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Australian Law Could Criminalize the Teaching of Encryption
New submitter petherfile writes: According to Daniel Mathews, new laws passed in Australia (but not yet in effect) could criminalize the teaching of encryption. He explains how a ridiculously broad law could effectively make any encryption stronger than 512 bits criminal if your client is not Australian. He says, "In short, the DSGL casts an extremely wide net, potentially catching open source privacy software, information security research and education, and the entire computer security industry in its snare. Most ridiculous, though, are some badly flawed technicalities. As I have argued before, the specifications are so imprecise that they potentially include a little algorithm you learned at primary school called division. If so, then division has become a potential weapon, and your calculator (or smartphone, computer, or any electronic device) is a potential delivery system for it."
Your government is the good guys. So, if you want to hide something from us, you must be with the bad guys. M'kay?
To be on the safe side, you should never teach math in Australia, especially not combinatorics!
The Muslification of Australia means you now have more time to learn the koran.
Governments worldwide that are marching to fascism want encryption banned. God forbid (and you bet they'll invoke God in what they're doing) you should be able to talk to someone in a manner they can't easily listen in on! This is not an unintended effect of sloppy legalese, it's a fully intentional consequence of obfuscated legalese.
Will they nail you for communicating with your bank? No. Will they nail you for communicating with someone they consider "undesirable"? You bet your arse they will.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
(If the article is accurate) For the Government of Australia, and its lack of basic reasoning skills (you cant ban mathematics). I hope they don't think they can simply ban other countries from invading, and get rid of the Air Force like some other nearby countries did. Also if they tax Uber that is a tacit endorsement of its legality and they should stop purporting to be a free market economy while having a protected monoculture government taxi industry with excessive licence fees. There is an old story about gold mining and excessive licence fees from a town up the road,. . . but I digress.
What is the 'key length' of one time pad containing 1MB of data? Xoring against properly randomized one time pads is one of strongest encryptions possible, will teaching about XOR also forbidden under new ruling?
We had a chance to be great, but we elected John Howard and it's been all down hill since then.
Thankfully I have multiple citizenships, but NZ or the UK aren't much better. At least the latter gives me an avenue into the EU and Switzerland, though.
How about outlawing the teaching of any religion with a major text longer than 512 words ?
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
The DSGL gives Department of Defence bureaucrats incredible power over scientists and researchers. It's a blatant grab for power by a department riddled with corruption:
http://cla.asn.au/News/defence...
http://defencereport.com/austr...
http://bayesian-intelligence.c...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
they make it illegal for people in Australia to learn anything more advanced than Algebra.
Those people are criminals, and/or descended from criminals, and they should be treated like the scum that they are. Criminals. Criminality has been proven to be genetic, and all Australians are criminals.
Watch Mad Max for proof that even their police officers are corrupt and criminally inclined. They are an evil, criminal bunch. Criminals, every last one of them. I would never let a criminal Australian eat so much as a bread crumb that falls from my table.
This seems to be just some overblown nerd rage. There's no way that ciphers over certain length would be banned in practice. This nonsense will be quickly forgotten and projects will use any kind of encryption that they want.
The article has also silly stuff like: "You wouldn’t think your phone, or calculator, or laptop computer, is a weapon on par with tanks, rockets, and missiles. But the Australian government may well have classified it as one, thanks to a very interesting display of scientific and mathematical ignorance."
Tony Abbott is a Prime Minister elected under the 5 eyes surveillance system. Which means that if he wasn't NSA/CIA approved his secrets would be leaked to the press to discredit him, so the fact he's elected and that didn't happen, means they approve of his choices.
So what you have their is a 'shaped' democracy. Where only surveillance friendly candidates can be PM of Australia, and ASIS, their secret service working with the NSA to ensure that always remains that way.
So suck it up, all the anti-encryption laws, corporate anti-people laws, all the unfair trade agreements. Because if you try to elect someone to restore the balance of power back to Australians, his private info will be available to press, and his competitors to ensure he never gets elected.
... that 512 bit elliptic curve cryptography is still quite good. :D
Every other culture at least tries to defend itself. Ours is seemingly suicidal.
No More Mosques. No More Muslim Immigration.
..and his weapons of math instruction.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
...to the UK.
Volume 2 of "The Art Of Computer Programming" contains an excellent description of RSA.
Actually, a decent mathematician should figure out RSA if you just remind them that every prime number has a primitive root, and that primitive roots of about half of all primes can be used to solve x^3 = a (modulo p) for primes p, and to solve x^3 = a (modulo pq) for a product of two primes pq if p and q are known, but not if only the product pq is known.
