Technology

I am the sweaty balls man and this happens often

Same. I can't find any Bluetooth headphones whose batteries don't die in 4 or 5 months anyway. Meanwhile my Moondrop wired headphones have been going strong for almost 3 years.

It’s strange to think about how complicit the public has become with this. You mean to tell me that 185 separate connections to other companies are required for me to… read an article?

You can get/make your own archive link by going to archive.ph and entering the article's URL.

Here's the link for this one: https://archive.ph/wUAQn

Instead of hacking Bluetooth, sounds more effective to be an "advertising partner".

I think BLE is only required for the initial compromise (extracting the pairing key). After that the attack can be performed over classic BT, and can impersonate either part (headphones or phone) to the other.
It's still very targeted and sophisticated, so no reason to panic unless you have reasons to think someone with the resources could target you.
Regarding the attacks, they go way beyond eavesdropping calls, since BT headphones usually have access to contacts and smart assistants, that you can use to extract a lot more information

10-15 meters might be good enough to conduct the attack from a neighboring office or apartment, while actual eavesdropping is not so easy.

Honey i got to go there is a man outside our window with a lapton and an radio antenna "Ignore the man outside your window and just read off your credit card number

Directional antennas exist and are very inexpensive

I'm not really sure that is the reason. I'm not saying I would put it past them, just that I really don't think it's necessary. Smart phone manufacturers have a million other ways they could spy on you if they wanted to. The U.S. Government already has the ability to know each and every thing you do on your phone, even if you never use Bluetooth. I think it's greed pure and simple. It probably cost's them a few pennies to add a physical jack and most people would lose their shit if a phone came out without Bluetooth capabilities, so they save those couple of pennies and put them into their greedy ass pockets.

That being said I have never bought a phone without one and never will as long as I have a choice. I do love my wireless headset though but I am also not too worried about being spied on (yet).

I'm 100% convinced that is why they stopped making batteries user replaceable though. In 2019 Edward Snowden did an interview with Wired magazine where he made the interviewer remove the battery from his phone as a condition of the interview. He explained that the U.S. Government can make it seem as if your device had been 'powered down' when in fact they can still listen to your conversations and transmit them back to the CIA or whatever other spooks that want to listen in. Shortly after than almost all manufactures stopped allowing you to remove the battery. Coincidence?

My current phone doesn't have a removable battery, because I literally couldn't find one in my price range that allowed you to do so.

The best advice if you don't want to be spied on is not to use a smartphone altogether or just do whatever you want to be kept secret away from the phone at the very least. Buy a Faraday bag and keep your phone in there if that's not an option.

I mean, there were legitimate technical issues with the standard, especially on smartphones, which is where they really got pushed out. Most other devices do have headphones jacks. If I get a laptop, it's probably got a headphones jack. Radios will have headphones jacks. Get a mixer, it's got a headphones jack. I don't think that the standard is going to vanish anytime soon in general.

I like headphones jacks. I have a ton of 1/8" and 1/4" devices and headphones that I happily use. But they weren't doing it for no reason.

• From what I've read, the big, driving one that drove them out on smartphones was that the jack just takes up a lot more physical space in the phone than USB-C or Bluetooth. I'd rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn't, and if you're going all over the phone trying to figure out what to eject to buy more space, that's gonna be a big target. For people who do want a jack on smartphones, which invariably have USB-C, you can get a similar effect to having a headphones jack by just leaving a small USB-C audio interface with a headphones jack on the end of your headphones (one with a passthrough USB-C port if you also want to use the USB-C port for charging).

• A second issue was that the standard didn't have a way to provide power (there was a now-dead extension from many years back, IIRC for MD players, that let a small amount of power be provided with an extra ring). That didn't matter for a long time, as long as your device could put out a strong enough signal to drive headphones of whatever impedance you had. But ANC has started to become popular now, and you need power for ANC. This is really the first time I think that there's a solid reason to want to power headphones.

• The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.

• USB-C is designed so that the springy tensioning stuff that's there to keep the connection solid is on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord rather than the (expensive, hard to replace) device; I understand from past reading that this was a major reason that micro-USB replaced mini-USB. Instead of your device wearing out, the cord wears out. Not as much of an issue for headphones as mini-USB, but I think that it's probably fair to say that it's desirable to have the tensioning on the cord side.

• On USB-C, the right part breaks. One irritation I have with USB-C is that it is...kind of flimsy. Like, it doesn't require that much force pushing on a plug sideways to damage a plug. However

and I don't know if this was a design goal for USB-C, though I suspect it was

my experience has been that if that happens, it's the plug on the (cheap, easy to replace) cord that gets damaged, not the device. I have a television with a headphones jack that I destroyed by tripping over a headphones cord once, because the headphones jack was nice and durable and let me tear components inside the television off. I've damaged several USB-C cables, but I've never damaged the device they're connected to while doing so.

On an interesting note, the standard is extremely old, probably one of the oldest data standards in general use today; the 1/4" mono standard was from phone switchboards in the 1800s.

EDIT: Also, one other perk of using USB-C instead of a built-in headphones jack on a smartphone is that if the DAC on your phone sucks, going the USB-C-audio-interface route means that you can use a different DAC. Can't really change the internal DAC. I don't know about other people, but last phone I had that did have an audio jack would let through a "wub wub wub" sound when I was charging it on USB off my car's 12V cigarette lighter adapter

dirty power, but USB power is often really dirty. Was really obnoxious when feeding my car's stereo via its AUX port. That's very much avoidable for the manufacturer by putting some filtering on the DAC's power supply, maybe needs a capacitor on the thing, but the phone manufacturer didn't do it, maybe to save space or money. That's not something that I can go fix. I eventually worked around it by getting a battery-powered Bluetooth receiver that had a 1/8" headphones jack, cutting the phone's DAC out of the equation. The phone's internal DAC worked fine when the phone wasn't charging, but I wanted to have the phone plugged in for (battery hungry) navigation stuff when I was driving.

and also why corporations didn't want them.

Exactly! So they can spy on us more!

GDPR. First time opening a European website? German ones like this are particularly transparent (by law, not choice).

I never have it enabled unless I am in the car driving and need driving directions or listening to music/podcasts. I prefer wired headphones, but manufacturers are making that difficult.

My old FM BT transmitter that let me connect to my car had a surprising range, bout about a 100ft in every direction which as I understand it they aren't supposed to be that strong. (Scosche brand from Best Buy)

Used to tune it to the popular country station and jam everyone around me from listening to that station, which made me happy. Couple times when there was a particularly loud or obnoxious driver...I definately didn't blast porn hub with my stereo off in my car..

Tangent.

One of my last concerts I went to was Meshuggah

Had a great time.

Thanks, I hate it. Vulnerable to your competitor red teaming it tho...