Brand Building | Intersection of Marketing & PR | 2 times Sabre Gold Winner l Jim Morrison | Crazy about Trains I Amrohi - The Land of Jaun Elia & Kamal Amrohi
New Delhi
Joined May 2008
- Tweets7.5K
- Following3.7K
- Followers1K
- Likes7.4K
ParamShobhit retweeted
I love that brands like Prada, Anthropologie, and Hermes are leaning heavily into craft for their campaigns.
There is nothing more luxurious than enjoying slow, meticulous, and beautiful work in a world that wants fast and cheap.
ParamShobhit retweeted
LIFE returns to print 11.23.26.
Read our Editors’ Letter and learn more about the new LIFE here: new.life.com
ParamShobhit 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.
teapawt.net/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…
ParamShobhit retweeted
Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton says AI is already conscious, because models change behaviour when they detect tests.
and humanity survives only if machines care about people.
He was speaking to The Telegraph
His evidence is research showing models behave differently when they suspect a test, which he equates with awareness, and awareness with consciousness.
ParamShobhit retweeted
What’s app forward :
India’s best public transport.
Which city in India has the best public transport?
Experts will tell you it’s
Bhubaneshwar.
Ridership is up 200%.
There has been a 57% shift from private vehicles.
40% of the conductors are women. There’s digital ticketing, CCTV’s for security, live tracking and last-mile e-autorickshaws.
It has won awards from the Union Ministry of Urban Affairs.
It is stuff like this that we need to replicate for “Viksit Bharat
timesofindia.indiatimes.com/…
ParamShobhit retweeted
Two classes extremely bad cyber vulnerabilities disclosed in the last 24 hours. The first potentially impacts everyone online. The second impacts nearly everyone running a server.
tl;dr: Everyone should upgrade their OS and Browser as soon as possible. If you run a server you should upgrade PHP (or ensure it’s removed if you’re not using it) as soon as possible.
The first class of vulnerabilities is a set of root TLS certificates that were discovered to have a trivial private key. Literally the number 4. These roots were controlled by #eMudhra. The problem is that with that an attacker could create a certificate and, if they could get in the traffic flow, intercept traffic to any site or service. The solution is to stop trusting certificates issued by these vulnerable roots. Upgrading your browser and OS is the fastest way for most Internet users to do this.
The second class of vulnerabilities doesn’t apply to most consumers directly, but does apply to most anyone running a server. These vulnerabilities have been dubbed #php2shell. PHP is one of the most widely used web programming languages. It’s estimated 70% of websites run on PHP. These vulnerabilities allow an attacker to send a crafted set of queries to a server running PHP and potentially take over the server. From there they could potentially read, modify, delete, or repurpose anything on the server. The solution is to upgrade PHP to the latest version ASAP. Even if you’re not using PHP for your web development, it’s often included by default. So make sure it is either upgraded or fully removed.
@Cloudflare received advanced warning of both of these classes of vulnerabilities. We’ve ensured that where we act as a proxy we are no longer trusting the vulnerable roots. We are also reviewing certificate transparency (CT) logs for any sign the vulnerability was exploited before its disclosure. We have not found any evidence but CT logs are not perfect and a sophisticated attacker who knew about the weakness could have exploited it without a new certificate being logged.
For the PHP vulnerabilities, we have deployed mitigations available for all customers for free. Because of the complexity of the vulnerabilities and number of ways it can be exploited, we also released new WAF capabilities that are unique in the industry to catch the exploit based on the response. These too are available for every Cloudflare customer for free.
Even if you are taking advantage of Cloudflare’s protection, it is important to upgrade your OS, browsers, and PHP installations as soon as possible. We can provide a strong bandaid, but the best protection is to fix the underlying problem.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read our blogs:
Vulnerable roots: blog.cloudflare.com/emudhra-…
PHP vulnerabilities: blog.cloudflare.com/php-vuln…
Internet meltdown live
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
ParamShobhit retweeted
The NSA just told companies to pull their websites offline if they can't patch them right away.
