>Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia said in July, “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”
Does math not apply in Australia? Is this where "new math" comes from?
Does math not apply in Australia? Is this where "new math" comes from?
You see, both terrorists and sex offenders are known to use maths. We must control maths for your own good. If you oppose us, you are supporting terrorism.
(This is just the latest episode of anti-science politicians nerfing the Australian knowledge economy. See also their mishandling of the national broadband network, the latest cybersec laws destroying remote work, and the gutting of the CSIRO.)
> Australian parliament passes encryption laws unamended
Three lines of argument are especially noteworthy:
“It is impossible to regulate cryptography.” or “Banning cryptography is like banning math.”
This argument misses the point in confusing the knowledge about cryptography with the wide-spread use of cryptography - or more specifically the use of cryptography to protect confidentiality. While it would be beyond the reach of governments to remove the knowledge about cryptography from the public sphere, it is certainly not impossible to threaten those that employ “illegal” cryptography with sanction.
This is exactly what happens with most regulation: Speed limits do not prevent the thought about driving fast, instead they address actually driving fast. It is behavior that is regulated, not thought.
So, similar arguments about the futility of regulation or the impossibility of enforcement aim a bit too high. Regulation does not require perfect adherence. Often it is enough if some people adhere to the specific law, and others can be punished in case of being caught. Again, speed limits are not perfectly enforceable, but they limit the number of drivers that drive recklessly, and it allows taking action against some drivers and thus nudging other drivers into compliance.
https://opaque.link/post/fog_of_cryptowar/
Shallow arguments don’t help anyone, they just marginalize the speaker beyond a narrow audience that already agrees with them.
At the same time, it provides a requirement for EMPLOYEES to make backdoors when asked without letting their employers know.
Or they could just use SMS and still be fine because the government has no idea how to actually identify problem data in the sea of data they have.
I'm very curious about how this will actually work, in practice, anywhere that uses any form of source control and even a modicum of process.
I mean, do you sneak this into an unrelated pull request and hope everyone reviewing it doesn't catch it? Do these changes by committing directly to master (assuming you even can do that), and just hope no one notices? What commit message do you use?
Even if you don't put this in source control, how do you get it deployed? Do you just tell your ops team "uh, don't use the automated deployment or the artifacts the build server produced, instead install from this zip file I made on my machine"? What happens if they are deploying a new version on a day you happen to not be there?
Even assuming you manage to do all this, what happens when you're eventually caught? For example, someone finds a remote exploit bug in the code, does a blame, sees your name next to an innocent-sounding-but-clearly-misleading commit message and injection of an apparent deliberate exploit... are you allowed to explain? I would assume, especially if you can't/won't explain, that the employer could fire you on the spot, so do you just have to go along with that?
A capable ;) agency wouldn't target the developers. They'd target the SysAdmin's who look after the build servers.
With agency backed er... malware added to the build servers, they'd be capable of adding on-the-fly exploit code to the shipped binaries.
Things like reproducible builds - gaining popularity among some OSS Communities for few years now - help to at least detect this.
Could be very difficult to detect for lots of situations. eg side loaded mobile apps, proprietary desktop apps, likely others too
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-17/innovation-nation-tak...
Australians ran out of faces for the palming.
Turnbull's replacement of FTTP with FTTN in deference to Telstra was shameful and showed how much weight he gave innovation. One year on NBN and I've already had a week offline (and no landline phone) due to faulty copper.
His appearance in the Panama Papers and alleged ties to Russian oligarchs bear out the reality of his world view: Malcolm is in it for Malcolm. I'd even question his Republican stance as being nothing more than posturing.
The copper at my street aged away and instead of laying a fiber optic, they put in new copper.
Physics laws exist and are fairly insurmountable. You throw an animal in a sack into a river and the law will get you arrested for it. This for not make the physics "fail to apply." And so it is with math, which software does.
What are good laws to have with respect software?
I'm wildly pro strong encryption myself. Software is not a law free zone, never has been, never will be. Saying otherwise is a little silly, just like the proposed (enacted) encryption laws are (imho) silly... In the US, Britain, Australia.
Hahaha brilliant! Thanks for making me laugh, that's the sharpest quip I've heard all day! :D
At the same time it reminds me of Tim Minchin talking about alternative medicine.
It was originally considered plural. That may even by why the transition from “mathematic” to “mathematics” happened in English.
But then I am from Australia.
The closest pattern to that is consistently not used with numbers of hundreds evenly divisible by ten. (OTOH, it is often used with “and”; the rule of not using and between components within the whole number portion but only to separate the whole number from a fractional part is not consistently applied in that informal alternative to the more formal thousands-hundreds form.)
ex: $270.50 -> Two hundred seventy dollars and fifty cents
Very vague, weak citation: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=maths%2Cmath%2...
Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio
Fancy that.
"Bring down the government. They don't, they don't speak for us."