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Ask HN: Will doors start slamming shut for Australia around the world?

5 points by andrewstuart 8y ago

Australia's new encryption laws make it probably more of a security risk than Huawei. Will the world start closing its doors to Australia?

steve_taylor 8y ago
If I was working at Atlassian in the Australian office, I would be very worried about Atlassian pulling out of Australia. A lot of companies use Bitbucket. Atlassian could be compelled to sneak backdoors into other conpanies’ code. There would be issues around incorrect hashes, but most devs would put it down to a mistake on their part and just re-clone the repo. Some backdoors will go indetected and some won’t. If you’re using Bitbucket, consider migrating to your own Gitlab instance, hosted in a country whose government values privacy.
- andrewstuart 8y ago
  What about the AWS Sydney region, and for that matter Google and Microsoft Australia?
  - bigiain 8y ago
    Amazon Google and Microsoft all definitely have enough business interests in Australia to have become untrustworthy due to these laws. I wonder how long it’ll be until someone like Digital Ocean starts advertising “we have no Australian office, and we’ve let go all our Australian staff!”? (Having said that, DO are at least as susceptible to NSLs. I wonder who the most reliable non five eyes cloud hosting provider is?)
phendrenad2 8y ago
Needs an "ask HN" in the title...
- tlb 8y ago
  Added
tlb 8y ago
Governments have been trying to thwart crypto for a long time, with limited impact on people who seriously care about security. In the mid-90s, it was illegal to export strong crypto developed in the US outside. So for quite a while programs would come with dummy crypto, and before building you'd download the actual crypto libraries from Finland and link them in instead. Also for a time, RSA had a patent on public key cryptography and enforced it against companies using it (say, for running a secure webserver) unless they used their closed-source library. So using crypto in the US was made difficult, and yet the internet was fine and most people got the crypto they wanted (except, ironically, defense contractors.) Although the new law sucks, everything will probably be fine there too. The Internet is pretty resistant to the sort of damage this law could create.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Export regulation had a lasting impact on everyone's security, because the mechanisms used to support it, even for people who had strong crypto available to them, were themselves vulnerable. See for instance FREAK.
simonblack 8y ago
When the Clipper fiasco happened in the States about 30 years ago, it didn't take long before the US started being left behind in crypto work by the rest of the world, especially by open-source crypto like PGP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

5 points by andrewstuart 8y ago

Australia's new encryption laws make it probably more of a security risk than Huawei. Will the world start closing its doors to Australia?

steve_taylor 8y ago

If I was working at Atlassian in the Australian office, I would be very worried about Atlassian pulling out of Australia. A lot of companies use Bitbucket. Atlassian could be compelled to sneak backdoors into other conpanies’ code. There would be issues around incorrect hashes, but most devs would put it down to a mistake on their part and just re-clone the repo. Some backdoors will go indetected and some won’t. If you’re using Bitbucket, consider migrating to your own Gitlab instance, hosted in a country whose government values privacy.

andrewstuart 8y ago
What about the AWS Sydney region, and for that matter Google and Microsoft Australia?
- bigiain 8y ago
  Amazon Google and Microsoft all definitely have enough business interests in Australia to have become untrustworthy due to these laws. I wonder how long it’ll be until someone like Digital Ocean starts advertising “we have no Australian office, and we’ve let go all our Australian staff!”? (Having said that, DO are at least as susceptible to NSLs. I wonder who the most reliable non five eyes cloud hosting provider is?)

phendrenad2 8y ago

Needs an "ask HN" in the title...

tlb 8y ago
Added

tlb 8y ago

Governments have been trying to thwart crypto for a long time, with limited impact on people who seriously care about security. In the mid-90s, it was illegal to export strong crypto developed in the US outside. So for quite a while programs would come with dummy crypto, and before building you'd download the actual crypto libraries from Finland and link them in instead. Also for a time, RSA had a patent on public key cryptography and enforced it against companies using it (say, for running a secure webserver) unless they used their closed-source library. So using crypto in the US was made difficult, and yet the internet was fine and most people got the crypto they wanted (except, ironically, defense contractors.) Although the new law sucks, everything will probably be fine there too. The Internet is pretty resistant to the sort of damage this law could create.

tptacek 8y ago
Export regulation had a lasting impact on everyone's security, because the mechanisms used to support it, even for people who had strong crypto available to them, were themselves vulnerable. See for instance FREAK.

simonblack 8y ago

When the Clipper fiasco happened in the States about 30 years ago, it didn't take long before the US started being left behind in crypto work by the rest of the world, especially by open-source crypto like PGP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip