For anyone who gets this abhorrent soft brick on their Roku TV, MAC address filter your TV on your router (prevents it from accessing the internet and phoning home). Hard restart your TV (unplug and replug since they lock you out of restarting via GUI), and Bob’s your uncle (dumb TV with no forced agreement for continued “dumb” use).

Unclear how long this will last, but as long as you keep your TV off the internet you should be good to go.

Also curious about this. I don’t run a firm, but I do have to cleanup and maintain consultancy projects after they get dumped on me / “my team”. I’ve been trying to think of ways to prevent contracts with “certain” companies, but since I am one of few technical people interacting with these projects it is proving harder said than done. My complaints on quality of code, maintainability, et cetera are met with “they move faster”, “they have more expertise doing projects like this”, and “they help keep us lean”.

I do feel like my position in the company is mostly herding cats (read: consultancy projects), which is a bit unfortunate given it wasn’t really what I thought I was being hired to do.

I am not a lawyer, but my first thought is that you cannot pass a six figure (or more) fine for this kind of infraction. Even though Trump is starting to show a pattern of disregarding this specific case’s proceedings, the judge would have to start at a reasonable amount and go up from there. In this case, I searched for reasonable fines for violating a gag order and got $1000 to $10000. If he handed down a $500,000 fine then the media / right would go crazy questioning if this fine was justified by Trump’s actions. I think we all know that regardless of the sum (barring $100,000+ fines), Trump is gonna disregard the fine and do it again. But doing so gets Trump closer to actually being imprisoned (in theory). The actual threat of being imprisoned is far more likely to quiet Trump than a monetary fee. ‘Tis the life of the (comparatively) rich, monetary fines don’t have the same sticking power as for you and I.

I know the threats he made were crazy on their own, but for some reason knowing it happened OVER VOICEMAIL seems even wilder…