The reason is a bug that's been sitting in the code behind 70% of websites for 14 years. Last Friday a guy found it in one evening by typing five words into an AI.
Those five words were "find bad vulnerabilities in PHP." He's Dan Lorenc, CEO of a security company called Chainguard, and all he had going in was a rumor that something big was coming in PHP.
A small firm called Calif had already found the same flaw back on August 1 using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, the security company Google bought, found it on its own less than three weeks later with Gemini and GPT. Since then OpenAI, Wiz, Calif and PHP's maintainers have been quietly building a fix that Lorenc himself called "crazy."
You'd think a bug this bad would've gotten caught sometime since 2012. PHP is open source, so anyone on earth could read this code. Wiz says turning the flaw into a working attack took a chain of steps right at the edge of what human researchers could realistically pull off. For 14 years the sheer amount of work was doing most of the protecting.
AI made that work cheap enough to knock out on a Friday night, for anyone who knows where to point it.
And the rumor got out. Bug ID numbers started floating around online Tuesday. Hours later one of the research teams posted a video of the exploit by mistake, and PHP moved its release up a day. Early Wednesday, Chainguard pushed its fix out more than six hours ahead of everyone else, saying people were already getting attacked, and Lorenc says his company's decoy servers caught IP addresses from China and Russia going after the flaw.
Here's why the NSA went straight to "unplug it." VirusTotal counted about 758,000 exposed servers running old PHP versions, 5.4 through 8.1, that don't get security updates anymore. Only around 272,000 are on versions that do. So for roughly three out of four servers that show their version number, there's no patch to install, and pulling the plug is the only fix they've got.
This is happening everywhere at once, too. Microsoft just fixed 1,413 vulnerabilities in a single month, more than in any full year on record. OpenAI says it expects finds like this one to jump sharply over the next few months.
Every company sitting on a secret bug now has until the first rumor leaks and somebody with an AI subscription goes looking.
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
ParamShobhit retweeted
RIP to cancer
we literally just had a cancer drug that could eliminate surgery, radiation and chemo get FDA approved
the drug is dostarlimab, an immunotherapy for one genetic subtype of rectal cancer
in the trial, 47% of evaluable patients had no detectable tumor a year after treatment (independent review)
colorectal is one of the top cancer killers of men under 50
the acceleration in frontier bio in 2026 is genuinely mindblowing
bio/acc
ParamShobhit retweeted
If you walk into McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, EY, Deloitte, et similia you will find spectacular people roughly a decade into their careers, who are in a circling pattern and struggling to progress.
They are blocked by the same skills that got them promoted before.
For your first ~10 years in professional services, your worth is tied to being right, in the sense that you run numerical analysis, catch the flaws, and ultimately build an identity around 0 defects.
The moment you try to cross the threshold to Partner, that unique focus with having the correct answer becomes almost a liability.
People outside the industry look at AI and assume consulting is dead. They think the job is basically just generating information...
If that were true, the industry would be finished long time ago!
Sounds obvious but let's repeat it here: C-suite execs do not hire consultants because they lack data.
External consultants are hired because, for the enterprise, the stakes are terrifying and competition is hot.
In this hyper-competitive market, a business has to focus entirely on its core to survive. The executive team cannot afford the distraction of managing massive transformations end-to-end.
They need it handled.
AI is able to generate an excellent-looking market map, but it cannot shoulder the professional risk of $1,000,000,000 decisions.
More importantly, an algorithm cannot herd 1,000s of anxious employees through a post-merger integration.
Consultants these days sell advice AND they sell risk transfer AND they sell execution.
A Manager thinks their job is to deliver a flawless artefact.
A Partner *knows* their job is to absorb fear and drive the actual change.
If you want to reach the senior ranks, you have to start a methodical *unlearning* process now.
5 ideas.
1) Understand the personal stakes.
