Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known. -Palahniuk
East coast US
Joined August 2022
- Tweets35.7K
- Following1K
- Followers6.4K
- Likes80K
“There are four questions of value in life.
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made?
What is worth killing for?
What is worth dying for?
The answer to each is the same:
Only love.”
I knew I wasn’t schizophrenic…those commercials are way too tight on the ass of obscure conversations, I knew it 😂
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…
Wendy Peffercorn retweeted
Researchers followed a group of people who said their marriage was really unhappy. Almost 8 out of 10 who didn't get divorced said they were happily married five years later. The ones who did get divorced weren't any happier for it.
This was a University of Chicago team led by sociologist Linda Waite, working off a national survey of more than 5,000 married adults. 645 of them said they were unhappily married. The researchers checked back five years later to see how the people who left were doing compared to the people who stayed.
Across the whole unhappy group, about two-thirds of the ones who stuck it out were happy in their marriage again. And the couples in the worst shape at the start had the biggest turnarounds, which is about the opposite of what most people would guess.
The divorce group never came out ahead on any of the 12 measures of well-being the researchers tracked, including depression and self-esteem. Getting out took care of some stress and piled on new kinds, mostly custody fights and money problems.
Here's the number that makes sense of it. In three out of four of these unhappy marriages, the other spouse was happy with the marriage. So most of the time it's one person going through it, and a lot of what makes someone miserable in year seven, a job going sideways, depression, a brutal couple of years with little kids, either passes on its own or follows them into the next relationship.
That's pretty much what couples told the researchers when they interviewed 55 who had turned things around. Plenty of their problems just ran their course. Some put real work in. And some stopped waiting on their spouse to make them happy, went and built that for themselves, and the marriage got better along the way.
To be fair to the two women in that clip, wives do have a real complaint here. Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld found women initiate about 69% of divorces, but when unmarried couples break up it's close to 50/50 who ends it. Something about being a wife specifically wears on people, and that's worth taking seriously. Abuse is a completely separate situation too, and 86% of the unhappy spouses in Waite's data said there was no violence in the marriage at all.
These were regular people having regular bad years.
Telling a woman the answer is always yes means comparing her husband at his worst to a guy who doesn't exist yet, and the five-year numbers say most of those marriages came back.
No crying in the casino 😂
#BREAKING: Gambling helpline director sentenced to 10 years for stealing $1.4M to gamble.
Wendy Peffercorn retweeted
“If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
— Jordan Peterson
Wendy Peffercorn retweeted
My kid:
“Dad, why do some coins have ridges on the edge?”
Me:
Sets up projector.
Plugs in laptop.
Clears throat.
Cracks knuckles.
I can not conceive of a worse professional fate than being fired from this position in 5 days flat, being exposed as completely illiterate on camera, then being exposed as larping a fake law degree by the president…
And then Tim offers to fix you 🪦
