Do your research. Air doesn’t offer its services to Italians (the country it also happens to be incorporated in) in order to avoid enforcement of the nations anti soccer piracy laws.

This indicates that the company either cannot stand up to that enforcement action or that its host nation is so corrupt that being able to endure enforcement without giving up customer data would be no shield to the customer.

Air is one of the few VPNs that offers port forwarding, a feature commonly used in piracy.

I am a happy user of air for piracy purposes. I believe them to not be able to withstand investigation.

Air is fine for my purposes. Be careful what purposes you use it for.

You are asking in the privacy comm so the answer is mullvad.

You are asking for someone to say nord though.

If you need to pirate use air. Do not rely on them for privacy.

Yes.

There is a lower volume of extraneous calls to advertising networks from an appletv box than from a Samsung or lg tv. Users see a lower volume of what they recognize as targeted ads (you gotta think about the confirmation bias here). The devices themselves can decode more complex stream types because they are spending less processing power taking screenshots and running image recognition models on them. A tv from a major manufacturer tends to cost more if it’s the “dumb” or digital signage variant, whereas a streaming box (that’s not like roku or whatever the bottom of the barrel option is) costs $100+.

If you’re worried about data collection your first step needs to be to get on either ios or graphene. You are already moving towards graphene so that’s good.

The problem you’re gonna run into with tws earbuds is the app. Each earbud has a whole ass little dsp in it which it needs because the sound is beamed to it as data and translated into analog audio before being sent to an amp and then to the little speaker in the earbud which excites your eardrum.

But in order to keep the timing right if you happen to have both in, they need to also communicate what frame of the mpeg audio stream they’re on and synchronize their output so you don’t have a very disorienting experience.

Now when you have the kind of muscle that lets you decode and synchronize playback between two speakers in real time you also have the computing power to apply the kind of “not just an eq” needed to get really quite nice sound quality out of a package the size of half a pinky finger.

Which is a huge deal because things the size of an earbud sounded like garbage 30 years ago for reasons of the laws of physics. The two ways to resolve that problem are using much more expensive designs and materials or throwing the equivalent of a pentium 4 at it. Take a wild guess which avenue the designers of the sort of tws earbuds you and I can afford went down.

If the maintainer of your phones os is the same as the manufacturer of the earbuds, they probably work great together and you probably don’t need any special software. If they’re not the same then the bespoke set of transforms applied to make the earbuds sound acceptable (or do noise cancelling, voice isolation, room tone compensation and a whole host of other stuff that headphones just fucking do nowadays) won’t be present unless you install the manufacturers special app.

Used to be you only had to worry about how much data your phones os is sending off, now you gotta worry about the middleware that makes your headphones work right too.

The problem with just not using the apps is everything is gonna sound like shit and you’re no longer able to trust what you see in reviews or other people’s experiences on the non review parts of the internet because they’re all using the app. So you can’t even trust other people when they say that some brand/product is good across whatever parameters define goodness for you and them.

You just gotta see what works for you and what can sound okay on graphene without some proprietary app and despite what probably everyone itt is saying, no one can help you make that choice in the slightest. If the shitty $20 Walmart ones work fine without the app and sound okay to you then accept a huge win and stop worrying about it.

Often a specific protocol over Bluetooth isn’t part of the subset of Bluetooth the host device natively supports or the functions offered by the headset are not natively supported by the host device.

No worries. All the same advice applies with the additional caveat that unless you’re on graphene you should trust an Android handset less than an Apple one.

You can’t get private tws headphones and even going wired isn’t any real solution because you’re sending the unencrypted signal up what amounts to an antenna in order to get it to your ears. And all the data collection is done on device so even if you’re using wired headphones you are still being telemetried.

If there’s a specific thing you’re concerned about or want to avoid, spell it out and I can try to help. I use graphene and ios daily.

You got a bunch of replies itt about different alternatives but not a lot dissecting what the problem is and what the feasible extent of the “solutions” are.

You asked for true wireless stereo airpods so I’m gonna assume you’re in the Apple world. If that’s so, I’m a privacy minded person who uses the old g2 airpods and has accepted the tradeoffs involved. When you need replacements the website therightpod.com is a fine place to go.

The airpods themselves arent really a huge vector for data collection, it’s the os that’s doing that. Apple is insane for telemetry because it’s how they find and fix bugs. The idea is to have a separate pathway for technical crash data to get to the qa and development people instead of relying on customer support for that. From the perspective of a developer, a support rep and a customer it’s a much better experience. You can turn a good portion of it off in settings.

True wireless earphones use Bluetooth. Bluetooth was never designed to be secure and has to support a large variety of mechanisms for pairing that are inherently insecure. Bluetooth must also support a truly enormous number of devices whose idea of a hardware shared secret is the Indian certificate authority “4”. Bluetooth cannot be “secure” and therefore cannot be private. The word is in scare quotes because there’s some cool stuff but people are constantly bypassing bt so how cool or safe some new method happens to be is up for analysis.

