Watch out for this one linux lovers…
Linux users accidentally bricked their new Samsung laptops by booting their favourite open-source OS on the shiny computers.
That is utterly brilliant work by Samsung, the ability to destroy hardware through software means.
I’m just glad the Linux community found it while it was under warranty, just imagine if Samsung had shipped a driver in 13 months time that had the same effect ?
After the shoddy Samsung plasma TV I had there was little chance I would be buying one anyway.
Twenty years ago you could kill a Commodore Pet with a POKE command, Samsung seems to have added a bit of Retro to its products but not in a good way.
:lol: Ooops!
A fix will be coming to a distro near you soon, update here [theregister.co.uk]
Apparently the problem code was based on reference code from Sammy :smackbum:
There may be a fix available but the hardware is still vulnerable, would you risk buying a laptop with a Remote-Brick exploit waiting to be triggered ?
You are absolutely right, Sammy have shown some serious incompetence. The rapid fix is a credit to the nix community but does not absolve Samsung at all. Especially since the developer’s only mistake was to use the Samsung approved reference code!
This bug is not Linux specific, you can brick these Samsung laptops from userspace in windows! More here [dreamwidth.org]