Literally zero percent chance I touch any software made in Australia now.
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.
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...)
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).
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.
With a somewhat heavy heart, but I shall be cancelling my service there.
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?
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.
A user would have to double-VPN for ProtonVPN to be the solution. Right?
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
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.
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.
There is also an Australian entity `Atlassian Pty Ltd` but it’s not clear to me what role that has.