That seems like dangerous and very anti-consumer practice. I honestly don’t like smart TVs in general, I haven’t seen one where you won’t end up buying a tv setup box, like Apple TV or Amazon firestick anyway.
Samsung you’ve done f up.
Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
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Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#92How different is this from IMEI blacklisting of stolen phones? The secondary market for stolen phones has kind of disappeared despite cost of phones increasing. EDIT: I think there is plenty of reason to want an open source tv os. They are terrible, ad ridden, bloated commodities. But this seems to be only valid use of DRM I can think of.
> How different is this from IMEI blacklisting of stolen phones?
It's not. People have been doing this for years now, it looks like the big brouhaha this time is that it's likely disabled when it connects to WiFi, not cellular or GPS info like how a phone might respond.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh the tyranny of having to pay…
I have a 10 year old Sony TV that I have NO proof of purchase for, I threw out that receipt with the box about 3 moves ago.
Well, since you didn't steal it why would they disable it?
But if you bought it off the back of some guys truck would you honestly expect it to work?
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you never connect any smart TV to your network and instead use a standalone device combined with a PiHole.
This only works until every "smart" device has a cellular modem built in.
You can come up with other fun conspiracies by realizing that the HDMI spec can share internet connections. Plugging in your "fire cast", or whatever external television device you use, could provide your TV an internet connection, but it doesn't seem to be widely used yet.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#95forget smart TVs, I want somebody to just make a decent dumb TV. Same thing goes for cars, I feel like there is a huge market for "dumb" products. Manufacturers feel the need to keep adding features for some reason
From the albeit little feedback I've heard, I hear the Spectre 4K dumb TVs are decent enough. They go up to 75" and Walmart sells them.
But yes, I want a bigger market for "dumb" products such as cars, and other consumer appliances such as TVs.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#96I bought one of Samsung's smart televisions a couple years ago. I think I paid $1500 for it. Anyway, it started showing me ads and the TV eventually became sluggish less than a month after owning it. Returned it as defective. Ever since that experience, I swore of all smart televisions and will never buy another Samsung television or smartphone again if I can help it.
I bought a Samsung smart TV recently got it all hooked up and noticed that the UI was unbelievably sluggish out of the box when i bought it...
Hooked it up to my Nvidia Shield, configured HDMI-CEC and it's everything i want for a TV, all it does is turn on and display the shield while passing through audio to my receiver haven't seen the Samsung UI in months.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read some other thread on here some time ago that talked about the option of using a Pi-hole (or so?) to block smart TV ads.
Some TV manufacturers have gotten wise to this ( sigh ) and started hard-coding their DNS lookup IPs.
I remember having to set up a firewall rule to drop or reroute all DNS queries through my PiHole. What a pain in the ass to have to jump through hoops for a device I paid over $1k for.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 10 year old Sony TV that I have NO proof of purchase for, I threw out that receipt with the box about 3 moves ago.
Well, since you didn't steal it why would they disable it? But if you bought it off the back of some guys truck would you honestly expect it to work?
From the parent:
> "Should a customer’s TV be incorrectly blocked, the functionality can be reinstated once proof of purchase and a valid TV license is shared to serv.manager@samsung.com or click here for more information"
I don't know why they would block me, but apparently it is something they've created a process for, a process I wouldn't be able to participate in.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a high-end Samsung 4K tv in 2015 or so for about $3000. I picked it after a week of research that showed it had the highest quality panel. After taking delivery of the TV, we noticed it had bright lower left and right corners that we later found out were due to new packaging that pinched the TV and caused most of the TVs in that batch to be ruined. Samsung claimed that the corners were "in spec" and refused…
What do you expect Samsung to do, throw away a $3000 product for a defect most consumers wouldn't notice?
Ah, found the Samsung Customer Relations HN account.
Re: Samsung remotely disables TVs looted from South African warehouse
#100I'm on the fence here, I sort of like the premise that looters don't get their booty. I do agree though I don't like the idea that a corporation can remotely disable a piece of hardware I bought.