<i>One thing you have to understand is that these internet-connected Blu-ray players in question are programmed to log their activities and send copies of this information to Samsung.</i><p>In some ways, this is even more disturbing than the bricking.<p>Only corporate greed can create a media player that watches you and needs constant firmware updates.<p>I have a VCR and DVD player which still work, and things like this are the reason I'm not buying any newer standalone players.<p>It reminds me of this old meme (I'm not aware of a Blu-ray version): <a href="https://files-cdn.sharenator.com/pirate-dvds-s800x825-43988.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://files-cdn.sharenator.com/pirate-dvds-s800x825-43988....</a>
That's why: "<i>What</i> does a factory reset entail?" is a fascinating question.<p>Everyone assumes you'll lose your settings during a factory reset, but what isn't as clear cut: Does it revert the firmware to whatever it was shipped with (bugs and all)? Some vendors do, but most vendors do not.<p>A legitimate factory reset (inc. firmware) mechanism or USB boot/reflash would have likely saved Samsung considerable amounts of money here (relative to mailing all of them two ways, they could have e.g. sent out free USB keys with the firmware).
I think the best approach is to never, ever connect a device like a TV, Blu-ray player, etc to the internet. That's the only way they'll survive. So far no HDMI-based attacks.<p>Hotglue the ethernet port?
You broke it, you bought it Samsung. Full refund. Pick up the device at your expense or provide disposal costs as well.<p>Warranty is not any part of the issue if you come into my house and break a thing I own and is my property.
These things can get really tricky.<p>We once almost bricked our devices (electronic magnifier/OCR for low vision people) with an update that added automatic calibration for the cheap crappy OEM touchscreen we used in some devices. It was so crappy all the screens we had in our company had the same serial numbers and returned different coordinates when you clicked in the same spot :)<p>Fortunately libev has calibration - you can provide a matrix to transform all touchscreen events with. We added calibration step - the software asked user to touch 4 corners on the screen, calculates inverse matrix and saves it to configuration for better touchscreen accuracy. We tested it extensively, and uploaded the version to our update server.<p>The next day customers started calling :) turns out libev (which reads the configuration during booting) had a "feature" that parsed the numbers in the configuration using the default system locale.<p>German locale uses . as thousands separator and , as fraction separator.<p>So, when you did the calibration and restarted the device with German locale your screen transformed the touschscreen events multiplying them by thousands - so you couldn't click on anything, so you couldn't use the device or click "update software".<p>It was even worse if you used german locale, saved the calibration configuration and then changed locale to English - then it simply crashed during boot because of wrong number format :)<p>Fortunately we left one usb port accessible so users could attach usb mouse and click "update" if they had the first situation, or download the whole firmware on an usb pendrive and update from it.<p>BTW the libev bug is fixed, now it always reads the configuration using C locale. Guess what happened when we updated the linux on our systems half a year later and that change was included :)
Programming errors happen, but thats why I don't get, that companies still use programming languages, where such errors result in a crash vs. an error which can be handled and recovered from. A faulty XML file shouldn't render the whole machine unusable.
Yet another reason for the warning <i>don't connect your 'smart' TV, DVD player, or any other entertainment device to your wifi router.</i> If you need Netflix, use a standalone device such as a Roku and connect it to the TV with HDMI.
Our Samsung home theatre sound system's bluray stopped working years ago, everything else works fine.<p>We have a few Samsung products and each one has a particularly annoying problem.<p>The worst part is the support, I post a polite request on their website and always get a very concise unhelpful answer.<p>I no longer buy Samsung products.
This is one of the many reasons hardware companies stop supporting older tech. It’s just not in their interests to push updates down to them, and can seriously back fire