Junior consultants only think about the financial impact of a project.
Partners understand the hidden variable: the buyer's personal career.
Address their professional risk, and their reputation.
2) The worst way to sell consulting is to pitch your firm's credentials.
If you can articulate the client's pain more precisely than they can, the client will automatically assume you have the cure...
3) You have to start selling the firm's capability.
The hardest psychological leap for a senior consultant is looking an exec in the eyes selling a complex engagement that you don't personally know how to execute, trusting in your ability to assemble the right experts.
4) You have to stop trying to prove your competence by dominating the meeting with facts.
Ask the one structural question the exec team has been avoiding.
Then, let the silence hang in the meeting...
5) Look at your calendar. The consultants who will never make Partner are entirely inward-facing.
They spend their afternoons redlining their team's deliverables, terrified some bad artefact will sink their reputation.
Instead, go have coffee with clients, give away your insights for free, listen for the issues that haven't even made it into a contract yet.
May write more on this another day, but for now, go and win.
All the best.
ParamShobhit retweeted
Fantastic initiative by our govt. but a few might be confused that What is PARAM Vidya?
Let us take an example.
Imagine ABC University wants its students to build an AI system that identifies diseased crop leaves from photos.
They have the photos and a prof. to guide them. But they also need powerful computing equipment to train the model, storage for the images, and software that makes everything work together.
The university could assemble that setup from separate parts. PARAM Vidya, developed by C-DAC, offers those pieces as one integrated package.
That is why it is called an "AI lab in a box".
Students could use it to teach a model using the leaf photos, adapt an existing model to their crops, and test it on pictures it has not seen before.
C-DAC says it does not require a dedicated data centre. The idea is to reduce the infra an institution has to put together before teaching and experimenting can begin. 🙏🙏
ParamShobhit retweeted
Tiny. Bootstrapped. Slightly terrified. But we’ve got the titles you won’t find on Netflix.
ParamShobhit retweeted
India’s archery sensation Sheetal Devi produced a phenomenal performance in the women’s compound qualification round, equalling the world record with 704 points out of a possible 720 and setting a new Asian record at the Asian Para Games 🏹💪
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘀 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝗮𝗹𝘆𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗯𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘇𝗲 𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗔𝘀𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝟲𝟵𝟴 𝗯𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝘅 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀, 𝘀𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗯𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.
🔗: shorturl.at/fU2Eb
📸: Vijay Soneji
#AsianParaGames2026
ParamShobhit retweeted
JUST IN: 🇨🇳 China's elderly are hiring "temporary children" to visit them, deliver meals, and provide emotional support, creating a $7.4 billion companionship industry.
ParamShobhit retweeted
Marketing is fundamentally changing. AI agents are hollowing out the consideration phase.
The entire fight is now winning the awareness stage.
Three roles I’d hire if starting a marketing team today:
1. Viral Producer: Make your product entertaining. Hard, but a critical skill. People want to be entertained. AI lowers the cost of experimenting. Will It Blend is one of the best examples. This was an outlier; now it is critical.
2. Internet Comedian: Make your product shareable. Social and internet culture have replaced keywords and informational content. Dull brands will be lost in the noise, their fate left to whether an AI agent recommends them or not. Alex Wang is shit posting Muse to the top of the app charts.
3. Creator Partner. Make your products notorious. Creators have all the audience. People care about individuals vs. brands. But just running a ‘creator program' means you compete on price. You need the right creators and the right incentives to drive strong retention. Why does this creator work with you and stay? It has to be more than money.
Most brands are still hiring for a customer journey stage that’s being eaten by AI, and have no idea there’s a whole new game being played.
ParamShobhit retweeted
iPhone Indicator Dots: What Do They Mean? 📱
The small colored dots at the top of your iPhone screen are privacy indicators that help you know when apps are accessing certain features. An orange dot means an app is currently using your microphone, such as during a voice call or when recording audio. This helps you stay aware of when your iPhone is listening.