Australia's tech industry savages Labor for backing bill | Hacker News Reader

Australia's tech industry savages Labor for backing bill

businessinsider.com.au

130 pointsDaviey33 comments

I am really unhappy this has happened. I’m an Australian living in the USA for a large tech company. I’m on a work visa.

I’m going to visit family back in Australia this Christmas. What happens if during the time I’m outside the USA the company I work for pulls my visa? I have to abandon my life that I’ve setup here?

Surely I can sue the Australian government in that case. There’s no way I can earn the money I earn here back in Australia.

Germany. Thats my plan if I need to leave the US. I will never work in Australia again after this or under this regime. I encourage Australian technologists to escape while they can.

It really bums me out, but I think I’m going to have to abandon Fastmail on principle. Hopefully this law will be repealed quickly before the damage to Australian software companies is too great.

Why victimize Fastmail? Law enforcement access to your email inbox remains exactly the same as before this bill was passed.

If you're just punishing any Australian company, FeelsBadMan (as an Australian developer).

Well, maybe because this person is doing just that, at it's scale. In the end australians are responsible for the laws they get voted so... that's probably, from an outsider's perspective the only guarantee of taking a "probably not crappy decision" imo...

Services are complicated, and I expect that encryption is used for a variety of purposes throughout. If a company is based in a jurisdiction that weakens the ability of service providers to use encryption for a wide variety of purposes, I’d rather avoid services based in that jurisdiction than develop a nuanced understanding of a service’s architecture and the interaction with the local laws that govern it.

In the end, I think I’ll probably look to some EU-based provider, largely because they seem to have the most reasonable set of laws with respect to human rights and privacy.

Sorry you feel like this is me victimizing Australian software devs. Honestly, I love Fastmail. But your country now has laws that preclude the service from moving toward a better encryption posture. If I ever want better, or don’t want to suss out how things got worse, I gotta abandon Australia. No hard feelings.

As others have pointed out, there’s at least two parties with unencrypted access to any given email I send or receive. And unless I’m PGP or SMIME encrypting everything, te security posture of email isn’t great to start. But I like to support services that make surveillance marginally more costly and marginally more resilient to volume back-door compromises. Australia’s taken a step back here and legally weakens Fastmail’s ability to improve here.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

I thought Fastmail offered (as much as is possible) “secure” email, but it says in their blog post that they routinely hand entire mailboxes over to law enforcement.

On the top hit they say they host everything in New Jersey, USA (with backups in seattle) but later say they are only governed by Australian law and don’t respond to US court orders: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html

Caveat emptor, I guess.

FastMail was never a "secure email service provider" - just an email provider that offer a good (UX-wise) alternative to Gmail, without mining your private conversations for advertising purposes.

I think they made it pretty clear a while back in a blog post on HN that security was not their #1 concern, like it is say for ProtonMail or other end-to-end encrypted email services.

Unless you and everyone you associate with were encrypting every single email passing through FastMail servers; this change doesn't mean a thing.

I know for a fact of a few companies (non gov orgs) that scrape netflow and other data straight from peering points at ISP locations.

I use Fastmail, and I'm not happy about this recent bill. But I don't believe it matters at all from what is current done/enabled.

I reached out to Fastmail support, who referred me to this post they wrote: https://fastmail.blog/2018/09/10/access-and-assistance-bill/

Don't worry - the rest of the Five Eyes will be getting their own version of this law soon, so Australian tech won't be at a security disadvantage for too long.

Why would they need those laws? One of the benefits of the Five Eyes establishment is that you can share intelligence. Having an allied partner able to do collection and analysis neatly side steps protections design to stop your own country from doing this type of activity on their own citizens.

The coalition clearly did this at the behest of the US and UK to be a 5 eyes beard. Yet this very action locks Australian tech companies out of those countries -- it's threatening my ability to work.

Labor had no reason to kowtow to this crap.

Have a source suggesting it was the US/UK?

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/627249909/australia-and-new-z...

Much discussion overnight here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18661483

Remember Lavabit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

I am disgusted by these clowns and as an Australian embarrassed that somehow these people ended up in power and representing us.

also: https://twitter.com/beneltham/status/1070276535007948800 i.e. it appears one the new powers cant be used by anti-corruption agencies.. funny that..

The utter stupidity and short-sightedness of politicians is on display in both the US and Australia this week.

