Samsung Update Bricks New Office Stereo System
Also Security Leaks And Bad Board Game Diplomacy

The Firmware That Demanded a Field Trip

The new Samsung Q990D soundbar, the one we paid extra for so the CEO's home theater would have the "immersive experience," has been fully immobilized by a routine maintenance update. The 1020 firmware, which presumably included a patch for some edge-case issue nobody knew about, decided that the flagship soundbar was done being a soundbar; the unit now merely freezes on the eARC input and says 'BYE' when you try to turn it off, which is a level of passive-aggression you typically only find in the HR department .

Samsung Electronics, with a level of commitment to physical media not seen since the days of zip drives, is telling customers that there is no over-the-air or USB fix for this particular oopsie . Instead, the multi-billion dollar appliance is going to require a physical trip to a repair center for a mainboard replacement. The IT department appreciates the corporate irony of pushing a catastrophic software update that mandates a hardware repair; this is precisely the kind of holistic, cross-platform synergy we are always being told to strive for during our quarterly performance reviews.

Quarterly Review Finds CEO "Hot-Tempered" and "Sore Loser"

A new tell-all book, Careless People, by former Director of Global Policy Sarah Wynn-Williams, suggests that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg might not be the most fun person to hang out with in the breakroom . The internal audit, disguised as a memoir, portrays the chief executive as hot-tempered, generally unaccountable for his decisions, and notably, a rather poor sport during a board game session. It is the sort of character assessment that typically results in a mandatory, all-staff "Conflict Resolution Workshop" that everyone attends via silent Zoom call.

Ms. Wynn-Williams details larger, more existential issues, such as Mr. Zuckerberg allegedly blocking the hiring of a human rights expert who was going to focus on the company's platform being used to foment violence in Myanmar . The book's subtitle, 'A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,' has a certain ring to it, but the most salient takeaway is that the man who runs a global communications platform is apparently the kind of person you actively avoid playing Monopoly with on a company retreat.

The Cleaning Bot Was Given The Vault Combination

A popular utility on the Microsoft-owned GitHub platform, the tj-actions/changed-files Action, has been successfully compromised in a classic supply chain attack that affects over 23,000 repositories . The action, which is supposed to manage file changes, had its underlying versions quietly re-tagged to point at malicious code, thus allowing an attacker to print a repository’s CI/CD secrets directly into the public build logs .

The malicious script found the secret credentials and then, with admirable but misplaced effort, double Base64 encoded the output to avoid detection, essentially shouting the "highly-sensitive information" into a megaphone using a fun corporate cipher . The maintainer's bot had its keys compromised, which is like giving the office cleaning bot the master key to the server room and being surprised when it starts using the shredder for the wrong paperwork.

Apple Finally Agrees to Use a Standard Communication Protocol

Apple Inc. has reluctantly agreed to adopt the RCS standard for messaging with its Android user base, which is basically the equivalent of the executive team finally installing Microsoft Teams so they can talk to the temp workers instead of forcing everyone to use Slack. This long-overdue acceptance will eventually allow for secure, encrypted, higher-fidelity messaging when a Blue Bubble person sends a text to a Green Bubble person, ending years of passive-aggressive JPEG compression and broken group chats The Verge reports.

The announcement is a victory for the concept of interoperability, a concept which Apple generally treats as a highly contagious disease. This move effectively confirms that the company's prior resistance to adopting the modern standard was less about 'security' and more about maintaining a proprietary, walled garden to make sure the kids don't talk to the wrong crowd in the schoolyard.

Briefs

• Tor Service Closed: The New York Times shut down its Tor Onion service. The digital equivalent of closing the secret underground entrance to the main library; now everyone has to come in through the front desk.
• Amazon HR Policy: Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28. The tech giant's new policy confirms that your smart speaker is, in fact, the corporate HR representative sitting in your living room, taking notes.
• Firefox Forking: A new look at Firefox forks reveals developers are now maintaining a separate, private version of the browser, much like how the engineering department keeps a secret, better coffee machine hidden in the basement.