Australia's tech industry savages Labor for backing bill

Why victimize Fastmail? Law enforcement access to your email inbox remains exactly the same as before this bill was passed.

If you're just punishing any Australian company, FeelsBadMan (as an Australian developer).

Unless you and everyone you associate with were encrypting every single email passing through FastMail servers; this change doesn't mean a thing.

I know for a fact of a few companies (non gov orgs) that scrape netflow and other data straight from peering points at ISP locations.

I use Fastmail, and I'm not happy about this recent bill. But I don't believe it matters at all from what is current done/enabled.

Services are complicated, and I expect that encryption is used for a variety of purposes throughout. If a company is based in a jurisdiction that weakens the ability of service providers to use encryption for a wide variety of purposes, I’d rather avoid services based in that jurisdiction than develop a nuanced understanding of a service’s architecture and the interaction with the local laws that govern it.

In the end, I think I’ll probably look to some EU-based provider, largely because they seem to have the most reasonable set of laws with respect to human rights and privacy.

Sorry you feel like this is me victimizing Australian software devs. Honestly, I love Fastmail. But your country now has laws that preclude the service from moving toward a better encryption posture. If I ever want better, or don’t want to suss out how things got worse, I gotta abandon Australia. No hard feelings.

As others have pointed out, there’s at least two parties with unencrypted access to any given email I send or receive. And unless I’m PGP or SMIME encrypting everything, te security posture of email isn’t great to start. But I like to support services that make surveillance marginally more costly and marginally more resilient to volume back-door compromises. Australia’s taken a step back here and legally weakens Fastmail’s ability to improve here.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Can we at least have a more intelligent conversation about how google designs its algorithms than "It's entirely automated".

Everyone here knows that google didn't just plug a bunch of servers together and it just magically came up with a search engine.

The idea that google has completely washed its hands of any untoward tweaking of search results to favour one party or another is just ignoring the reality of the claims being targeted at google.

It didn't help either that when questioned about things like the plan to "improve hispanic voter outreach in key states" that google just pretends like it never happened.