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Apple Flies Top Privacy Executives Into Australia To Lobby Against Proposed Encryption Laws (patentlyapple.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Patently Apple: Last week Patently Apple posted a report titled "Australia proposed new Laws Compelling Companies like Facebook & Apple to Provide Access to Encrypted Messages." Days later, Australia's Prime Minister spoke about the encryption problem with the Australian press as noted in the video in our report. Now we're learning that Apple has flown in top executives to lobby Turnbull government on encryption laws. It sounds like a showdown is on the horizon. This is the second time this month that Apple has flown executives into Australia to lobby the government according to a Sydney publication. Apple executives met with Attorney-General George Brandis and senior staff in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's office on Tuesday to discuss the company's concerns about the legal changes, which could see tech companies compelled to provide access to locked phones and third party messaging applications. Apple has argued in the meetings that as a starting point it does not want the updated laws to block tech companies from using encryption on their devices, nor for companies to have to provide decryption keys to allow access to secure communications. The company has argued that if it is compelled to provide a software "back door" into its phones to help law enforcement agencies catch criminals and terrorists, this would reduce the security for all users. It also says it has provided significant assistance to police agencies engaged in investigations, when asked. UPDATE 07/20/17: Headline has been updated to clarify that Apple is lobbying against the proposed encryption laws in Australia.
It seems the headline is wrong. Apple isn't lobbying against encryption. ??
sig: sauer
Wouldn't Apple be lobbying FOR encryption in this case?
and not against..
Again...
I'm confused, why does the title state Apple is lobbying AGAINST encryption? It's contradicted by both the summary and article itself.
"Apple has argued in the meetings that as a starting point it does not want the updated laws to block tech companies from using encryption on their devices"
It says right there - Australia wants to limit encryption, and Apple is not in favor of that.
You seem to be expecting much of BeauHD
I know nobody reads TFA but for fuck's sake, the headline doesn't even match the summary. Apple's privacy executives flew into Australia to lobby FOR encryption, not against it. Who the fuck is even running this place?
This is Apple. They're not lobbying against encryption; they're lobbying against backdoors!
Apple Flies Top Privacy Executives Into Australia To Lobby Against Encryption
It sounds like they are lobbying against laws which require them to provide a backdoor for the government through their encryption. I'd call this arguing for encryption, not against it.
I was going to tell you to get off my lawn, but then I looked at your slash ID. You've got me by a few thousand counts. Carry on..
sig: sauer
TFA headline is "Apple Flies Top Brass into Australia to Lobby against Australia's Proposed Encryption Laws" Looks like the word "Laws" got truncated.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Did the submitter and editor even bother to read the headline of the actual article???
"Apple Flies Top Brass into Australia to Lobby against Australia's Proposed Encryption Laws, not Negotiate"
Look, I know some folks here hate Apple, but if you're going to put a spin on something, at least make it less obvious. #FakeHeadline
CAPTCHA: frauds (seriously)
Why do you love the terrorists so much?
Signed,
The Australian Government
Co-signed,
The governments of the US, Great Britain, most EU countries, Russia, China, and pretty much everywhere else
#DeleteChrome
How about citizen representatives of a public interest group such as Linux Australia or FSF?
Silly me! We only exist to promote the interests of US corporations.
We can't even talk about this because the headline is so bad.
Aha - looks like they just added it :-) Enjoy.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Where the headlines are made up and the Stories don't matter!
Good, now my penis is going into your butt. Stop struggling!!!
The headline reads "Apple Flies Top Privacy Executives Into Australia To Lobby Against Proposed Encryption Laws", which means "Apple Flies Top Privacy Executives Into Australia To Lobby Against Proposed Encryption Laws" in English. They are flying top privacy executives into Australia to lobby against proposed encryption laws, so the headline is correct.
right, but they already have a backdoor, they don't need this...
Stop being corruptive and helping terrorists for cash & power. 2 + 2 = 4. Your action has consequence. It's not magic.
Signed,
People with a Brain
Apple Inc.
Co-signed,
Everyone else who also has a Brain
That is the *corrected* headline. The original one that everyone was complaining about was encrypted by BeauHD to render its meaning unclear...but thanks to intense lobbying efforts of Apple's VP for Slashdot Headlines, a backdoor was found and the headline is now displayed in cleartext.
The current PM is already well-disliked by everyone in the IT industry by singlehandedly botching the NBN fibre-to-the-premises rollout project.
All Apple would have to do would say that they'd pull out of Australia if these anti-encryption laws went through. In fact, the laws would probably cause this through implication. The PM's popularity would plummet. He wouldn't be so stupid as to risk it.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Yeah, the original headline said "Apple Flies Top Privacy Executives Into Australia To Lobby Against Encryption", omitting both "proposed" and "laws".
I hate that term. It should be replaced and removed completely. Commoners have zero clue what the f that meant from the start. When they don't understand, how in the world are they going to even care?
We should really be replacing it with 'locks', 'files lock', 'Computer files lock', because that's what it basically is. It locks the file(s) up and ensure those with the key can read it.
Not to mention when we put it back into context, we can now change backdoors into terms like 'secondary key' to the locks. It makes it easier to understand why this is bad.
