"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"
Fuck off.
This is a wake up call for us to make free and open source Smart TV operating system so we can stop this tyranny.
> This is a wake up call for us to make free and open source Smart TV operating system so we can stop this tyranny.
Why does the TV have to be smart? Having the smarts integrated into the TV requires that 2 components be replaced if either no longer meets the user's needs.
Lets make a really nice large format display with no smarts or connectivity and then let the user choose an Apple TV, Roku, Fire, Android, or whatever.
This! I'm never buying any kind of smart TV again. I currently have one those TCL TVs with Roku built in and it sucks. All of the apps on it are slow, the menu/home/OS is slow. This could just be a overall Roku thing but I'll never buy either a Roku or a "smart tv" again.
I mainly use Apple TV and PS4 to access all of the streaming services. They are slick, fast, and responsive.
I have a Hisense with a built-in Roku, same experience, but it got a lot faster once I cut off its internet access. (It's still connected to the home network so I can use the iOS remote control app for it, but I set up a firewall rule to block it from WAN access.) Worth a try if you can live without it dialing out.
Yeah it's not perfect, they shove everything into that TV & Video section[1] and then in there I sometimes I have to look for the app I want in another sub-screen. I want to just create a folder on the home screen with my streaming apps on it. I'm probably going to get another Apple TV in the end. But even with all of those annoyances I am still much happier using the PS4 than the built-in Roku.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBJxPkUUh4 <-- If anyone is curious, this is what PS4 does to your streaming apps and there's no way out of it. You are forced to go into this section to find the streaming app you want to use
I think it depends on who initiates the lock. If a company can choose to arbitrarily lock my device then inevitably it will be misused. In the case of phones it is usually the customer initiating a lock, either from Find My Phone style apps or through the carrier itself.
My TV phoning home doesn't really seem like it accomplishes much, and will likely be misused in the future, not to mention is an entire layer to vectorize in terms of fleet device attacks.
>I think it depends on who initiates the lock. If a company can choose to arbitrarily lock my device then inevitably it will be misused. In the case of phones it is usually the customer initiating a lock, either from Find My Phone style apps or through the carrier itself.
why does this matter? In either case the entity responsible for handling the lock request is the company itself.
The company has to coordinate it because otherwise I would need to have a server that supports some remote locking protocol and my phone configured for it.
Who initiates it matters because if a TV vendor can arbitrarily brick your TV for something after you've paid cash for it, then that smells of theft. The same thing if a TelCo could or would arbitrarily brick a device I paid for. The distinction is that I'm telling them to do this to my phone.
>Who initiates it matters because if a TV vendor can arbitrarily brick your TV for something after you've paid cash for it, then that smells of theft. The same thing if a TelCo could or would arbitrarily brick a device I paid for. The distinction is that I'm telling them to do this to my phone.
What happened in south africa:
* TVs are sitting inside a factory
* TVs are owned by samsung
* factory gets robbed
* the owner (samsung) tells the manufacturer (samsung) to brick the devices
I fail to see how it's different than:
* iPhone is sitting in your pocket
* iPhone is owned by you
* you get robbed
* the owner (you) tells the manufacturer (apple) to brick the device
> 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
That means the Samsung TV's call home. How do they know when to stop calling home? The answer is they don't. That's one layer of the problem.
The second layer being that they can "incorrectly" brick someone's TV. Remote device administration when done by a TelCo requires a whole ton of validation, your eSIM goes through a fairly extensive validation check when it logs onto a network, which is why it has this capability in the first place. They are not the same thing in this way either. If TelCo's started accidentally bricking peoples phones I think you'd see similar criticism of the practice.
The third layer, as mentioned in other threads, is that most people don't keep receipts. A TelCo knows you went through an activation process with a certain phone number. It's a little easier to target at that point. You don't need to dig up a receipt from months or years ago.
>The second layer being that they can "incorrectly" brick someone's TV.
What gave you that impression? The statement put out by samsung? It's reasonable to think that they keep very good records of where a given TV should be and whether it was at a looted factory. If the TV was blacklisted, it's almost certain to have been looted. The statement is just a CYA to prevent a PR nightmare on the off chance that some TVs make it back into the retail supply chain and into the hands of an unsuspecting buyer. Legally speaking, it's still stolen property and the customer can't keep it, but Samsung doesn't think exercising that right is worth the hassle/negative press.
>The third layer, as mentioned in other threads, is that most people don't keep receipts.
People don't keep receipts for a $1000+ purchase? On the off chance they don't, they can get the retailer to make a copy, with supporting documentation.
>You don't need to dig up a receipt from months or years ago.
This is for devices that were looted weeks before. I see no indications that they're going to use this to do random ownership checks.
Not OP, but I'd say the problem is that someone, doesn't matter if it's the manufacturer, can disable your device remotely or that he has access to it at all.
iPhones are necessarily cloud connected, TVs not so much. Activating my iPhone is something I normally do and provides me value (payment, location services, etc etc) so there’s a natural place.
All this is bloat on a tv.
Also the iPhone bricking requires a police report and has a pretty defined process and I’m not aware of any overreach by Apple to brick phones like this story.
