The Bluetooth chipset installed in popular models from major manufacturers is vulnerable. Hackers could use it to initiate calls and eavesdrop on devices.
This really makes me hate that we don’t have headphone jack anymore
downvoted for that website’s super illegal “pay us to not track you” policy
Consent required for free use
I think that’s explicitly forbidden by the EU, and it’s a German domain.
Not all sites charge - yet.
Unchecked consumer-grade RF signals that are broadcast in every direction are insecure??
Color me shocked!
Well, if these devices required any sort of authentication (e.g. pairing) to free access to their ram and flash, we wouldn’t be having this particular story…
Hah, jokes on them, I managed to fuck my earbuds’ microphones so they’re useless now.
You did WHAT with them?
They don’t GO there…
I am the sweaty balls man and this happens often
Why are your earbuds… in your pants
Gotta feel the bass
my balls and my ears sweat at the same time
Oh, fair enough then
So glad I use wired earbuds and refused to buy a phone that didn’t support them.
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.
My sony earbuds lasted 5 years before I decided to replace the batteries in them, which cost me $20 and 30 min. I would hope other earbuds wouldnt die in only half a year
Which ones? I have 1004, they got fucked in the washer
Mine are the WF1000XM3
I still have never heard noise cancellation as good as those ones. I have a couple other pairs of earbuds as well, one set for side sleeping, and one set for water. I like to listen to audiobooks in the shower and the IPX7 ones have held up great
I want exactly this set up. I need different ones for bedtime, swimming and everyday wear
Well, I can recommend the soundcore anker life A1 earbuds for swimming, and the soundcore sleep A20 for low profile earbuds that dont stick out of your ear. Went through atleast 4 sets (wired and wireless) of earbuds for each until settling on these.
To be fair I kept buying models that cost $20 to $30 so maybe the higher end ones would last longer. That said, my Moondrops wired headphones cost the same but are way more reliable.
The site wants to share info with advertisers. I found this to be refreshingly honest.
We and our up to 185 partners use cookies and tracking technologies. Some cookies and data processing are technically necessary, others help us to improve our offer and operate it economically…
Anyway, can we get an archive link?
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?
Well yeah, they have to hoard your advertising data somehow. How else can they advertise things that you don’t need to buy?
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”.
Sounds like the attack scenario is very sophisticated and targeted, and only works within the range of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) connectivity, so 10-15 meters under best circumstances. At that point they might as well eavesdrop on my calls in person.
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 information10-15 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
Wired headphones stay winning
Yep I only use wired…
And this is why people wanted headphone jacks… and also why corporations didn’t want them.
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.
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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).
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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.
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The connection got shorted when plugging things in and out, which could result in loud sound on the membrane.
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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.
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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.
I’d rather just have a thicker phone, but a lot of people wouldn’t
I think this is a case where the corporations were telling people what they wanted rather than people really asking for thinner phones. Same thing with bezels, I don’t know anyone who asked for the screen to go all the way to the edge (or worse, curve around onto the sides). Apple and Samsung said ‘this is what people want’ when in fact it was what their marketing department wanted because they wouldn’t be able to sell the iGalaxy N+1 if it was slightly thicker or heavier than the iGalaxy N.
Honestly I’d be happy with a phone sporting two USB C ports, one centered and one off to the side where the headphone jack used to be, both fully functional.
I know someone who works somewhat high up at Apple and he told me another reason was that they really wanted to improve the water proofing.
That’s just gaslighting. Other phones had audio jacks, water protection, and you didn’t have to hold them funny.
My bro is a huge apple kool-aid guy and he spouts their dogma word-for-word.
Yeah. One Samsung flagship phone (before they went down the Apple way) had headphone jack and stylus but still had better IP rating than iPhone.
