Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

  • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 hours ago

    The can perfectly design these devices to work even when the “smart” part is bricked.

    This is just hostile design to steal your data, just keep this shit out of the house.

  • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    I had a Samsung fridge-freezer from around 2012, and it developed a fault where it would stop trying to be cold after two days. The engineer diagnosed a faulty motherboard and wanted about 1/3rd the cost of a new fridge to fit a new one, so instead I fixed it with a timer plug that switched it off and on again every day at 3:15am

  • the_armchair_potato@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Why are people still buying Samsung and LG appliances? After my 1st Samsung stove died just over a year, I learned my lesson. Wake up consumers and quit spending money on garbage!!

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      8 hours ago

      Had a freezer fixed on warranty recently. What needed replacing? An electric heater. Yes the freezer has a heater in it!

      (It’s for the anti frost feature.)

      • Corhen@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yea, actually quite important: need to make sure the cooling element doesn’t get covered in ice, which tanks performance.

  • redlemace@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    AI line of fridges

    excuse me ?? smart fridge ?? AI ?? I don’t want to talk calories or nutrients, I just want a cold beer and fresh milk & vegetables. There will be a cold day in hell before I buy an AI capable fridge. I’ll go to a root cellar long before that! (i live in the woods, so yes, I CAN do that easilly)

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Y’all remember when Windows updated their OS and all computers without enough memory to run it were bricked?

    Because we didn’t throw a fit then, when a company’s update destroyed our possessions, now we’re getting more of it.

    This could actually just be more modes of planned obsolescence.

      • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        The one that took my beloved living room streaming laptop 😭 fucking windows

        if Linux was more accessible to someone like me, I’d do that shit in a heartbeat. (what I mean by that is I want to download a “Linux Wizard” program, that automatically saves all my shit, installs a super easy/stable Linux version, then deletes windows, then restarts my computer and BAM! you’re good to go!)

        • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 hours ago

          “automatically saves all my shit” - define “all”? If truly EVERYTHING, you would need at least as much free space as already used, + some for the OS

          “installs” - well, that’s possible and has been done before, it’s just that nobody bothers anymore because it’s complicated, also because that implies automatic partitioning and bootloading which often sucks at least on Linux land

          “easy/stable Linux” - well, if by “easy” you mean “it will never ever ever 4-th wall break and demonstrate that a computer isn’t a Netflix vending machine” then none. Unlike on Windows, the 4-th wall breaks are meaningful, however. On Windows it just tells you “lol this won’t work, you suck, go reinstall”.

          • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            OK so I have a nice External harddrive with enough terabytes of free space to save my stuff, then what do I do? Download a Linux installer, delete Windows (somehow), Load Bootscreen(assuming I still can after I delete Windows), and type in “Run Linux Installer?” is it that about the gist of it?

      • Archangel1313@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        Remember when there was just a little dial in the top of the fridge, that you turn, from “cold” to “colder”? Yeah. That’s really all that’s required. Fancier fridges had more than one dial, that controlled individual compartments, like your crisper drawers.

        • Joelk111@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          I’m pretty sure technology connections has spent an hour explaining why that’s sub-optimal while also explaining the refrigerant cycle for the 10th time.

          • Eheran@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            But it was so great… Seriously these people have no idea what they are talking about. Sure it worked. And they also broke, last time I had to fix an old style thermostat is many years ago luckily.

      • foo@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        There’s plenty of middle ground. We had integrated circuits embedded in circuit boards for a long time before re-programmable chips started appearing, and those ones certainly didn’t connect to the Internet and brick themselves.

        • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          PICs are cheaper than discrete ICs, even if they’re programmed only once and shipped. This is why you’ll see mainboards with un-populated sections - the processor has a software build that either excludes the un-populated parts or is designed to detect and ignore them. A discrete IC would need far more engineering to be able to selectively ignore, or each model would need it’s own discrete IC.

          • foo@feddit.uk
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            18 hours ago

            If by discrete ICs you mean custom logic baked into silicon, yes that’s always been expensive. I was referring to off-the-shelf ICs that cost pennies, which used to be orders of magnitude cheaper even than PICs (in the days before Internet connected fridges).

            Before the term software engineer was commonplace, electronic engineers used design circuits around off-the-shelf components, like the venerable TI 555 timer or op-amps, and design a circuit around them. To do it they’d need the datasheets (https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm555.pdf). Hobbyists and aspiring young engineers would buy books like this: (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/14021/IC-555-Projects/), which were like O’Reilly cookbooks for electronics circuits. The equipment to program a PIC used to be way beyond the reach of hobbyists, and wasn’t necessary for manufacturers producing simple control circuits. If you look at circuitboards from that time you’ll see some ICs with pins that aren’t connected to anything because those just weren’t needed for the circuit, much like you describe the empty sockets in modern boards.

            It absolutely was possible in the pre-Internet days to design a fully functional fridge, and more, without writing code of any kind, and it was cheap too.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        Given the fact my fridge regularly freezes my water, I’m reasonably confident that the bimetallic strip would possibly do a better job.

  • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    Just wondering, is it confirmed that food actually spoiled? Because making the actual cooling dependent on smart functionality seems incredibly stupid. I assumed it would just be all the smart features that stopped working, but if it couldn’t even cool anymore… woooow XD.

    • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Looks like it. Also seems confined to just Korea. The cooling itself was affected.

      “[T]he refrigeration and refrigeration functions themselves did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of,” one user wrote, per a translation.

    • billwashere@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I mean I can sorta understand some convenience functions but it oughta have some default setting it falls back to. Especially temperature settings.

      I do have a Samsung fridge but nothing that fancy. I mean I tried to get it to trigger an Alexa routine to play a message when the door opened but that didn’t work. Alexa saying “Close the door fatty, you’re not really hungry” could have been motivational.

      • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        You know, there are plenty of cheap window sensors you could just as well attach to your fridge door to achieve this XD.