Ah, I see. It's mainly the lack of due process and the implication that legitimately purchased units might have been included in the bulk lockout. Thank you for explaining!
When you see what the open source community is able to do with entertainment systems I'm sure there is a market for an open source smart TV. But the issue will always be marketing to the customers and brand reputation that will make years to acquire. But sure, done right with quality premium products first, not low cost ones and times, this can be achieved.
> This is a wake up call for us to make free and open source Smart TV operating system so we can stop this tyranny.
Heh, firey take.
Personally my want is for systems like Netflix's Discovery and Launch[1] to take off. TV's can present themselves on the network, and phones or other devices can tell them to start running certain activities, & control them from afar.
There's been some good work to try to modernize these early protocols, & to build a more robust, fully featured, competent standard. That work has been happening at Open Screen Protocol[2] spec, which recently went Draft.
Alas, of course, Apple seems like they're going to do everything they can to prevent open standards from succeeding. They have a couple dozen patents vaguely in the field, most of which seem farcially ridiculously generic & obvious, and the bulk of these patents don't start expiring till 2024. They've disclaimed these to the working group[3] and while it doesn't prevent the standard from being worked on, as far as I know, it means there's almost no chance of it being supported or shipped until ~2028 or latter.
This is a spec that seems enormously pure & good, based on simple, obvious, straightforward ideas. I'd expect a random pick of Senior Engineer I's to come up with a design real similar to what is presented here- little of it feels novel or interesting. It's so damning, so sad that this world feels so obstructed, so road blocked, from doing the right thing, from the good & easy paths. And Apple being the sinister juggernaut preventing the good just feels so typical to me, locking us in to specific narrow means, controlling how we connect, how we think. It's been very hard days for me hearing Apple set us back like this. And I have no hope any kind of Fair Reasonable and Non-discriminatory licensing will ever be set up, no confidence we could try to find a legal route, even if we wanted to. Humanity is occluded by the largest, vastest, highest tech entity on the planet, held back.
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.
Or.....against thieves. As someone who had stuff stolen, I'd pay money for electronics that catches fire once reported stolen, thieves are literally scum of the earth and only one step above murderers and rapists in my books. Great step by Samsung here.
I can't argue with your assessment of thieves, but if you're going to have self-destruct mechanisms in your devices, appliances, or car, do you really trust a company like Samsung with the red button? Wouldn't you rather have that under your own control?
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.
I am not a South African lawyer, but it is almost assuredly part of their common law if nothing else. Being based more on Roman-Dutch law, they probably call it an Aquilian action instead.
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 you're the bad guy!
>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 you're the bad guy!
You're not the bad guy, but you're also not entitled to keep the stolen goods. It has to go back to its original owner. I'd be pretty pissed if someone stole my bike, sold it, and I'm not able to recover my bike because somebody "bought" it at 80% off.
Do you not believe in property rights? If a stolen car gets resold that doesn’t automatically void the original ownership papers… and that’s the standard practice in every country in the world I think.
Apple remotely scanning our phones for "suspicious" content, Samsung remotely disabling our TVs on the suspicion of TV being stolen what is next?!
This is akin to Crypto Wars from the 1990s but this time the enemy is far more dangerous. In the 1990s we had a centralized enemy the government which decided to turn against us this time the enemy is decentralized in the form of private corporations which are turning against us one by one.
Government can be tamed but private corporations can not; they only see profit and now they think they can get more of it by lying to us they do it in the name of social justice.
Even more fun is that there’s some receipts where the ink fades/rubs off in a matter of days so even though you have the paper receipt you still have no proof of purchase.
And you're not expected to. This is for TVs that were recently stolen. Do people here actually think this will be used in the future for random ownership checks?
You might have paid the TV second hand, and not be aware of the theft. What recourse do you have then? You're out of pocket, the seller might not be reachable anymore, and you have no proof of purchase.
Supply chains matter and that has always been true. You have never had recourse for buying stolen goods under law. If you buy stolen goods, the police can seize them and you are out the money.
If it was stolen, it was never yours, even if you paid the thief for it. At least in the US, this is a settled matter; You have no right to a stolen good that you paid for.
Burning the buyer means they will be more careful who they buy from next time. This could be both good (reduces market for stolen goods), and bad (inhibits legitimate 2nd hand sales). In the long term I would expect some technology for proving provenance pops up but it might be a little painful until that happens.
> "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.
oh the tyranny of having a product which you purchase and think you own have all functionality be remotely disabled—effectively becoming a multi thousand dollar paperweight—at the whim of a large international corporation with no real recourse...
> > You have recourse by showing proof of purchase
>How does that help when the product is out of warranty?
This is for TVs that were recently stolen. They'd definitely be in warranty (short of you not buying from an authorized reseller because you bought it out of the back of a truck), and you're reasonably likely to have the receipt.
While TFA focuses on recently stolen goods, the broader concern here is the invasive remote control that Samsung has over your device. The concerns I'm reading in this thread include Samsung turning on invasive advertising, remote bricking, and possibly monitoring your media consumption.
So in light of the relevant debate here, how exactly does a proof-of-purchase help if the product is out of warranty?
Fuck off.
This is a wake up call for us to make free and open source Smart TV operating system so we can stop this tyranny.