state.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| The problem comes in if that old firmware has security
| holes, particularly if the device is network-connected.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Attackers aren't usually in a position to reset firmware,
| and if they are they might as well do a whole host of other
| things like replace the device with a compromised one. I
| don't think there is much of a point to trying to protect
| from that.
| devsda wrote:
| Ability to reset to original out of the box firmware is not
| only about failsafe. It's also a protection from "bug fixes"
| taking away features you had out of the box.
|
| I'm still pissed off about LG removing record to disk option
| from our TV after an upgrade. I've only connected it to
| internet & upgraded assuming some of those bug fixes resolved
| few dlna issues otherwise it's always on internet block list.
| tomstokes wrote:
| > will be booted automatically if all else fails
|
| I prefer to keep the factory firmware reset to a manual
| process that requires user intervention.
|
| For example, holding down the reset button for 10 seconds
| after plugging the device in.
|
| In my experience, it's not a good idea to have a device
| automatically roll back firmware and erase user data after
| failed boots. These mechanisms get triggered too easily
| during certain power outages (power comes on then goes off
| just long enough to cause multiple failed boots) or when
| users are doing simple things like rearranging their power
| cables.
| devmor wrote:
| #2 has been a godsend in the custom/HEDT PC market. Many
| expensive motherboards now come with a "dual BIOS" system that
| gives you an older known working image to boot from, in case
| flashing a new version broke something that can't be easily
| undone.
| shantara wrote:
| Another amazing feature is the ability to flash a BIOS from
| an unbootable system. You insert a flash drive with the
| firmware file into a USB port, press a hardware button and
| the BIOS gets updated, even without a CPU socketed.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| This is a requirement for any motherboard I purchase now. I
| have enjoyed the ability to use AMD CPUs that are slightly
| outside of the generational support or enable features I am
| not promised.
|
| Without the ability to flash from USB without a CPU doing
| this requires keeping spare CPUs that will work just to
| flash.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| HEDT = High-End DeskTop, which (until 2022) referred to CPUs
| with more cores and separate sockets compared to 'normal'
| consumer CPUs, apparently.
|
| https://tweakers.net/reviews/10334/het-einde-van-de-high-
| end... (Dutch)
| amelius wrote:
| This is what everybody wants, but almost nobody does. Time to
| market, etc.
| tomstokes wrote:
| You need to have the firmware equivalent of a platform team.
|
| It's common now for medium and large companies to have some
| variant of a cloud platform team: People responsible for
| shared practices, infrastructure, and processes in the cloud.
|
| Smart hardware companies have done the same for decades. You
| have a firmware platform team that handles things like update
| protocols, recovery protocols, testing checklists, on-device
| OTA update architecture, and other critical functions.
|
| When you're a company like Samsung that continuously releases
| and develops products this actually increases your time to
| market rather than decreasing it. You let each product team
| focus on the parts of the firmware that make their product
| valuable and free them from having to roll their own update
| systems
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Samsung has multiple such teams. In my experience with the
| broader industry, platform teams are usually less than a
| dozen people who own millions of lines of mostly-external
| code. You don't usually get the luxury of careful
| deliberation and comprehensive testing because you're doing
| too busy putting out fires and chasing down manufacturer
| errata.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Samsung might be one of the good ones, but sadly most
| hardware manufacturers treat firmware and software like
| just another line item on the BOM. Like a screw or a
| silicon gasket: Source it from some "supplier," spoon it
| into the product somewhere on the assembly line, and then
| never touch it again. I've seen a hardware manufacturer
| that doesn't even use source control or branching. When
| they have a new hardware product, they take the software
| that is closest in functionality, hack it until it works
| with the new hardware, and then set the software back on
| the shelf until next time.
| drdaeman wrote:
| It's almost exact same thing as purchasing an insurance.
|
| If the management folks have personal health insurance,
| surely they must understand the concept and the need. And
| this is a much better deal because unlike actual insurance
| this is more like "invest once, enjoy forever" type of thing.
| And multi-stage boot chain, recovery partition and staged
| rollouts are not some rocket science that needs some serious
| expertise.
|
| Yet, here we go. Humans are not really rational actors after
| all, and collective humans are even less so.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| But .. but then they can escape the extortion to a working
| state..
| ymyms wrote:
| Great points! As an addendum to this, if #2 becomes untenable
| for whatever reason (such as a vulnerability in the factory
| firmware image), then this #3 would be good to strive for as
| well:
|
| 3. have a set of conditions to mark the running firmware image
| as "safe" and have it become the new fallback firmware image
| for this scenario. That way you can have a recently up-to-date
| firmware version constantly trailing the new ones
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| IMO this is a terrible idea for many reasons but the most
| important of which is: As a consumer I should have the right
| to have my device revert any b.s. update and get my setup to
| how it was the day I bought it.
|
| So many companies have begun rolling out updates that makes
| the device I purchased call home before allowing any user
| functions and if/when that server goes down my device becomes
| a brick. This behavior essentially invalidates my ownership
| of the product and renders it to a service, provided at will
| by the manufacturer.
|
| Your idea ensures my device will one day become a brick as
| soon as the manufacturer decides to mark their update
| requiring internet check-ins "safe".
|
| If you think I'm exaggerating check out Louis Rossmann's
| YouTube channel.
| ymyms wrote:
| FWIW, my background is in B2B hardware and that's the
| perspective I am coming here with. Out of curiosity though,
| how do you weigh your value of control vs. security
| vulnerabilities? Modern speaker systems allow some form of
| wireless connectivity, so there is bound to be something
| and not all consumers will be savvy enough to keep up with
| security updates on their own.
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| My thoughts on security vulnerabilities is that they
| exist on any out of date firmware and that should be
| expected. I've never rolled back to factory settings and
| assumed that this device is now exposable on a DMZ.
|
| Specifically I'm talking about consumer devices, which
| are almost always behind a NAT config + firewall. If your
| soundbar has a vulnerability it's pretty much irrelevant
| if someone has already breached your network.
|
| If we're talking about enterprise networking equipment, I
| still stand by my concerns that the the owner should be
| able to revert back to stock but the burden of
| responsibility is on the technician configuring this
| device, not the manufacturer.
| Zak wrote:
| It seems to me the mentality has become that since end
| users tend to be bad at system administration, they
| shouldn't be allowed to do it, for their own good.
|
| I reject this mentality. I don't think it's necessary or
| desirable to make it impossible for people to do things
| that have negative consequences for themselves. Put a
| "here there be dragons" warning on the firmware rollback,
| bootloader unlock, or similar dangerous operation and let
| people take responsibility for the outcome.
|
| In the case of consumer devices, most people won't even
| try those things; those who do risk further problems for
| the chance of a better outcome. In the case of enterprise
| networking equipment, there's an IT department that, in
| theory has the skills and resources necessary to make
| good decisions about technology.
| pc86 wrote:
| There will always be security issues, so "but security"
| is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever
| they want with a thing that they purchased from you (I'm
| of course just speaking morally/ethically here since
| there's no legal provisions preventing that in most
| places).
|
| If I pay you for a product, you have no moral right to
| tell me what I can and cannot do with that product, up to
| and including messing with the firmware, installing
| known-bad firmwares, wiping it and building my own
| firmware, whatever I want. It's mine, I paid for it, stop
| violating my private property rights.
| echoangle wrote:
| I think I agree with you generalle but just from a logics
| perspective, this is a bad argument:
|
| > There will always be security issues, so "but security"
| is not a reason to prevent a consumer from doing whatever
| they want with a thing that they purchased from you
|
| Just because there will always be security issues doesn't
| mean you shouldn't try to take care of the low hanging
| fruit.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Not the person you replied to, but I'm literally pulling
| wire again to avoid dealing with that dichotomy. And
| hardware developers that think OTW firmware updates are a
| neat idea >:(
| bmicraft wrote:
| Unfortunate you'd need to weave that all the way through the
| whole product stack in order not to end up in a state that
| looks like it's working at first glance but actually isn't
| doing what it is supposed to - like everything running but
| not showing an image, or everything running except networking
| is dead (-> also no further updates possible), or (remote)
| input devices, etc etc
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| From the manufacturer's point of view, a sufficient "safe"
| state is "can receive and apply a firmware update" -- worst
| case scenario you can always push out a new re-signed and
| renumbered version of the older working version.
| ymyms wrote:
| Network connectivity would need to be in the set of checks
| to determine if an update was successful. Also, there
| should hopefully be QA. If you only have one smoke-test for
| a firmware image it should be whether or not it can
| upgrade/downgrade a new image from that one.
| jandrese wrote:
| The second point is the really important one here. Mistakes
| happen, having a factory reset that actually works is crucial
| to avoiding extremely expensive recalls.
|
| I'm reminded of the time a random NPR station accidentally
| bricked the infotainment systems on thousands of Mazdas and
| because there was no factory reset feature they had to spend
| millions replacing head units. That's just bad design.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.
|
| This doesn't work if your threat model includes denying
| rollbacks to prevent exploiting bugs in old firmware. I'd love
| to be able to roll-back firmware on some of my devices to allow
| me to "jailbreak" them using old firmware.
|
| In some cases your newer firmware may be blowing e-fuses that
| prevent old firmware from functioning. See the Nintendo Switch,
| for an example.
|
| To be clear: I think this is anti-consumer and wrong, but
| manufacturers absolutely do it.
|
| Edit: I also think it should be illegal, by way of consumer
| regulation. I don't think consumers should have option to waive
| their right to manufacturers not damaging hardware they own.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This doesn't get enough attention, waaaay too many of these
| issues are traced back to the vendor trying to "prevent"
| someone from using their product in a way that they don't
| like.
| koolba wrote:
| Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It either
| performs its well defined functions when you bought it or
| they sold you a device that doesn't input/output sound.
|
| Updates for these types of things always fall into three
| categories. Either they're gimping some unanticipated
| usage, they're trying to insert ads, or they're trying to
| gather more usage data.
| basch wrote:
| Maybe a new codec? New streaming app support? New
| wireless protocol? CEC bugfix?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, all of those are in the realm of possibilities, but
| has it ever been the norm?
|
| In my experience, products like this are only get updates
| when the company finds a way to extract more money:
|
| - add more ads
|
| - add more ads that pretend not to be ads
|
| - to remove functionality, so it won't cannibalize sales
| of more expensive product
| hirako2000 wrote:
| More hardware is sold at cost or at a loss, compensated
| with ads. I don't like the model either, but that's how
| it is.
|
| If price isn't the only factor for some, it is for many
| who would otherwise not buy these things. Sellers picked
| up on that long ago.
|
| Other comments wish to see regulations, they can't outwit
| those marketing tricksters. For profit enterprise can,
| and will offer more alternatives with bigger stamps about
| privacy, ad-less certified and whatnot.
| harrall wrote:
| It's the norm because people rather buy one single
| product that does it all.
|
| The alternative to an all-in-one sound bar is having
| regular 5.1 speakers, a nice receiver, a nice streaming
| box, and maybe a dumber TV and you will have absolutely
| the best setup but it's a lot of putting pieces together,
| more space usage, and either money (if you want it right
| away) or a lot of waiting (if you want to get it used).
| bradyd wrote:
| Even dedicated receivers have software updates now. My
| Onkyo receiver had an update that added Dolby Atmos
| support, for example.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway? It
| either performs its well defined functions when you
| bought it or they sold you a device that doesn't
| input/output sound.
|
| Unfortunately there are soooo f..ing many devices out
| there that don't follow the specs, no wonder given how
| long and complex alone the Bluetooth specifications are,
| and HDMI/HDCP (which a soundbar with ARC support
| needs...) is even worse, and don't even try to get me
| started on CEC because that is an even bigger pile of
| dung, or stuff like GPUs that run HDMI over DVI, MHL or
| USB-C in DP mode and god knows what else people expect to
| "magically work" with a 5 dollar adapter they got off of
| Alibaba. And no, "audit products to follow the specs"
| isn't a foolproof solution either. That means that
| everyone has to deal with everyone else's quirks and at
| least the most popular devices and their manufacturers
| have to supply firmware updates to react upon reports of
| quirks.
| bipson wrote:
| While I agree with what you wrote
|
| > [...] GPUs that run HDMI over DVI [...]
|
| I thought HDMI and DVI use the same signalling (at least
| the 'digital part' of DVI, was it DVI-D?), just over a
| different connector?
|
| In my memory only the connectors competed for adoption,
| and Home Entertainment industry opted for HDMI and the
| PC-industry opted for DVI, while the signalling was not
| contested (besides DVI also being able to carry analog
| signalling with full spin-out, and HDMI carrying audio
| instead). My memory might not serve me well here though.
|
| I never thought HDMI would win :( but it makes sense I
| guess - Computers/their use changed :(
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Sibling mentioned CEC fixes-- this one is huge. CEC is
| lovely in concept but I ended up having to disable it
| completely across my setup as there was just way too many
| bits of weird behaviour with devices turning themselves
| on and then switching the TV or AVR to their input
| apropos of nothing.
|
| I feel like CEC tried way too hard to be magical instead
| of exposing enough control for the user to be able to
| block certain commands from problematic devices, or even
| just designate that device X will always be the boss in a
| particular setup.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Absolutely this.