What happened in the US?

Yeah, I'm curious as well! US legislators are surely just as aweful, but I haven't read about anything exceptional this week.

The hearing where Steve King asked iPhone questions to Google and asked why Trump shows up under "idiot" so often in image searches. When it is entirely automated.

Can we at least have a more intelligent conversation about how google designs its algorithms than "It's entirely automated".

Everyone here knows that google didn't just plug a bunch of servers together and it just magically came up with a search engine.

The idea that google has completely washed its hands of any untoward tweaking of search results to favour one party or another is just ignoring the reality of the claims being targeted at google.

It didn't help either that when questioned about things like the plan to "improve hispanic voter outreach in key states" that google just pretends like it never happened.

Also, it is a poorly kept secret that google employs a small army of editors to curate the top search terms.

I didn't think the issue worth discussing since it seemed to be a clear case of deliberate power inversion - politicians trying to put fear in the media instead of the other way around. It seemed to be clear cut messenger shooting because reality refused to honor their persecution complex.

Really Google is pretty stereotypical corporate gutless about taking off auto-complete at anything remotely controversial even when it is an objective truth that say Santorum got his name associated with literal filth in response to comparing legalized gay relationships with beastiality. I saw little reason to bother with complexities when the accusations were so coarse and wrong.

Also how is improving hispanic voter outreach remotely a matter of controversy? The US has universal voting rights. Their job is to connect people with information. Complaining about it strikes of the Dotcom Freudian slips of bribery in complaining about him making music videoes with rappers - that isn't remotely illegal and bringing it up says far more about the source than the subject. That is downright saintly compared to lobbying and media conglomerates giving blatant editorial pushes.

> Also how is improving hispanic voter outreach remotely a matter of controversy?

Well hispanics mostly vote for democrats, so by increasing hispanic turnout you will get more democratic votes. If google cared about democracy, why not help everyone get out the vote? Why are they specifically hiring busses for hispanics in swing states unless they are trying to help the democrats?

> The US has universal voting rights. Their job is to connect people with information.

Yes, and im telling you they were not connecting all people, but focusing on connecting certain kinds of people to vote.

> Complaining about it strikes of the Dotcom Freudian slips of bribery in complaining about him making music videoes with rappers

Huh?

> That is downright saintly compared to lobbying and media conglomerates giving blatant editorial pushes.

So i don't get your arguemnt other than something about kim dotcom and rappers and because of that it's actually a good thing?

How would you feel if facebook ran a campaign of "getting out the white vote" that paid millions of dollars in adds and hiring rentals and drivers to get out only white people to the polls? Or just replace white with democrat or republian.

I don't see how anyone sees this as "saintly" rather than exactly what it is, a company in it's position of power trying to influence the results of an election. I have no idea how anyone but a radical capitalist sees that as a great service.

Exactly. If race baiters can manipulate white __ to show all black results, and a bunch of left-wing trolls can manipulate the word idiot to show Trump, what's preventing real manipulation of results for more targeted searches during elections? it wouldn't be as easy to spot as the aforementioned things. I wasn't quite buying the whole search manipulation/conservative censorship thing until I watched the leaked meeting after Trump's election (which was basically a call to political action by Google's leadership), i quickly reconsidered.

The thing is it really manipulation if people actually all refer to Mitch McConnell as a turtle mockingly? SEO is a known "game" and arms race.

Correctness in a factual accuracy sense vs what people say are two very different search spaces and only the later is generically possible without knowing everything upfront.

The correct answer would be: The system we built learnt that association from the public discourse, and we neglected / decided not to remove said association.

The reality is that while most of Google's search system is autonomous, a lot of work goes into making adjustments to avoid a negative perception of Google. Removing politically incorrect phrases from autocomplete is an obvious example.

Is the effect of this limited to domestic industry, or does it affect Australians working abroad? Can the Australian government ask a citizen working abroad to spy on their foreign employer, and threaten them with imprisonment if they return without doing so?

They are simply making implicit things explicit. Though, I am not sure why

Maybe the implicit thing didn't work?

more likely the Coalition needed something they could all agree on to be seen to be doing something. There's precious little that the various bits of the parties agree on, so picking on the nerds was an easy one.

Why is Labor being "savaged" if the conservatives are the ones presenting, pushing for, and providing the overwhelming proportion of the votes for the bill?

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