It's funny to see a coin like this minted considering the Australian government's position on encryption and privacy (well, not just Australia - pretty much any other Commonwealth country too).
Usually such a comment is a reference to a certain American media mogul who has tried to swing several recent elections and found themselves largely preaching to the choir with a very much reduced audience. But their miss rate is now exceedingly high: 2022 federal miss. 2022 SA miss. 2020 Qld miss. 2019 federal hit. 2018 Vic miss.
In fact, the people in charge in Australia are basically the voters. It upsets some people that Australian voters behaved basically the same as voters in every other democratic country in the post-1970s inflation and post-cold war liberal periods.
He was born in Australia, but in 1985 he surrendered his Australian citizenship in order to meet the legal requirements to become the owner of a US television network.
Mostly the people who go to elite schools - Oxford/cambridge etc, that's the training ground, for better or worse, children of old money, and those of new money, with a polite sprinkle of everyman. It's not a permanent group though, some enter, some leave over time, money is the driver though, and the desire to be in control.
A loud representation that you can see in action are the children of trump, even with all their obvious faults they have access to multi billion dollar deals that few average people see. Murdoch et al is their propaganda arm, if you have an agenda you'd like to be in the public sphere and have lots of money, then you can use these to move public opinion in that direction.
It wasn't super difficult, and was quite fun. I'm not a cryptography person and have zero knowledge of ciphers or anything like this, but a friend and I saw it and thought it'd be fun to give it a shot. We shared ideas but pretty much solved each puzzle ourselves in different ways (which was interesting to see in itself).
The hidden 5th puzzle was both the hardest to get going on (due to no hints compared to the others), while also being among the easiest once you figured out what it actually was.
> There's a challenge out there to see who can correctly break all the layers, and, would you believe it, yesterday the coin was launched at 8:45am; we put up our web form and said, 'Hey, if you think you've got the answers, fill in the form'," she said.
It’s just a game for them to popularize code breaking and do some youth recruiting.
They spent a lot of taxed money on the stunt. To have it solved the same day means almost everybody they might have engaged with it has already lost interest.
What? Its not some impossible hard code, its just a fin little exercise to get attention. It wasn’t intended to be unbreakable or take more than an hour to figure out by people interested in cryptography, the news is just that a particular 14y old was enthusiastic and also ready at the mark to speed run it.
Your attitude is equivalent to complaining about a newspaper sudoku being solved by someone early in the day, because “now no one wants to solve it and the paper wasted all that money making it”.
You really cannot perceive the difference between a few square inches on a newspaper page and a custom-minted coin?
They clearly hoped it would take at least weeks for a full solution, so they could have multiple press events. Or if not, they should have; incompetent either way.
These codes are really just little puzzles, modern cryptography has no weaknesses of the kind these codes have.
There are even sites that teach you about bad modern cryptography, like cryptohack [0] but in general the kind of skills you learn there won't be useful either unless you happen to find a piece of software that rolled their own crypto and did something really dumb (which does happen, occasionally, see the Sony PS3 hack where they used a not-so-random value for crypto, which made it broken)
No doubt it's an excellent strategy to identity where any future/potential opposition may come from.
As Sun Tzu says in The Art of War:
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
It's just fun. They're not using this encryption to hide anything important. Frankly this sort of encryption solving is a bit of a dead art. Mostly the code breaking is either data engineers making the crackers more efficient, or those people looking at weaknesses of particular implementations or protocols.
Breaking custom encryption is dead in any country smaller than say, the UK or maybe Canada.
It is getting headlines exactly today, and never again. The goal was not to get it solved; they already knew the solution. The goal was to get a lot of people working on it. Now we know a motivated 14-y.o. can solve it in a few minutes, so it does not merit attention. "Plonk", as we used to say before endless September.
The fifth level was a binary puzzle hidden in the colouration of the writing. Darker/lighter letters were 1's and 0's. The second part of the 5th level was that the other ring of writing had 3 "colours", which were the dots, dashes, and spaces in a morse code string.
The only reason the fifth level was "hidden" was that there wasn't obvious hints/clues pointing to it like the first 4, where each specifically hinted at how to solve the next.
I doubted the fact that there really was a fifth level. It seems like exactly what someone would make up on the spot in an embarrasing situation like this.
It's important to always remember that such advertising is actually soft propaganda.