|
| The frustration when I turn on the Steam Deck and the
| Apple TV goes
|
| "Look at me. Look at me! _I 'm_ the output now"
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Yup, game consoles are ground zero for this. I hit the
| button on the PS5 controller only to have the receiver
| and TV power on, then the PS4 wakes up for some reason
| and then switches the AVR to _its_ input.
|
| My Sony UHD player also seems to want to grab the input
| sometimes too, so maybe it's Sony that's the source of
| the problems haha.
|
| And again, it's all just so maddening because it feels
| like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR should
| never send power-on messages to its input devices."
| Because then I would just power on the device I actually
| want to use, it would turn on the AVR and TV, and we'd be
| golden.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I turn off CEC all the time and my tv refuses to
| acknowledge it if I ever unhook the device or HDMI.
| Always defaults back. Drives me crazy.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Lindy-HDMI-
| Adapter-Female-41232/dp/B0... -- I have a couple and it's
| solved this problem for me completely. I hate how
| unpredictable CEC is when things go wrong, on top of the
| ridiculous 3 device limit.
| jldugger wrote:
| Even better: I have some sort of Useless Machine[1] bug
| where turning on the TV will power up the PS5, which then
| puts itself to back to sleep.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Oh I've definitely had this one too, where the TV powers
| up to the "I'm going to sleep now lol" screen from the
| PlayStation.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _And again, it 's all just so maddening because it
| feels like it would go away if I could be like "Hey, AVR
| should never send power-on messages to its input
| devices."_
|
| Yeah, that sounds a weird "feature" in the first place.
|
| If I manually turn on the UHD
| player/Chromecast/PS5/whatever, it makes sense that the
| TV also turns on and switches to the respective input.
|
| I could also _sort_ of imagine that if I switched the TV
| to some input source, it might be convenient if the
| device connected to that input turns on. (Not by a lot,
| though. You need the device 's remote/gamepad/whatever
| anyway to tell it what to do, so the one button press
| saved doesn't really buy you much.)
|
| But what makes no sense for me is the TV turning on _all_
| input devices when it 's being turned on itself. When
| would you ever want to have the PS4, the PS5 and the HD
| player running, let alone as the default behavior?
|
| That sounds like a genuine bug in the TV.
|
| (Also, you sound as if you have some sort of "2 <-> n"
| setup with n input and 2 output devices. I have no idea
| how CEC would even be supposed to behave in such a setup.
| Would an input device turn on both output devices?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| It's a conventional setup:
|
| TV <- AVR <- PS4, PS5, Switch, UHD
|
| I suspect the issue is largely with the receiver (a
| VSX-935), as that's seemingly the component sending a
| turn-on signal to its inputs.
|
| If I could, I would have probably run everything to the
| TV and just done all the audio over eARC, but the TV is
| on the other end of a 50' HDMI cable, so I definitely
| need the receiver as an in-rack multiplexer.
| xg15 wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense.
| m4rtink wrote:
| I have a laptop, steamdeck, Nintendo Switch and
| chromecast all connected to an LG TV and all the ouput
| switching and remote pass-through works as expected.
| Maybe just a lucky combination ?
| godelski wrote:
| > Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway?
|
| No matter the device, software rots.
|
| Not because the device changes, not because the software
| changes, but because the world does
| otterley wrote:
| Also, time-to-market pressures can result in initial
| shipments having (minor but not showstopping) firmware
| bugs. Post-sale firmware upgrades can be beneficial for
| the customer.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| And the obvious solution is to isolate the device from
| the world. Most of my stereo is isolated from "the
| world", and some parts are close to 30 years old. Why
| does a soundbar need contact with the internet?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Modern soundbar are bugged Bluetooth enabled, also with
| ship with interfacing protocols, while legacy
| bluetooth/wifi drivers are ok, protocols just break
| cle wrote:
| Innocuous product features like streaming music,
| integration with Alexa/Google, connecting to TV and other
| speakers via wifi. Oh and collecting analytics data and
| selling to ad networks...
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Just because you want to keep using old tech doesn't mean
| everyone else wants to.
| godelski wrote:
| That kinda defeats the point of having a device. Sure it
| works in some cases but we're talking about a soundbar
| here and that has to interact with other devices. It's
| whole purpose is to interact with other devices.
|
| Even if it doesn't need to contact the internet you're
| still going to want it to connect through cables. There's
| good reason to connect through bluetooth.
|
| But why should it contact over the internet? Well it sure
| is nice to be able to stream music from my NAS. There's
| utility in that. There's also utility in the parent
| company updating firmware to support new audio codecs. Or
| to support new algorithms. If my device is gaining more
| utility, that's a great thing! And of course, if it is
| connected wirelessly in any way (including bluetooth) I
| sure as hell would like updates with respect to security.
|
| Without this, the thing becomes e-waste. The environment
| moves. Time marches on. No thing can exist in isolation,
| no matter how hard you try. Again, software rots, not
| because the software changes, but because the world does.
|
| But that's not the problem here. The problem is abuse of
| that power. It isn't for the benefit of the customer. The
| problem is managers pushing to release before things are
| ready. The need for speed with no direction. To not even
| consider in the calculus of decision making the
| tremendous costs of when things go wrong. And how this
| lesson is never learned despite facing the problem time
| and time again. Issues like this now cost tons of
| engineering hours, tons of lawyer hours, and ultimately
| will cost tons in rebates and refunds. How many weeks of
| work is that equivalent to? Sure, it doesn't always
| result in catastrophic failure like this, sometimes it
| results in smaller failures, sometimes small enough they
| can be brushed off. But those are still costs that no one
| considers. That's the problem here.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| In my case, my stereo is connected to an inexpensive
| Airplay adapter.
|
| So I do get all the advantages of a connected device, but
| if the adapter is bricked, I can easily replace just that
| small device. And more likely, when there's a new
| standard, most of my equipment is unaffected.
| godelski wrote:
| s/soundbar/airplay adapter/g
|
| I believe you're missing the forest for the trees. My
| argument is invariant to the specific device we're
| talking about.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Why does a soundbar need software? An active speaker with
| a jack plug would work just fine
| palata wrote:
| > Why else would a soundbar need updates anyway?
|
| Because for free you only get the first 15 levels of
| volume. If you want to get to 25, you need to pay a
| subscription.
|
| I thought it was obvious... how does the seat heating
| work in your car? /s
| hirako2000 wrote:
| We've solved long ago mass manufacturing challenges.
| Today's problem is to sell.
| nottorp wrote:
| Upvoted, but I'd pay a subscription to _restrict_ a
| neighbor to the first 15 levels of volume out of 25
| sometimes :)
| devilbunny wrote:
| While I agree with your broad statement, I have a TCL
| (with built-in Roku) TV that has a bug in the sound
| processing. Either it becomes very quiet, drops out
| completely, or comes in and out with a lot of stuttering.
| Happens irregularly, typically though not always weeks
| apart (though on no schedule I've identified), solved
| with a reboot of the TV (which of course can't just be
| done by turning it off and back on - you have to select
| "restart system" from the menus).
|
| I owned it for at least six months before this occurred
| the first time.
|
| In theory, I could do a USB update of the firmware and
| hope that fixes it. In practice, they want my serial
| number to let me download it. No thanks, I'll pass, even
| though it's never been connected to WiFi or Ethernet and
| never will be. I'll just reset it every once in a while.
| update wrote:
| > they want my serial number to let me download it.
|
| Out of curiosity, why is that a problem to you? Granted,
| it is strange; I went through the process for my TCL Roku
| who's wifi stopped working (still not fixed, and now a
| second, 3yo TCL Roku has bricked itself. nice!)
| gm3dmo wrote:
| To install an AI update you didn't ask for, do not need
| and cannot turn off?
| c5karl wrote:
| A lot of consumer products ship with half-baked software
| and/or firmware. I wish Polk would fix the bug(s) that
| cause my soundbar to freeze and need a reboot several
| times per week. But it's an old product that's not longer
| sold, so I'm probably SOL.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem usually aren't vendors. The problem usually are
| rightsholders - the movie/TV series industry _still_ didn
| 't get the Spotify memo, and the console game industry...
| well it's hard to say they don't have a point insisting on
| serious DRM given how rampant piracy becomes once there's
| an easy-enough root method available.
| mastercheif wrote:
| This is an undersold part of the story
|
| It's not only media companies with DRM
|
| IoT integrations like Alexa come with numerous security
| requirements that are often good ideas in theory but lead
| to hacky workarounds to meet certification requirements
| Loudergood wrote:
| The massive success of Steam points otherwise.
| pqtyw wrote:
| In what way? Console makers wouldn't gain anything by
| weakening DRM and making devices rootable. It's not like
| they are making that much money from device sales.
|
| Of course then you have MS which basically just turned
| XBox into a cheap but totally locked down gaming PC
| (since there are very few Xbox exclusives these days).
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Steam is a very convenient and beloved marketplace but
| that doesn't mean it doesn't have a solid DRM and anti-
| cheat measures built in.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Is this the Spotify that is a broadly unprofitable
| business, which is why it's so desperate to enter into
| new ones, or the Spotify that has DRM?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Spotify made 1 billion $ of profit in 2024. Hard to call
| that unprofitable.
|
| My point is, it (and Youtube) killed piracy for the most
| part when it comes to music. Trading CDs full of mp3s
| used to be a sport in school a decade or two ago, these
| days why would anyone even want to invest the time when
| Spotify has everything anyway at a price point school
| kids can afford it?
|
| Netflix used to become the same thing for movies, but the
| greed of studios killed it and now it's more expensive to
| have the large stream services than cable TV.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Exactly. If your company's threat model considers its own
| customers as attackers, you're the baddies.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| Not always. There's a time and a place for including end
| users in your threat model. These would include
| scholastic and carceral settings, where in both cases the
| end user may, as an example, desire access to resources
| that have been deemed inappropriate.
| Hizonner wrote:
| > scholastic and carceral
|
| Same thing.
|
| > deemed inappropriate
|
| Ooh! Deeming! Can I deem too? Huh? Can I? I have a number
| of candidates.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| This is a good reason for manufacturers not to deny
| rollbacks, and a good reason not to have e-fuses.
| basch wrote:
| Blow the fuse after its confirmed working. Or always allow a
| one version rollback.
|
| Im not a fan of firmware lockdowns but I understand other
| people may value security over moddability.
| 0x457 wrote:
| At very least, it should be two partitions: previous
| firmware and current firmware.
| Szpadel wrote:
| even with that "requirement" add special minimal recovery
| that can be booted with special buttons sequence by
| bootloader and allows some form of flashing signed firmware.
|
| this should be especially trivial when your device have some
| usb ports.
|
| you can keep all requirements of only newer or the same
| version of firmware to flash, with all refuse checks.
|
| if you mess up, you can allow consumers to flash fix using
| regular pendrive
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, they do it, but usually in devices where it's basically
| part of DRM. I don't think engineers put that much though in
| security of soundbars.
| xp84 wrote:
| Yup! Depends on what's a higher priority: Preventing
| catastrophic destruction of the device, OR, "protecting" some
| IP from ultra-small-scale piracy, even though ultimately
| anyone bent on piracy will be able to pirate anyway.
|
| Clearly the latter is heavily preferred by most companies.
| protocolture wrote:
| Big part of the UBNT vs Cambium dispute. IIRC UBNT won in
| court, but just to prevent the Cambium firmware being
| installed on their hardware the next few firmware versions
| fixed it so that it cant be easily reverted.
|
| Whats worse is that a lot of the affected hardware was near
| or EOL anyway, so Cambium was simply helping rescue devices
| headed for the scrap heap.
| efitz wrote:
| Sometimes they do it because it's contractually required if
| they want to get access to proprietary standards, for example
| to allow them to play copy-protected content.
|
| Copyright and patent have morphed into evils that drive anti-
| consumer and anti-competitive behavior, and have driven a
| "subscription" model that allows rent seekers to achieve
| their wildest dreams.
| water9 wrote:
| Blowing efuses is a destructive action and it should not be
| legal for a company to destroy parts of your electronic
| device that you paid for
| grumple wrote:
| I think the correct way to do this is to allow a rollback to
| the immediately previous working version. Before updating,
| write current firmware to failsafe data storage, then do the
| update. Then a firmware reset sends you back to the last good
| version. I'm pretty sure this is already done by many
| hardware and software manufacturers, such as me.
| clysm wrote:
| Yes it does work... with an A/B update system.
|
| Android systems can do this today. After an orderly shutdown
| of new software, then it can mark the new stuff as good and
| not allow older software to boot.
| Vilian wrote:
| The funny part is the Samsung update that bricked a10
| phones was a update to smart things, so it couldn't use the
| Android A/B capability to roll back lol
| croes wrote:
| But then at least have backup firmware of the one you want to
| update, so you can go one step back in case of errors.
| nomel wrote:
| Is that applicable here? We're talking about speakers. For
| most/low security devices, a firmware rollback, or a
| firmware-download mode, are fine. In this case, it would
| probably have prevented millions in losses, with the risk
| being a...jailbroken speaker?
| omoikane wrote:
| > 1. Staged rollout of firmware update
|
| Especially if there is an internal testing stage before
| actually rolling out to production. It's possible that the
| users seeing the bricked devices are in fact limited to the
| initial wave, but the damage is already done.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Sonos completely missed the boat on these two simple concepts
| as well.