For large primes (like 1024 or 2048 bit) the number of calculations needed are a bit lengthy, but even a naive implementation on a modern computer is fast enough to implement it. Maybe not fast enough for hard disk encryption, but fast enough to encrypt a few megabytes of documents.
If having XOR is criminal, then only criminals will have XOR.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
AND?
This isn't a good omen for The Legion of The Bouncy Castle..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I guess ROT2^513+8 encryption is too strong for the Aussies to crack?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We also have Pasta & the BBC.
That said, the yanks don't suicide bomb people like Muslims do. I'd rather like in America than a 3rd world muslim shithole.
Old fart Aussie software dev here, as recently as the early 90's Australia (and the US/UK) considered encryption techniques to be a "munition" for export purposes, it was illegal to export anything stronger than 48bit. Then some bloke put out some OSS called PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), he had stayed within the regulations by using something like #define BITLEN 48, but also given the world an algorithm that could be trivially changed to any arbitrary length and re-compiled. This created a legal paradox that drove the customs people nuts, there was a huge fuss about it at the time but eventually the various governments realised the regulations were unenforceable and dropped/ignored them.
Aussies made a huge mistake at the last election. This mob have managed to politically unite Aussies (against them) in a way I haven't witnessed since the downfall of Gough Whitlam (IMO - due to GW's "sore loser" re-election campaign). Trust us, we have mandatory voting and will boot this embarrassing mob out the first chance we get. There isn't a sector of Aussie society they haven't upset in the past year alone, the only chance the conservatives have of winning is if they put Turnbull back in charge and allow him to purge the "tea party" types from the current cabinet, they have way to much power for the tiny slice of Aussie society that they represent.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let me be blunt:
Fuck 'em!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Heaven forbid these politicians ever learn about the one time pad, they'll outlaw addition and subtraction too. Not to mention xor.
Can you really not picture a case where you wish to communicate with someone securely, but only have a secure window for a brief time? For instance, a spy leaving to serve overseas.
That you couldn't figure this out proves you are too stupid to be on the internet and should probably wear a helmet everywhere you go.
slow Down Cowboy!
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Would be an enemy of the state?
Has electrolytes,mate. Got time for a blooming' onion?
No, really. This is what it would come down to.
We need encryption for banking, day to day transactions at every store, as well as general communications in industry generally. Banning the study of encryption would guarantee that Australia becomes a second rate country in computer science.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Encryption is but a tiny side-show in the global march towards Collectivism — the coin, of which Fascism and Socialism are indistinguishable sides. As predicted long ago:
It starts with concern for the poor, that inevitably causes the government to undertake support of the downtrodden with various "War on Poverty" initiatives.
A few decades and trillion-dollars into it, there are not only millions of recipients of the dole, there are also tens of thousands of government officials involved in distributing it. The combination makes it impossible to stop the foolish undertaking — it may be reformed and rearranged, but it can not be ended.
And then comes the idea, that, if we must support the unsuccessful among us, we should try to prevent them from doing (what we consider to be) stupid things: take drugs, drive too fast, eat fat (no, not fat, sugar!). Right here on Slashdot, the idea that our self-imposed responsibility for others allows us to control their actions, is alive and well.
And then government types begin to deliberately rearrange things to be able to attach their own strings to various incentives you can not refuse. The first example of this was, probably, the imposition of federal speed-limit by mandating, that States receiving federal Federal highway funds implement them.
The most recent example here is the federal take-over of education loans, which allows the Administration to better control, what the colleges teach and what students do. Because it raises the tuition costs so much, fewer and fewer students will be able to forgo such federal aid and will be forced to accept it — with all of the strings attached to them and the colleges they attend.
Compared to these aspects of the Collective increasingly controlling the Individual's life, use of encryption is of little to no consequence. Maybe, a new Republic in Antarctica, on the Moon or Mars will take the lessons of our errors to heart — the way our Founding Fathers studied those of the Romans...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I guess it's illegal to tell you my ROT-520 algorithm is actually (ROT-13 * 40) now.
Doh! I've just committed a crime in the eyes of the Australian government! So much for that Australian vacation.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
If you generate your random pattern with a proper random source (e.g digitize noise), and it truely is a one-time pad then its uncrackable, and to hack it, well I guess you could try swamping the message with noise in the hopes of forcing some effect that can be cracked.
