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Crypto-Bashing Prime Minister Argues The Laws Of Mathematics Don't Apply In Australia (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes the Independent:Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the laws of mathematics come second to the law of the land in a row over privacy and encryption... When challenged by a technology journalist over whether it was possible to tackle the problem of criminals using encryption -- given that platform providers claim they are currently unable to break into the messages even if required to do so by law -- the Prime Minister raised eyebrows as he made his reply. "Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," he said... "The important thing is to recognise the challenge and call on the companies for assistance. I am sure they know morally they should... They have to face up to their responsibility."
Facebook has already issued a statement saying that they "appreciate the important work law enforcement does, and we understand the need to carry out investigations. That's why we already have a protocol in place to respond to any requests we can.
"At the same time, weakening encrypted systems for them would mean weakening it for everyone."
Facebook has already issued a statement saying that they "appreciate the important work law enforcement does, and we understand the need to carry out investigations. That's why we already have a protocol in place to respond to any requests we can.
"At the same time, weakening encrypted systems for them would mean weakening it for everyone."
Can't take this anymore...
old old joke. couldn't top Turnbull's though.
What? Want citation? Just give me 30 minutes and then check Wikipedia.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is already sufficient mass of people who believe encryption can have proper backdoors for police enforcement, or even worse that only criminals have something to hide. We have seen this discourse in recent political cycles, and given tendency to mark any expert opinion as "fake news" do not help either.
The "geek" image given on media always helps portray fake ability to overcome anything. Even Star Trek had this: "10 hours, you have 2". I would assume people are thinking "the experts are just lazy, they say it cannot be done, but in fact they are just avoiding the work".
I'm not sure it will be solved in a short while, once people understand why proper encryption is necessary (i.e: loss of online commerce, or even bank account contents) the sentiment might start to change.
Malcolm Turnball (or Chairman Mal as we call him) is an ex lawyer from a privileged background who lucked into dropping a few bucks into some 1990's "computer thingy that my financial advisor assures me is a good investment" and riding in the wave of the first tech boom, to the tune of about 300 million dollars.
He honestly considers himself the smartest person in the room.
He's a fucking lawyer who won life's big lottery.
I'm sure you guys have similar stories about your politicians.
The sooner this imbecile is gone from politics, the better.
It's disappointing to me that we still use the word 'law' to refer to entirely different things:
1. Things humans make up that they then want other human beings to follow.
2. Things humans make up after observing something in order to describe it.
Descriptive laws and prescriptive laws are exact opposites, both chronologically and causally.
Aside from eliminating privacy for everyone, can measures like this be expected to actually fight terror or crime at all? Encryption is essentially a solved problem; a coordinated terror group needs only do a little work to make its own app using strong end to end encryption in the backend. Insisting that popular messaging apps be insecure simply robs the common citizen from privacy protection tools without addressing the problem which is claimed to be tackled.
I for one look forward to Australia's War on Mathematics.
https://www.malcolmturnbull.co...
Liberty thru marksmanship never caught-hold downunder ...
Y'might wanna tell that to Ned Kelly, mate. He found out all about marksmanship, the hard way.
Wot? Oh, look it up, for Christ's sake, ya dopey seppo. I'm not ya mum.
The man who tech companies hailed as a boon to the entire tech industry as a former chairman of Ozemail during the rise of the internet. Here's a man who should "get it.".
Ozemail went under during the dot.com crash, but hey I'm sure he had nothing to do with that. Maybe they tried to use some of that that strange mathematical thing.
the "technology" companies first excuse when a government asks for lawful intercepts is "we can't do that its encrypted" when they can tell exactly how long you watched a cat video or what posts you have been looking at because they track that...
(facebook et al is after all a website/platform)
what the australian government was saying very, very badly is that they want access to the platform and didnt want to be burdened by cryptology on the stream.
The information stream might be encrypted but the end points and server certainly not... the problem is who do you give access to ?
