Comment by kriops
7 months ago
What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?
7 months ago
What an absolute clown literally trying to outlaw math. Are people going to jail every time they apply Fermat's little theorem, or what exactly is the plan here?
I suggest you look into how much of chemistry, physics and biology has already been "outlawed", and how the legislatures went about it ?
If I possess, e.g., a certain quantity of U235, the government can act on the material, e.g., confiscate it because it is a physical entity. Meanwhile, I can arrive at the knowledge required for encryption, and even an encrypted message, a priori.
In other words, it is not even slightly comparable.
That knowledge is not illegal, nor would it necessarily be illegal to write it down.
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You are familiar with “intent” right? It’s not right, that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.
Tell that to Chinese trying to get through the Great Firewall.
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Yeah, nitrogen chemistry, high-concentration hydrogen peroxyde is already fairly restricted, as well as poisons.
Including in the US. The "right to bear arms" doens't cover high-energy explosives.
High explosives are even less regulated than firearms in the US. You can buy them by the ton and explosives are very inexpensive. This does not circumvent compliance with regulations for safe transport and storage, which is the practical limitation.
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Interestingly, the laws around high explosives in the US aren’t as restricted as you think.
You can make lots of things legally. The laws are around storage and transport. Where the short version is you 24hours and you mostly can’t transport.
Ackshually, when the NFA was passed to 'tax' explosives ('destructive devices'), it was considered unconstitutional infringement on the right to keep/bear arms to ban explosives, machine guns, etc so they 'taxed' them instead. You can still buy/manufacture them with a tax stamp.
Also when congress de-funded (outlawed) the process for felons to restore their firearm rights, they forgot to do it with explosives. So even a felon can have high-energy explosives legally.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
All Australians now live with the Assistance and Access Act 2018, where yes in fact if you use the illegal math, receive a TCN and do not comply… straight to jail.
Australia is dystopic in more ways than one[1], so this unfortunately does not surprise me.
I probably do not have to point out the issue with the soundbite, but I am doing it anyway: The “laws” of mathematics are valid across all of existence. Last time I checked, that includes Australia. As a matter of fact, I have personally stored encrypted communications with an Australian vendor after the law went into effect (not that I knew about that law in particular). And I can confirm that the communications were indeed still encrypted.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w (Honest Government Ad | Our Last Fair Election?)
This doesn't seem hard to do. Messaging apps exist in app stores, transmit data through one of a few ISPs often past national boundaries to a couple of data centers. It's not hard for a national government to see the communication and stop it or punish those attempting it. It could be done by technical means, putting pressure of the stores, or anywhere along the chain. Countries block all social media by fiat. It seems easy enough.
It is easy to ban what are currently the most popular apps for encrypted messaging. But the math is more or less trivial, to the point that this will simply kick off a cat-and-mouse game the government cannot win. And that is before steganography comes into play.
At the absolute worst, OTPs are trivially uncrackable and relatively foolproof, assuming you can exchange keys out of band. Furthermore, it is trivial to generate keys that decode captured ciphertext into decoy cleartext, should the government try to coerce the keys from you.
I'm not saying OTP is practical for regular people in everyday chats (though it certainly can be for text, in my opinion). However, it is apparent to me that if RSA+AES becomes unviable, for example, then it will have nearly no impact on any criminal operation that cares about security.
I agree with you in substance. But do these cute little word games—where we redefine commonly understood strings of words with idiosyncratic meanings to obscure what’s actually being disputed—work on anyone? It’s like saying that gun control is “literally trying to outlaw chemical reactions and kinetic energy.” Why not just clearly articulate what right you think society should protect?
Define encryption.
To help you along, you basically have two alternatives:
1. Be intentionally vague, so the definition encapsulates just about anything and can then be applied and enforced at will. This is obviously what they are going for, by the way, and *that* is the word game being played here.
2. Some set of sets of mathematical functions, contingent on some properties pertaining to computational complexity. This is what cryptography is and, as such, is the correct way to go about it. Non-exhaustively, one property we are looking for is that some data can only be considered 'encrypted' if the computational complexity of decoding it without a secret/key is strictly higher than with said secret/key.
As I also said in another comment, I can derive an encrypted message a priori. That makes it fundamentally different from any analogies tied to physics or chemistry.
You mean like '1st amendment' and 'freedom of speech'?
This is Denmark?
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Trying to ban or weaken encryption is like trying to outlaw gravity because people fall down stairs
They'll just ban encrypted apps?
Define 'encrypted app' in a way that is not just completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent.
It's almost as if being able to ban things in a completely arbitrary and internally inconsistent way was exactly the point...
They'll just ban apps like Signal.
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And if they do that, do you think it will affect what criminals do?
Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.
It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."
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I don't have enough context, why are they trying to ban encryption in the first place?
Now that you see how the government lies in the area you actually understand, try to extrapolate a little and think about what else the government might be lying about ;)