|
| See their new app debacle which coupled a non-reversible
| firmware update that made the hardware incompatible with the
| old app.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Most companies don't do this because it's not one of their
| organizational priorities to have reliable updates. The
| infrastructure is usually custom built and maintained by a
| couple of folks who have a dozen other responsibilities they're
| told are more important. Testing is usually limited by hardware
| availability and release velocity. "One of every board revision
| we've ever produced" simply isn't available and waiting two
| days to run through every firmware version before you release
| updates is a conversational non-starter with the PMs.
|
| There are commercial offerings (like mender.io, never used)
| that basically specialize in providing rock solid update
| infrastructure, but that again takes investment and
| organizational priority that doesn't exist for non-feature
| code.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Different industry, but I (a long time ago) worked in a place
| that built scientific instruments.
|
| > "One of every board revision we've ever produced"
|
| The, ah, "special" people we had running engineering didn't
| even put in the work to be capable of the software querying
| the board rev. We had to play games like running certain
| motors past a position limit and seeing if there were limit
| switches there (or not) to guesstimate board revs.
|
| I'm guessing stories like this are common.
| boricj wrote:
| I'm working on embedded systems and I've seen and heard some
| horror stories just on the device's side. Piles and piles of
| pre- and post-reboot shell scripts filled with race
| conditions against the system's services and themselves. When
| these break, if you're lucky a factory reset is enough to fix
| the system, if you're unlucky they become field bricks.
|
| I'm trying to buck the trend though and on the new embedded
| system I'm working on, I've specifically designed the upgrade
| system to be as reliable as I can make it. It goes something
| like this:
|
| - The new firmware is downloaded to the secondary application
| slot.
|
| - Just prior to rebooting, the entire state data of the
| system is serialized as a document and stored on a flash
| partition.
|
| - The upgrade flag is set, the system reboots and MCUboot
| does its thing.
|
| - The new firmware finds out a upgrade happened, clears out
| all the data partitions, restores from the document and then
| clears out its partition.
|
| The system is basically sanitized and restored after each
| upgrade. It's also the same codepath that handles saving and
| restoring the system's configuration by the end-user as well
| as settings management. If the document schema is for an
| older version, run the N-to-N+1 schema upgraders on it prior
| to applying instead of trying to patch the system in-place.
| If something goes horribly wrong, flip a jumper to trigger
| the heavy-duty sanitization that nukes the entire external
| flash (internal flash only contains the bootloader, primary
| application slot and factory parameters so it's essentially
| read-only once the application boots).
|
| It might be hubris, but I hope it's good enough that I'll
| never see a bricked card that can't be resurrected by a
| factory reset with this project (assuming no hardware damage,
| no internal flash corruption and no bricking firmware getting
| signed with production keys seeping through the cracks
| despite all the checks in place).
| fragmede wrote:
| add a watchdog timer to reboot automatically on failed
| upgrade as well.
| boricj wrote:
| We already have a watchdog timer. We could automatically
| trigger a factory reset after N bootloops following an
| upgrade, but it's up to the end-user to decide to flip
| the switch so we won't go there.
|
| I kept the summary short and simple, partly because that
| product isn't out yet and also because I don't want to
| bury the lead with a lot of extraneous details that we do
| take into consideration, but are irrelevant to the big
| picture idea of an upgrade method that factory resets the
| card and restores its state with a codepath shared with
| the end-user save/reset and configuration mechanisms.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| That's a strong start, but be careful if your system ever
| evolves beyond a single logical processor. You'll need
| additional orchestration to have reliable updates in a
| distributed system with semi-independent processors. The
| update on one might succeed, while another fails. Depending
| on when the old images were produced, the new images might
| not be able to talk to each other. Depending on their
| relative roles in the system (e.g. one sets up the power
| supply or network for the other, or acts as the time master
| to do certificate validation) this may or may not be an
| easily fixable issue even if each system locally thinks
| it's okay.
|
| This sort of functional interdependency has become
| increasingly common in embedded these days with
| heterogenous SoCs.
|
| One thing I've seen before is to separate downloading from
| rebooting, broadcast the manifest for the updates between
| all the independent processors (all updates need a
| declarative manifest for so, so many reasons) to check
| locally, and only proceed when they all agree. Rollbacks
| are initiated if they can't see everyone with their
| expected versions afterwards.
|
| Still isn't perfect either.
| boricj wrote:
| Fortunately, it's a single no-frills MCU running the
| Zephyr RTOS. It does communicate with another system, but
| they are so very loosely coupled to the point that we
| really don't care whatever is running on the other side.
|
| I won't get into details, but in some of the horrors
| stories I've heard the distributed system happened to be
| entirely software in nature. There are plenty of creative
| ways to mess up an upgrade on a uniprocessor system.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Reverting to factory state seems riskier than last known good
| state. You could run into things like TLS root authorities not
| being recognised, deprecated cipher suites, etc. Just because
| that version worked a decade ago, it doesn't mean it's
| compatible with the world today.
| tomstokes wrote:
| > Reverting to factory state seems riskier than last known
| good state.
|
| Reverting to factory state is the last resort. You don't have
| users do it unless there is no other good state to return to
| on the device.
|
| > Just because that version worked a decade ago, it doesn't
| mean it's compatible with the world today.
|
| That's why I said you have to include this in your test
| procedures.
|
| When you're planning for the long term you can accommodate
| for these things on your servers.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > > Just because that version worked a decade ago, it
| doesn't mean it's compatible with the world today.
|
| > That's why I said you have to include this in your test
| procedures.
|
| You can't test _the world_. Even if your servers can
| correctly respond to requests from old software, it doesn't
| mean that the network between you will too.
| xp84 wrote:
| Networking surely does introduce complications especially
| when TLS is now basically considered required and cert
| lifetimes are being limited for 'security' reasons.
| However most consumer devices have functionality, often
| their primary/most important function, to which network
| connectivity isn't even needed. For instance, a speaker
| producing sounds.
|
| In the factory reset state, things should have a USB
| flash drive firmware install route which could be used to
| bring back working root certs, etc.
|
| Of course again this depends on whether the mfg is
| worried about DRM bypass hacks that are found later on in
| the factory firmware.
|
| I'd support legislation to issue stiff fines for devices
| that can't be factory reset at any time, with the only
| exception being for directly-consumer-benefitting anti-
| theft (so, iCloud lock is okay).
| radicality wrote:
| But can't you? Sure, factory firmware from many years ago
| might have issues, but should still work well enough to
| allow you to fully offline upgrade to a newer working
| version.
|
| I think all the OP was saying, is: Suppose you're
| releasing firmware version N for some widget you make.
| Now, for all versions V in (0..N-1), verify that applying
| N to V works correctly.
| Galxeagle wrote:
| I get the sense that #2 is viewed as a risk for DRM, given all
| the work that goes into preventing firmware downgrades to
| potentially insecure firmware. Specifically thinking of the
| Nintendo Switch[1] that goes so far as to _blow fuses_ on each
| firmware upgrade!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23534793
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| eFuses were already on the Xbox 360/PS3 generation.
| Smartphones also use them to lock out proprietary photography
| algorithms if you unlock the bootloader.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse
| gorlilla wrote:
| This is the de facto playbook for one of the Mega-Evil Corp.'s
| CPE firmware (Gateways, IPTV receivers, etc...).
|
| New firmware is pushed in phases 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50% then
| full scale.
|
| Each stage has some delay incorporated for
| acquisition/application and then for telemetry (including
| support contacts from affected accounts) to determine impact
| and allow for regression fixes.
|
| The other reason they would phase launches is because of
| firmware builds being used across multiple CPE models and
| hardware revisions, where only a small subset of hardware could
| wind up being problematic, but not discovered until deployment.
|
| When you have millions of devices deployed, even a fraction of
| devices having an issue can create a shit storm on the support
| side of things.
|
| It all seems so obvious once you know to think about it.
| gwerbret wrote:
| Both are very reasonable features, of course. Here are (some
| of) the real-world challenges to their implementation:
|
| #1: Requires competence, and/or management that isn't too
| focused on velocity and features to listen to their engineers'
| warnings about exactly the sort of problem being discussed
| here.
|
| #2: Many firmware updates explicitly and specifically want to
| strip away features that the hardware shipped with (by
| introducing DRM, paywalls, etc.), so see the comment about
| management above.
| ErrantX wrote:
| Another good one is; please always split any security updates
| from feature changes (and backport the updates per whatever
| versioning policy you have for those lagging the latest).
|
| After many years of being burned I always delay system level
| non-security -related updates at least several days after
| launch to mitigate the risk.
| greesil wrote:
| Also a dev or dogfood population of devices used by employees
| liendolucas wrote:
| The important feature here I would insist on is to let the user
| decide when to do a firmware update. Not the other way round.
| That's the way to build a good consumer relationship.
|
| Why on earth a sound bar needs to update its firmware? Why
| firmware needs to be in a couple of tweeters and a woofer? It
| should basically output audio from an input source.
| ethan_smith wrote:
| I completely agree with both points and would add a third:
| design for _offline use first_ (maybe treat every OTA update as
| - this might be the final version this device ever receives).
| Products should work perfectly fine without an internet
| connection, heck that 's how they worked until 5-7 years ago.
| Core features should never depend on cloud services, and
| updates should be opt-in, not forced.
|
| Offline first approach respects user autonomy and creates a
| natural safety net against bad updates. Plus, it means your
| product keeps working even when servers change or get shut down
| years later or a nuclear war happens. Sure, connectivity has
| benefits, but a speaker's main job is playing sound, not
| phoning home. Building offline-first also forces better
| engineering decisions about longevity and graceful degradation.
|
| It's so hard to find any offline-first apps/devices nowawdays,
| which is sad to see in a world of algorithms and AI.
|
| This whole situation reminds me of this:
| https://programmerhumor.io/linux-memes/thats-the-attitude-sa...
| the_snooze wrote:
| But you see, the problem with offline use is the manufacturer
| can't claw back value in the future. How will you keep
| shareholders happy if you can't arbitrarily push ads, hobble
| existing functionality, or impose a new subscription service?
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Exactly - that's the flaw in trying to extract infinite
| growth from finite products. We've turned durable goods
| into rental services without consent, all to please
| quarterly earnings reports.
|
| The tragedy is that "respecting customer ownership" is now
| seen as leaving money on the table rather than building
| lasting brand loyalty through quality.
| weinzierl wrote:
| > _" A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state"_
|
| A failsafe firmware reset back to a safe and secure state yes.
| The factory state is not necessarily that, so no.
|
| I think devices should keep a last known good state firmware
| but keeping a full factory state immutable firmware would be
| irresponsible for many usecases.
| fhd2 wrote:
| What hardware reset typically does, in my experience, is to
| reinstall the last firmware you installed. Many don't even
| have the space to keep some original and/or safe image in
| addition. I'm working on one device where we delete much of
| the existing system to make space for even downloading a new
| firmware image. It's wild.
| LegitShady wrote:
| iirc for computers doesn't gigabyte have some kind of
| patent on dual bios design (active vs backup bios chips).
| I'm sure there are other ways to implement it but I think
| thats true.
| werdnapk wrote:
| As a user/customer, if I'm part of that 1% with an issue and
| get the same sort of "canned" response you see on the mentioned
| thread, I feel like me as a user doesn't matter. I guess the
| next step is calling customer support and then having the
| person on the phone making me go through their checklist of
| things I've already tried and again, feeling like this is of no
| use.
|
| I think it usually takes a big rollout for these big companies
| to actually "hear" their users.
| neilv wrote:
| For this $1500 street price soundbar, I'm wondering whether
| they consciously decided not to invest in BOM cost or software
| effort that would help avoid bricking.
|
| I'm not sure I understand various industries' conventions...
|
| While interviewing for a principal engineer job, I was meeting
| individually with a bunch of team leads and managers, and one
| engineer asked how would I design firmware updating for the
| company's product (which was more critical, complex, and
| expensive than a soundbar).
|
| I assumed they were probably trying to see whether I would
| throw in some robustness/resilience (not oversimplify it). So I
| sketched it out, while hitting notes like diffs, downloading
| and assembling in staging space, imperfect networking, having
| at least two firmware "slots", backing out upon boot loop or
| failure soon after boot, gradual deployment to installed base,
| contrasting with some less-critical consumer product firmware
| update practices, etc.
|
| (Either that was a bad answer, or they got distracted thinking
| about something I'd said, because I was getting odd
| subconscious backchannel cues, and they were unresponsive when
| I tried elicit more requirements or guidance about what they
| were looking for. Maybe there was some standard embedded
| systems programmer canned answer that I was supposed to recite
| (analogous to the Web brogrammer 'system design' interview),
| and they couldn't think of how to nudge me towards the
| shibboleth without saying it?)
| gblargg wrote:
| > A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state.
|
| Or perhaps to the very first released firmware version. This
| way they don't have to support updating from any version to the
| latest, just from the first one.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state._
|
| Do you mean like a physical button? That could work, though I'm
| not sure I've ever seen it. Holding down power for 10 seconds
| (or whatever) usually just erases user data, but doesn't reset
| firmware. Are you aware of any device that does this? But does
| it require some meta-firmware to roll back the firmware? What
| if that meta-firmware has a security flaw and needs to be
| updated? And _that_ update is faulty?
