News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by lwansbrough on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:01AM (#18616428)
Literally zero percent chance I touch any software made in Australia now.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by neotek on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:32AM (#18616842)
This immensely stupid law applies to any business that operates in Australia, which includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Github, and every other major tech company on the planet.

If they want to continue doing business in Australia (and they very much do) then they'll be forced to comply, which means everybody in the world is negatively affected by this insanity.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by bigiain on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:14AM (#18617048)
Cutting loose ~25million potential customers might actually be a financially rational for some companies. It's not like we here in Australia are really a very big market on the global stage...

Won't surprise me at all to find some businesses (like perhaps Whisper Systems) who's "doing business in Australia" doesn't actually earn them a single cent, yet will open them up to enormous reputational damage if they continue operating in Australia after this, might just choose to take thier app/service out of the .au app stores...

(BRB, backing up my iDevices and switching auto-update off...)

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by alfiedotwtf on Friday December 14, 2018 @09:57PM (#18686769)
Please don't turn off updates. You're going to miss out on exploit fixes, which puts you in a worse position.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by hvklos on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:27AM (#18617091)
If they want to continue doing business in Australia (and they very much do)

Meh. 25 million people, and not a top ten economy. Australia has a powerful reality distortion field that makes it seem more important than it is. Must be the tourist marketing and the fact that it punches above its weight in producing successful entertainers.

It’s more likely that WhatsApp and other encrypted messaging apps will just get pulled from the Australian App Store (if the Australian App Store remains in place, since it’s likely to be chosen as a distribution vector for compromised software).

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by ShinTakuya on Friday December 07, 2018 @03:42AM (#18626034)
The population isn't a relevant part of the argument, Mexico has 130 million people and has a smaller economy than Australia. After the top 6 or 7 economies, the next 6 or 7 are all comparable in size.

But more importantly, because of the high GDP per capita and low income inequality, Australians are wealthy with lots of disposable income. And so most international marketplaces see disproportionately high amounts of Australian spending when considering population size.

For instance, where I work, the top 5 spending countries are the US, Canada, Australia, UK, China in that order.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by cam_l on Thursday December 06, 2018 @08:31AM (#18617834)
Of they don't get pulled, well, that tells you something too.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by interfixus on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:09AM (#18617302)
Fastmail, don't forget.

With a somewhat heavy heart, but I shall be cancelling my service there.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by mediocrejoker on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:43PM (#18630304)
Does anyone know of a similar service hosted in Canada?
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by kazen44 on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:30AM (#18617419)
i wonder if this would affect other, non autstralian mail providers (protonmail for instance).
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by protonmail on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:44AM (#18617519)
No it does not, as we fall solely under Swiss jurisdiction since we don't have a presence in Australia.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by blkcoffee on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:36PM (#18623625)
From the Bill itself "A person is a designated communications provider if...

4 the person provides an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia

5 the person provides a service that facilitates, or is ancillary or incidental to,the provision of an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia

6 the person develops, supplies or updates software used, for use, or likely to be used, in connection with:(a) a listed carriage service; or(b) an electronic service that has one or more end-users in Australia"

I believe ProtonMail falls into these categories. As an Austrlaian and a user of your services myself, will this mean getting service "officially" cut off in Australia?

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by brokenmachine on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:56PM (#18624159)
The Australian government has successfully nuked it's own entire IT industry from orbit. Great job guys.

I feel sorry for the people who started good businesses only to have them destroyed by this shitshow.

If it wasn't so scary as a citizen myself, it'd just be sad.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by protonmail on Thursday December 06, 2018 @08:04PM (#18624203)
If that happens, then you could simply use ProtonVPN to bypass the block.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by _archon_ on Friday December 07, 2018 @11:48AM (#18629179)
Wouldn't that mean that ProtonVPN then has an end user in Aus, and would then be theoretically subject to all this nonsense?

A user would have to double-VPN for ProtonVPN to be the solution. Right?

