The fact that you can't see such measures as being draconian is kinda the point of this thread. The way that the heavy handed nature of the Australian government approach seems normalized to your average Australian is precisely the normalization of authoritarianism being protested!
... Not sure where in my post I comment on authoritarianism. I was criticising an absurdly skewed take compared to the source provided.
But sure. Lets go into this.
Part 1. Authoritarianism.
I don't like it. I do see the Australian government getting worse with it. And there is very little I could do to stop it other than vote right wing nutters out of parliament.
Part 2. heavy handed approach to COVID
I agree with it - even in hindsight. Society had no vaccine. No RAT. Awkward PCR testing process with delays. No real defense. The ONLY thing that we could do was to halt the spread until we could get a vaccine. As demonstrated by "elevator sneeze man", you can't trust the populace at large not to spread it.
And there were fuckups. Apart from "elevator sneeze man", the airport quarantine bungle anyone? These fuckups should be investigated in their own right.
Right now, Australia has ~10% of the number of cases as the US. Which is fair because we're roughly 10% the population size and now we're vaccinated COVID has been allowed to roam.
Australia has ~1.5% of the number of COVID deaths as the US. Which is down to being vaccinated BEFORE we let COVID roam.
I like my parents. I like the parents of many of my friends. At least some of them would have died due to COVID if it had been let to run rampant before we got a vaccine.
Conclusion
So yeah, I was happy to live through the Melbourne lockdown. As traumatic as it was, it was better than the alternative.
But ScoMo should be friggin' nailed for his "multiple ministries" bullshit.
That has literally nothing at all to do with Melbourne.
And yes, some governments definitely show two faces when it comes to China vs what they do themselves.
I'm not sure why you've decided to be so angry, instead of realising our government was doing it's level best to try and get it right. eg Give 'em a break dude.
The analogy is very obvious, come on now. Melbourne's lockdowns were even worse and longer than Canadas.
Not all actions get a "Well shucks, better luck next time" second shot. The anger of myself and others is completely justified. Unless you would also say the same to the Chinese at the moment?
To me the instincts of our leaders in high stress unique situations are critically important. The actions taken by Dan Andrews are disqualifying from leadership in my book. I'm not saying he's a bad guy in his personal life or anything like that, but not fit for office. His actions are by far the grossest breach of human rights in Australia in the last 50 years and will not be forgotten.
k. What's (in hindsight) the right approach that _should_ have been taken, that likely would have worked out better in important measures?
By "important measures" I'm meaning things like "number of deaths", "number of COVID infected", but also things like "people who kept their jobs" (etc).
Note that I'm not arguing here, I'm genuinely asking. My impression is that we (in Melbourne) "did ok" as we had low numbers of deaths/infections, and the government support package(s) seemed to have worked for a lot of people. With some notable exceptions (eg artists), which I really don't think should have been excluded from support. :/
You can't seriously be saying this is just a right-wing problem. Dan Andrews literally shutdown playgrounds to stop children playing (sorry "their parents congregating").
A brutal streak of authoritarianism runs deep on both sides of Australian politics. They only get angry about who gets to hold the whip.
Isn't that what we are doing now? Have you seen rates of uptake on boosters?
Lockdowns were a shocking totalitarian action I never thought I would live to see in my own country. But of course many can only see/say that when looking at China, even though what is happening there is just a more extreme mirror of our own crimes against humanity.
More people were dying from COVID in June and July in Melbourne than at any point during the pandemic. Case numbers look low because nobody even bothers getting the PCR anymore unless they work in health.
The public can't be trusted to do the right thing. Many people aren't getting additional doses of the vaccine so their immunity has weakened. Why are we not in lockdown right now? It's literally costing lives as we speak.
Yep, exactly. Lockdowns can only have been justified if we are willing to take the same action going forward under similar conditions and risk. If we aren't, then they were gross overreach of government powers.
For the record, I am not against the idea that the government would provide some financial support for people so they could have stayed at home etc. But the forced closure of the whole society including and especially the banning of seeing other people was unbelievably totalitarian and indefensible.
Have a look at "freedom-loving" red states like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas and Alabama. All seem to be quite "draconian" when it comes to quarantine
That eliminates the US. Maybe there's some other country that doesn't have "draconian" quarantine measures?
I'm genuinely confused by your point. Are you saying that because other countries have quarantine restrictions, that makes their pandemic approach equivalently restrictive as Australia was? Victoria spent over 250 days in lockdown between March 2020 and October 2021. We had curfews at 6pm for weeks and were allowed out of the house for 1 hour a day and not beyond 5km of our houses. Are you seriously asserting that if the US enacted these restrictions, I would be on here professing that these were the pinnacle of freedom?