|
| If you're talking about a code sent from your servers to
| devices to reset, that seems like asking for the impossible. If
| a firmware update bricks the device, that may very well brick
| its ability to receive codes at all.
|
| In both situations, it starts to feel like a problem of
| infinite regress...
| boricj wrote:
| > 2. A failsafe firmware reset back to factory state. Some
| sequence that resets the device completely back to the way it
| was when it came out of the box, firmware included, as a last
| resort.
|
| That's a nifty mechanism that also allows downgrade attacks, so
| it has cybersecurity implications that may or may not be
| acceptable. Furthermore, it might not be practical or even be
| possible to restore the system to factory condition due to
| technical reasons.
|
| The team next door allows its systems to downgrade to a
| previous minor version with a mandatory factory reset. It
| however refuses downgrading to a previous major version because
| it implies the bootloader was upgraded or the storage was
| repartitioned and they really don't want to rollback that.
| walrus01 wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why my home theater system is built
| from discrete parts (not an all-in-one soundbar), with a high
| quality receiver that never talks to the internet, doesn't have
| an ethernet cable and has no wifi access (it works fine as a
| bluetooth sink when I want to play something from my phone into
| it), separately purchased 5.1 speaker system, and roll of 16awg
| stranded copper speaker cable from monoprice.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Should be codified by law: - If a firmware can be
| updated, it must keep a minimum ROM feature so it can be
| recovered. - No device should be updated without the
| *owner* explicit intention to do so. - Full docs must be
| released if the vendor stops supporting it.
| mmanfrin wrote:
| > - No device should be updated without the _owner_ explicit
| intention to do so.
|
| Ahh! But you are just leasing the software!! Samsung is
| technically the owner!!
| tremon wrote:
| - if the manufacturer retains some form of ownership after
| "sale", it is obligated to provide free repairs/replacements
| for the duration of the contract
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| If it's a lease maybe it should cost money, nobody would buy
| these stupid pieces of shit if they all had $1 / year
| peppercorns attached
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _No device should be updated without the *owner* explicit
| intention to do so._
|
| That point has practical issues, because most consumer
| electronic customers are technically dumb.
|
| Consequently, you end up with a long-tail of deployed device
| firmware versions, which makes support a nightmare (fix this
| external integration that broke... across 20 different
| versions).
|
| I'd phrase it more in terms of: - Every device
| must include an option for owners to disable automatic firmware
| updates.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| >That point has practical issues, because most consumer
| electronic customers are technically dumb.
|
| It's a speaker that worked fine until Samsung unilaterally
| broke it. I don't think the customers are the dumb ones here.
| ziddoap wrote:
| The original comment and the reply are talking generally,
| not specifically about this one case.
| davkan wrote:
| Customers will gladly use an outdated browser or OS with
| known exploits to access their most sensitive information.
| Automated updates are necessary evil. Even a smart speaker
| with a vulnerability could end up as part of a botnet.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| Then we should strive to improve computer literacy. I
| think technological solutions should still ultimately
| empower their users.
| davkan wrote:
| I can only assume you've never worked in desktop support
| if you think that is something the general populace is
| remotely interested in. Smartphones are a step in the
| right direction for the tech illiterate and uninterested.
| There is zero reason to give lay users enough rope to
| hang themselves with despite that being the opposite of
| what I or most users of this site would like for
| ourselves.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| I actually did work with customer support in my very
| first job :) We had a limited IT crew, so programmers on-
| site would often go to the users' office to help with
| software and hardware issues.
|
| My anecdote is the opposed of yours: they were interested
| in knowing why something wasn't working, but only as long
| as you're willing to be patient, talk slowly, and explain
| any unknown concepts to them, if required.
|
| Insulting them, or just telling them it's their fault
| something wasn't working would be a sure way to get a
| negative reaction instead.
| davkan wrote:
| Fair enough. Many of my end users were indeed eager or at
| least willing to learn as you say. A non-insignificant
| portion were not though, and those are the ones I'm
| speaking of. But that was also a professional
| environment. Your interested users had some obligation to
| the company and the support of professionals like
| yourself to guide them.
|
| Additionally, I don't think these people are stupid, and
| I'm not demeaning them. They simply do not care to know
| and that's perfectly fine. I wouldn't demean someone for
| not understanding how their car works, or even failing to
| get their oil changed. The computer is a tool to file
| taxes and shop on amazon for most people, they have a
| million other priorities in their lives that come before
| making sure windows is up to date, let alone actually
| considering its security. It's the job of these companies
| to ensure their technology can be used safely without
| consideration by the end user.
| gr4vityWall wrote:
| > I don't think these people are stupid, and I'm not
| demeaning them.
|
| Sorry if it sounded like I was implying you thought that,
| or called them stupid, I didn't mean it that way. That
| statement wasn't trying to 'refute' anything you said
| either - it was just expanding on my anecdote of what I
| saw that it worked or not, whether in a professional
| environment or somewhere else.
|
| Now, replying to your recent post,
|
| > It's the job of these companies to ensure their
| technology can be used safely without consideration by
| the end user.
|
| I think we just hard disagree here. I believe ultimately
| the user is/should be on control of how their own
| computer is used.
| davkan wrote:
| No worries, I agree with you in principle and for my own
| usage but, in practice I don't want my grandma to have to
| think about security at all and I'd prefer if there were
| very few ways she could be social engineered to
| circumvent what security is there.
|
| Beyond that I think total control can still be achieved
| in the realm of hobbyists who can run Linux or flash
| alternative firmwares etc.
| derf_ wrote:
| I think this is completely rational given a realistic
| threat model. As a customer, I've had my browser hacked
| exactly never, but examples of feature downgrades from
| vendors abound. Vendors are a much more serious attack
| vector than a random hacker.
| davkan wrote:
| I would assume your browser automatically applies
| security updates in the case of 0day exploits, no?
|
| Like I said, automatic updates are an evil. But the
| general populace will absolutely defer every security
| update until the end of time so long as they don't have
| to spend five minutes waiting to get to their desktop.
|
| Obviously vendors enshitify their products via firmware
| updates and potentially brick devices or introduce new
| vulnerabilities but, it's ludicrous to pretend that the
| general populace are good stewards of their internet
| connected devices or that they ever will be. They simply
| do not care, they never will, and its up to the rest of
| us to design products for the lowest common denominator
| if we want protect end users and have a safer internet.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Also the number of times I want my speaker or TV to go
| online is zero, while Samsung apparently wants that
| number to be greater than zero for both products. So it
| is frequently the companies that put us in this situation
| in the first place.
| lopis wrote:
| > No device should be updated without the _owner_ explicit
| intention to do so.
|
| I want to be able to opt-in to updates of my devices with
| official updates without the fear of them being turned into
| useless e-waste...
| mnau wrote:
| In EU, Cyber Resilience Act requires automatic updates, so the
| second point is moot.
|
| Most owners want just plug and play, so it makes sense.
|
| Even third point is pretty moot. We don't do that for hardware,
| why for software... A component is no longer manufactured?
| Tough luck, hopefully you stockpiled it.
| Hizonner wrote:
| Um, that's not what "moot" means.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Your second condition practically guarantees proliferation of
| exploitable IoT devices.
| rzz3 wrote:
| A law? As an engineer, I really don't want a bunch of
| technologically-inept congressmen telling me how I have to
| build software, firmware, or hardware.
| mateus1 wrote:
| As an engineer you should be familiar with laws and
| regulations. Try creating health care software without
| regarding HIPAA, for example, should make for lots of fun and
| lawsuits!
| evgen wrote:
| As if engineers actually get to make decisions about
| software, firmware, or hardware. Ha! That is truly hilarious.
|
| I would rather have a bunch of mildly responsive legislators
| setting the boundaries of what is acceptable than a bunch of
| middle-managers trying to justify their salary to their
| private equity overlords.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| An aside: I'm seeing an uptick of class-awareness in HN and
| that's worth celebrating. It seems "all it took" was the
| mass-layoff apocalypse.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| As an end user I don't really care what you want. I want the
| thing I paid money for to keep working after you've
| disappeared. Otherwise, in my estimation you've stolen from
| me.
|
| Prison time is an appropriate remedy for theft.
| agilob wrote:
| >As an engineer
|
| Construction, hardware, radiation, dam and wastewater
| engineers are highly regulated professions. Do you take
| responsibility for bugs in your technology? Do you have
| insurance for your mistakes in professional work? Are you an
| engineer or a coder? Are you certified to do your job or just
| passed a boot camp?
| tedunangst wrote:
| Found the guy who wants to talk about traffic lights without
| a license.
|
| https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-
| li...
| slt2021 wrote:
| Similar to Crowdstrike failed auto update incident.
|
| What was the need for the global instance 0->1 rollout of the
| firmware over the air ???????????????
|
| could they perhaps test it on a small subset? perhaps on Samsung
| CEO's home system, not the customers'?
| dlahoda wrote:
| he uses apple may be...
|
| previous used
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/13/samsungs-chief-st...
|
| new one uses, but just does not tell it.
|
| apply display is good with apple tv.
|
| and ceo dislikes automatically installed free to play tv apps
| and ads. as samsung does.
| dlahoda wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem.
| .. 2500 usd samsung tv with unremovable ads.
|
| and here unwanted apps installed randomly
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/ztuv0l/samsung_sma.
| ..
| barbazoo wrote:
| Samsung should merge with Sonos, they are all doing a really
| great job :)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Samsonos? Sonosung?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I loved my Sonos soundbar. It sounded amazing. But it required
| me to use their terrible app. That's why I got rid of it (the
| app was REALLY bad!) - luckily, before they started bricking
| customers' devices.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I have my sonos integrated nicely inside Home Assistant and
| can control all core and most extra features nicely without
| using the app.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Samsung sucks. Their customer support is a joke. And this is
| across the world. Right now I am back in Brazil, just got a new
| samsung product. It was delivered non-functioning. Hours since I
| submitted a ticket. No answer. Talking to a real human being is
| impossible.
| sva_ wrote:
| Their hardware is technically great. It is the software that
| sucks.
| genewitch wrote:
| hard disagree, i gave my anecdote as a top-level comment, but
| they have an across-vertical problem in their company, but
| why fix it if they make money
| jillyboel wrote:
| Their phones are alright but everything else they make sucks
| qingcharles wrote:
| It seems that way. The camera on the S24U seems to be a
| decent piece of engineering which is totally hosed by awful
| software and a sensor that can't be accessed at full res by
| third party apps.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| reclameaqui.com.br is usually helpful.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| My Samsung TV got more and more unusable with every update. Over
| the years, saved apps, like Youtube, started to disappear every
| time it woke up. Then it would default to their Samsung TV app,
| rather than your last app. Samsung TV app happened to be on the
| Baywatch channel every time my young children started the stupid
| thing. Finally, after it took 2 minutes to load the youtube app,
| I factory-reset the device, disconnected the internet from it,
| and put a Beelink mini PC in front of it. Works flawlessly.
|
| Samsung product life cycle support seems like planned
| obsolescence.
| napolux wrote:
| I have a similar experience with my high-end Samsung TV from
| 2013. The TV itself still works perfectly so I'm not replacing
| it soon (still 1080p, not 4K, but...), but over time, Samsung
| has steadily removed key features with each update. When I
| first bought it, it supported Skype video calls (and now the
| integrated webcam can't be used at all), IPTV streaming, and
| various third-party apps -- all of which are now gone.
|
| NEVER BUYING A SAMSUNG TV AGAIN
| pjmlp wrote:
| The issue is not Samsung per se, it is the smart TV crap we
| can't get rid of.
|
| With luck there are some old TVs still on remaining stock and
| that is about it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| This is exactly why "Smart" TVs don't make any sense. My in-
| laws have a perfectly fine Sony TV, it's nok 4K, but the HD
| picture quality is amazing still. Apps have slowly started to
| disappear as they are no longer being updated and new one
| aren't being added.
|
| I don't know how this work, but either Sony or the streaming
| service must be making the apps, and neither seems interested
| in maintaining apps for a 10+ year old TV. So when the
| streaming services are updating their backend, older TV don't
| get updated applications.
|
| Smart TVs make absolutely no sense, the streaming service are
| moving to fast, so you'll need a cheaper box, or a product
| that is support for a decade.
| xp84 wrote:
| 100%. I think most people should probably transition their
| thinking from using smart TV apps being an obvious or
| reasonable thing to do, to viewing them like the ads you
| sometimes find in the box when you buy something. They're
| basically just ads for streaming services, and they're
| mainly there to try to trick you into connecting the TV to
| the Internet so that it can gather data for them.
|
| In the event that one wants the app functionality, they'll
| always be better off with a streaming stick. Even in
| respectable brands of TVs like Sony, the SOC's are weaker
| than what you find in that $40 "Chromecast with Google TV."
| so they're pretty horrible to use even while they are
| current and supported.
| zamalek wrote:
| LGs, while still smart TVs, are relatively competent at being
| dumb TVs. Your only other options these days (sans rescuing a
| dumb TV from e-waste) are commercial panels and projectors.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| We have a 4K TV from Philips (really, TP Vision), which has
| Android TV, but you can just set it to an HDMI input and
| then it works as a dumb TV.
|
| Being a Philips (TP Vision), it also has Ambilight, which
| is nice.
|
| It's a few years old though, so no guarantees that newer
| Philips (TP Vision) models work the same way.
| echoangle wrote:
| If you just use an HDMI input and attach some streaming box
| to it, Samsung TVs work just fine. Just never touch the
| remote and only interact with the source and everything
| works.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| My experience with LG wasnt any better. Thorough about a year
| the tv became increasingly unresponsive. You start it, after
| 30 seconds the sound andpicture appeared, and for about 2
| full minutes it would not react to inputs what so ever
| (except turning off). So if you happen to turn the tv off
| with higher volume, you could not launch it in the evening
| without it blasting for 2+ minutes at night. Abhorent
| bobdvb wrote:
| Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung.
|
| Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't
| want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013
| was always trouble and it doesn't support many current W3C
| features that you'd want as a developer. Most people I know
| are drawing the line at supporting 2014 or 2016 Samsung
| devices.
|
| Could Samsung update their devices to ensure they still
| supported modern frameworks? Possibly, but they don't really
| get any revenue from providing OS upgrades and those devices
| suck in terms of RAM and CPU.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I hate this idea that software "rots" all by itself when
| it's just left on a device and is impossible to keep
| working. I would at the very, very least expect my device
| to work exactly as it did on day one, for the next 50
| years, assuming I don't change the software. It's bits on a
| flash drive! It doesn't rot, outside some freak cosmic ray
| from space flipping a bit.
|
| If you're saying the software stops working because the
| backend it talks to goes away, well that's a deliberate
| choice the company is making. All they have to do is have a
| proper versioning system and do not touch the backend
| service, and it also should work forever.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Certificates expire.
| albrewer wrote:
| Google learning this the hard way with the recent
| chromecast outage[0]
|
| [0]: https://www.googlenestcommunity.com/t5/Streaming/Reg
| arding-a...
| 3np wrote:
| So don't burn CA pubkeys into your binaries without means
| for user override. If the software can persist a user-
| specific analytics ID it can support user certs. This is
| a solved problem.
| jajko wrote:
| Yeah but how many people would do that? You, me, and
| maybe thousand other people here and similarly minded.
| That's sadly fart in the wind for such companies and not
| worth creating more friction and risk (ie folks hack
| their under-warranty tvs till they stop working and then
| come back asking for free replacements and tarnishing the
| brand).
|
| I wish there was some trivial real-life applicable
| solution to this that big companies would be motivated to
| follow, but I don't see it. Asking for most users to be
| tinkering techies or outright hackers ain't realistic,
| many people these days often don't accept basic aspects
| of reality if it doesn't suit their current comfy view,
| don't expect much.
| bombela wrote:
| But we could do it for our friends and families. A repair
| shop could do it too. Instead of a full brick.
| xp84 wrote:
| I certainly hate that idea as well, but I also accept a
| pretty decent amount of that because of interactions with
| the greater world outside of one company's direct
| control.
|
| For instance, suppose a streaming service starts
| requiring a new login method. They have to update their
| apps to use this new API. If there are and have been over
| a dozen different distinct smart television operating
| systems in the past 15 years, and there will be a dozen
| more in the next 15 years, it's unreasonable to expect
| that even companies the size of say, Netflix, are going
| to reach far enough back in their history to update all
| those apps. They probably don't have developers who
| understand those systems anymore.
|
| And also, the software distribution mechanisms for each
| of those platforms are probably no longer intact either
| in order to receive an update. While it's true that my
| Panasonic Blu-ray player that I bought in 2009 is still
| perfectly functional, and has a Netflix app, I assume it
| doesn't work and that Panasonic would be hard pressed to
| distribute me a working updated app.
|
| The only way things would be much different would be if
| technology progressed at a far slower pace, so there had
| been no need to adopt any breaking changes to how the app
| is built, how the apps and firmware was distributed, etc.
| toolslive wrote:
| what bother's me even more is that they are constantly spying
| on me (phone home, what am I watching, ...) and pushing
| advertisements to my TV. My next TV will probably not be
| connected to the internet.
| update wrote:
| I use a pi-hole to block the spying. My experience with
| Amazon's FireOS & Roku is they phone home a lot.
| ce4 wrote:
| Why wait for the next TV when you can just disconnect the
| darn existing box now?
| hbn wrote:
| Well I'm not sure what use you'd have out of Skype
| integration when Skype itself is being axed in a couple of
| months
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Still appreciating my 2011 high end Samsung TV. I believe
| it's the last non-smart product year. It could stream videos
| from a network share but that's about it.
|
| Judging by current trends i will have to replace the attached
| chromecast before the TV breaks.
| jerf wrote:
| I pulled my Samsung Smart TV off the network a while ago,
| precisely because it was getting slower and slower over time.
| The allegations of spying pushed me over, but the apparent
| belief that they own my TV would also have done it.
|
| I want a separation between my display device and the thing
| serving it anyhow, but that's just me in my techie world. The
| fact that performance got worse with each update, though,
| that's just over the line for everyone. I mean, if you're going
| to babble about how you're upgrading my experience, shouldn't
| you, you know, _upgrade my experience_ instead of constantly
| downgrading it? My experience gets downgraded, but gee golly,
| it sure seems like _yours_ is getting upgraded.
|
| Well. It's really not that hard to not plug in the ethernet
| cable.
|
| My Roku boxes have also had the same trajectory over the years.
| As time rolls on, they just get slower and slower with each
| update. Slowly, but surely. How exactly this is accomplished
| I'm not even sure, it's not like they're overflowing with new
| features or doing bold new computations for my benefit. They
| just get a little bit slower every effing time. But at least
| replacing my Roku boxes is $20-40 now. Hey, sure, OK, a $40
| thing probably can't be expected to work 5 years from now. If
| nothing else, video codecs do march on and specs may exceed
| what the hardware decoders can handle. OK. My $1000+ TV does
| not get that grace. It damned well better be able to _turn on_
| in less than 30 seconds, even 10 years, 20 years from now. No
| excuses.
| eckesicle wrote:
| I also had the Baywatch bug. Neo QLED right?
|
| Every time you'd start the tv it'd switch to the Samsung
| Baywatch 24/7 stream.
|
| So inappropriate for the children.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >So inappropriate for the children.
|
| The bug, or Baywatch itself?
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| I had a smart TV that gradually got slower and slower until it
| became basically useless. I figured it was just running out of
| RAM as apps got larger with updates over the years.
| hadlock wrote:
| We bought a samsung tv in 2016 and it slowly became unusable by
| mid-2020. Fortunately it got dropped by the movers and we were
| able to justify buying a new TV (LG). The LG UI/UX is awful
| though, I wish we'd bought a sony. LG TVs don't have a way to
| simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4" you're stuck using it's "smart"
| detection system, which can only be reset by physically
| unplugging the HDMI cables from the back of the TV, which is
| never easy to get to. Apparently the solution is to buy Sony
| and just pay the extra price.
|
| I have a "smart" Samsung TV in my home office but it's never
| been plugged into the network and has a chromecast and various
| networked devices plugged in to it as a "dumb tv", that has
| been working out great, the TV still turns on/off easily and is
| as fast as the day I bought it (makes sense, it's still running
| the factory firmware).
| tzs wrote:
| > LG TVs don't have a way to simply select "HDMI1/2/3/4"
| you're stuck using it's "smart" detection system, which can
| only be reset by physically unplugging the HDMI cables from
| the back of the TV, which is never easy to get to. Apparently
| the solution is to buy Sony and just pay the extra price.
|
| Another possible solution is to only use one input on the TV.
| Connect an A/V receiver to that one input and connect all
| your other devices to the A/V receiver. Then you should only
| need to deal with switching inputs on the TV if you want to
| watch over the air TV using the TV's tuner. You can probably
| even get rid of that need by getting a stand-alone TV tuner
| and hooking that up to the A/V receiver.
|
| Many A/V receivers have network interfaces that you can use
| to control them if for some reason you don't want to use
| their remote. Most Denon receivers for example have an HTTP
| server that presents a web-based interface if you browse to
| it from a computer or mobile device.
|
| They also run a simple HTTP based API that is easy to use
| from scripts. For example here is a shell script that gets
| the current volume setting of mine:
| URL=http://192.168.0.xx/goform/AppCommand.xml cat >
| tmp.$$ <<HERE <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
| <tx> <cmd id="1">GetVolumeLevel</cmd> </tx>
| HERE curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: text/xml" --upload-
| file tmp.$$ $URL rm tmp.$$
|
| which when run gives me this at the moment:
| <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <rx>
| <cmd> <volume>-45.0</volume>
| <disptype>RELATIVE</disptype>
| <dispvalue>-45.0dB</dispvalue> </cmd> </rx>
| bombela wrote:
| But this breaks DRMs if that's something you need.
| tzs wrote:
| It generally should be OK if you get an A/V receiver that
| implements the current HDMI and HDCP and related
| standards.
| Dwedit wrote:
| I had a Samsung QLED TV, and still had to upgrade the
| firmware once. Thankfully you can do this by USB storage
| without connecting the TV to the Internet. The preloaded
| firmware had audio issues where sound would drop out, even
| when playing through the built-in speakers, and I haven't
| seen that issue happen since upgrading the firmware.
| bobdvb wrote:
| I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG,
| among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics
| anymore but a decade ago that was my field.
|
| TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad.
| You get 4-6 months to make any profit on a new model before it
| gets discounted so heavily by retailers that you're taking a
| bath on each one sold. So every dollar in the BOM (bill of
| materials) has to be carefully considered, and not far back the
| CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core, and
| still under 1GHz. Bottom of the bin ARM cores you'd think twice
| to fit to a cheap tablet.
|
| They sit within a custom app framework which was written before
| HTML5 was a standard. Or, hey want to write in an old version
| of .NET? Or Adobe Stagecraft, another name for Adobe Flash on
| TV?
|
| Apps get dropped on TVs because the app developers don't want
| to support ancient frameworks. It's like asking them to still
| support IE10. You either hold back the evolution of the app, or
| you declare some generation of TV now obsolete. Some developers
| will freeze their app, put it in maintenance mode only and
| concentrate on the new one, but even then that maintenance
| requires some effort. And the backend developers want to
| shutdown the API endpoints that are getting 0.1% of the traffic
| but costing them time and money to keep. Yes, those older TVs
| are literally 0.1% or less of use even on a supported app.
|
| After a decade in consumer electronics, working with some of
| the biggest brands in the world (my work was awarded an Emmy) I
| can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what could be
| described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single biggest driver
| for a TV or other similar device being shit is cost, because
| >95% of customers want a cheap deal. Samsung, LG and Sony are
| competing with cheap white label brands where the customer
| doesn't care what they're buying. So the good brands have to
| keep their prices somewhere close to the cheap products in
| order to give the customers something to pick from. If a device
| contains cheap components, it was because someone said "If we
| shave $1 off here, it'll take $3 off the shelf price." I once
| encountered a situation where a retailer, who was buying cheap
| set-top boxes from China to stick a now defunct brandname on,
| argued to halve the size of an EEPROM. It saved them less than
| 5c on each box made.
|
| For long life support of the OS and frameworks, aside from the
| fact that the CPU and RAM are poor, Samsung, LG and Sony don't
| make much money from the apps. It barely pays to run the app
| store itself, let alone maintain upgrades to the OS for an ever
| increasing, aging range of products.
|
| And we as consumers have to take responsibility for the fact
| that we want to buy cheap, disposable electronics. We'll always
| look for the deal and buy it on sale. Given the choice of high
| quality and cheap, most people choose cheap. So they're hearing
| the message and delivering.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Yeah, but is there a way for consumers to compare the compute
| performance of any given TV?
|
| If OEMs differentiated their TVs based on compute
| performance, consumers might be able to make an informed
| choice. (See smartphones: consumers expect a Galaxy Sxx to
| have faster compute than a Galaxy Axx.)
|
| If not, consumers just see TVs with similar specs at
| different prices, so of course they're going to pick the
| cheaper one.
| 3np wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Without insight beyond being a consumer,
| I do think there's room for disription (ideally from within
| the industry itself) vs 10y ago.
|
| Comparing models from 2005/2015/2025, for example. Most
| people literally can't tell 4k from 1080 and anything new in
| the HD race mostly feels like a scam. The software
| capabilities are all there. I think to differentiate from the
| no-name stuff, longevity is going to become a more
| significant differentiator.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| The problem is getting that jank even when you buy the
| expensive models, though.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >I can confidently say that I never saw anyone doing what
| could be described as 'planned obsolescence'. The single
| biggest driver for a TV or other similar device being shit is
| cost, because >95% of customers want a cheap deal.
|
| You are literally the first person I have ever seen say this
| online, besides myself. I have worked in hardware for years
| and can vouch that there is no such thing as planned
| obsolescence, but obsession over cost is paramount. People
| think LED bulbs fail because they are engineered that way,
| but really it's because they just buy whatever is cheapest.
| You cannot even really support a decent mid-grade market
| because it just gets eviscerated by low cost competitors.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > TVs are a wildly unprofitable business... not far back the
| CPUs in practically every TV was single core or dual core
|
| Explain to me then how an Apple TV device for $125 (Retail!
| not BOM!) can be _staggeringly_ faster and generally better
| than any TV controller board I 've seen?
