Real world example

Yes, of course, it was a mistake, I reworded that sentece

The only safe phone is a phone with no data.

Otherwise there will be tools to gain full access.

Without forgetting the good old rubber hose attack

FWIW I think the only way to keep confidential information is hosted in another country, encrypted, with no credentials (or even the name of the server) cached, all on open sources stacks, with the infrastructure provider different from the operating system provider different from the application provider and encryption provider

Is this convenient? No Is this accessible to the average user? No

I just think something at certain point went extremely wrong in history. We accepted control in exchange of convenience

Yeah and I think it’s a pity. It’s the byproduct of “app culture” everything has to be easy. One button, plug and play…

Unfortunately like many things in life “saving” (time and effort n this case) has a cost

Unfortunately even the best intentioned and best audited project can be compromised. So that is not a guarantee (sure, much better than closed source but that is a given)

You may be forced by a rubber hose attack (or legal one) to insert vulnerabilities in your code… and you have the traffic… a single point to attack… signal/proton/etc

Is it possible with two different vendors? Sure it is but it is way more complicated

Call me old fashioned but I really think that for real E2EE the vendor of the encryption and the vendor of the infrastructure should be two different entities.

For example PGP/GPG on <any mail provider>… great! Proton? Not great

Jabber/XMMP with e2ee encryption great! WhatsApp/Telegram/signal… less so (sure I take signal over the other two every day… but it’s enough to compromise a single entity for accessing the data)

Like asking for asylum? How do you imagine immigration pans out? (Not emigration, sure, that is the easy part)

Do you realise that the wast majority of conscripts is doing office job. When you take the decision option 1 is more “doing office job unless you are unlucky”. And even there, likely the people that commit suicide and/or develop PTSD are not people that rape (they are doing just fine and happy to go for another mission)

Option 2 is only if you have two citizenships (and the other is not Russian like the majority of Israeli people) otherwise you can’t really move

Cool, what would you do? Desert? (And go where?) Commit suicide?

Israeli army is significantly made of conscripts. Men need to serve at least 3 years compulsory military service, women 2 years.

And I am sure not all of them support the government. I would go as far as the one with PTSD and committing suicide are the ones that less support the talking points of the government

I am not saying it cannot be done, I am saying that it’s hard… that means more expensive… that means that either the final price is higher or the specs are lower or there are other compromises for reducing the cost (e.g., not updating the operating system)

It’s hard to make water/dust resistant devices with the 3.5mm jack. It was designed to be simple not water resistant. Contacts are close, it’s an hole so water and dust hang out there. Some problems are shared by more modern ports (e.g., iPhone not charging because dust in the lightning jack) but to less extent. This is why they disappeared. Before it was a “must have” and producers had to either put more/better material or have a lower IP rations. After Apple showed that 90% of the people didn’t care, the others followed suits.

I guess the joke is that in Germany the high speed train is called “ICE” (named that way way before the US department)