Australian Math Control- Coalition and Labor strike deal on inane anti-encrpytion bill, bill moves ahead to vote which is all but guaranteed to pass

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Like I said (it appears to have been deleted) if someone would kindly build in such a back door, then grab some private communications between a member of government and their mistress/rent-boy, make those communications public, 

 

Oh look, privacy is now a basic human right. At the least it would be specified only for them which just proves the point that governments should live in fear of those they govern.

Nahh, they'll probably just do what the UK did and except themselves from the law.

 

Investigatory Powers Bill: Politicians exempt themselves from new wide-ranging spying laws

 

Obviously politicians should have different laws which apply to them when it comes to security and privacy.

[Trik'Stari]

3 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Nahh, they'll probably just do what the UK did and except themselves from the law.

 

Investigatory Powers Bill: Politicians exempt themselves from new wide-ranging spying laws

 

Obviously politicians should have different laws which apply to them when it comes to security and privacy.

Not surprising at all. Completely intolerable behavior as well.

 

Such legislation should be responded to with public executions via mob.

[RejZoR]

10 hours ago, Sauron said:

They'll find out they can't enforce it at some point... encrypted traffic is indistinguishable from unencrypted traffic as long as both sides agree on the encryption method. It's still just a bunch of numbers.

Even then, what IS plain text? You could read a file that looks perfectly normal when in reality every letter, or word, or sentence or what have you is mapped to something completely different for the author and the recipient.

That's already some sort of encryption. Plain text literally means what you see is what it means. To the letter.

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

That's already some sort of encryption. Plain text literally means what you see is what it means. To the letter.

I'm saying you'll never be able to tell plain text from encrypted text.

[samcool55]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

That's already some sort of encryption. Plain text literally means what you see is what it means. To the letter.

That's encoding, not encrypting.

The letters you see aren't stored as letters, they are stored as bits, as we all know.

Your computer needs to decode those bits first to letters before we can see it.

 

Encoding is when it's publicly known how to encode/decode stuff.

Encryption is when it's not publicly known how to do it (because you need private keys which are clearly not public).

 

You can encode as much as you want, because it's publicly known how to decode it, which is fine because it happens all the time.

ASCII is a way of encoding/decoding stuff for example.

 

If they ban encoding, you can throw away every digital thing with a display, simple as that.

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

I'm saying you'll never be able to tell plain text from encrypted text.

Well you will if you have the right key. Seems like you got a bit carried away there in the argument O_o

[abazigal]

I think at this point, it will be easier to tech companies to just not serve the Australian market. Not to mention that any Australian company will be met with distrust. This move will likely end up hurting Australia the most. 

[Sauron]

8 hours ago, samcool55 said:

Well you will if you have the right key. Seems like you got a bit carried away there in the argument O_o

If people snooping on your conversation had the key it wouldn't be a very good encryption system, would it?

[samcool55]

4 hours ago, Sauron said:

If people snooping on your conversation had the key it wouldn't be a very good encryption system, would it?

If the wrong people have the private keys then yes, it wouldn't be a good system, but that's not the fault of the encryption itself (assuming it's still classified as safe) but poor key management. It doesn't matter how good an encryption is if the key gets into the wrong hands.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

If the wrong people have the private keys then yes, it wouldn't be a good system, but that's not the fault of the encryption itself (assuming it's still classified as safe) but poor key management. It doesn't matter how good an encryption is if the key gets into the wrong hands.

 

A good encryption system doesn't have a key to manage as such, (obviously a key exists or existed at some point, but it's deliberately not accessible or recorded so it can never get into the wrong hands, you can't steal what functionality does not exist).

[RejZoR]

10 hours ago, abazigal said:

I think at this point, it will be easier to tech companies to just not serve the Australian market. Not to mention that any Australian company will be met with distrust. This move will likely end up hurting Australia the most. 

That's already happening. Australian e-mail provider FastMail is already being distrusted by people and people are fleeing to other providers like ProtonMail who are not bound by Australian laws. It's already hurting them and the thing only just passed by their gov't.

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, samcool55 said:

If the wrong people have the private keys then yes, it wouldn't be a good system, but that's not the fault of the encryption itself (assuming it's still classified as safe) but poor key management. It doesn't matter how good an encryption is if the key gets into the wrong hands.

I think we're arguing over nothing - my point was that the Australian government can't tell a plain text from a file that seems to be plain text but is actually encrypted, which means they can't enforce this law.

[LAwLz]

38 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I think we're arguing over nothing - my point was that the Australian government can't tell a plain text from a file that seems to be plain text but is actually encrypted, which means they can't enforce this law.

Using encoding like "good" meaning bomb or whatever is extremely easy to decipher. 

In order for communications to stay private, encryption like that of AES is necessary, and that is very easy to detect and outlaw. 

[Sauron]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Using encoding like "good" meaning bomb or whatever is extremely easy to decipher.

There are more clever ways of doing this...

 

One could also send an AES encrypted message hidden in a bunch of plain text files (e.g. using the first letter of the document or whatever).

 

Steganography is also a thing and it's extremely hard to detect without the original image.

[RejZoR]

On 12/10/2018 at 3:58 PM, LAwLz said:

Nahh, they'll probably just do what the UK did and except themselves from the law.

 

Investigatory Powers Bill: Politicians exempt themselves from new wide-ranging spying laws

 

Obviously politicians should have different laws which apply to them when it comes to security and privacy.

Anyone remembers Enemy of the State with Will Smith? These people won't stop until their face is displayed on their TV in the living room. Then they'll freak out. The fact that these people are so scared of it that they exempted themselves from it should be a red flag by itself. If it's so harmless then why they exempt themselves from it? Apparently heads need to roll for real or parliament be on fire for this shit to stop, because things are starting to just get worse and worse in seemingly free countries...