|
| I really want to highlight how ludicrous the difference is:
| My $4,000 "flagship" OLED TV has a 1080p SDR GUI that has
| multi-second pauses and stutters at all times but "somehow"
| Apple can show me a silky smooth 4K GUI in 10 bit HDR.
|
| This is dumbass hardware-manufacturer thinking of "We saved
| 5c! Yay!" Of course, now every customer paying _thousands_ is
| pissed and doesn 't trust the vendor.
|
| This is also why the TVs _go obsolete_ in a matter of months,
| because the manufacturers are putting out a firehose of crap
| that rots on the shelves in months.
|
| Apple TV hasn't had a refresh in _years_ and people are still
| buying it at full retail price.
|
| I do. Not. Trust. TV vendors. None of them. I trust Apple. I
| will spend _thousands_ more with Apple on phones, laptops,
| speakers, or whatever they will make because of precisely
| this self-defeating decisions from traditional hardware
| vendors.
|
| I really want to grab one of these CEOs by the lapels and
| scream in their face for a little while: "JUST COPY APPLE!"
| mystified5016 wrote:
| This describes essentially all Samsung products: really cool
| for the first few months then progressively accelerating slide
| straight into the trash.
|
| I'm never buying any Samsung products again if I can avoid it.
| A forced update bricked my damn phone when it forcibly
| restarted while I was showing something to a client.
|
| Samsung doesn't give a shit. They'll trash the device you paid
| for and tell you to suck it up and buy a new one.
| withinrafael wrote:
| Yep, I stopped using Samsung products not too long ago.
|
| Reminds me of the time when a Samsung VP (or whatever his
| title was) showed up at a Microsoft Build conference to
| promote their TVs and the shiny new Tizen .NET Framework that
| shipped inbox. I asked if they planned to backport it to last
| year's model--which I had just purchased--so we could test
| with and target existing TVs in the market. He looked me
| straight in the eye and, with a smarmy grin, said
| (paraphrasing), 'No, we want consumers to buy new TVs.' I
| walked away disgusted and abandoned any idea of targeting
| that platform.
|
| Similarly, I vaguely recall a Samsung event that had
| leadership--CEO?--flat out say they wanted consumers to buy
| new TVs every year or so. I couldn't immediately find the
| quote though.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I find it appalling that no matter how much money you spend on
| a Samsung TV, you'll get banner ads in _the fucking source
| switcher_. Absolute total disregard for their users.
|
| LG still has bits that are ultimately ads, but at least they're
| less egregious, presented as suggested content in a Home view
| that already aggregates content from various sources. Not ads
| for fucking McDonalds and similar. At least that was the case
| as of a couple of years ago--I disconnected my LG from the
| internet the day I got an Apple TV and never looked back.
|
| Just let me buy a large class leading display without trying to
| insert yourself into my life, please. I'm already paying
| through the nose for it.
| rplnt wrote:
| Sounds like every Android vendor, woth Google leading the pack.
|
| (disclaimer: maybe 5-10 years ago)
| eitally wrote:
| Contrary to lots of other opinions here, I bought a 65" Samsung
| TV at the beginning of covid and I sincerely don't have any
| significant complaints. The remote is easy to use, launching
| apps is straightforward, connecting an ARC soundbar was no
| problem, nor was connecting a Chromecast and an Xbox, and it
| "just works". Every once in a blue moon (maybe twice a year-
| ish) I've had to power cycle it to fix a wifi connectivity
| issue, which may well just be a result of DHCP lease expiration
| on my network.
|
| I have a modern Sony Bravia, too, which is running "Google TV"
| natively. On the plus side, the UI is just about identical to
| what you get with a Google TV dongle (which I also have,
| plugged into an old 32" monitor in front of my bike trainer),
| but it's also a really heavy interface that's also increasingly
| rich in ads. If your household is like mine, and holds
| subscriptions to a half dozen or more streaming services, some
| of which are bundled and some of which are either discounted or
| comped via entirely different subscriptions (mobile phone) or
| membership (credit card), it's really not helpful to have
| Google show me subscriptions I might want to add-on to my
| Google TV sub, nor do I appreciate seeing ads for content from
| things I don't subscribe to. Also, the Sony remote has about 50
| buttons -- not a fan.
|
| All things considered, I end up having to fiddle with the Sony
| TV far more frequently than the Samsung one, usually because of
| network or app issues.
|
| We have an old Roku stick plugged into an old tv in a spare
| room, too, and it's almost intolerably slow. It's primary use
| case is to plug into our projector for backyard movies in nice
| weather, so I keep it around, but man is it dog slow.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| > don't have any significant complaints.
|
| Are you happy with it spying on you?
|
| That's what _all_ Samsung televisions do, and there is no way
| to turn it off. They advertise on their own web page that
| they monitor the content viewed on their televisions for
| targeted advertising.
|
| This isn't via some sort of metadata, they take screenshots
| at regular intervals and upload them to _very insecure_
| hosting.
|
| I hope you never look at any "sensitive" content on your TV!
| devmor wrote:
| I will never understand why people are willing to connect so many
| of their devices to the internet for minimal features. I went out
| of my way to build a network that prevents even the things I want
| to have local wifi access from being accessible to the internet.
| freehorse wrote:
| If you want your devices not to belong to you, connect them to
| the internet.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Many devices these days are _required_ to be connected to the
| internet, which is bizarre, but here we are.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yeah like these "cheap" HP printers, which have to be
| connected to the internet so that they can force you into a
| subscription, use their own inks only etc. They do not belong
| to you either.
| deskr wrote:
| Thoughts and prayers for the poor soul that owns the bug.
|
| I've done my share of embarrassing mistakes and each time I've
| felt awful. Nothing on this scale though.
| yread wrote:
| Unplug the soundbar and listen to the sound from the TV while you
| wait until Samsung fixes their shit. What's the problem?
| winkelmann wrote:
| The question is if it still works "enough" to update to a
| working firmware, or if it's so broken that it can only be
| fixed by flashing the EEPROM directly.
| X-Istence wrote:
| This is one of those cases where I am glad I don't have my
| soundbar connected to the internet...
| widerporst wrote:
| True, that would be preferable, but alas Samsung is bent on
| making their products as big of a pain in the arse as possible.
|
| At least with my Samsung soundbar, the remote can change the
| volume, the subwoofer volume and change between modes
| (standard, surround, game). But if I want to enable night mode,
| I _have to_ use the SmartThings app. There 's no way to enable
| it using the remote. What's worse, the app often hangs when
| connecting to the soundbar, requiring me to force stop and
| restart it. So sometimes toggling a feature that should be a
| single button on the remote takes me over a minute.
|
| Samsung is right next to HP on my list of brands I will never
| ever buy in my entire life.
| maayank wrote:
| I'm currently away from home but can deny list domains on the dns
| level. Anyone knows the domain this update is using? Blocked
| samsung.com
| jms703 wrote:
| To prevent automatic firmware updates, ads, and any other
| spying I'm not aware of, I block these in DNS:
|
| *.samsungcloudsolution.com
|
| *.samsungosp.com
|
| *.samsungqbe.com
|
| *.samsungcloud.tv
|
| *.samsungads.com
|
| The first one gets the most hits.
|
| I also don't connect my Samsung displays to Wifi anymore.
| Unless I notice a problem that I have to search to fix. Then if
| there's a firmware update that fixes the issues, I'll do it.
|
| NextDNS and ControlD are helpful for blocking this sort if
| thing, or Pi-Hole if you want to set it up yourself.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| My samsung was so noisy that I went to forget the wifi
| network... but it couldnt. So I ended up blocking its mac at
| the router. Prior to that it was always the #1 blocked device
| on my pihole.
| maayank wrote:
| Thanks, blocked! Fingers crossed it didn't fetch it yet
| yubiox wrote:
| I made the mistake of connecting my bose noise cancelling earbuds
| to the phone app so I could disable autoplay. They updated
| without any warning and now they won't charge properly and the
| noise cancelling sucks. It used to be amazing. Never connect
| anything and never take updates unless you need a specific fix.
| hbn wrote:
| I swear AirPods in general are just less reliable than they
| used to be too. I feel like I need to be doing incantations for
| them to work sometimes, whereas I recall them feeling like
| magic compared to BT headphones I've used in the past, the way
| they would seamlessly pair, start/stop music when you pull one
| out, etc.
|
| It reminds me of some discussion I was seeing the other day
| about how the dynamic island on the newer iPhones is way
| buggier than it was at launch. Someone suggested that this
| happens because the S-tier engineers are tasked with building
| these things to blow everyone out of the water at launch, and
| then B-tier developers are tasked with maintaining them for the
| following years, at which point stuff starts regressing.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Build quality too.
|
| My iPhone XR that I am deliberately keeping on lower iOS for
| jail breaking reasons that when comparing the thunderbolt
| port to the iPhone 13.
|
| The quality lacks so much that I am unable to listen to music
| with a wired headphone adapter.
|
| Any slight jiggle of the adapter will cause it to disconnect.
| I don't want to use BT headphones.
| Lammy wrote:
| FYI: The Bose app also phones home with your media metadata by
| default. There's an option to disable it tucked away on the
| same screen as the Privacy Policy.
| mihaaly wrote:
| "never take updates unless you need a specific fix"
|
| Weirdly, serious groups, among them Signal seem to be clueless
| about this rule. In Signal, in their security concious context,
| this is a bit of puzzle to me why. They have updates every few
| days sometime, but no more than 2 weeks pass by without their
| update banner appears in the most prominent spot in their
| desktop app: above all of your recent chats, with background
| higlight to pop out even more, if someone would miss in
| important messaging. Like if this was the most important thing
| for everyone around - so much that it is made not possible to
| turn off -, to keep their software very very fresh, the
| freshest possible! It is generously allowed not to download
| updates immediatly, but that's it. The alert is always there.
|
| But there are so little changes between updates. Once I checked
| the history, dominantly marginal things. Yet, the prime spot in
| their UI is occupied with these marginal things too, all the
| time (it must not be critical update in every few days because
| that frequency of security risks would be too worrysome for an
| app like Signal!).
|
| And this is just one of the examples out there, there are too
| many similar ones (serious or marginal use apps alike).
|
| Looks like software engineers lost sense throughout time,
| thinking the central spot of the user's mind is occupied like
| their own with the maintenance and state of their precious
| product. Not the task at hand where some whatever tool should
| help, without grabbing the attention away from the task all the
| time (also with all those frequent 'helpful' pop-up tips many
| software employ - I am looking at you Teams as prime
| perpetrator - for self advertisement, that is an other
| senseless narcissistic attitude).
| caminante wrote:
| HN title is editorialized. I assume "bricked" is a lot worse,
| i.e., permanent.
|
| Comments show that there might be resolutions and potential for
| firmware patch. [0] Bad updates happen.
|
| [0] https://us.community.samsung.com/t5/Home-
| Theater/Samsung-Q99...
| pizzalife wrote:
| Bad updates happen, but companies with good development
| practices don't ship catastrophically bad updates. Source: I
| worked at Samsung
| johnklos wrote:
| "bricked" usually means bricked for most people - those of us
| with EPROM programmers wouldn't count.
|
| They did this with their Blu-Ray players about five years ago:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/18/samsung_bluray_mass_d...
|
| Each device had to be shipped to a repair center because they
| needed to directly re-flash the flash storage. The issue with
| the Blu-Ray players was that an update caused it to get in to a
| state where it would boot loop before it even got to a point
| that anything could be done, manually or otherwise.
|
| What we don't know yet with this issue is whether the devices
| are booting enough to apply another firmware update. It may be
| possible to do this, fixing this issue. If that's the case
| "bricked" would be technically incorrect, but for now, it's not
| a wholly inaccurate term.
| caminante wrote:
| _> "bricked" usually means bricked for most people_
|
| This is too circular for me. Google "bricked" and you get the
| Oxford Languages definition, which says "...typically on a
| permanent basis."
|
| e: HN headline has been corrected
| nickthegreek wrote:
| A soft brick is still a brick.
| caminante wrote:
| Yet, as you note, still different.
|
| I'll take a chance on a hardware update if the forums say
| "soft brick." If people are saying "brick," then I'm only
| moving forward if I'm prepared to write off the device.
|
| edit: HN headline has been corrected
| ftufek wrote:
| Unfortunately those "solutions" don't work, the person who had
| a potential solution was able to at least go through the
| inputs, this is not the case here, you can't even go through
| the inputs.
|
| I've tried all the potential solutions this morning. It seems
| permanent unless Samsung somehow finds some magic to fix it,
| especially since the soundbar won't connect to WiFi/internet
| and doesn't do anything with the USB plugged in.
| jtrueb wrote:
| A lot of folks in this thread say rollback to a known firmware
| version is required. Where are they getting all this
| microcontroller ROM?
