Tony Abbott will be the new Prime Minister of Australia, but that’s at the head of a coalition of conservative parties, with his party, the Liberal Party, the largest.

The Wiki on the Parliament of Australia is a place to start, but don’t expect to really understand it unless you live and vote in the country, after going through school there. They do things differently, borrowing from Britain, the US, and anyone else they thought had an interesting idea.

They have 150 members in their House of Representatives and 76 in their Senate.

It looks like Australia is in for ‘interesting times’. People apparently wanted a change, and I suspect they are going to get one.

Update: From Kryten in comments – the Guardian as a brief explanation of the Australian voting system.

Google is rushing to complete a project to encrypt the links between their server farms with a TLS 128-bit AES system, obviously to counteract the impression that they are handing client data to NSA. Of course, if they receive an order from the FISA court, they will hand over their client data to NSA, so this is more about PR than reality.

It is a good and necessary thing that they are doing, and something they, and every other Cloud seller should have done before to protect their systems from non-government intruders, but this is transit encryption, and users should be encrypting their own data, using their own systems.

Bruce Schneier has a couple of posts up on what we now know about NSA activities and some basic things you can do to protect your data.

The best current solution is to use Open Source software, things like GPG [Gnu Privacy Guard], based on Open PGP, is a good place to start. There is no corporation that can be strong-armed into providing a NSA backdoor, and a lot of paranoid people looking at the source code to make sure one doesn’t ‘magically’ appear.

Bear in mind – there is no unbreakable code. When I was in codes were graded on estimates of how long it would take to break them, e.g. there were 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, and 1-year codes. Given the advances in computers and algorithms I would assume that my 1-month codes are now 1-day codes.

Something like targeting information only needed to be secret for a limited time – I mean, after you drop the bombs it isn’t exactly a secret that the area was a target. The purpose of the encryption was to make the information worthless by the time it was decrypted, because the assumption was that it would be decrypted.

If you are in business you want codes that will hold until the statute of limitations runs out. 😈