this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 188 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Andy Yen says draft safety standards ‘would force online services … to access, collect and read users’ private conversations’

What the hell Australia. This isn't gonna magically help you prevent the next Emu war.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago

But it will help them in their corruption and self-enrichment, which is the entire purpose of all attempts to erode civil liberties.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Australia is a country with shit laws as someone who lives in Australia

Life is fine unless you somehow manage to break those stupid laws

For example there was that video of the one guy from Australia who wanted to ban anime, yeah some of our politician's are that stupid

Thankfully anime isn't banned completely but hentai is which I find stupid because it's fictional drawings

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

The emu are watching. Waiting. They cannot be stopped.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or Kangawars. Or Toadwars. Or Kangatoadwars becaue you know those bastards are gonna fuck and make a super beast death machine animal...thing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’d watch the wheels off of “Kangatoadwars!”

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[–] [email protected] 144 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It's worse then you think. As a Australian citizen you are required to comply with any order which includes leaking code and introducing back doors. Failure to comply or notifying your employer about the request will result in federal charges with a sentence between 20 to 60 years in prison. The legislation that contains this was passed almost a year ago.

Recently there's been a wave of mass disruptions and data theft in Australia including most of our ports halting operations for a day and one of our largest phone and internet service providers being compromised where millions of peoples personal information like driver licences and passports being leaked.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's a really fucking stupid law. Do we need to worry about Australia becoming fascist?

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don't want to believe this, my brain is refusing to process that statement, I have stared at that article in a state of disbelief for a minute. Surely someone can't be that stupid, right?

I have heard plenty of brain dead arguments by anti-encryption people, but this is by far the stupidest. There is no way, there is just no way that he's so.... I want to say brain dead, but that would imply that there is even a brain there for it to be dead.

Regardless of political affiliation, or even the individual's stance on encryption, surely there can't be a single person that heard that statement and didn't laugh at it, right?

Perhaps the Australian stereotype of being upside down holds some truth, considering his... utterance; he must walk on his hands and constantly get bit by snakes and attacked by drop bears on his daily commute, that's the only explanation for how someone can make such a statement

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Oh, it's no fun. And we have media concentration issues here too, so you won't get balanced or even a mention of both sides of an issue.

Australia has been the testing ground for implementing Big Brother's spying technology policies. The ones that are often tried later on in the US or UK.

Nearly all of them have passed with full support from the two major parties here. I wish everyone better luck.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Too late. Already is.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How does that even work? When you push code for a back door it's going to still go through a code review so it's not exactly going to be secret, right?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

20year minimum, really? Isnt that also for murder?

[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago (13 children)

I recently switched my email from gmail to proton mail, because fuck google's.. well... everything. Glad to hear that Proton Mail keeps fighting for privacy!

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I changed back when google got rid of the free "mail for your domain" and frankly its been a great thing for me. They keep announcing new things that replacing my existing apps.

They have a password manager now that I use. They are finally adding actual fuction to their online drive storage so I can sync files and backup photos.

Its been well worth the price for me. If only they had an office suite lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I really wish their password manager used a serif font, though. That's pretty unacceptable if you're generating secure passwords.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Please don't use serif fonts for UI elements. Imagine the buttons on your file manager being Times New Roman. (eww.) I think what you're looking for is a monospaced font that's designed to distinguish O/0, I/1/l, etc.

Plug for one of my favorite fonts: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you explain why them not using a serif font is bad?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Generally speaking, serif fonts make it easier to distinguish between visually similar characters like o, O, and 0 or 1, I, and l.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only thing I haven't found a good replacement for was how G Drive also handles Office style documents. I make use of that a lot, especially from my phone. But I agree, Proton Mail hasn't been painful one bit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Seriously? My workplace uses google drive, and many documents are made with word. ... A very common problem is that sometimes someone opens a word doc from the web interface of google drive - which automatically can conveniently opens it with google docs, which totally screws up the formatting and then autosaves it.

(I hate google, and I resent that even after I've removed all aspects of it from my home & personal usage, I still have to use it at work.)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Proton's feature set is very limited and kind of all over the place depending on platform, and development is incredibly slow, especially for Linux, but I do believe they're committed to privacy and they do have a whole suite of products now under a single, very reasonably-priced subscription.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (7 children)

To everyone saying they've changed to protonmail, check out https://simplelogin.io/ , owned by proton and free for all paying proton members. Unlimited email aliases so you can have a unique email per service. The apps also on fdroid.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just finishing up that transition myself and glad to hear I made a good choice!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Same, using Proton mail and I am now blissfully Google free. Something else I found the holidays good for is finding out all the old accounts I have floating out there from sites that I interacted with over the years so I can cancel them or change the email if i decide to keep them. But, no more Google! Next on my list is Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm in the (gradual) process of switching all my stuff from Gmail and Google to Proton mail. I really like the mail client and Proton Drive works better on my computers than Google Drive did, but Proton Drive doesn't back up my phone yet and I wish they had an office suite like Google does. I don't put anything important or private on Google docs, but it's useful to be able to access my textbook notes from any of my computers. I haven't used the password manager because I'm using Bitwarden, which I really like.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

They just released photo backups on android

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has proposed cloud and messaging service providers should detect and remove known child abuse material and pro-terror material “where technically feasible” – as well as disrupt and deter new material of that nature.

The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.

I so love these magic wand-waving legislators. "Spy on your users and control what they do on your encrypted platform, but in a way that doesn't break encryption or violate privacy..."

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If a corporation won't ruin a good thing, you leave it to government to get the job done.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The Australian government would have you believe that we're in the middle of some kind of CP endemic and everyone needs to suffer for it.

This will catch precisely nobody, as the criminals will immediately move to a different platform, of which there are many.

I host my own mail. If the AFP want to inspect it, they'll need a warrant.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.

But privacy and security groups argue the draft standards, as written, could allow the eSafety commissioner to force companies to compromise encryption to comply.

Andy Yen, the founder and chief executive of Proton, told Guardian Australia the proposed standards “would force online services, no matter whether they are end-to-end encrypted or not, to access, collect, and read their users’ private conversations”.

“These proposals could not only force companies to bypass their own encryption, but could put businesses and citizens at risk while doing little to protect people from the online harms they are intended to address,” he said.

A spokesperson for the eSafety commissioner said Inman Grant welcomed feedback on the draft standards – including on the technical feasibility exception.

“Having mandatory and enforceable codes in place, which put the onus back on industry to take meaningful action against the worst-of-the-worst content appearing on their products and services, is a tremendously important online safety milestone,” Inman Grant said.


The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 187 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The eSafety regulator has stressed in an associated discussion paper it “does not advocate building in weaknesses or back doors to undermine privacy and security on end-to-end encrypted services”.

Just straight up lying with that one.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Technically maybe, but not necessarily. This is tactic that executives use all the time to force their employees to do illegal, or unethical actions, without ever telling them to.

For example, Wells Fargo executives didn't tell their bank employees to commit fraud, but they set their sales targets such that the ONLY way to reasonably achieve them was to defraud their customers.

However, I didn't read the actual white paper, so maybe it does explicitly say backdoors need to be built.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Good. I fully support them. Fuck this shit

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Organisations and groups who want to protect privacy should come up with ways themselves on how to protect their services from certain activities.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You mean like implementing strong data privacy measures and fighting regulators to protect them? That sounds like a good idea to me. If you’re interested, that is what the article is about.

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