Comment on Zero-day: Bluetooth gap turns millions of headphones into listening stations
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 8 hours agoIt sounds like they have some kind of wake function that it’s always listening for? I don’t think that’s a common feature in headphones just because of the battery drain, but they’re always chucking useless features on electronics so I’m sure some are floating around out there. I doubt it’s something you wouldn’t know about unless they were secondhand, though.
dgriffith@aussie.zone 7 hours ago
It’s BLE - Bluetooth Low Energy.
Basically devices with BLE can listen for a wake-up command and turn on, similar to the “magic packet” of wake on Ethernet.
It also means that most devices with BLE end up flat within a month. I had a speaker with BLE and had to deliberately download a much older version of the Android partner app to turn it off, as they dropped the option to do so in later versions for “convenience”.