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.
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.
At 15 he should be leading the team.
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.
I did a little write-up here if anyone's interested: http://senwerks.com/hacktheplanet/Solving-the-Australian-Sig...
It’s just a game for them to popularize code breaking and do some youth recruiting.
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”.
Do they really want to do that - considering these talented people might use their code breaking skills against the government? ;-)
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)
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.
Breaking custom encryption is dead in any country smaller than say, the UK or maybe Canada.
Your comment reminds me of this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/932/
Now, how believable is that?
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.
It is mostly believable that there is a fifth level.
It is likely that they haven't received a correct solution at the time of the announcement yet.
Which part are you doubting?
Cue Maxwell Smart: "would you believe 5 layers?"
70th Anniversary of ASIO – Marked with New 50-Cent Coin by Royal Australian Mint : https://www.ramint.gov.au/publications/70th-anniversary-asio...
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:
Do we still consider that encryption in this day and age? I know it technically is , but..
It's not like the PM is sitting there with a coin in hand, trying to decipher reports from the Australian Defence Forces....
... or maybe they were 15 at the time, can't remember
In the UK it’s one month of all our private communications thanks to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.
What is it in Australia?
That looks like metadata (see https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/nat-security/files/dataset.pd..., PDF warning). Which is still private, but doesn't include your private calls and messages.
How long do they keep private calls and messages?
7-10 years, in practice. 2 years, in requirement. [0]
[0] https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Depart...
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.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/business-spectator...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
...And it did so without a squawk!
Edit, it sort of proves my point, doesn't it?
> 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".
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.
Reckon if we got into the Tardis and went there it'd take a research effort to recognize that we were actually in the same country!
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?"
To do that it would've had to have said "Remove this grafitti immediately, sheep!"
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.
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/working-in-australia/r...
