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Samsung's SmartHub
[15:55:31] matt [wronka.org]/Trip Two nights ago, my wife went to bed, and I tried to watch some Columbo on Netflix (I was up to the Great Santini, who sets up his own alibi through a fragile, technical, contrivance). We've only recently subscribed to Netflix since I've always been leary of the reliability of cloud services and rental subscriptions like this in general. It turns out the flakey Samsung implementation was more to blame.

This isn't abnormal. First off, the Samsung equipment (we own two of their TVs and one DVD player, all with essentially the same software) seem to arbitrarily forget WiFi passwords, which makes supporting them frustrating if not useless (they're all on the unsecured network now). Sometimes it fails to connect for a short period, and I need to just wait; that wasn't happening.

Obviously, there was a larger problem. I gave up and watched TopGear on my MythTV box instead, expecting whatever issue Samsung was having to resolve itself the next day. Why a box can't trust that it's on the Internet, or at least be optimistic about it once it's gotten an IP address, and a DNS server that resolves what it needs is an open question that I've tried to ask Samsung support (like the TV's software, I'm not optimistic for a response).

Yesterday while I was at work, I­ got a message from my wife, complaining about the DVD player not thinking it had Internet access. Obviously, she wanted to think it was a problem with our network—which is reasonable, given that's what the software said—but it turns out Samsung still didn't have their system up. It seems that there was some DNS hokeyness with their Akamai DSA settings. After a chain of CNAMEs (some of which included "china-" prefixes for some reason) eventually we got very short TTL addresses, which were not returning appropriate answers for the TV.

A Web search found somebody who *had* found an IP address that worked, also being served through Akamai DSA:
http://www.myce.com/news/smart-tv-mayhem-sony-samsung-users-central-servers-go-75137/

The resulting IP for www.samsung.com was 23.66.247.46; while you're setting-up your own DNS for your Samsung devices, I also suggest making ad.samsungadhub.com and rd.samsungadhub.com either fail or point to localhost since these are what send and track impressions for the annoying little piece of real estate in the top right corner.

I strongly discourage anyone from buying one of these devices (and apparently Sony devices) for these features, since they seem to be fragile. As I­ was trying to find information on the current outage (Samsung was not forthcoming and even mentioned on their support page of no known issues), I found references and news articles for outages regularly going back to 2013. It's clear Samsung doesn't treat this as production functionality.

More coverage today, after a couple days of this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/samsung_sony_tv_outage/

H&R Block
[16:19:28] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.generay I feel like the quality of the H&R Block on-line tax software has dropped this year.

First, if your page is about to time-out, and click the button to "save and continue", it will extend your session by reloading the current page, which loses all data that you've input--which is very frustrating if the reason you were taking so long is that you had to add lots of values and that work is lost now.

Secondly, it goes through its verification process, and I'm not quite sure what it's doing because it obviously hadn't calculated my mortgage interest deductions. Clicking back into that section and out, even after it said that it verified all fields, resulted in a significant swing from "owe" to "refund". It really makes be doubt whether I can trust it, but at this point my only option is to probably go through everything again by hand.