this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Do people not know what "bricking" means? This article is about HP disabling features if the printer runs out of ink.
If they bricked it, it would be unrecoverably broken, never to function again.
A more accurate term would be that they ransom the functionality of the product they sold until you pay the ransom.
Or maybe they engineered a "multifunction" device with shitty error handling: if any subsystem has an error, all functions fail, even those that don't depend on that subsystem.
A junior engineer filed a bug report about it and submitted a patch that allows subsystem errors to gray-out only certain functions in the UI.
The PM didn't consider the bug launch-critical enough to merit an engineer's time to review the patch. One senior engineer did briefly look at the patch and said "sorry, we can't alter the UI without brand & design review, i18n, and a lot of shit you don't wanna do."
The system shipped with the bug intact. The PM was rewarded for launching the product on time, and got promoted into a different position.
A year later when the users start fussing, the people on the team say "we never heard of that problem."
(This is hypothetical. Tech companies do be like that sometimes though.)
Just because they accidentally made ransomware doesn't make it not ransomware.
Exactly, yeah. The incentives within the company generate shitty behavior towards users, even if no individual wrote out a design for that shitty behavior.
And if this was in the first version, everybody would understand. If it's still in version 5, it's by design.
“Bricking,” “hard bricking,” and “soft bricking” became inexorably intertwined during the early days of flashing custom Android ROMs
HTC Dream and G2 user/modder here
I’m not familiar with that. Brick means “your item is now a brick.”
I’ve never heard of hard or soft.
Soft brick afaik is like when you mess up fastboot and need to use Qualcomms tool to repartition and repair fastboot.
Generally you cannot do this, but the tool leaked for some devices, this it's softbricked
QC uses the firehose protocol to load software that early, but that’s a good overview
The tools are generally available to flash, but manufacturers may not offer the next signed bootloader as something you can easily download (that one then implements fastboot)
You also need some mechanism to force the PBL to jump to download mode instead of trying to load the next bootloader
At that time, “Hard Brick” was getting used for the hardware was damaged
“Soft brick” was something like a boot loop where the device was unusable, but something like a DFU flash could repair (using DFU since every manufacturer had their own boot flash implementation back then)
At some point after that, people just went back to saying “bricked” for both
As someone that rooted their phones a lot back in the day it's wild how vividly I remember this and it went down exactly as you described lol
A bit like most Inkjets when the unreplaceable waste ink pad dries up 😭
Sit through a whole turn on sequence, just for the screen to say the manufacturer's equivalent of "Bin me, I'm dead" with the only option being to power off