What I will remark is that US citizens have certain constitutional protections which we do not that in theory inhibit their government's ability to enact restrictions like these i.e. "freedom of movement".
We were talking about the "lift sneeze man" violating quarantine, and whether it was "draconian" or not for the authorities to pursue him. I pointed out, by way of the US, that authorities pursuing someone who violated a quarantine order is not uniquely Australian nor particularly draconian.
We were not discussing the merits, or lack thereof, of lockdowns. Let's not shift the goalposts. But FYI: Here's a list of lockdowns in response to Covid worldwide, including the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lockdowns
6pm curfew? Did Sydney do that? Melbourne didn't. The rest seems about right.
But having seen what Italy was going through - lockdowns with COVID still spreading and hospitals overloaded with the dying. I didn't want that for us.
The "freedom of COVID movement" people were cursed many times - they kept the lockdown running for longer because they couldn't see beyond themselves. They were the cause of the curfews because they tried to use cover of darkness.
You won't see it until you leave that place.
The firebombing of Shanks-Markovina should be a wake up call about the power of deeply entrenched corrupt and anti-democratic bodies. The existence of the private criminal investigation into Shanks by interest groups should leave one fearful on the path being followed there.
The Australian economy exists as source of raw materials for the world, a laundromat for wealth via gambling, and a ponzi around housing to enrich the ruling class. Any political force that challenges these pillars is not allowed to be.
Very neat. In the video, the illicit cheating device was hidden in a phone.
It is theorized that these magic trick could be used in private poker houses to cheat players.
"We're pro-life." It's like, well what does that make me? You know what I mean? You're so pro-life! You're so pro-life, do me a fucking favor. Don't block med clinics, okay? Lock arms, and block cemeteries. Let's see how fucking committed you are to this premise. "She can't come in." "She's ninety-six, she was hit by a bus!" "There's options!" "What, do we got to have her stuffed? What are you talking about, she's dead!" "We're pro-life, get her out of that casket! Get her out! She's not going, we're pro-life people. There'll be no death on this planet."
"Boy, I've never seen an issue so divisive. You ever see it, it's like a civil war, isn't it? Even amongst my friends, who are all very intelligent! They are totally divided on abortion! It's unbelievable! Some of my friends, for instance, think these pro-life people are annoying idiots. Other of my friends think these pro-life people are evil fucks. How are we going to come to a consensus? You ought to hear the arguments around my house; "they're annoying, they're idiots, they're evil, they're fucks!" Brothers, sisters, come together! Can't we once just join hands and think of them as evil annoying idiot fucks?" -- Bill Hicks, 1993
The only person it is tricky for is the mother, who is the only person in the universe whos opinion matters on abortion, and we must abide by the decisions of the individual.
Anything else is absolute horror of biological control and loss of bodily autonomy, and should be rightfully ignored, and anyone that thinks differently needs to think about minding their own business and not making a difficult thing more difficult. Those that use the legal system to enforce their hatred of women? Get off the planet please.
Personally I'm pro-abortion but I think it's trickier than you say. Evicting a living entity, even for people who are pretty progressive, is usually seen as a delicate subject. To me evicting an entity is a lot trickier subject than merely abandoning it, and the points against using force to evict that entity could have merit. Although we are both in agreement that you can safely abandon the life you created without any moral obligation.
Personally I see no moral difference between abandoning life before or after birth. Neither wrong, but abandoning before birth requires a forceful eviction.
>The only person it is tricky for is the mother, who is the only person in the universe whos opinion matters on abortion, and we must abide by the decisions of the individual.
I mean to frame it as only involved life as the mother I think is disingenuous. Perhaps the fetus is not viable but it has to be at least considered in this equation, even if only to decide offspring has no rights to compel their parent to keep them alive.
Ok good :-)
I think my issue is the your idea of eviction, its not eviction, in the same way we don't 'evict' cancer, we 'treat' it. I think its best to leave it at 'no moral difference between abandoning life before or after birth.'. Agreed. Lets not make this difficult situation harder for women who have to make very difficult decisions in life.
IMO the courts did right though here revoking Roe v Wade. For such a tricky subject without enumeration of this right in the constitution, the constitutional basis for determining this would be allowing voters in the various states to decide. In some states they have decided to agree with you. In others they haven't. IMO supreme court did right here, and allows us to have our cake and eat it too. Democracy, if you will.
That is, if you play by the rules of finding nations and constitutions to be legitimate :)
Its mean 'crypto phones', or custom firmware mobile phones with their own voice, chat and messaging system. The most recent busted operation, Anom, was actually run by Law Enforcement who backdoored the devices and recorded all the calls and messages. A very successful operation.
I am assuming there are several actual real not-run-by-the-police systems that they are referring to, I can see the NSW government introducing some really silly legislation that turns out to accidentally criminalize ios and android. Oops.
