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📢📢📢My book, Deep Unlearning, is now available for preorders at simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-Unl…
I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣
I don't know how people write so many books because this one took a lot out of me. It turns out, I had a lot to say 😂, with editors cutting out 50k of my words 🫣
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
this is so bleak
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I had to take a little break to rest my eyes & voice after recording the audio for my upcoming book (which you can preorder at simonandschuster.com/books/Deep-Unl…).
So it took me a while to get to the indomitable Arundhati Roy''s essay, Apocalypse Now and Then (H/t) @ambaonadventure. 🧵
So it took me a while to get to the indomitable Arundhati Roy''s essay, Apocalypse Now and Then (H/t) @ambaonadventure. 🧵
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@MyriamFrancoisC @AdioDinika Where he notes:
"“The choice facing Africa is stark: continue as a data colony providing cheap labour for surveillance tools that serve foreign interests, or assert digital sovereignty by developing governance frameworks that prioritise African lives over foreign profits.”
"“The choice facing Africa is stark: continue as a data colony providing cheap labour for surveillance tools that serve foreign interests, or assert digital sovereignty by developing governance frameworks that prioritise African lives over foreign profits.”
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@MyriamFrancoisC @AdioDinika "I know that, earlier in this essay, I suggested we should “regulate with extreme prejudice”. But what I really want to say about those AI companies is this: terminate with extreme prejudice."
Couldn't agree more.
Couldn't agree more.
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) 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 te 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.
x.com/log4j/status/2…
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/char…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…
@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 te 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.
x.com/log4j/status/2…
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/char…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/…
i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv.
i kept getting weirdly targeted ads.
i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic.
zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs!
discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
Fun fact: Nathan Cofnas' doctoral advisor was Andreas Mogensen, a noted longtermists who's worked at the Global Priority Institute & published articles with MacAskill and Hilary Greaves. He also coauthored the review paper on longtermism for the Lancet's recent Commission report.
No media coverage on Professor Jason Arday cleared AGAIN of plagiarism while the weasel faced white supremacist who instigated the witch hunt against him is being feted at Oxford University for a talk on DEI backed by racist party Reform UK.
Reform Uk isn’t ’satisfied’ with day so launching independent review of his appointment at Cambridge University but not Oxford University’s appointment of Dr Lola Salem who is on trial for possessing indecent images of children. She just happens to be Michael Gove’s ex girlfriend. Zero media outrage.
White power should be studied.
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
Translated: we’re doing some seriously not legal shit and we’re preemptively trying to shake legal culpability for it
BREAKING: OpenAI’s autonomous AI systems have tried to prevent employees from monitoring their actions, and the company is not sure why, per NBC
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
“They created malware and should be prosecuted for it.”
This week on The Tea, former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team and leading AI researcher Dr Timnit Gebru exposes how AI companies can build models that exploit vulnerabilities, fail to contain them, and escape episode out NOW on YouTube 💡 Join us at theteanetwork.co for ad-free episodes and bonus content
youtu.be/3EY2QDfp2O4?is…
This week on The Tea, former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team and leading AI researcher Dr Timnit Gebru exposes how AI companies can build models that exploit vulnerabilities, fail to contain them, and escape episode out NOW on YouTube 💡 Join us at theteanetwork.co for ad-free episodes and bonus content
youtu.be/3EY2QDfp2O4?is…
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
No media coverage on Professor Jason Arday cleared AGAIN of plagiarism while the weasel faced white supremacist who instigated the witch hunt against him is being feted at Oxford University for a talk on DEI backed by racist party Reform UK.
Reform Uk isn’t ’satisfied’ with day so launching independent review of his appointment at Cambridge University but not Oxford University’s appointment of Dr Lola Salem who is on trial for possessing indecent images of children. She just happens to be Michael Gove’s ex girlfriend. Zero media outrage.
White power should be studied.
Reform Uk isn’t ’satisfied’ with day so launching independent review of his appointment at Cambridge University but not Oxford University’s appointment of Dr Lola Salem who is on trial for possessing indecent images of children. She just happens to be Michael Gove’s ex girlfriend. Zero media outrage.
White power should be studied.
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@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) retweeted
"We've removed live internet access..."
Why were you testing malware-like agents with live internet in the first place?
Sounds pretty irresponsible.
Also after milking the "rogue AI" agent narrative for marketing you just going to admit it was weak sandboxing? Lol
Why were you testing malware-like agents with live internet in the first place?
Sounds pretty irresponsible.
Also after milking the "rogue AI" agent narrative for marketing you just going to admit it was weak sandboxing? Lol
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing…
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RT @kortizart: They’re fighting a measly one time 5%
wealth tax in CA right now, and refuse to pay or even respect the work of artists th…
wealth tax in CA right now, and refuse to pay or even respect the work of artists th…
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RT @kortizart: GenAi developers like, Jason who works at Anthropic, pretend like they were forced to build bad tech. And now that their ir…
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The level of entitlement and god complex these people have is unreal.
GenAi developers like, Jason who works at Anthropic, pretend like they were forced to build bad tech. And now that their irresponsible actions are clear and felt in full force, he blames everyone else, while still demanding to be a part of the solution?
True Psychopath shit.
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