-you have no control of the 'secondary key'
-your locks can be unlocked by someone else with the 'secondary key'
-the 'secondary key' can be stolen without you knowing
To actually start implementing it, we really need to start changing right from the technical articles, like using a simple parentheses into Encryption (files lock) and Backdoor (Secondary Key) would be 100% better for the commoners as a starter to understand.
The more people understand the issue, the better it is to resolve the issue.
You've got me by a few thousand counts. Carry on..
Woosh! The joke works *because* you have a low user id.
Even more bothersome, the executives are not being flown to Australia.
Instead, they are being flown INTO Australia.
Everyone knows that Australia has no innards.
And don't tell me they are flying direct to Alice Springs.
Like quite a few of you out there,we here in OZ also have a democratic system that tries its best, but sometimes gets it wrong a bit.
Unfortunately, as a lot of you guys have seen as well in your own countries, sometimes a party gets in strictly because they're either the lesser of two evils. This is the case in Australia as well. The two main "blocs" of parties are swapping over every election cycle or two (and knifing their leaders in the process) as there's just no real alternative on the horizon except for some fringe greenie/religious nutcase parties.
We have a parliament full of weak, small minded and self absorbed men (and women) who lack the will and stomach to do what must be done, in their quest for opinion polls, re-election and nest feathering. If it's not militant unionists killing the nations finances paying for their utopian pipe dreams, it's the pampered members of the 1% (like the current Prime Minister) who buy their way into politics to rule to masses, as they sure as shit don't need the money.
As we've seen in the UK, the US and now more and more in Europe, the people are getting sick of this. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be) as Australia has topped the global wealth, health and happiness lists for the best part of the last 25 years, the level of collective outrage isn't as high as in other places that are really struggling economically and socially, like the UK and US.
So we get dimwits like Chairman Mal who come up with these hair brained schemes, as well as totally screwing up the NBN, and they're not immediately voted out. I think this will be a good test case though.
I await with interest the predictable orgy of apologetic grovelling from the government when the reality of the situation is explained to them in no uncertain terms by Apple et al and they realise all those people with iPhones and internet banking also vote.
Fostaz. Oastraalian fa beeah.
"07/20/17" is meaningless gibber. From context, I believe you meant "2017-07-20". Please do better in future!
Apple executives met with Attorney-General George Brandis and senior staff in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's office on Tuesday to discuss the company's concerns about the legal changes...
It's great that Apple is defending encryption. What's NOT so great is that they seem able to meet with such high mucky-mucks almost at will. A mere citizen of Australia, (or Canada, or England, or other such countries with purportedly democratic traditions), would be hard pressed to get so much as the steam off the piss of the AG or the PMO. The fact that such lobbying as this is even suffered to exist, is a slap in the face of all that Democracy stands for.
As for backdooring encryption, the fact that governments can openly push for it without having their asses handed to them by the people at whose pleasure they allegedly serve, is so wrong in so many ways that it's simply mind-boggling. Bread and circuses, along with education designed to stunt emotional and intellectual growth, have turned people into sheeple. I wish there was some way to wake the poor fuckers from their stupor - I'm tired of the world being dragged down by the dead weight of their complacency, unawareness, and willful blindness.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
You're very welcome on my lawn. ;-)
John_Chalisque
If two top mathematicians are having a conversation, in English, about the ins and outs of, say, the latest greatest advancements in applying group cohomology to analytic number theory, consider the transcript that GCHQ/NSA would get from that phone call, and the difficulty in understanding it. Demanding that the phone company be able to decipher the language for them is stupid. Demanding that the phone company not offer the facility for people to communicate in languages that the phone company cannot decipher on behalf of GCHQ/NSA would be stupid, and kind of like madatory-1984-NewSpeak-on-steroids.
For one thing, it is too easy to write end-to-end encrypted messaging services. The _hard_ part of what things like WhatsApp do is to make it scalable to handle millions of concurrent users with the ease it does. Everyday people need this, but terrorists do not. An ad hoc end-to-end encryption system can be done in a few hundred lines of JS/PHP/HTML, using e.g. cryptojs. The result can be stuck at any url you like, temporarily, in such a way that there is no practical means to recover messages without the correct keys. (Basically a key-value store, where the key is produced by some kind of deterministic hashing method, as is the decryption key for the information stored there. Both the server end can easily break things up based on further hashing of the key, and likewise the client can break up messages into separate chunks, separately encrypted with keys produced by various salted hashes, such that you need to recover it all.)
John_Chalisque
26th of Tamuz, 5777, you schlemiel!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We need laws like this in place, to eliminate people's false sense of security. These laws are never going to prevent people from using encryption on their own. The fact is, they shouldn't be trusting Apple or Facebook with their proprietary devices and software to encrypt their data. They should consider it 100% vulnerable at all times when relying on closed-source software. So why allow them to market that false hope to their users? This will result in better, more secure communication software. (At least on devices which aren't locked down like Apple's.)
If the clowns put into law weak encryption I will smile like an evil monkey. We deserve getting hacked all day everyday because Turnbull is an idiot.