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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss B2 bombers bring grounded, Twitter firing its CEO/owner, Raspberry Pi availability, “smart hosts,” bad handwriting recognition, and more.
Steve in Kenosha, Wisconsin and asked: “I understand TikTok is owned by a chinese company and the profits go to the Chinese government. But doesn’t everything we order from China go to their government in some way? So why is it so much worse than any of the other social media out there? Just wanted to get your thoughts on that.”
Steve, the profits going to the Chinese government is not the problem, the data going to them is.
Social media allows governments to easily build a profile on individual users and to then class those profiles into groups that can be influenced in specific ways.
Social media has been used to influence opinion very often in the past and putting that capacity to influence very large portions of the population in the hands of a geopolitical adversary is a problem.
Social media also allows governments to easily build graph connecting users, so a government can see who is likely to be working with whom, or who likely shares similar views. Those are tools that are problematic in anyones hands, but even more so an authoritarian governments hands.
No social media is good, at best theyre data harvesters to push ads. Avoid them all if you can.
Neil in Virginia Beach, Virginia and asked: “What is a good input to plug a soundbar into, the “eARC audio return” input or just a regular HDMI input? Just curious what the differences are between the two and if one is better than the other.”
Neil, you probably wont notice the difference but eARC should be the better option.
Traditionally, HDMI audio went through an ARC channel, ARC being just Audio Return Channel. eARC stands for Enhanced Audio Return Channel and its the next generation replacement for ARC.
You may notice a difference in that eARC allows uncompressed 5.1 and 7.1 audio, but it also requires an HDMI with Ethernet cable to achieve its full functionality.
eARC will fall back to ARC if it has to, so theres no harm in at least trying for the newer standard and letting it revert to the older one if it needs to.
As always everything will play a part, the media, the hardware, the cable, and your ears, so you may not notice the difference, but why not try for the better one anyway and see if you do?
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