All the main attacks on OTP systems are about getting hold of the private one-time-pad key file. Something fairly easy on Windows (MS being US based) and Android (big fat piece of spyware disguised as a mobile OS).
And of course you can send updates to your one time pad using your initial one time pad key, so you don't need an initial key bigger than all the data it will ever send.
... all about division, how it works, and how to do it without using my calculator?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
These people are even more batshit insane than the government here in the good ole USA...Thats what you get with people writing laws on subjects they have ABSOLUTELY NO knowledge about... And to think I was close to emigrating to Australia back in the early 70s, after visiting there in my youth... May saner heads prevail....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
ELSE?
Over 60 laws have been passed in the war on terror. First they attacked terrorism by enabling the suspending of people's rights (that legally, Australians don't have anyway) at will, similar to martial law. Then it was attacking international crime by increasing legal severity and/or converting it to a revenue stream, (IE fine). Next they went after the pedophiles and copyright pirates. This law can be selectively applied when someone becomes a political inconvenience.
First, Tony Abbot's mantra was "Look Muslim, look terrorist". That raised the hate and fear so much that people got violent. For the last few months he's been issuing 'crime wave' reports from the parliament podium. This is really a "Look terrorist, the police need more powers" mantra. It excuses any laws he tables at parliament and stops all other politicians disagreeing with his laws. Plus, it keeps what little that discussion occurs away from his failed budget policies.
Doesn't this mean that expert witnesses, in criminal prosecution trials, would become harder to procure? After all, you're making the *knowledge* illegal.
The Australians must have got the idea from the nutcase British Prime Minister who wants to make all encryption illegal.... so ban all paper and pens "for your safety".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Take Nobody's Word For It.
When did Australia hop on board the idiot train?
OR ELSE what?
The problem, and it is a big one, is that everybody is living in the same huge bag we call planet Earth. So, to control a bad person we are forced to restrict them for not to use the technology they could use to hide their secrets, and doing so, we restrict everybody else in their authentically rightful rights.
... IMPLEMENTING ... so stupid and retrograde regulations, they need to invest their time discovering what made their current problems to appear and to provide the right solutions to them. Because this will escalate to the complete lost of freedom for everybody in the sake of their safety, when the ones describe what safety is are not the one are suffering for it.
But, as is usual in human history, when you put many constraints to somebody, this person will find a different way to do the things. But later, you keep the constraints and something, that was completely valid for the good ones, will become useless for everybody.
They are not attacking the source of the problems but the symptoms. This is the same as to consider that some people could have fever and, because of that, we would quit all the conditioned air in the planet, "in case" one of them pass through a place with A.C. active, or to forbid the sugar because somebody could have diabetes. No, the right way is to cure the person with fever and to provide treatment to the diabetes sick person, including a healthy food diet and to let all the others to enjoy conditioned air or to consume some sugar.
Instead of being inventing and, worst of all
... I've read in quite a while.
After all, they could be used for encryption algorithms using key sizes in the gigabyte range!
Violent revolution.
That truly is the only solution.
But NOT NAND AND OR.
at all costs. Sure, USA is bad but the little cousins are determined to show up everyone else. The UK and AUS in particular are about as bad as it gets.
does that mean no more prime numbers and no more factorisation in math class for aussies ? LOL , btw my 9 yo is already pretty good with cesars sqaures , juxtaposition and transposition , does that mean she wont ever be able to see a wild roo ?
The extrapolation is simple:
1) Don't use computers.
2) Don't use mathematics.
3) Don't think.
Oh, and don't try to imagine the consequences, this could be illegal also.
QUOTE:
A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock - let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker - is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties.
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850 (also seems applicable to security holes in computer systems?)
They will go away in a few years.
ISIS, the islamist group that Australia government says is bad, also bans math education... Interesting
well, given the Australian leader's mental capacity, it is a wonder why he does not forbid all education just to be on level with the rest of the population in terms of brain...
Just askin'. Not an expert in encryption and not sure the number of bits employed in HTTPS, but wouldn't this basically ban a secure Internet in Oz? Many important non-Australian sites would not be available there. I'm guessing much, if not most, Internet traffic comes from overseas to Oz; again, not sure.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Are their noses that far up Uncle Sam's arse? They seem to be stealing every page from the GOP's playbook.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
divide... and conquer!
We went through this crap before and got rid of it about 20 years ago when Bill Clinton was President.
Someone not reading their history again? It hurt a lot of good companies and people.
After all, learning long division is about as much fun as boot camp.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo