181–190 of 727 posts
This technology was used for good this time, but there's nothing stopping it from being used for evil next time. The fact that Samsung is even capable of doing this means you don't have control over your Samsung TV even if you do own it legally.
It actually true for any smart device now a days. Apple can do same for an iPhone.
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Samsung's appliances have a pretty bad reputation in general, especially the refrigerators and side loading washing machines.
Never again will I buy anything Samsung. They have steadfastly refused to fix my fridge's ice maker even though they have admitted it's a design fault, and retailers will not take it back as faulty because the ice maker is not considered vital to the functioning of the refrigerator in general.
The larger question for society is do we even want smart everything? I rarely see this issue debated. Undoubtedly, software enables complex/rich functionality for what were hitherto relatively "dumb" devices, but the same flexibility can also lead to exploits, backdoors, bugs and place too much control in the hands of the manufacturers and many other nameless parties. The most important aspect here is remote connecti…
Overall I'm not against such a thing because at the end of the day this makes theft less attractive and thus protects consumers. However not like this: "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 [...]". That's flipping the burden of proof around. Clearly not the way to go about this. Also of co…
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It is quite pointless to fight hardware vendors for FOSS support if they don't want to and you don't have to. Why spend effort to crack their platform when you can buy from competitors, which you do a disservice for fixing Samsungs TVs. Then again I don't know if there are any 'dumb' or open software competitor TVs left on the market ...
The same argument applies to M1 and people still (successfully) reverse engineer them.
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Obviously that's not the point, here. The fact that Samsung has the ability to brick a TV remotely _at all_ is ridiculous. It's not hard to imagine this being used by an attacker to shut down all Samsung TVs remotely, or for planned obsolescence if you want to be more cynical.
That would be about as huge of a security failure as an attacker sending out a malicious OS update for any other device, except with a planned, controlled way to disable TVs, Samsung could reenable them promptly once they realize. Intentionally disabling purchased devices to force them to buy new ones is called trespass to chattels and is illegal.
How 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.
On your phone you might have unencrypted private content and information on the other hand on Smart TV you have entertainment apps and entertainment content no private information at least that is what I think most people have and do. I don't anybody who stores private information on the Smart TV so when stolen Smart TVs start to circulate on the market no private information can be acquired or accessed(besides maybe…
IoT gone wild.
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Oh the tyranny of having to pay…
Some people will pay, not knowing the TV was stolen. A batch of stolen TV's could end up in the ends of a legit distributors; someone could end up with that by walking into some established brick-and-mortar discount TV warehouse type place. Gee, I hope that everything you own that you got off Craigslist in good faith and paid for is remotely disabled if it had been stolen, while the thieves enjoy the money. Because y…