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. 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 (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: [2] Cost of US consumer goods: [3] Vizio Q3 2024: [4] Texas v. Samsung:

Thanks to @solana's Alpenglow consensus upgrade, you can now deposit into @Bulletxyz in under a second (instead of 12.8s+)! This was probably my biggest ick about our onboarding process. Our frontend and data APIs are now the slowest piece LOL. Well played @anza_xyz ⛰️👏

@blknoiz06 100% man, I remember meeting you before Solana got big and you've stuck to your guns the whole way. Things felt bleak as shit building in 2023 post FTX, but you and @mert really saved the ecosystem when everyone on CT was grave dancing. Turns out fundamentals do matter

September was an absolute blur, looking back on it we actually shipped a bunch of cool updates, and finally cracked a few big milestones (10m volume, 2m OI) 🚢 Bullet Liquidity Provider (BLP) was finally opened to public deposits, and the $300k cap filled the same day. We've extensively tested the strategy for 3 months and it's been overall profitable, with a 2.37 Sharpe and ~100% APY on the last 30 days annualised. Deposit caps will be opening up again this week, keep notis on 🔔 Speed. We benchmarked end-to-end execution against other perp venues. Bullet came in at ~8ms, ahead of Lighter and HL (Nado just recently improved their p50 a lot to ~7ms, congrats to them, we will get you back xd). Our matching engine runs at ~250µs, and most of the remaining time goes to the network, and there's a lot we have flagged to improve still. Thankfully still have the lowest p999 (tail latency) of any DEX by a factor of 4x. Collateral. You can now post SOL and jitoSOL as margin, meaning no hassle to sell your beloved bags to stables. We built the jitoSOL integration with @jito_sol, so your collateral keeps earning staking yield while you trade. New Markets. We listed RAY, BNC, UNI and NEAR, and PUMP and DOGE go live tomorrow. We also automated most of our listing pipeline, so a new market now takes us about 15 minutes end to end. Expect a lot more of them, and quickly. People under-appreciate the operational burden of exchange listings, and we've spent a bunch of time seeing how it can largely be automated. We're aiming to list 2 new markets every week. Liquidity. Most majors (BTC/ETH/SOL) are now consistently 0.1-0.5bps wide at the top of the book (!!), which is testament to why we've been hell bent on building the fastest execution stack on the market. @AphelionTrading is now providing very competitive liquidity on Bullet. They were the highest-volume onchain market maker on Solana from last cycle, and true friends and legends that I am grateful to be working with again. Fees. We cut trading fees across every tier, and volume picked in accordance. We are going to continue experimenting with fee structures that reduce friction to onboarding for new traders evaluating our product, our goal being to provide the best cost for the average perps consumer (spread + fees). Affiliates. More than 100 affiliates have signed up since we launched the program. Form linked below. Product. We shipped subaccounts, isolated margin, and vault infrastructure that lets anyone launch and run their own vault.

Big update - BLP is now open to everyone! 🏦 The Bullet Liquidity Provider vault has been running privately since May with prop capital, in order prove the strategy was stable and profitable across different market conditions. Since inception: +22.2% returns (~64% annualized)

Things have been a tad quiet on the bird app for us, but that's not to say we haven't been shipping: - Session keys for instant tx signing - Commodity & equity markets - TWAP and Scale orders - Improved perf & stability of the UI - Nuking lots of backend tech debt 🚢🚢🚢

@Bulletxyz @PhoenixTrade @richwgalvin This is precisely why our team invested heavily into APIs and docs now that agentic coding tools are relatively capable A big pain point over the years was getting maker liquidity which came at a huge cost to onboard MMs. Uniswap enabled retail LPs, and Claude can for CLOBs.

@Bulletxyz @PhoenixTrade If you want to start writing your own trading bots (market making, funding arb vs HL etc), I wrote a really straightforward starter repo in rust. Fork it, boot up Claude code and it should get all the context from the AGENTS(dot)md