• 0 Posts
  • 5 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Bluetooth protocol support for audio is a bit of a mess, and many Bluetooth devices (especially knock off or no-name budget brand headphones/headsets) skimp on applying the standard properly.

    Absent the absolute latest Bluetooth standard support (5.3 or better), you’re usually limited by the protocol to very poor quality audio. It gets even worse of your device shows up as a headset inst4ad of heaphones/speaker since it has a mic return channel crammed into the very restricted bandwidth too. The way (mostly quality) vendors have worked around this prior to the latest Bluetooth protocol versions was to use raw data channels with negotiated compression formats and a special “escape hatch” protocol supported by Bluetooth (A2DP). Both sides had to negotiate a shared compression algorithm and implement it for sending the compressed audio so it could be decided at the destination. Poorer quality or older headphones, and older Bluetooth Linix stacks didn’t do this very well.

    Not sure if any of that is applicable, but in general Bluetooth is always worse quality than wired because of bandwidth restrictions. And until Bluetooth 5.3 that added LE Audio and a related very efficient audio compression algorithm, it was a compatibility crap shoot.



  • aaravchen@lemmy.ziptoPrivacy@lemmy.mlHow trusted is TorGuard?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    edit-2
    21 hours ago

    I had TorGuard for years, but the service just got more and more questionable over time. I stopped using it a handful of years back. I’ve more recently looked at them again, and their VPN-router product is just a whitelabeled device you can buy elsewhere that they did the trivial install of their VPN software on. Their actual VPN speeds are fine, certainly better than I’ve heard AirVPNs are, but you either get thrown in the pool of exit points that are all very well identified as malicious VPN exit points (so everyone blocks you), or you pay to upgrade to an individual “residential IP” exit point. That gives you a completely unique exit point so the minimal VPN “blend into the exit point crowd” simply won’t exist anymore, and it’s questionable what reputation those “residential IPs” might have (I’ve gotten blacklisted IPs from my direct ISP before, IP reputation is everything).
    The service claims it has no/minimal logs, but they also have a privacy policy that seems to allow a good bit of data collection now (if I remember correctly).

    If you’re trying to use it for geo-unblocking, a residential IP option might work for you. If you’re trying to use it to keep your privacy from your ISP, you might very well be trading one bad actor for another. If you’re trying to use it for hiding P2P activities it will probably function well, but I can’t speak about how well they’ll actually protect your privacy from DMCA requests (if that might be relevant to you).



  • I experienced that only when doing expert things on my system like trying to install new drivers. I’ve been using 4 different immutable distros for a few years and literally the only “breaking” thing was when UBlue distros moved to Fedora 42, which no longer allowed you to use the ostree admin unlock --hot-fix hack to directly modify your system and made you build your own modified variant using their GitHub template repo.

    I’m actually moving my wife to a UBlue distros specifically because I set it up remotely and it just auto updates.


    I will warn however that Flatpaks can be a nightmare for basic things like browsers if you want to do things like use a webcam, microphone, or, god forbid, a USB device. Make sure you manually set that up in the (probably flatpak) you’re using before handing it over (probably by using Flatseal).