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Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

There's a $30,000 bounty set up for anyone who can patch the firmware to eliminate the ads. Please consider contributing additional donations against the matching funds.

https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/samsung-familyhub-refrige...

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I lieu of a donation I'll continue to not pay for ad-laden garbage.

Keep the bounty, but target the cause and not the effect. Who made the decision? Send a drone army once a month to spray paint their house with PSAs about consumer rights.

I recall Louis saying that some (or all?) solutions to these bounties cannot be revealed to the public due to being liable under DMCA circumvention measures. IANAL.

Doesn't it just affect US citizens?

IANAA.

Canada and Mexico too thanks to CUSMA.

In light of the ongoing trade war, I think Canada should just tear up this agreement.

I’d vote for that.

The US has successfully bullied many countries around the world to adopt their same insane IP laws, at the cost of cancelling trade agreements with those countries if they don't comply. So no, it affects many countries.

In fact the first DeCSS trial was in Norway. Which started the whole internet wide civil disobedience campaign of mirroring it, putting it in haikus and t-shirts, etc.

Seems like they should release the fix on a Hong Kong server.

They can be revealed volunarily by the author, but FULU can't require or condone it. Because of the DMCA section 1201, trafficking in circumvention tools to violate digital locks is a felony punishable by 3-5 years in federal prison.

Yeah maybe this would be an exception since patching firmware to disable ads probably doesn't constitute circumventing digital locks, unless in the process of doing so they do.

I would assume AdGuard or Pi-hole can do the job? No need for potentially unsafe firmware patches

> Include instructions for carrying out the functional method which are accessible and easily usable by a non-technical individual

Good luck for anyone to claim this bounty if that's one of the requirements. Does the fridge have any exposed ports at all that the average person could access without removing anything from the fridge?

It's also not clear in the bounty, if I add funds to the campaign and it gets fully funded, does that mean that software/hack will be released publicly? Or only to "backers"? It's not clear what the donation goes to, besides for the person who makes the hack to claim.

What's the use if a non-technical individual can't apply the fix?

What's my donation gonna go to if the requirements are impossible to fulfill?

It helps to read into the personality and psychology of Louis Rossmann a bit, who is running this. He does component-level repairs of MacBooks, and entirely understands that custom firmware will likely require JTAG to flash the MCU.

FULU / Rossmann isn't handling the public release ... at all. They're worried that doing so would violate US law or at least cost a lot in court fees. They'd be super stoked if whoever made it released to to the public and absolutely not just to "backers".

That website has never once paid out a bounty? hmm...

It looks to be a very new program.

While the fulu.org domain has been around for a long time, archive.org's oldest snapshot of bounties.fulu.org is from late last week.

This press release from Oct. 23rd agrees with archive.org's snapshot history: <https://fulu-foundation.ghost.io/repair-bounty-program/>.

Given the complexity of the tasks on offer, I'm unsurprised that zero of them have been completed in three days. Give those boffins some time, yeah?

I think the bounty aspect of it is incredibly new, the operator only released an announcement video a week or less ago.

accurate HN username

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