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Comment by chooseaname | Hacker News Reader

Article says crash, not brick. Brick is not recoverable.

We've changed the title to sidestep this. The word 'brick' is up there with 'doxx' on the list of curiously provocative words that people will strongly protest if you use them wrong, yet aren't exactly well defined. Not as high on the list as 'doxx' though. 'Troll' is on that list too.

It's described as crashing in loop, even on restart. For people who don't know how to reflash/wipe from recovery, it render their phone useless, so as well as bricked.

I'm curious to see the post-mortem on this one, i'd guess a bug in the libjpg used in android, and a malformat in the encodibg of the picture ?

From my understanding, if it happens once, it's a crash, if it keeps rebooting it's a brick. If it can be recovered it's a soft-brick, otherwise it's a hard-brick.

Another commenter agrees with you, writing:

> it soft-bricked their phones (ie. they had to factory reset their device)

But the whole point of coming up with the word "brick" was to describe the set of scenarios where even things like factory reset won't work. This is "literally" all over again.

But even with a hard brick (where it's "literally a brick"), you can sometimes bring it back to life by opening the device and swapping a component or soldering something.

I like soft vs hard brick, because it connects to software and hardware. With a soft brick, the device is basically a brick until you reset the software. With a hard brick, it requires potentially a hardware fix.

The thing is there is always more levels of bricked. Usually people refer to bricked as being unrecoverable through the usb flashing methods but there is usually a way to open up the device and flash the nand chip back to a working state. So its bricked in the perspective of a user but not for someone with electronics experience.

Some users report that it soft-bricked their phones (ie. they had to factory reset their device). Others were able to recover it by either deleting the wallpaper from TWRP, or pressing a sequences of keys to take a picture and set that as the wallpaper (apparently for them only the display was broken, everything else worked(.

But the article also says if you set it as your wallpaper, you cannot get past the lock screen, which I am guessing is because it crashes again loading or rendering the wallpaper. So maybe you could boot with a key combination and reset the phone, but it's pretty close to bricking.

Soft bricks can be recovered from.

I hadn't heard the term "soft brick" before, and if you Google it all the top results are about this.

"soft brick" is commonly used on XDA.

Is it a term that's usually only applied to androids?

Not really, it's used for example with OpenWRT too:

site:openwrt.org "soft-brick" - 213 results

'brick' in general is a sliding scale based on how many device debug/recovery tools you have access to and how much device disassembly you're willing to tolerate.

No, iOS devices can also soft-brick, it's just a general term. Most often people encounter the term in relation to hacking/rooting hardware, like a Nintendo DS/Switch for instance. Hitting up Wikipedia or Trends can help you dig through its usage considering how Google's search algo heavily biases current events wrt relevance.

Neither the article nor the headline say soft brick. Besides, "soft brick" is just someone not wanting to admit that brick has an understood definition but they like the word brick and want to use it.

Does brick have an understood definition though? I think this is the millionth time I see this exact discussion about a news story using the term differently from the one true definition. That doesn't seem very understood to me.

Well, yeah. "Brick", as in a paperweight, as in it's dead for good, forever. It's in the word.

discussions must be had. it's one of those sesame street stories anyway; they want to use tech lingo with the kids.

It's so rare these days I really don't understand why people fuss over the definition.

It's almost impossible to brick anything with software, and even in hardware unless you damage the PCB itself you can usually recover if you tried hard enough (e.g. Even if you fry a $1500 FPGA you could technically reflow a new one and pray the bitstream is OK if you need it fixed now - although I'd rather you than me)

Technically you could also lay out new components and copper trace on an actual brick, too.

I've always understood it to mean 'broken beyond software or high-level firmware repair'. i.e. if not actually a blown component, something needs to be reflashed which has an inaccessible JTAG header or something, rather than something 'higher level' like recovery images over ADB & USB.

It is in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brick

Under the 'verb' usage:

2 : to render (an electronic device, such as a smartphone) nonfunctional (as by accidental damage, malicious hacking, or software changes) // … those who dared hack the phone to add features … risked having it "bricked"—completely and permanently disabled—on the next automatic update …

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