I work in a related industry and I've had some exposure to this, the DRM requirements for Blu-Ray licensing are an incredible straightjacket, everything has to fail-closed for fear of the content providers losing one droplet of their precious content so if the slightest thing goes wrong the system is required to shut down rather than try and continue. So my first guess would be a DRM-forced mechanism malfunctioning in some way, however the fact that it's hit the whole world at the same time would point more to a certificate expiring. Again, that's DRM b*****s, in the systems we build we disable expiry checks since all they can do is DoS your devices at some point in the future.
This also explains why Samsung are having such trouble doing anything about it, DRM is explicitly designed to keep everyone, and in particular the legitimate owner of the device, out, so this may well be something they're not capable of fixing. Had something similar on a system a while back where they had to break the security of the system (via a remote buffer overflow, for geeks reading this) in order to patch it. If Samsung can't find a remote-exploitable hole in their own system, there may be no way to fix this outside of a hardware swap.
That's an interesting theory. DRM is a bad solution to an inflated problem.
Mine is an expired signing certificate in the Java code that powers the devices. As soon as the machine boots into firmware, it reads the code, finds that the code is no longer validly signed, and exits back to hardware control and reboots.
My theory requires that Samsung would need to figure out some way of having us completely wipe the memory to put the date back to their "zero date" and immediately load an updated firmware from USB that is signed by an unexpired signing certificate.
Since there has been virtually no feedback on this issue from Samsung Tech Support, I feel the need to ask a few pragmatic questions instead of focusing on a technical solution.
True or false? Samsung exited the Blu Ray Market last year.
True or false? Due to exiting that market segment, Samsung has defunded the Blu Ray tech support team.
Due to exiting that market segment, Samsung has defunded the Blu Ray tech support team. [Partially True (~95%), seems that they have atleast one person reading up on all our of tech support comments ha. /sarc]
We are barking at the moon.
[TRUE - Listening to Ozzy right now]
I'm also one of the "affected"; only thing we can do is hit them where it hurts. The pocket books.