The endpoints are in the hands of consumers however the platform is not...
good luck
John Jones
He is the Prime Minister after all, so he should know about cryptography... I'll show myself out.
A camel is a horse created by a committee
don't tell the government to go fuck themselves.
I hate their subservience
I think they did: "[we, Facebook] appreciate the important work law enforcement does, and we understand the need to carry out investigations. That's why we already have a protocol in place to respond to any requests we can." That's lawyer talk for "you look butt-hurt and stupid. Please fuck off."
If he didn't disagree with the math, then he would know that there is no possible way to do that without compromising the security of things that *should* legitimately be encrypted, such as electronic bank transactions, for example. If back doors exist, they will be just as usable by people with nefarious intentions as they would be by those who may mean, however sincerely, to protect us from such people.
If law enforcement has an encryption back door, then that exact same back door can and most certainly would be used by criminals. Laws against it wouldn't actually stop anyone who was already intent on breaking the law anyways, so all one is accomplishing by adding such backdoors is endangering everybody so that law enforcement is more readily able to catch people that may have otherwise used it for nefarious purposes.... except now law enforcement has exponentially *MORE* work to do, because now they also have to catch all of the bad guys who are using these back doors with nefarious intentions to harm people... people they wouldn't even have to *TRY* to catch if private individuals were allowed to use truly secure encryption.
To be fair, it is certainly regrettable that criminals can get away with their actions by using externally undecipherable encryption to conceal any evidence of their misdoings, but in the end, it is simply outside of the realm of the principles of reality by which this world seems to operate that one can ever really prevent this without seriously endangering those that could have had an entirely legitimate use for encryption.
There is no agent in this world, or for that matter in all of the entire knowable universe, that could hope to actually enforce the notion of "X can do this math, but Y cannot", so that is why what he is asking for defies the laws of math.... and unlike laws of a nation, the laws of math are not simply constraints by which people or things are expected or obligated to conform to, they are observations that have been rigorously proven to be universally true within the domain that any given such law governs.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Scotty knew enough to start with an archaic computer he had never seen before (Ach! The keyboard, yes!) and sketch out the process for generating transparent aluminum, so I would consider him considerably further skilled than a technician.
Maybe we should think of this fictional character as the 23rd century counterpart to a naval officer (Scotty had officer rank, we wasn't a Chief Warrant Officer or such rank) in charge of Engineering on a nuclear aircraft carrier? Who probably has at least an undergrad degree in Nuclear Engineering?
As to getting battered by a shovel, didn't locomotives lose their shovels decades ago when they switched from coal-fired steam to oil-fired Diesel?
A quick search shows that Malcolm Turnbull has Royal Blood and he is a direct descendant, all the way through male heirs, of King Canute.
Canute tried to command the tide knowing full well that it would not work to show his idiot advisors that there were limits to the power of the crown. So Turnbull must have been related to Canute's advisors which makes sense since Prime Minister is the modern equivalent to an advisor in a Royal Court even if the power dynamics are now very different.
Perhaps the Queen could step in to re-educate this twit since it worked before for his distant ancestor? I'd suggest having him stand in the middle of the outback in the full sun on a hot summer's day while she signs a law to make the sun to stop shining or 8pm to follow 10am if you want a more mathematical flavour.
I suspect Oz politicians bumped him off so they could get away with such idiotic statements.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Likely both. Dumb people always think they know and understand everything. And when they are proven to be wrong in a non-ignorable fashion, then that is just a fluke to them. Ever tried to somebody really dumb that they do not get it? It is completely hopeless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Much like other jurisdictions, some Australians of certain political faiths *hate* the opposition and its leaders with a passion approaching that of, well, conservatives' hate for liberals, and find it difficult to engage in civil debate, preferring to lash out in personal attacks. I admit I held Rudd and Swan in contempt for their smug, "we know best" attitude, and I think Gillard was a breath of fresh air. I despaired when the LNP put Abbott into the leadership, knowing it would set us back many years.
