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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977·

Bricked for me means broken beyond repair, which is certainly not the case here. Basically, your best option would probably be to physically move away from the other devices, which considering the short range of Bluetooth should be doable in many cases. Provided you realize what's going on of course.

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Bricked used to mean that, but now it's certainly changed to mean "unusable"

It bothers me to no end that the meaning seems to have changed (I've recently noticed that as well, and I blame it mostly on a sloppy usage of the term for clickbait). I get it, non-tech-savvy people don't see the difference - but what are we supposed to call an actually bricked device now?

Is a device ever really bricked? There's almost always some low level hackery you can perform to recover it or at least boot into an alternative firmware. And in the case of something like an encrypted boot partition with hardware-based cryptographic verification, if you get into a locked out state, it's just a matter of finding the right exploit before you can unbrick it...

Of course most cases short of a severe hardware defect can be unbricked given the knowledge, time and means, that's not the question. I'm referring to the rising tendency on YT and social networks to call any software crash, DoS or whatnot a "brick" when it can be mitigated by simple user-level measures such as a reboot, or in this case, by turning off BT.

IMO the term should be reserved for firmware faults or the levels below. Wikipedia gives a pretty good definition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_(electronics)

I don't think we should follow each and every dumbing down of society.

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