In the early days the Government essentially didn't want the citizenry to know that ASIO and ASD existed but if it did learn of their existence then it was important to keep discussion about them at the bottom of the political agenda.
That's long past and now the citizenry has some basic knowledge about how these agencys operate and that the work they do can at best be described as both 'unsavory' and secretive. That is, even if they're essential, they don't have the best of images.
That's where soft propaganda becomes essential and now steps in, that is it's time to create a 'warm and comfortable' feeling about them in the public's eye.
Coins have always had value, authority and presence not to mention ubiquity, it's why the head of the reigning sovereign is always on them.
To provide these 'questionable' agencies a better image what could be better than to associate them with all that solid authoritative suff?
Right, you've got the picture.
In fact the linguist and politial philosopher Noam Chomsky wrote a book about it called Manufacturing Consent:
> The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 requires telecommunications companies to retain a particular set of telecommunications data for at least 2 years.
> … is not defined in the TIA Act but is generally understood to refer to information about a communication that is not the content or substance of a communication.
> The Act requires CSPs to preserve stored communications at the request of certain domestic agencies, or the Australian Federal Police acting on behalf of certain foreign countries, in advance of a warrant to access the information being issued.
> ...
> There are two types of preservation notices—domestic (‘which cover stored communications that might relate either to a contravention of certain Australian laws or to security’) and foreign (‘which cover stored communications that might relate to a contravention of certain foreign laws’).
> In turn, there are two types of domestic preservation notices—historic (‘which cover stored communications held by the carrier on a particular day’) and ongoing (‘which cover stored communications held by the carrier in a particular 30-day period’).
> A foreign preservation notice only covers stored communications held by the carrier on a particular day. The Ombudsman and the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security will have oversight in relation to preservation notices.
Preservation notices are incredibly rare, and no drag net requirements exist in Australia. CSPs are free to store such things, but generaly don't - beyond required metadata.
You're pretending it doesn't exist at all, when in fact the Fourth Amendment provides enormous, common protection - which some government agents rarely violate (leading you to claim the "government" ignores it entirely, which is false).
The Fouth Amendment is not only still fully valid, it continues to hold up extraordinarily well when it comes to protecting you in a court of law.
Edward Snowden's revelations included the detail that back in 2008, the then-DSD sought to /give away/ bulk data on australian citizens to foreign spy agencies.
In response to the revelations of this attack on Australian democracy, launched by an agency tasked to defend it, australia's attorney general focused on declaring Mr Snowden a traitor.
Australia has been blatantly violating the privacy of its citizens increasingly over the last 2 decades. Its surveillance legislation is unrivaled in developed countries except for perhaps the UK.
Sigh, I see this pop up so I should really just copy and paste one of my other answers, but.
Australians supported handing in our guns after Port Arthur, Australians that want to engage in firearm use for sport, hunting, antique collection or pest control can all still do so within appropriate circumstances that the public overwhelmingly support.
Low hanging fruit, moronic, pro-gun sentiment only shows how little you understand about the country you are talking about.
(Not an endorsement for the Aus 3-Letters spying, which is a different issue.)
I visited Australia while on deployment and the process to go hunting, including the temporary firearms permit and training required, was rather more simple than I’d been led to believe. Getting permission through my CO was harder.
Weird, somehow the United States is mysteriously lacking in armed protest and pushback of their corporation's and government's surveillance, even post-Snowden's reveals of that exact thing against their own citizens.
That’s right, because if I had a gun I’d be taking it to parliament to demand that they stop [something]! And [something] would surely be different as a result!
You can pull it up. It doesn't change that it was an empty political stunt, that most guns were not in the buyback, that people simply took the buyback money to buy new guns (which you can check at the time by massive gun profits selling guns to Australians), or, as I pointed out above, that there are more guns now than before Port Authur [1].
So go ahead and post the video. Then read the rest of the story.
"Let’s hope that one of them was, “Australia should be a republic”"
Not that far from where I live at the intersection of two busy roads there used to be a tall concrete Besser block wall with spray-painted graffiti scrawled on it in large black lettering which read:
"The Australian people are bloody-minded sheep."
The truly remarkable thing about the graffiti was that in over 20 years no one covered it up or spray-painted over it. (And it would have been easy as there was a bus stop right nearby with easy pedestrian access.)