For your info, and because you asked nicely, here's a slightly biased nutshell description:
The currently-in-power LNP (Liberal-National Party consisting of centrists or liberals in the true meaning, moderate conservatives, and some far-right conservatives) are a coalition of right-of-centre blue-bloods and farmers. The blue-bloods believe they are born to rule and get all puzzled when they lose elections - "Why aren't we in power? We're the ruling class!" That's the attitude that upsets those who belong to the opposition, and generates the vitriol. Generally sound economic policies, but lousy social and environment policies. Australians, being anti-authoritarian larrikins (convicts) at heart, eventually get upset with increasingly out-of-touch blue bloods and squatters (the farmers) and vote them out.
The opposition (Labor, factions from moderate left-of-centre to quasi-communist, supposedly representing the workers, or the common man/woman) can't seem to govern the nation without raising taxes and/or borrowing large sums to fund their policies, and they just keep borrowing, and we end up in the shitter economically, and people eventually get sick of the debt and high interest rates, and vote them out. Usually *much* more enlightened social and environmental policies than the LNP, but sadly those policies tend to rely on borrowed funds, and they collapse when the remaining dollars have to go to pay off debt.
Outliers are the greens (mostly left of Labor) who would raise taxes to Swedish levels, but also provide social services and environmental support to match. Otherwise, it's fair to say that the greens do not understand economics. I can't hate them, they're so earnest, and they do manage to swing some nice deals when they hold balance of power in the senate.
Other outliers are far-right christians, firearm owners, real communists, and so on. Fortunately most Australians have excellent bullshit detectors, so these small outliers tend to stay that way. Some of them have figured out that they'll have more influence by working their way into the major parties, which is why we have people like Abbott, and Cory Bernardi, who's just broken ranks and formed his own ultra-conservative group. Hopefully he'll be flushed down the bowl at the next election.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
So the idea was to get the engineers (who are really technicians and troubleshooters in the show; ; the real engineers are back at Mars designing the next-generation starships) to cut corners to come up with something workable even if it's very risky, or to come up with some new approach that takes less time (again, risky).
I'm wondering if you haven't actually worked as an engineer by that statement or if you do you have an exceptionally rare ivory tower job. I've got nearly three decades experience as a working engineer and I can assure you that a good portion of nearly every real world engineer's time is spent troubleshooting and fixing technical problems. Exactly the sort of stuff you are describing on the show. Very few engineers worthy of the title manage to stay back at the home office designing product without getting their hands dirty fixing the inevitable problems that result when their design breaks or is asked to do what it wasn't designed for. Engineers are asked all the time to come up with stop gap solutions as well as ways to same money, time, or other resources. Think Apollo 13. You seriously want to claim those guys were just "technicians and troubleshooters" just because they were coming up with workable-but-risky solutions? The "real engineers" aren't just drawing stuff on a white board in the office - the job is actually much more diverse than that and the good news is that it's much more interesting as a result.
Another part of the engineer's job they don't tell you about in school is how much time you'll spend writing and revising documentation. And it's been my experience that a large portion of the engineers out there are rather bad at this mundane but very important task. They tend to overlook details rather routinely and they forget that they aren't writing primarily for themselves. The point of engineering documentation is to describe something so OTHER PEOPLE can understand what needs to be done efficiently and to the smallest relevant detail. That's something they could teach in colleges but do not for some reason.
The laws of nature limit what laws humans may implement. You cannot make a law that falling out of windows is illegal on grounds that gravity must not apply. I mean, of course you can make such a law, it's just impossible to enforce it and you look like a complete idiot for even proposing one.
Like this goofball here.
And yes, it IS impossible to give governments a backdoor while at the same time having sensible encryption that allows your economy to make sensible business deals. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You can either have an economy that works or you can have broken encryption with backdoors. Pick your poison. Because one thing is certain: As soon as you must not use sensible encryption anymore in a country, it becomes really, really, REALLY difficult to convince a foreign actor to deal with you in any sort of deal that requires even the least kind of confidentiality.
And you better don't expect me to do any kind of business online in such a country.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.