151–160 of 580 posts
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 firmwa…
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
Then we should strive to improve computer literacy. I think technological solutions should still ultimately empower their users.
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>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.
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.
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, disco…
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 colos…
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...
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Probably some new AI/tracking/ad delivery features
It's a speaker system. It plays sound. Why could it possibly have AI, tracking, or ad delivery?
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.
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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
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.