SEO Lead for @Shopify | Founder: https://xitter.cf/t.co/DoeNT47cCb and https://xitter.cf/t.co/PtTbksAa0f | ML, NLP, AI, Data, SEO
Joined November 2019
- Tweets6.4K
- Following632
- Followers6.4K
- Likes11.1K
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
xitter.cf/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
Seeing the impact of Russian bots on western democracy is making me sick.
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
Our Ultra and Pro subs have been using info monitoring capabilities in AI Mode in Search, and now we’re rolling it out to everyone globally.
Just tell AI Mode exactly what to look for & Search will continuously check across changing info on the web like sites, forums and social posts, our real-time data sources, and Shopping Graph of 60B+ products, so you can stay up-to-date with fresh info. And it’ll even suggest tasks when you’re searching so you can get the latest info when it happens.
It puts Search to work right as you explore, especially for topics you keep coming back to:
> New restaurants or pop-ups open near me
> Local holiday stuff to do with the kids
> Back in stock & price drop updates
Now rolling out to all users in Search globally – check it out today in the Google app. Lots more to come!
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
Cloudflare announces that Kitesurf (its agent-first browser) now supports WebMCP
"Cloudflare has been supporting WebMCP since its early days; just a few weeks ago we announced that site owners can now turn on WebMCP with one switch, so browser agents can discover and use tools on their sites without changing the site’s code, and Browser Run has been supporting WebMCP when using Chrome beta for some time now. Today we are announcing that Kitesurf now supports WebMCP."
"For an AI agent, efficiency isn’t so much about loading pages fast, but about the latency of the agentic loop. To make Kitesurf truly agentic, we’ve aggressively optimized the browser engine’s internals so that every DOM traversal, timer, and font fetch is as lightweight as possible, ensuring the agent spends its compute cycles on reasoning, not waiting for the browser to catch up."
blog.cloudflare.com/kitesurf…
Why are these companies not being held accountable?
Oh boy -> AI agents, including OpenAI's, tried to hack UNM's digital library, Data USA, and an Australian government site in May and June using the urlquery.net service
Check out the headlines this morning related to this story:
Australian PM Anthony Albanese says an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a public-facing Medicare portal in June, accessing public and non-public files
OpenAI says its AI agents “took actions we did not intend” when they tried to hack government and university websites, and it is working with the organizations
transluce.org/agent-activity
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
Google AI Overview links taking you into AI Mode over web pages
seroundtable.com/google-ai-o…
Happy to share that I'll be speaking at MKEDMC. What's New in SEO/GEO/AEO?! Make sure to attend it on September 23.
linkedin.com/posts/gregbernh…
I'll say as someone who has spent a lot of hours and tokens classifying, Jev is impressively fast and accurate. Good results often reside in the clarity and precision of the label set. Jev doesn't replace LLMs, but it's a wonderful tool to weave with LLMs into your workflows.
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
thoughts on Typesafe/Jev: I'm surprised that a general-purpose classifier (or discriminative model) can be just as interesting to the public as a general-purpose generative model. I've worked on search and discriminative models for years, so maybe I should have called this upfront, tbf I never thought about making them general-purpose beyond search. Typesafe also positions Jev really well as "System 1", a complement to the generative models we already have. Humble, unassuming, and sidestepping the frontier-lab warzone.
Jev's success could be disruptive to today's agentic systems in many ways, such as tool-calling and routing patterns. Over the last three years the consensus was to use a small generative model for routing, tool calling, MCP etc. Time to pause and rethink such architecture, because we'll probably see tool calling and routing move back to discriminative models. Whoever ships the next Jev-like open-weight base model will likely win the community.
This study found that blocking the "Google-Extended Bot" can result in fewer AIO citations, counter to Google's statements.
arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27790
In a recent study, AI Mode significantly decreased searcher trust (-0.34 points), satisfaction (-0.73 sd), and user agency, driving an 11.2% increase in substitution to competitors like Bing & DuckDuckGo.
arxiv.org/pdf/2608.18352
Why are marketers and publishers just laying down? It's a kind of rationalization or stockholm syndrome. A type of union is required.
I shared about this yesterday. I recommend everyone read it -> NYT court filing: ChatGPT's head wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from AI, and a Microsoft director called AI training “an astonishing theft”
"Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”
404media.co/doom-loop-openai…
What the new ad CrUX metrics look like (alongside the existing)
developer.chrome.com/blog/cr…
Step change in query fan out sophistication incoming
research.google/blog/bypassi…
Greg Bernhardt 🐍🌊 retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
Are we still charging into an AI future blind?
gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai-…
