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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!
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.
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?
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...
I lived in Oz during the Howard era. Abbott's making him look pretty good.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
... that 512 bit elliptic curve cryptography is still quite good. :D
..and his weapons of math instruction.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Didn't the US government already try to do this, like 2 decades or so ago?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
Didn't the US government already try to do this, like 2 decades or so ago?
Yep. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) control the export and import of defense-related articles and services on the United States Munitions List. Until approx 1997, ITAR classified strong cryptography as arms and prohibited their export from the U.S. So welcome back to pre-97 Australia...
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?
Sadly true, so feel free to entice them over to Australia and you'll have my thanks.
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"
No. All other cultures have already been overtaken by American culture: Burgers, Hollywood, American music, games and software. You just don't realize how much Western culture has already dominated the world in the last decades. And you fear a church from another country? You have been fully brainwashed.
Anyway, congrats on finding a smooth way to introduce your racist/discrimination hatred into a thread about encryption (you and the parent post - if you aren't the same).
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.
No, they use drones instead of losing any of their own lives.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Seriously I am living in Islamic country right now. You should try it ,hours and hours of ridiculous jiberish blasted through huge speakers straight into your home or where ever you go. Having to watch what you say because some random will just kill you. Seeing poor women being oppressed every where . Seeing huge mosques being built every where when there is a total lack good infrastructure. I couldnt understand how any sane person knowing the alternatives would want this.
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.
"Seriously I am living in Islamic country right now. (snip) I couldnt understand how any sane person knowing the alternatives would want this."
You're saying you know the alternatives, you're saying someone who chooses to live there knowing the alternatives isn't sane, and you're saying you live there. So, you're saying you're not sane...right? And if so, why should I take your word on the rest of it?
It wasn't like this in Malaysia. Sure you could hear the sound of prayers coming from the Mosque, but I found that soothing. Otherwise it was chilled out. And I mean really chilled out - anything goes. I think its the same for other SE Asian countries.
The kind of ultra-conservative fundamentalism (Wahhabism) that is spreading through started is a political tactic started by the elite to preserve power and promote nationalism.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>