Don’t have conversations over Bluetooth that would implicate you. Don’t have conversations over a device connected to the known compromised cell network that would implicate you.

If it’s not open source, remove them.

If they’re open source then the people posting them are in the right place.

A policy like what’s being suggested in the op will only be walked back in a few months.

E: also disclosure is a stupid requirement. All it does is give people something to fight over and there’s no industry accepted process for evaluating ai code as opposed to human written code, so disclosure doesnt even serve a useful purpose. It’s literally just giving people something to argue about when the hypothetical post is ostensibly about the software or what it accomplishes.

Probably https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/RTCIceCandidate

You can, maybe, have you actually imported or exported all of your passkeys before?

The concern is that in order to solve a technical problem, trusting the user, a system of actions and technologies called remote attestation was added to the passkey design. It allows for the service being authenticated into to figure out if it even wants to accept the supposed users attempt. One way remote attestation can be done is by client. Not using a client the service accepts? No way in even if you have the right credentials!

This is really powerful technology that lets me ensure my own services won’t even allow connection to insecure clients or just clients I don’t wanna talk to.

But of course we’re not talking about me using passkeys to gate access to my own services I control, we’re talking about Google, Microsoft and Apple doing it. So built into the passkey standard is the capacity for the service to simply stop allowing you to access it with a passkey if you don’t have the right thingy (or any other suite of remote attestation technologies, client is just one example).

Do you know if your passkeys do this? Do you know how to get in to your accounts if passkeys are suddenly not working?

People are mostly afraid of lock in, control, etc here but the real problem is that most users don’t understand how passkeys work. How can you comply with a regime of passkey use if you don’t know how they work?

It’s even more apropos that the fediverse behaves unpredictably when uploading images.

Passkeys in a nutshell: how does it work? Idk. Who’s in control of it? Idk.

I wasn’t able to see the image because it’s an avif. What a weird format and choice of format.

Apropos of a discussion about over complicated unpredictable passkey behavior.

It’s funny because I can’t see it and when I view the code of your post and copy/paste it into the location bar I get the broken jpeg picture.

Yeah the technology is cool but I stay away from passkeys and tell people not to use them because there’s too much room to permanently screw up.

Maybe they’ll remove the non portable type from the spec or roll it into an enterprise equivalent like with ad.

Eh, the op said it doesn’t have to be perfect in their last paragraph.

I find a lot of the people on this board don’t really understand what privacy is and instead just don’t want to be advertised to.

Bite the bullet and get the previous generation appletv 4k.

The paradigm of use is slightly different but everything works.

No.

You are not donating to a cause when you purchase goods or services. You are not liable for what someone else does with their money.

Boycotts are only effective when paired with direct action. There is no direct action in this case.

Boycotts that involve not using some necessary service are paired with replication of service through the group organizing the boycott. There is no replication of service in this case.

So you aren’t responsible for the actions of the mullvad owner and not using it isn’t an effective method of changing his behavior (there is no direct action or service replication to accompany an organized boycott, which I would also argue there isn’t since people who made the decision to switch didn’t do so in a unified way or with any demands).

But does it protect you to leave mullvad?

No.

You’re leaving the most straightforward, private and secure vpn with if not the best apps, certainly best in class apps, and a history of literally functioning as a brick wall against investigations by the authorities. No other provider has done what mullvad has done when the screws were put to them because no other provider has had that happen.

So it accomplishes nothing and makes you less safe.

If you don’t need to switch from mullvad I recommend you do not.

I don’t think it’s a honeypot, it seems much more like a way to take money from people who believe there will be a vpn ban enforced by preventing Americans from either connecting to known foreign vpn services inside the nations borders or outside.

That would be a reasonable use case, in the case of a crackdown or ban this service would act as a completely law abiding relay out to mullvad. Great firewall style service.

E: and if using a combination of multiple hops between vpn servers and extra traffic shaping to confuse edge routers is your bag you can just use mullvads daita and multi hop and get that.

I commented that it was stupid in the previous thread. Someone asked “how so?” But the post got deleted. So here goes.

None of what the op says is information you need to know to understand that it’s stupid. They self describe as a layer between you and mullvad. Your computer first makes a connection to them then to mullvad before going on about its business.

That’s stupid.

If you trust mullvad (and all evidence suggests you should) then what do you need obscura for? It’s another layer of complexity and another series of points of failure to accomplish what, protection from mullvad? If you need to be protected from mullvad (and all evidence suggests you don’t) then you should just not use mullvad at all.

What likely happened is after a bunch of easily spooked people who havent carefully thought about their decisions jumped ship to other providers, this company approached mullvad to use their backend at wholesale rates to provide the service to the company’s customers for retail rates.

Just use mullvad instead of this shell game.