That’s great and all but I’m not switching to Bluetooth headphones and I’m definitely not going to fiddle around with dongles every time I switch between listening on my phone and my PC. Phones are gigantic anyways; let my have my headphone jack. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these smartphone manufacturers that ditched the old standard will happily sell you shiny expensive disposable wireless earbuds.
as someone has been fiddling with dongles for years, it’s not that bad, and you can just permanently connect your headphones to your dongle. the apple dongle is excellent and beyond enough for iems and a lot of headphones. I personally have one dongle + iems for my phone and another dongle + headphones for my PC, and that setup works really well for me. You might want to consider it. Otherwise, those big beefy Bluetooth headphones might be semi-repairable, and there are of course also Fairphone Bluetooth earbuds that are apparently fairly repairable (though I know nothing about those). At least you can replace the batteries and the ear tips or pads, and that’s usually enough to last you a decade with these things.
you can just permanently connect your headphones to your dongle
No. Fuck that. My PC has a headphone jack, and I use it. I don’t have a bunch of extra USB-C ports on the front of my computer. Modern phones have plenty of spaces for headphone jacks. They could put it there, they just don’t want to.
I used a USB connection through my KVM to connect to one computer or the next. But it’s just something to plug my headphones into the 3.5mm jack.
Since it never gets unplugged, it doesn’t get lost; unlike all those “just have this snowflake dongle in one of all of your stuff so it can get lost monthly and you can buy another” people.
Again: my startac 7800 had a jack and it was tiny. Apple and Samsung have NO EXCUSE.
phones are already very full and dense, and a headphone jack is a very large component. plus, the Bluetooth is simply part of the small SoC, it’s a microscopic size. That doesn’t mean I prefer Bluetooth, but it makes some sense.
You sure?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-diy-hero-added-a-working-headphone-jack-to-an-iphone-7-plus/
I don’t buy that excuse in the slightest. Especially when Sony phones still have headphone jacks on their flagship phones too.
Great post, thank you.
I lot of great points here, I would be on aboard if phone therefore had two USB-C ports as standard
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and also why corporations didn’t want them.
Exactly! So they can spy on us more!
No, the real reason is it saves a few pennies per phone. They can already spy on us through the internal mic.
It’s always about the money. Everyone else yelling about them spying, they’ll only do that if it makes them more money.
The only time a hacker is going to target you like this is if you’re an extremely high value target like a CEO or if you’re in the crosshairs of a nation-state. The average hacker isn’t going to waste this kind of effort to hack someone with $200 in their bank account and no power over anything or anyone.
Double post
What is that site asking me to agree to? No thanks
GDPR. First time opening a European website? German ones like this are particularly transparent (by law, not choice).
There’s lots of money to be made by inserting a hardware back door in your product then later disclosing it as an unfixable vulnerability and force your customers to buy new hardware which has the same but different backdoor. Repeat.
Thanks, I hate it. Vulnerable to your competitor red teaming it tho…
Archive link: archive.ph/wUAQn
I had a neighbor about 6 years ago that blasted rap at full volume every evening.
rap booming in the background
one fine day
"hmmm, what were these headphones on bt again? wait… soundbar. I don’t have a soundbar.
hmmm, I wonder"
device paired
Jellyfin>Artists>… Meshuggah
Obzen
Combustion
play
Volume 100%
“I think I’ll go to the store for a while!”
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.
Elastic would’ve been amazing (among other things, it has all songs on the album laid on top of another, playing simultaneously)
This one is great for destroying speakers: warning super loud (turn down your volume before playing) https://m.soundcloud.com/osium-1/official-paul-walker-tribute-fast-and-furious-7
Good Lord! Thank you for the warning! On lowest audible phone volume it blew me away lol
What is that and why does it exist??
The compressor and normalize sound effect applied over and over again. From the montageparody era.
I occasionally visit it to find my bluetooth earbuds.
… and this is why I don’t use bluetooth on anything.
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.
Because they can’t sell you more Bluetooth crap if they give you a choice.
Stop buying no-Jack phones.
