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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The bill will go into effect in November.
The Australian government is implementing laws that'll pressure tech giants like Facebook and Google to decrypt messages for terrorist and criminal investigators, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on Friday, reports the ABC.
Investigators would ask for assistance from Apple, Facebook, Google and others in cases regarding terrorism, pedophile rings and drug trafficking.
"We've got a real problem in that the new law enforcement agencies are increasingly unable to find out what terrorists and drug traffickers and pedophile rings are up to because of the very high levels of encryption," Turnbull said to reporters.
"Where we can compel it, we will," he added, "but we will need the cooperation from the tech companies."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @08:17PM (16 children)
Tech companies can stop serving Australians until their government cooperates. Which chicken will swerve first? Public demand for social media? Or robber baron demand for advertising impressions?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 17 2017, @09:02PM (11 children)
Good news, here comes the startup governmentstoogesocialnetwork.com to eat all those delicious users who suddenly can't access facebook or google.
The bigger problem is the centralization of the internet around a few shitty social networks, but we can blame users for that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday July 17 2017, @09:24PM (7 children)
There. FTFY.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 17 2017, @09:28PM (6 children)
Nah, it's users. No one chose to use facebook because of technical limitations of other sites. A lot did because "all their friends used it".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @09:38PM
I choose not to use Facebook because I have no friends and thus I have no peer pressure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Monday July 17 2017, @09:42PM (4 children)
As Facebook gained popularity, there were several *distributed* social networks being developed. However, since most folks were getting upload speeds of 10% or less than their download speeds and ISPs were abusively blocking server ports for their residential customers, the distributed model couldn't take hold.
And if no one is running the distributed platforms, what's left?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday July 17 2017, @09:44PM (2 children)
I think you're underestimating the extent to which non-adoption of distributed platforms were because people are lazy. And overestimating the extent to which something at least 50% of internet users don't even know about affected their choices.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday July 17 2017, @11:15PM
Perhaps that's so. However, if users had a viable option (with reasonable upload speeds and less abusive ISP ToS), many more people would likely have known about the alternatives, as they would have been much more actively marketed.
However, there's really no way to know one way or the other, is there?
Not trying to argue with you here. I'd say that, given the lack of evidence either way, your assumptions are just as (in)valid as mine.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:04AM
Both Windows 98 and MacOS 10 shipped with a Personal Webserver [wikipedia.org]Enabling "Personal Web Sharing", OSX [macinstruct.com].
In the late 90's it was still expected that the average person would want to host a website.
The asymmetric speeds used to be a technical limitation. now, I am fairly sure they are a political one.
ISPs don't want Cable and VDSL cutting into their expensive symmetric business offerings. As a result they tune it for lots a burstable download speed, and not much upload.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:11AM
Distributed does not mean everybody self-serves from their own machine.
Consider Skype, before Ebay bought them (With NSA Money**). It was a pretty good distributed model, with a mix of skype's own servers distributed around the world, and volunteers who had direct connections and could run a node simply by opening a port or two. I did that for a few years. Never had any blocking by my cable company. I could always see the packet load in the network card stats.
Then Microsoft bought it from Ebay, (again with NSA money **) and immediately routed all call setup through their servers, (un interesting calls are then handed off to microsoft datacenters around the world, unless some government wants to listen. (Its still a distributed network, sort of).
The problem is not the the asymmetric nature of the home connection. The problem is that the various services (other than Jabber) were too busy competing to think about federating,
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @10:28PM (2 children)
Ah yes, blame the plebes. Are you aware of the network effect and first-mover advantage? People use what their friends use. It's a natural monopoly.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 18 2017, @12:13AM
Like the phone company, where you can't talk to anybody off-network?
Xmpp/Jabber handls this just fine.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18 2017, @03:07AM
People can still make their own decisions and refuse on principle to use abusive services like Facebook (which is a monstrous surveillance engine). Instead, you see people giving sites like Facebook not only their own information, but other people's information as well, even if those other people want nothing to do with these services! They are therefore complicit in the privacy violations.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday July 17 2017, @09:07PM (1 child)
No apple, facebook, google and others of their ilk? That's a MAJOR win for privacy.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 17 2017, @11:08PM
The companies that don't care about privacy will keep doing business in Australia. We had a story yesterday about Apple's plan to open a data centre in Guizhou, China.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Monday July 17 2017, @10:09PM
In an ideal world perhaps, but let's not kid ourselves. We all know that most corporations will trip over themselves to give the government what it wants provided it doesn't hit their bottom line.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 19 2017, @09:00AM
There's a PR battle to be won there.
Will the people blame the tech companies, or the government?