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Literally zero percent chance I touch any software made in Australia now.
by lwansbrough 8y ago
Literally zero percent chance I touch any software made in Australia now.
- TheChaplain 8y agoIsn't Atlassian Australian? Or did they move?
- stock_toaster 8y agoI believe Fastmail is too, sadly.
- askaboutit 8y agoThey’re Australian but have offices in other countries. I believe they would move for the right reasons. This seems like a pretty big reason, considering they’re targeted at enterprise. But move where? UK will have this next, America does this without any laws at much greater effect and scale.
- ENGNR 8y agoIceland? Switzerland? 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
- mikro2nd 8y agoCalifornia. I had to agree to some changes to their ToS the other day (for Bitbucket) in which I agreed to dispute resolution under California law. I suppose that's a pretty good indication of their thinking. It's not like this legislation is unexpected or sudden.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoAre the U.S. "gag orders" equivalent to this new Australian law?
- cyphar 8y agoNo, the new law has no judicial review and has a few other things that wouldn't fly in the US. It's markedly worse (though don't get me wrong, the US definitely has it pretty bad in this area too).
- girvo 8y agoYou say that like FISA Courts are actually judicial review and not rubbing stamps... where you win is that you have a stronger set of rights and case law about it.
- cyphar 8y agoThe difference is that there isn't even fake judicial review. And I disagree that we have a stronger set of rights -- the difference is that the NSA explicitly ignores your constitutional rights. 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.
- keithnz 8y agoSo that means things like BitBucket / Trello are now all fair game to the Australian government?
- toyg 8y agoTrello is based in NYC. I don’t know the actual corporate structure, but they could potentially be spun into a controlled company, maybe, to avoid this law somehow. 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.
- msmithstubbs 8y agoIt looks like the cloud services are supplied by a company incorporated in the US [1] ‘Atlassian, Inc’. They probably needed to do this when they listed on the NASDAQ. There is also an Australian entity `Atlassian Pty Ltd` but it’s not clear to me what role that has. [1]: https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service
- ShinTakuya 8y agoAtlassian is still very much based in Sydney. The CEOs (there's two joint CEOs), vast majority of the engineering teams and more are all just down the road from me. As with most large international tech companies, they have a number of different legal entities for regulatory, tax and other reasons.
- siquick 8y agoThere is still a substantial engineering team in Sydney
- bigiain 8y agoFor now. I bet there's a lot of passports being dug out and resumes being polished up tonight...
- neotek 8y agoThis immensely stupid law applies to any business that operates in Australia, which includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Github, and every other major tech company on the planet. 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.
- bigiain 8y agoCutting loose ~25million potential customers might actually be a financially rational for some companies. It's not like we here in Australia are really a very big market on the global stage... 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...)
- alfiedotwtf 8y agoPlease don't turn off updates. You're going to miss out on exploit fixes, which puts you in a worse position.
- hvklos 8y agoIf they want to continue doing business in Australia (and they very much do) 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).
- cam_l 8y agoOf they don't get pulled, well, that tells you something too.
- medecau 8y agoAtlassian, Sage, and others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_companies_of_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Software_companies_of...
- Fordec 8y agoHuzzah, another talking point to convince the team to migrate off Bitbucket. Silver lining I guess!