| drcongo wrote:
| I own one Samsung product, a very expensive fridge freezer, and
| it's been garbage since the day I bought it. I'll never buy a
| Samsung product again.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Do you guys miss owning things and they were just...yours? Like,
| you paid money for them and then you had them and you had full
| control over them and someone half a world away wasn't able to
| reach into your house and break them or make them do evil things?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I drive a 30-year-old Nissan pickup truck for this exact
| reason. Not sure why, but I get a small sense of joy knowing
| that the corporate overlords aren't "watching" me drive. Of
| course they're "watching" me on my phone (as I drive the beater
| truck), but that's a different story.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| my headphones just popped up an alert on my phone that turned
| out to be an ad for a nascar race. that got their app
| uninstalled. if they ever realize that they can start shoving
| ads directly into my ears that's when the headphones
| themselves get taken out back and smashed with a hammer.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Before I bought my most recent vehicle, I did my research and
| figured out how to physically disconnect the modem /
| telemetry unit.
| ed_mercer wrote:
| That old truck is probably polluting 10-30x more than a
| modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have
| spent time and money making engines more efficient and
| reducing harmful emissions.
| userbinator wrote:
| Don't care. They can entice us as much as they want. We
| will not comply. Some people love rolling coal for that
| reason.
|
| (My semi-daily driver is over 50 years old.)
| z3c0 wrote:
| A couple days ago, I was thrown by one of my Windows devices
| pitching an ad for a video game to me in the notifications. I
| immediately disabled the related setting, which was of course
| enabled by default. Every device you buy is rigged by default
| to encourage you to buy more things.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| You will own nothing, you will have no privacy, and you will be
| happy.
|
| (Or not, of course...)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not really. My iPhone, and especially my AirPods, have gotten
| massive feature upgrades since I bought them, and I didn't have
| to pay a thing.
|
| And I assume my WiFi router updates have helped _prevent_
| people doing evil things with my devices.
|
| Samsung's update here is obviously a massive fail, but it's one
| consumer device out of tens of thousands. I think it's clear
| the benefits outweigh the harms on the whole. Definitely sucks
| if you bought this particular soundbar though.
| jajko wrote:
| You don't understand the situation in this case. This is not
| some auto-update, people have to put some serious effort into
| updating manually... effin soundbar.
|
| Why on earth would anybody do that? I have these speakers,
| exactly model D, it works flawlessly either via eArc with TV or
| Bluetooth with both android and apple, there is absolutely
| nothing to fix or improve. You have to tinker with USB key and
| obscure series of actions or install a dedicated app on phone
| to force an update - why would anybody ever need such an app in
| first place? I am minimizing amount of apps on my phone, and
| not installing every semi-unknown low quality crap just because
| I can. That's basic security 101.
|
| You can tweak basses directly on remote for these. These
| speakers are not HiFi albeit cca fine performers, realistically
| you will never need more from them (and TBH that one feature is
| absolutely stellar idea that many much more expensive receivers
| don't have, when kids go sleep I lower basses since they travel
| easier through walls and doors).
|
| Its like pushing unknown BIOS updates to motherboard when your
| PC works perfectly fine, and then complaining it isn't anymore.
| Its sad state of 2025 electronics in general, but it was
| exactly same 10 or even 15 years ago, this ain't something new
| or unknown.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Side note, it's frustrating that this link tries to open in an
| app on my Samsung phone.
|
| I installed the GitHub app a long time ago, and that had similar
| behaviors that kept me from the web-based experience I know &
| love & which is more URL based. Finding that disappointing, I
| uninstalled the app. But still, GitHub results in Google don't
| show the URL, they just say "app installed" where the URL would
| be. What a colossal regression.
|
| More to the topic, we are on day 4 of Google Chromecast Audio &
| 2nd generation being broken. Supposedly an expired cert. Amazing
| neglect, ya'll.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Looking at /r/Chromecast, it seems the problem got fixed very
| recently.
| iaw wrote:
| I am looking to get a new monitor in the next year or so and have
| been considering ultra-wides. During my research the proportion
| of people that had _horrible_ experiences with Samsung monitors,
| typically right after warranty expired, was enough to deter me
| from the entire brand in the future.
| yobibyte wrote:
| vibe coding
| drlobster wrote:
| They did this before, about five years ago. I had to send it back
| to them for a fix and it came back a few weeks later.
|
| https://hackaday.com/2020/07/19/the-real-story-how-samsung-b...
| drlobster wrote:
| Also talked about here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23578920
| ftufek wrote:
| Yeah, some people say they got replacements through the
| warranty. The problem is, this thing is really big and heavy,
| so boxing it up is a real pain, especially if you've had it a
| while and already threw out the original box.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| That's why my buddy said it's time to buy shares in bubble
| wrap
| varispeed wrote:
| Nah, just be a geezer and wrap it in bin bags and then tape
| around. It's bricked anyway, innit.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Waste of bin bags. Just write the address on the front in
| marker pen.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I assume you never bought Samsung again.
|
| 'Having' (paid for) a device for not having it for weeks is not
| that customer friendly attitude. It is almost in the same
| league with how UK furniture makers exploit customers. You get
| into the shop, see something nice, start ordering it, casually
| ask about the delivery date, cancelling the whole thing and run
| to an Ikea after learning that it will take somewhere between
| 4-6 months, depending on the workload of the factory. They are
| insane! I mean those who actually buy this way. The
| manufacturers are just brazen. Thinking that someone goes into
| the shop for leaving behind money for the honor of using a
| product of theirs sometime in the unspecific mid term future,
| instead of like NOW!? Shameless.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I just snapped after 2014. Used to be a Samsung consumer with
| their TVs, galaxy phones, security cams, etc... Their hardware
| wasn't that bad. It was the software update either buggy or
| bricking my devices that threw me off. I swear never to allow
| another Samsuck (my little girl coined that) device in my home
| and family lives again.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| > Have you tried to factory reset your soundbar?
|
| 2 years ago, when LLMs started to become huge, I was really
| hoping that by this time AI would do this 1st line tech support,
| with actually helpful questions, suggestions and deductions.
| dghughes wrote:
| ...nervously looks over at my Bambu X1-Carbon...
| bregma wrote:
| I recently replaced all my kitchen appliances with matching mid-
| scale Samsung-branded ones. The first thing I did after powering
| them on for the first time was disable the WiFi. For this reason.
|
| Also, it's entirely unclear to me why I need WiFi or a remote
| server for my dishwasher or refrigerator in the first place. What
| possible value-add is there?
| Finnucane wrote:
| Nothing that needs wifi or an app is allowed in my kitchen.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| its crazy that the fridge and coffeemaker needs to talk to the
| internet
| hondo77 wrote:
| Probably so the appliance can let a server know to have your
| phone notify you that your appliance is done doing what it was
| doing.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| "We understand how frustrating an unresponsive soundbar can be."
|
| Isn't this about the most condescending thing they can start
| with?
| genewitch wrote:
| "... and that's why we did it!"
| baxuz wrote:
| I got a good deal for an S90C + Q990C combo. It was 50% off off
| their regular price which was already quite a bit cheaper than
| the comparable LG/Sony counterparts.
|
| After 1 year, I am 100% sure that I will never again buy a
| Samsung product, no matter how cheap it is.
|
| Just look at the first sticky here:
| https://www.avsforum.com/threads/2023-samsung-4k-s95c-s90c-s...
| bowmessage wrote:
| My Q990C requires factory reset about once a week. It's
| maddening.
| baxuz wrote:
| It's the WPA3 encryption. It needs to be set to WPA2 only for
| it to not shit itself.
| genewitch wrote:
| I have been boycotting samsung since ~2014; because of my
| experience with two, brand new, ~$1000 samsung devices, neither a
| phone. Their customer service blew me off, because both devices
| had _intermittent_ issues. I tell people to avoid the company and
| its products.
|
| both devices were malfunctioning within the first month.
|
| 1) 4k60 32" monitor, the power button always flaked and it would
| randomly shut off, thus necessitating unplugging and plugging it
| back in, 2-3 times a day. customer service: "unplug all monitor
| cables and plug just power in. what is on the screen? oh, then
| it's fine. have a nice day!"
|
| 2) Refrigerator. Intermittent fan issues were the reason i
| called. i ended up having to replace, for cause, the heating
| elements in the refrigerator side as well as the fans due to ice
| damage to the impellers; then the ice machine started leaking
| inside the freezer door somewhere, and that leak would freeze on
| the bottom of the freezer and push the door open, letting water
| just drip on my floor for hours, nearly damaging the subfloor. I
| also had to replace the motherboard. So now i have a water-less,
| ice-less refrigerator.
|
| i could go on about how their SD cards are quite fast but don't
| last long if you have them in outdoor devices (like dashcams,
| trail cams, security cameras) - the only raspberry pi i've ever
| had to throw away had a samsung SD card in it that overheated to
| the point of contact burns - i went to unplug it to reboot it and
| received a welt from the SD card for my troubles.
|
| I'm just one person, but read enough anecdotes and you can ignore
| them all!
| gblargg wrote:
| I had to stop getting Samsung Pro Endurance microSD cards after
| three in a row failed after a few months (write speed dropped
| below 2 MB/s). This was after the update to the blue and white
| color scheme (and higher endurance figures, hah); the older
| black, red, and white ones worked great and I fortunately got
| over a dozen of them.
| binarymax wrote:
| Sometimes you have to hack their support script to get a
| replacement or a refund. After the first support call if you
| don't get what you want and it happened again, Call back to
| open a new support ticket. Pretend to walk through their steps
| but not do anything, and when they asked what was on the screen
| I would say it's blank and not turning on.
| genewitch wrote:
| or - and this is gunna sound crazy - I don't compromise my
| ethics and lie to a company to get "service". Instead, i'll
| loudly tell everyone that Samsung is a crappy company that
| doesn't care about their customers.
| tzs wrote:
| Not a good year so far for Samsung. Just under two months ago on
| a large number of their TVs with voice control it started only
| recognizing commands in Russian. It took them several days to get
| that straightened out.
|
| It was educational. I learned that I completely suck at trying to
| speak Russian. I could type "channel 4" into Google Translate on
| my iPad, press the Mic button on my TV remote, and press the
| speak icon on Google Translate and the channel would change.
|
| But no matter how many times I listened to Google Translate say
| that in Russian I could not manage to match it close enough the
| TV to accept it.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Assuming English is your first language, I can probably guess
| which specific parts of the "channel 4" Russian pronounciation
| gave you trouble. I'm sure your effort was valiant, but the
| language is just so different compared to English
| krunck wrote:
| I hate smart TVs. Why put all the functionality in one device
| when a small part of it is going to become obsolete real soon
| while the TV part will continue to work for a decade or more. I
| buy dumb TVs and a separate "smart" component like Roku that can
| be replaced as easily as a shoelace.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Same.
|
| I bought a couple of Chromecasts for that reason but they're
| supposedly discontinued now.
| slig wrote:
| They're discontinued and a week or so ago a certificate
| expired and millions of Chromecast V2 aren't working.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Do you find dumb TV software (dynamic backlight controls for
| example) and hardware on par with smart tvs?
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| I go for smart tv's that can be dumb. As long as it reliably
| uses my input each time it starts and doesn't try to overlay
| anything, that's all I need.
|
| Once or twice a year I'll go trough firmware update notes,
| connect it to the internet if there's things that can improve
| my "dumb" usage (fixes/improvements to refresh rate, Dolby
| xyz, etc.), then disconnect it from the internet again.
| creddit wrote:
| Yes I'm always very surprised that people deal with the awful
| software that are on the TVs.
|
| I use an Apple TV which, while a relatively expensive solution,
| has a clean interface and integrates well with the rest of my
| hardware. Plus rarely are there ads being shoved in your face
| in the OS/Home Screen. Apps can still do as they like of
| course.
| fullstop wrote:
| The software on mine is pretty good, but I find myself using
| a PS5 for media streaming these days.
| nelblu wrote:
| My strategy is to buy cheapest TV on the market (which is
| usually an ad loaded Crapware like hisense) and then never ever
| connect it to the internet but use HDMI to plug into a
| dedicated computer.
|
| Basically all I need in a TV apart from the display is an HDMi.
| It works amazing, been using like this over 10 years now.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > My strategy is to buy cheapest TV on the market
|
| Unfortunately if you're a stickler for image quality this
| isn't an option. You can still not connect it to the internet
| of course, but if you're buying a high end TV there's no way
| to avoid all the other modern TV bullshit.
|
| Namely needing to change the settings on every input for
| every source type. The first few days of a new TV is a
| regular trip into five layers of menus as you watch a new
| source combination for the first time (HDR Blu-Ray, Dolby
| Vision streaming movie, high framerate game) and have to turn
| off motion smoothing, turn off sharpening, turn the whites
| back down from basically blue to 6500K. I mean christ, there
| are still TVs out there shipping today that turn on overscan
| by default. Analogue TV broadcasts ended in 2012 here!
| fullstop wrote:
| I have a Hisense, and the one that I got (65U8G) isn't full
| of crapware and has a great picture. I played the panel
| lottery and won.
|
| They do, of course, sell some very low-end sets.
| ken47 wrote:
| This post is about a soundbar, not a smart TV.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I lump modern TV bullshit (crappy "smart" features, motion
| smoothing, horrible default settings) in with modern car
| bullshit (huge touchscreens everywhere, the near total death of
| real physical controls).
|
| Everyone you speak to at best is ambivalent and at worst
| vehemently hates it. And yet there's no sign of it slowing
| down. It's baffling.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Reading this makes me glad that I didn't give my TV the WiFi
| credentials.
| hyperluz wrote:
| Sony bricked my WF-1000XM4 by overheating its batteries. Some
| users reported things melting. $250,00 of my work straight to the
| trash bin. Thank you Sony...not.
| rd11235 wrote:
| Good motivation for a PSA:
|
| This happens more and more often, and there is a fairly easy +
| popular workaround (which also comes with 99% ad blocking as a
| bonus). Just either set up pi-hole locally OR use a hosted DNS
| service that does essentially the same thing.
|
| Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to
| resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve these
| hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP.
|
| Arguments for pi-hole or other local solution: Free. Private.
|
| Arguments for hosted solution: No set-up headache, no local
| raspberry pi or other machine to maintain. Overall a bit simpler.
|
| Guide for blocking updates after the service is set up (I just
| went through this a month or two ago to block updates to my LG
| TV):
|
| Step 1: Search around for servers that correspond to updates for
| your device.
|
| Step 2: Test these lists; realize that they are often incomplete.
|
| Step 3: Shut your device off. Open pi-hole like service, and
| watch queries live. While doing so, turn on your device (and if
| you have the option, check for updates).
|
| Step 4: Put all of the queried hosts you see into your block
| list.
|
| Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When this
| happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were blocked
| at that moment. Remove only those from the blocklist. (And cross
| your fingers that the manufacturer doesn't use the same hosts for
| typical functionality and updates.)
