The problem with all of this is the employees are told to not physically stop thieves for liability purposes, so the alarms do little. The Bluetooth chip disabling tools is a good idea, but sadly most stolen tools are sold in flea markets or online where the thieves just won’t say the tool doesn’t work then disappear after the sale. It needs some obvious highly visible warning that the tool is inoperable.

I'd use a bluetooth tag. Although I'd surmise this way helps the little guy avoid getting over tired.

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

*ban self link/spam http://andrywilz.deviantart.com/journal/LumNkey-Worlds-First-Bluetooth-LED-686595870

OK fine, you made me look into it more...

So Bluetooth itself is an internationally agreed upon frequency range that the information is passed. The device itself dictates the frequency range of the sound you hear so you're right.

I think I either got misinformation or I might have gotten confused thinking that a cheap speaker would sound better direct connected where the reality is any particular speaker will have a range of capability and a cheap speaker may not have one as wide as human hearing.

#1 bluetooth uses a slight offshoot of mpeg2 audio compression which gets worse because you are most likely recompressing something already compressed with mpeg and that makes things even worse. This is the strength of AptX, it is an audio compression designed to not get exponentially worse when dealing with mpeg compressed audio. THAT SAID! Anyone know what phone he is using? The GOLD phantom supports AptX, so if he uses a samsung/htc/lg phone he would have been using AptX.

#2 speaker construction, it is an overblown Flip3 with radiators on the side. The radiators are designed to capture the back pressure of speakers and convert it into more audible sound waves, very good at saving the low frequencies and directing them back at the listener. The problem is it is a secondary uncontrolled speaker. This means your sound balance can go out of wack. Perfect for a $79 portable speaker, not ideal for a $3000 home theater setup. Also the speaker appears to be..mono? so you need 2 of them for stereo?

Yea, sorry, you can buy speakers that are not much bigger than this, hell you can buy a SET of front facing speakers and a good sub for $3000 and do better.

the freq. range of bluetooth is the freq. range it can transmit/receive, so it affects audio. the encoding and decoding seems to be more problematic these days as it introduces noise, artifacting, and distortion. different bluetooth codecs have different freq. range characteristics.

I'm pretty sure bluetooth has a smaller frequency range than human hearing so a true audiophile would probably scoff at this even if it has a jaguar on the box

Your video, ᚼᛒ: Harald Bluetooth and Your Phone, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 16 Badge!

I followed the YouTube link to see if there were other songs...and found a rotary phone bluetooth experiment...



Dude should productize that...idiots would eat that shit up.

* related= http://videosift.com/video/Best-Bluetooth-Headphones-For-Running

Tuan Ban
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRqWIa9tF3U

*ban2.0

Tuan Ban
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRqWIa9tF3U


* related= http://videosift.com/video/Top-Bluetooth-Headphones-2015

Forbes Billionaire 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDqqYp2iE_Y

... so, it's a bluetooth headset without a speaker you wear on your finger.

Thank you for the link. To be clear, were these guys using walkie talkies and they failed? That's not obvious from the video. It looks a lot like they weren't and are trying to cover themselves by saying 'walkie talkies can fail so there's no point using them'. I'm being a bit grumpy about this and could well be wrong, it's just the way the video says 'walkie talkies can fail' not 'our walkie talkies failed'.

Buy good walkie talkies not cheap shitty ones and test them where you're going to use them. I've used them a lot at sea and not had any issues with the good ones. No technology is perfect, but there are still ways they could have mitigated the danger.

Another option would be to use a phone and a bluetooth earpiece. Open conversation throughout the run with the guy at the bottom of the hill. If the signal cuts out you slow down. It's really not rocket science. There really are plenty of ways they could have tried to avoid this.

But at the end of the day you're right, an open road is always a risk regardless.