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by medecau on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:19AM (#18617057)
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by Fordec on Thursday December 06, 2018 @10:52AM (#18619030)
Huzzah, another talking point to convince the team to migrate off Bitbucket. Silver lining I guess!
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by TheChaplain on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:08AM (#18616450)
Isn't Atlassian Australian? Or did they move?
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by askaboutit on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:19AM (#18616498)
They’re Australian but have offices in other countries. I believe they would move for the right reasons. This seems like a pretty big reason, considering they’re targeted at enterprise. But move where? UK will have this next, America does this without any laws at much greater effect and scale.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by ENGNR on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:34AM (#18616569)
Iceland? Switzerland?

They'd need the system admins, CI infrastructure and code review team to be in a jurisdiction free of this kind of thing, and then treat all changes subject to laws like these as hostile

The alternative is sell software that everyone knows has backdoors. Pretty hard business case to make

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by mikro2nd on Thursday December 06, 2018 @07:27AM (#18617397)
California. I had to agree to some changes to their ToS the other day (for Bitbucket) in which I agreed to dispute resolution under California law. I suppose that's a pretty good indication of their thinking. It's not like this legislation is unexpected or sudden.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by emiliobumachar on Thursday December 06, 2018 @10:04AM (#18618520)
Are the U.S. "gag orders" equivalent to this new Australian law?
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by cyphar on Thursday December 06, 2018 @10:40AM (#18618906)
No, the new law has no judicial review and has a few other things that wouldn't fly in the US. It's markedly worse (though don't get me wrong, the US definitely has it pretty bad in this area too).
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by girvo on Friday December 07, 2018 @10:07AM (#18628236)
You say that like FISA Courts are actually judicial review and not rubbing stamps... where you win is that you have a stronger set of rights and case law about it.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by cyphar on Friday December 07, 2018 @01:14PM (#18630033)
The difference is that there isn't even fake judicial review. And I disagree that we have a stronger set of rights -- the difference is that the NSA explicitly ignores your constitutional rights.

All of our rights (other than the right to a jury for certain criminal trials, freedom of religion, the aquisition of property must be 'on just terms', the right to be a senator if you can vote, and the right to vote in federal elections) are in common law. This means that any new law can overturn those interpretations.

Personally I think Australia needs to push for a constitutional bill of rights. Unfortunately this is going to be a very hard battle to win, given the enormous requirements to get a constitutional amendment passed.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by stock_toaster on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:02AM (#18616700)
I believe Fastmail is too, sadly.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by msmithstubbs on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:29AM (#18616831)
It looks like the cloud services are supplied by a company incorporated in the US [1] ‘Atlassian, Inc’. They probably needed to do this when they listed on the NASDAQ.

There is also an Australian entity `Atlassian Pty Ltd` but it’s not clear to me what role that has.

[1]: https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by ShinTakuya on Sunday December 09, 2018 @06:36AM (#18640401)
Atlassian is still very much based in Sydney. The CEOs (there's two joint CEOs), vast majority of the engineering teams and more are all just down the road from me. As with most large international tech companies, they have a number of different legal entities for regulatory, tax and other reasons.
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by keithnz on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:10AM (#18616735)
So that means things like BitBucket / Trello are now all fair game to the Australian government?
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by toyg on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:35AM (#18616855)
Trello is based in NYC. I don’t know the actual corporate structure, but they could potentially be spun into a controlled company, maybe, to avoid this law somehow.

To be honest, Trello is the least of your worries, with Atlassian. Authorities having unfettered access to all your code, regardless of privacy settings, is more worrying imho. Then again, GitHub is US-based and the PATRIOT Act already gives that power to US authorities, so if you care about that, self-hosting in the only way.

Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by siquick on Thursday December 06, 2018 @05:33AM (#18616847)
There is still a substantial engineering team in Sydney
Re:Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended by bigiain on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:46AM (#18617176)
For now. I bet there's a lot of passports being dug out and resumes being polished up tonight...