How does your comment make sense?

It is possible to continue memorialising holocaust victims AND to condemn the genocide in Palestine.

Was the KabelDirekt one advertised as being suitable for headphones?

I share your frustration about not being able to tell in advance what’s inside a cable.

Years ago, as a side hustle, I sourced audio cables; custom-making them where needed. Since then, the market has been flooded with Chinese imports that don’t mention the specifications that used to be commonplace:

• Shield type
• Shield gauge and qty
• Conductor material
• Conductor gauge and qty
• Resistance per metre
• Capacitance
• Outer diameter

The only negative point I saw in reviews of the Syncwire cable is that the braided jacket transmits mechanical noise to headphones. As someone else here mentioned, that’s a problem with braided headphone cables generally.

Unfortunately, all the similar cables I could find on Amazon have braided jackets:

• Ugreen (yes, they do still sell audio cables)
• Ugreen w/90-deg jack
• CableCreation

They all cost $10-$15 and look a lot like each other. Maybe from the same factory?

As you say, it’s virtually impossible to buy tinsel-cored audio cable in suitable lengths for DIY. If you want non-braided, I guess you’ll have to either spend more money or cannibalise a cable from an existing pair of earphones/headphones.

Let us know how it goes!

You serve; they don’t protect.

1. It’s advertised to be suitable as a headphone cord (not just a headphone extension cord or aux cord).

2. The cable is quite slender, <4mm OD (compare it to the 3.5mm plug in the photo). Yet it has a braided jacket, probably over a PVC jacket. That combo takes up more width than a PVC jacket alone. Therefore, the inner cores must be slender.

3. Slender conventional inner cores in a wire advertised for headphone use would likely result in low reliability and bad reviews. But this cable has good reviews.

4. Therefore, it’s probably made with tinsel wire.

N.B. Any pair of headphones/earphones (and old broken pair, or from a junk shop etc) likely has tinsel wire. Most headphones/earphones use captive cables, but you can always just snip the cable at the headphone end, solder on a 3.5mm plug (see tips in earlier comment), and thereby make yourself a cable that will work with headphones that have a 3.5mm socket.

From sucking the lifeblood out of democracies.

Jolla was already mentioned in this thread. There are also others.

Your Monoprice cables were probably made with ordinary stranded copper wire, which is suitable for use in an aux cable but not a headphone cable.

Good headphone cables are instead made with tinsel wire, for far more flexing cycles than typical stranded copper. This page has close-up photos showing how it differs from ordinary stranded wire.

Based on its advertised intended usage, I would guess this $13 Syncwire cable is made with tinsel wire.

It looks decently-made. From a BIFL perspective, you may want learn to be able to replace the 3.5mm jacks. Tinsel wire isn’t easy to solder, but here are some tips on how to do it:

• https://homerecording.com/bbs/threads/soldering-lacquered-headphone-wire.397429/
• https://www.electronics-lab.com/forums/threads/soldering-connections-for-my-replacement-3-5-stereo-plug.279014/

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I’m probably having a brainfart (watched the video during insomnia), but re: the section 12m 10s into the video, can someone please clarify why “the instructions are dangerously wrong”?

I understand it relates to the earlier demo in which those instructions gave the illusion of “verifying” an ISO that was in fact malicious. But:

• why did those instructions fail to genuinely verify the ISO?
• what would the correct instructions have been?

Bruce Schneier, who invented the term security theater, would perhaps disagree with you.

however would never trust “age” with what they did

What happened with age (or its devs?) that made you not trust it?

Is anyone else concerned that the two new military bases might one day act as staging posts for the USA to militarily annex Greenland?

Fucking hell, I remember when (many years ago) Tom Watson seemed a reasonable person, as politicians go.

I had no idea he had become so craven. Simply appalling.

Thank you for posting this and raising awareness.

As the post I linked to says:

Privacy Not Included was launched in 2017 to help you understand the privacy risks of tech products that connect to the internet. We are continuing that work in the form of Product Reviews at our magazine Nothing Personal, where our privacy experts do hours of hands-on testing and research on the most popular consumer tech items and their privacy features.

Mozilla created such a list: Privacy Not Included.

Similar discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/i7vaq8/how_can_i_degoogle_at_school/

Anyway, if you want maximal compartmentalisation between your school identity & the rest of your life:

• Treat school Gmail as read-only, as far as possible: write & send only if absolutely necessary & be concise.
• Use browser compartmentalisation as others have recommended, or if you have time on your hands then go a step further & use Qubes.

Ballistic Cordura is just a brand name for heavy-duty nylon manufactured by Koch Industries, which has spent millions of dollars on climate change denialism, the Tea Party, anti-vaxx-related campaigns, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers

So, you might want to look for wallets made of generic heavy duty nylon rather than Cordura-branded nylon. The fabric will be functionally similar, without bankrolling Charles Koch.

That doesn’t seem to be true in practice.

People on the secondhand market seem to be more drawn to other “premium” brands and to features that are less important for a smartphone than security (e.g. camera zoom).

Most places I’ve looked, secondhand Pixels are priced similarly to or lower than other brands’ secondhand “flagship” phones of similar age - even though Pixels have a killer feature the others lack: security hardware to run GrapheneOS.

I don’t judge but I do get annoyed…

Getting annoyed is a form of judgement.

… at US defaultism

Yes, U.S. defaultism is problematic.

Still, as long as companies, especially US-based ones like Google, are exporting their US-centric products & practices, people outside the US will be exposed to products & practices shaped by US law.

Because enforcement is rarely watertight, the above holds true even if the importing country’s laws forbid those products & practices.

Therefore, unless you wish to live in ignorance, it’s worth being aware of the laws that most strongly shape the technologies that in turn shape your society - even laws from jurisdictions outside your own.