I read it in high school and would agree, it got me really excited about cryptography and espionage throughout history, no undoubtedly helped me discover infosec and cryptography. I saw Simon Singh present an another launch later, very inspiring author.
You are probably not going to get any sympathy for your hard line attitude here, this is hacker news, not daily stormer. You might want to grow some compassion too.
The tech industry was built and maintained by immigrants, and all families are immigrants to new lands at some point in their history. Look around, you will see there are folks that are doing things that you will not do for money. If you want those things to stop and collapse society, keeping pushing for deportation of the labor pool.
I was a vegan for 10 years, now I only eat meat. I bought into the sustainability argument for a long time.
I will not return to a plant based food diet -- and many people will agree with me, often quite aggressively.
Eating beef is so important that I will spend my last dollar buying that expensive hamburger.
What I am trying to say is your line of coercion is a waste of time and doomed to fail. You cannot force dietary habits on people with an argument of sustainability.
I don't care if the planet ends, I just want my damn steak, and that is a primal urge far stronger than sustainability ethics.
Subverting browser trust by installing a mitm root is not a good way to implement network policy. Many have tried to do this, such as AV vendors, and it generally ends badly.
Do I trust your TLS and certificate trust implementation over a mainline browsers?
Do you understand the nuances of implementing webPKI for browsers?
I think asking the user to give up traffic authentication and confidentiality for a privacy features are best be implemented as a browser extension without this trade-off.
You have to give up trust in some way. I trust extensions running on all websites less than I trust a mitm proxy, because the mitm proxy doesn't have the ability to run code in the browser process itself. Its capabilities are similar or even higher and unlike intentional TLS mitm attacks, addon redirection is near impossible to find in the browser UI.
Reading through the code I see very little in the way of webPKI nuance and that's probably not a bad thing. Whatever special webPKI handling browsers do gets overridden by importing a user certificate anyway.
I don't know what will happen when this proxy encounters a host with a bad TLS certificate or when mutual TLS authentication is requested. My best guess is that it will 500 and send an empty page back. Proxies like Squid do the same, though I've also seen proxies generate certificates with the same errors (bad dates, bad domains, etc.) to allow the user to "fix" the problem. I don't think such problems are within the scope of the proxy as long as invalid HTTPS certificates aren't made valid by missing verification.
One additional benefit of this approach is that on a normal computer this system also allows blocking operating system tracking and such, not just browser traffic. Run such a proxy on the network edge and with four it five lines of nftables rules + proxy configuration to force devices to work through the proxy, you can apply the privacy protections on your entire network, or specific hosts if you add exclusion rules to some IP addresses.
On mobile this will be a lot harder because of the prevalence of TLS pinning. Android and iOS are nearly impossible to mitm without root access/jailbreaks even if you do it intentionally. I very much doubt that console and "smart" devices will work with such a system either.
I use mitm proxies for my research, and very much understand their purpose. what I am objecting to is using it as a general purpose privacy policy network filter. That is not what a MiTM proxy should be used for.
The mitm proxy can inject js into the stream and fake any origin. At least the extension has limits of what it can access, and the code is fixed, unlike a proxy that can say something is anything from anywhere.
I am saying it is a bad thing, in when you put the browser in enterprise certificate mode with a MiTM cert you are disabling security features. All of the problems you have outlined are made worse by the proxy, either by failing open or failing closed.
You are right in that a lot of devices have countermeasures against these MiTM attacks and will not work for this purpose out of the box. This is another reason not to use this pattern for your general purpose tools.
That's the thing though, uBlock rules can also inject scripts and addons can intercept and replace contents of network calls through the injected code.
I think mitm proxies should be used for whatever people find them suitable. I don't have a problem with this use case, especially as this is clearly something you will only get working with a moderate understanding of the underlying concepts.
Tools like Privoxy have existed for years and I don't know why you wouldn't trust a proxy over an addon. Just don't set it up for other people who can't make the risk/reward judgement (though the same goes for adblockers and other extensions).
> I trust extensions running on all websites less than I trust a mitm proxy, because the mitm proxy doesn't have the ability to run code in the browser process itself.
No, but it is absolutely able to inject code which will then be run in the browser.
It does not mean that there is not a single bug, but I do not think it is fair to completely discount this approach. Especially when the alternative is browser extensions which bring their fair share of trouble regarding trust, performance, limited capabilities or even security.
I discount this approach. It is necessary but not sufficient to pass on simple browser SSL tests. There are other complexities that are best left to the browser to negotiate the session.
The connection parameters including encryption parameters and certificate from the origin.
There are a lot of weird rules in WebPKI you may miss, this is beyond a general purpose TLS library.
Enforcing Certificate Transparency rules or CAA records, is the proxy doing this?
