I haven’t looked in the tor protocol for more than a decade but if routing was done based on traditional networking parameters (ttl distance, ping, etc) pretty sure you would end up all your nodes in your jurisdiction.

If you were using pure random, routing may involve only US (where there are a significant percentage of nodes)

Instead you can see that rarely there are two nodes in the same jurisdiction.

Years ago there were a config file mapping countries to jurisdictions and maybe that has been ditched but still I don’t buy that it is pure random or using traditional routing criteria

Of course not! For this reason you need different providers and jurisdictions for datacenters, operating systems, encryption providers.

It’s the very same principle tor works: sure you can do traffic analysis and be able to “unmask” a tor user… and for this reason tor deliberately sends traffic across 3 different jurisdictions. Is it still possible to force 3 different nodes to cooperate for the unmasking? Sure… but you need 3 jurisdictions to collaborate with that.

Also, fun fact: bank secrecy is still in effect for Swiss residents (regardless of the citizenship) and people resident outside of the US and EU. Because things are always more nuanced than they seem 🙂

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

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.