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Step 5: Later, you may encounter broken functionality. When
| this happens, look at your logs, and see which server(s) were
| blocked at that moment_
|
| Eventually you end up with advertisements being served because
| the application refuses to show the content without the
| advertisements.
|
| So let me cut back to your main idea:
|
| > _Main idea: Ads, updates, etc. typically (not always) need to
| resolve hosts before connecting to servers. Simply resolve
| these hosts to 0.0.0.0 instead of a real IP._
|
| Better solution: resolve these hosts to an address you control
| on your network. You could even resolve it to a "public"
| address and add a static route to your router.
|
| You can then choose to serve no-content from that address.
| jillyboel wrote:
| Maybe that worked 10 years ago but nowadays they figured out
| ssl certificate pinning
| lurking_swe wrote:
| why connect the junk to the internet to begin with? it's a TV.
| I can buy a better streaming box and plug it in. People really
| over complicate things sometimes IMO.
| wvenable wrote:
| > This happens more and more often, and there is a fairly easy
| + popular workaround (which also comes with 99% ad blocking as
| a bonus). Just either set up pi-hole locally OR use a hosted
| DNS service that does essentially the same thing.
|
| DNS over HTTPS is going to render this method ineffectual
| eventually. Smart devices are going to stop trusting anything
| on the local network.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Just more evidence that buying something smart is dumb.
| timewizard wrote:
| Samsumg did not bring THEIR home theater systems, they bricked
| CUSTOMER theater systems that did not belong to them.
| jp1016 wrote:
| Reminder to myself to not auto update anything or manually update
| to the latest version.
| palata wrote:
| When will someone build a good theater system with an open source
| OS? That would be great!
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Just get a receiver and some standalone speakers. It doesn't
| need an OS, and there's no reason for it to talk to the
| internet.
| saturn8601 wrote:
| Be the change you want to see in the world.
| gblargg wrote:
| I made the mistake of updating my HIKMICRO mini thermal camera.
| Before it worked as a normal UVC USB webcam with any app or
| camera/video program on the PC. After it just has weird green
| coloration with hardly any variation, and only works properly in
| their Android app. I contacted company but they didn't care, nor
| provided any way to "downgrade" the firmware to the original
| version.
| treme wrote:
| I think it hasn't even been a year since Samsung bricked bunch of
| their phones with firmware update. They really must have no
| proper engineering team behind update process.
| jijji wrote:
| why would a soundbar need a firmware update?...seems like a
| solution looking for a problem... what's next my toaster needs a
| firmware update?!?!
| space_firmware wrote:
| Sigh, another day, another consumer product without fault
| tolerant update systems. SpaceX has a white paper on doing this
| with their satellites for Starlink.
| https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5...
|
| It is bad engineering on Samsung's part to even be able to brick
| their product with an update.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Why are these things connected to the internet at all?
| Animats wrote:
| On forced updating: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.
| Blessed be the name of the Lord."
| caminante wrote:
| LOL. Lord giveth patch updates, e.g., mRNA vaccines, startup
| blogs, work from home...
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Software crisis. The more you build the less you understand, the
| more you can affect, the less control you give to people etc.
|
| This will bite us again and again in general.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I always really enjoy these community forums. They are total
| garbage.
|
| Hello, I am Rene, a community expert on the Hacker News
| Experience Forums. I see you are having trouble with an auto-
| flagged post. I will try to help you with your auto-flagged post.
| Have you tried turning off your kitchen tap and turning it back
| on again?
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| Perhaps a stupid question, but why they don't test the firmware
| updates internally before releasing them?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| They almost certainly do, but there's always ways that the test
| jig differs from the units in the field, for example:
|
| - The test jig is probably pristine, so no hundreds of hours of
| telemetry data clogging up the internal storage.
|
| - The test jig might be on ethernet whereas a lot of users
| would be using wifi.
|
| - The test jig probably targets specific A -> B upgrades rather
| than testing progressive upgrade across every version that's
| ever existed.
|
| - The test jig can't cover every permutation of config options.
|
| - The test jig probably only does a bare minimal smoke test
| after the install, so if the problem takes a bit to kick in, it
| might not show up.
|
| Not to say that it's certainly any of these, but all are
| possible contributors. In the coming days it'll become clearer
| what particular pattern the affected devices follows, and/or
| clever people with JTAG dongles will reverse engineer the
| problem and spill the beans.
| Y_Y wrote:
| The test jig should be in expected conditions. We have
| simulated tests, and we have tests that run on the devices on
| my desk, but we also have a real world setup for consumer
| devices in a separate building that could be mistaken for the
| real deployment environment. That's not feasible for every
| company, but it's certainly feasible for Samsung. It doesn't
| mean you'll catch everything, but it does address some of
| your points.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| There's no question about what it _should_ be, but without
| technical leadership up the chain that understands and
| insists on this, it 's easy to see how it could atrophy
| over time with cuts and staff turnover.
|
| Like once upon a time, someone established a lab with
| twenty different units in different states, and put in
| place a process for validating the releases on it, but that
| person is long gone, and parts of the lab haven't worked
| quite right in years, but the parts that do still give a
| green checkmark, and who wants to stick their neck out and
| block a release over some baroque process no one even
| understands, right? It's not like the lab ever seems to
| really catch a major issue, does it? Just send a :ship:
| emoji to the slack channel and wait to be assigned your
| next ticket in the sprint meeting.
| kkarpkkarp wrote:
| so what are the users for? /s
| agilob wrote:
| Today a tech lead with admin role on GH opened a PR, approved
| it for himself and merged it, because he could override GH
| rules. The PR had failing unit tests. It went straight to prod
| and caused 20 minutes downtime of one functionality. We do test
| things, sometimes you're just not prepared for all the
| permutations of the idiocy out there...
|
| This is more common than you think. Only a few days HP update
| bricked their printers
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/firmware-update-bric...
|
| Similar thing happened to Hisense
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Hisense/comments/18xnmz9/the_latest...
|
| Samsung phones:
| https://www.androidcentral.com/phones/galaxy-s10-phones-smar...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The answer seems to be that things get tested, but the
| results often get ignored.
| agilob wrote:
| Human error, don't worry, we will be getting rid of these
| pesky humans soon
| sumedh wrote:
| You dont need a testing team when the users can do all the
| testing for you.
| 0xFEE1DEAD wrote:
| Someone on reddit [0] mentioned that they updated their device
| via USB and hadn't encountered any issues. If that's true, then
| it might actually have been the previous firmware update that
| silently bricked the device. Or maybe Samsung only test in a
| controlled lab environment without real world signal
| interference.
|
| In any case, it's mind boggling how a multi billion dollar
| company lacks proper rollout strategies.
|
| I have a pair of Sony WH-1000XM4 headphones, and their app
| constantly tells me to install the latest firmware update. After
| the 20th time I finally agreed - only to be met with the update
| instructions: I must perform the update in a place with no other
| bluetooth or wifi devices.
|
| Where on earth would I even have to go to find a place without
| there being any 2.4Ghz signal interference?
|
| I've never been more careful when pressing "Cancel," making sure
| I don't accidentally tap "Agree and Continue".
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/1jb1ymp/comment/...
| mmmlinux wrote:
| My girlfriend had to wear a sleep monitoring device, and the
| instructions also had stuff to that effect. including putting
| all phones in airplane mode and unplug any assistant speaker
| things you might have. I assume the real purpose of this is to
| make you actually sleep. But they claimed it was to make the
| data collect properly...
| TylerE wrote:
| It's much more just typical manufacturer trying to avoid
| liability. It costs them nothing to say don't do that, and if
| it cuts tech support costs by 1%.
| bhaney wrote:
| I also have a pair of XM4s. I installed the app briefly when I
| first got them so I could turn off the voice notifications on
| connection/mode change, and then immediately uninstalled it and
| have never needed it again. Why on earth would I want to update
| the firmware on my perfectly working headphones?
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| What if they release a firmware update that ads "immersive
| advertisements" to your audio? I'd hate to miss out on that.
| mh- wrote:
| The app enables other features like changing EQs, etc.
| bhaney wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure why I'd want that on my headphones
| themselves. I just set it to a neutral EQ during initial
| setup, and now I change the EQs elsewhere in the audio
| pipeline (music app, mixer, etc) just like we were all
| doing before the advent of headphones with their own apps.
| dsr_ wrote:
| None of my headphones have firmware to update. They
| connect with copper (8000BCE) wires (1830CE) to a 3.5mm
| jack (1950CE) based on a 1/4" phone plug (1890CE). Some
| of them use neodymium (1885CE) magnets.
|
| If I want equalization or convolution I apply them
| upstream shortly after decoding.
| gmueckl wrote:
| How is the audio compression codec[0] negotiated between the
| phone and the headphones over Bluetooth? IIRC, Sony supports
| higher quality codes outside of the standard BT required
| ones. Is the app required for that negotiation or is it all
| in the operating system now?
|
| [0] There is no lossless high quality audio over BT, only a
| bunch of lossy codecs.
| bhaney wrote:
| IIRC, the app isn't actively involved in bluetooth audio
| negotiations, but it does allow you to change settings
| within the headphones around what codecs it will advertise
| support for and prefer to use. Those settings have
| reasonable defaults and any changes you make persist on the
| headphones even if you uninstall the app.
| luis8 wrote:
| a faraday cage should do the trick
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > In any case, it's mind boggling how a multi billion dollar
| company lacks proper rollout strategies.
|
| Having worked for several billion-dollar companies, I can tell
| you it's very common. The extremely short answer to why is
| "silos on silos on silos on silos". Quite often, each team
| rolls things out however the hell they feel like. And the teams
| don't have very good people on them. It doesn't have to be this
| way, but the people at these companies simply don't give a shit
| about doing it in a better way. Bad leadership ensures it
| continues.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| This is why you phase release of updates to 1% of customers, then
| 2%, then 5% over a period of hours... while watching the help
| desk queues. Because testing is never perfect.
| hosteur wrote:
| One more reason to never allow a tv on the internet.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Why does a sound bar need a firmware update?
| jajko wrote:
| I have those, desperately checking if they don't auto-update...
| whfff, luckily no.
|
| I never patch such devices as long as they work, the only
| exception is phone and desktop. Those idiotic phone apps to tweak
| some minor stuff - thank you but I couldn't care less, I install
| maybe 1 new app to my phone a year and no, it won't be due to
| buying some effin' loudspeakers.
|
| There is simply 0 real gain for me and always non-zero risk. Even
| those I hate updating, but grokking they are too important to
| leave some known hackable surface open.
| nfriedly wrote:
| I have a samsung "smart" TV, and a few years back it started
| interrupting the DVD I was trying to watch every 15 minutes or so
| to tell me to check my internet connection. My internet was fine,
| but whatever server it was phoning home to had apparently gone
| down.
|
| I ended up factory resetting the TV to make it forget my wifi
| credentials, and I just haven't put it back online since then. I
| haven't regretted it at all.
|
| I think mine is compatible with the SammyGo custom firmware, so I
| might install that one of these days, and then maybe I'll
| reconnect it to my network. But, for now, I just have a PC
| connected to it and manage everything there.
| nabaraz wrote:
| I got tired of constant updates/apps on home screen/lag and all
| on my Samsung TV and finally bought a Sony. Everything I do is
| through Apple TV and Xbox now, Sony is not connected to the
| internet.
|
| Other than the slow boot (takes about 5 seconds to switch to
| Apple TV after pressing power button), I have no complaints.
| yuumei wrote:
| I have the same Samsung sound bar and absolutely nothing works.
| We need to hard reset it every day because it refuses to work,
| switching between programmes in Netflix causes a horrible loud
| crack, the latest one is having speakers out of sync. Really bad.
| Unfortunately the rtings reviewers didn't seem to test any of
| these things.
| Ikatza wrote:
| Yet another reason why I don't connect appliances to the
| internet. My TV is plugged to an Nvidia Shield, and that's the
| device that gets online, since it was designed for that.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| Jokes on them: I tried and failed to connect it to wifi and gave
| up.
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