The wall has gone now as it has made way for apartments (I had always meant to photograph it but had never gotten around to doing so). :(
Two observations: that no one had bothered to tamper with the message or paint over it (and, say, the Council could easily have, it being on a public thoroughfare and that removing graffiti was a policy) says something rather profound in that amongst the population there's a general acceptance of the fact.
Second, the Australian electorate is remarkably politically conservative. With the exception of a few minor instances, it has never done anything radical and that's essentially been the case right back to federation in 1901 (that was when Australia became an independent state after Britain gave it its Independence).
Thus, as a nation, Australia has always kowtowed to Britain and after WWII it has done so with the US.
When a law is enacted in Australia one can bet top dollar that it's already been enacted in Britain or more latterly the US (but to a lesser extent). Originality doesn't exist in Australia's political DNA.
That's why Australia is part of the Five Eyes agreement, without Britain and the US it'd behave like a lost child at a country fair.
Trouble is everyone knows it, especially so the Chinese who've essentially enslaved the country economically.
I've actually thought that some of the recent legislation, specifically the metadata retention and anti-encryption, has been the five-eyes using Australia's democratic populace of "bloody-minded sheep" as a testing ground and/or precedent for implementing the same privacy invasive legislation in the other countries that may be less 'compliant' without said precedent.
My thought has been even more pessimistic than that. Why even pass your own legislation when your intelligence agencies can just get Australia to extract that info for you.
You don't need to actually backdoor the targets device, just the platform they use. Who cares about jurisdiction as long as your friends are willing to hand over data in the interest of international security.
From the standpoint of someone who did not agree with that legislation or the subsequent follow on changes that pulled on even more… and several less internationally noticed little legal things… We squawked, as loudly as we could, but it made no difference, because they went and did it anyway. So it wasn’t even a strangled squawk, but a completely ignored squawk.
It really doesn’t help that we have very few constitutional rights with which to push back with as any sort of “inalienable” baseline.
> "The Australian people are bloody-minded sheep."
> The truly remarkable thing about the graffiti was that in over 20 years no one covered it up or spray-painted over it. (And it would have been easy as there was a bus stop right nearby with easy pedestrian access.)
Everybody who saw it probably thought "yeh, it's a fair cop, mate".
In the next 100yrs the north polar ice will melt enough that China can go around the top to it's trading partners. The strait of Malacca next to Malaysia will stop being as critically important as it is now to China's oil imports.
It's likely the SEA region will cool off, the action will move up north and all those subs we bought will go from AUKUS to AWKWARD.
Aus just needs to cut costs and forward into quality (koalaity?) manufacturing and science. Or we could just keep ripping up the ground like a bulldozer on a bender and hope China doesn't tank the iron ore price.
Oh, I didn't read your post properly. For some reason I thought you were talking about routes opening due to sea level rising.
The northern sea route is not given the same scrutiny as the strait in that video though. Clearly if western allies were blockading China's sea trade at choke points, the sea route has some fairly obvious problems.
It's the defensible inland routes which will be the most important. To that end, the push to expand NATO into Ukraine almost could not have gone better for China if they had orchestrated it.
> Trouble is everyone knows it, especially so the Chinese who've essentially enslaved the country economically.
I think of it as a chinese mining province. The long period of growth was merely the long period of Chinese growth. And that growth was good for the country, but also terrible: the "dutch disease" of high commodity prices gutted manufacturing and other businesses.
And de-incentivised governments to really think about what the nation needed, as middle class homeowners continued to see their net worth rise, thus "what, me worry?"
> The truly remarkable thing about the graffiti was that in over 20 years no one covered it up or spray-painted over it. (And it would have been easy as there was a bus stop right nearby with easy pedestrian access.)
To do that it would've had to have said "Remove this grafitti immediately, sheep!"
I don't know much about Aussie politics, but is there more to becoming a republic than removing The Queen from her largely ceremonial role? I'm guessing the Governor-General she appoints would become democratically elected instead, but what other differences would there be?
That's the roadblock: there has to be a way to appoint the governor-general-replacement (aka president?) and no-one can quite agree on what that should be.
Let's not even think about maybe tweaking the powers of the role, or even codifying that any exercise of those powers should be transparently reported to the electorate (as per a recent/current scandal).
The fact that the political class controls the process of defining all these rules, and no-one trusts the political class to do what's right for the country (vs. right for them and/or their backers), means we're stuck with the current system, which is at least a more-or-less known quantity.
