Technology

and also why corporations didn't want them.

Exactly! So they can spy on us more!

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.

Consent required for free use

I think that’s explicitly forbidden by the EU, and it’s a German domain.

I hate that. I’m looking at you Healthline. I hate that it’s always so high in the results.

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

The website also wants to drm fingerprint you

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

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..

Ive always hated phones without the 3.5mm and won't stop even if all phone manufacturers remove it

A fine choice though.

A speaker i have from bose is always on and "sleeping" and can be connected to from the phone no matter what i do, drains the fucking battery and when i want to use it finaly its dead.. wouldnt be surprised if some headphones worked the same..

You did WHAT with them?

They don't GO there....

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

Directional antennas exist and are very inexpensive

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.

LOL at the big debate I read just yesterday about how better wireless headphones are, and how useless jacks on phones are nowadays...

The flaws, discovered by German cybersecurity firm ERNW and first reported by Heise Online, affect dozens of headphone models from brands such as Sony, JBL, Bose, and Marshall, with no comprehensive firmware fixes available yet.

• Sony WH-1000XM4/5/6, WF-1000XM3/4/5, LinkBuds S, ULT Wear, CH-720N, C500, C510-GFP, XB910N
• Marshall ACTON III, MAJOR V, MINOR IV, MOTIF II, STANMORE III, WOBURN III
• JBL Live Buds 3, Endurance Race 2
• Jabra Elite 8 Active
• Bose QuietComfort Earbuds
• Beyerdynamic Amiron 300
• Jlab Epic Air Sport ANC
• Teufel Airy TWS 2
• MoerLabs EchoBeatz
• Xiaomi Redmi Buds 5 Pro
• earisMax Bluetooth Auracast Sender

ERNW emphasizes that this is only a partial list.

Source

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

Or public transit. Or public parks. Or grocery stores.

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.