The Laws of Mathematics are commendable

Jack Larkin0 HN recommenders · 2018–2025
13K views · news · dated · Uploaded 2017-08-02

A clip of Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying the laws of Australia prevail over the laws of mathematics, regarding encryption. The audio is quiet in the second half.

HN cites it as a joke and shorthand when governments try to legislate against encryption or math.

Watch on YouTube

5 comments from Hacker News

@zeth___2018 · in “An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]”

You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough. To put it simply, you sound like this guy: [VIDEO] When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.

@usernew2023 · in “Montana becomes the first US state to ban TikTok”

While a dupe, there are thousands of users reading this site sporadically - I've been on here over a decade and have never seen either previous discussion. The site's fresh out of 1990 design is hostile towards navigation of anything beyond a few pages of comments. If people discussed this enough in the other 2 threads, they can... gasp.. skip the discussion here. so let me kick it off then. What exactly does this mean? To illustrate my point, let's change the scenario. There's a small town north of Chicago called Skokie. 100k people. Lets say they pass a "law" to ban some app from Google's play store. People in Montana should perhaps take their phone, ask it what a computer is, listen to Siri's answer, then call 411 and ask them how to open a pdf. Then they should shovel some cow dung - as is daily life - and finally then they can pass some laws about cow dung. And now this, from the Australia lawmakers. Australia, the Montana of the planet. [VIDEO]

@leventonportera2023 · in “Treasury Department introduces proposal targeting crypto mixers”

The people making and passing these laws are 70-100 years old and not only have no idea what encryption or p2p is - they start deleting their gmail emails in their browser when their laptop pops up an out of space message. My favorite goto in these discussions - the Australian PM saying that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics, when talking about encryption. You heard that right an old bald guy who doesn't know how to use the second mouse button because mice don't have buttons - they have ears and a tail - is legislating to break AES256. You just have to pass a law to break it you see, and then the math law will have to obey the overriding Australian law. [VIDEO] Here's the thing though - that's not what this is all about, and these old hags have a very well-versed body of people behind them pushing the agenda. The reason the old hags sound like clowns, is because they are puppets with clown makeup. The goal here, is exactly what you said. Prohibition of encryption, because the people in power want more till they're kings, and they want to see everything you do so they can stay kings. In reality, none of this is meant to be enforced. It is however meant to pile up bogus charges and remove you from the public eye where you can make noise against them, once they decide to remove you for any other reason they want.

@BLKNSLVR2024 · in “Patreon: Blocking platforms from sharing user video data is unconstitutional”

A recent Australian Prime Minister did claim legislative power to alter mathematics. Poor quality sound, but: [VIDEO]

@BLKNSLVR2025 · in “Drilling down on Uncle Sam's proposed TP-Link ban”

Prime Minister (at the time) Malcolm Turnbull announcing it: [LINK] The above is just the announcement and doesn't include answering media questions wherein we would have heard dear Malcolm's famous quote: “Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia" Very quiet audio of the last half of the above quote: [VIDEO] Political understanding of mathematics and encryption has not progressed in the intervening 9 years, much the same as the thirty years prior. Regulating internet security is forming a similarly unfortunate trajectory.