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July 20, 2020 06:58 pm

Samsung Blu-ray Players Reportedly Bricked By XML Parsing Error

Hammeh writes: Since the middle of last month, thousands of Samsung customers found their older internet-connected Blu-ray players had stopped working. In the days that followed, complaints about devices caught in an endless startup boot loop began to appear on various internet discussion boards, and videos documenting the device failure appeared on YouTube. To fix the issue, Samsung eventually advised customers to return their inoperable video players for repairs. There is no software fix. "We are aware of the boot loop issue that appeared on certain 2015 Samsung Blu-Ray players and are offering free mail-in repairs to customers who have been impacted," a representative of the mega-manufacturer said in a Samsung forum post. It was speculated by netizens and some media reports that a HTTPS certificate error was to blame. However, it's been suggested to The Register that the cause of the failure was an XML file downloaded by the network-connected devices from Samsung servers during periodic logging policy checks. This file, when fetched and saved to the device's flash storage and processed by the equipment, crashed the system software and force a reboot. Upon reboot, the player parsed the XML file again from its flash storage, crashed and rebooted again. And so on, and so on, and so on. Crucially, the XML file would be parsed before a new one could be fetched from the internet, so once the bad configuration file was fetched and stored by these particular Samsung Blu-ray players in the field, they were bricked.

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