Your E-Mail Data - Australian Privacy & Surveillance Laws

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exportgoldman

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#83430 23-Aug-2007 01:46

I am also concerned about this, because privacy laws in Australia and New Zealand are a bit different, and more importantly, if the Australian government decides to take over a Yahoo! server it will automatically get data belonging to New Zealanders. Once the data is in the hands of the Australian government it would be a fight between Yahoo! and Australian authorities, and I'd say the least protected interest would be of the data in those disks, regardless of data being actually property of foreigners in relation to that country.

I think the world we are now living in looks a lot different from even five years ago, and with revelations that America has monitored, and even planned invasions of New Zealand (during World War 2) We should at least have our communications infrastructure on our own soil.

The only way I can see cokemaster thinking this, and the backup solutions being OK, is if this was a rushed rollout, and Yahoo! do plan on hosting a cluster of servers in New Zealand. My feeling is this isn't going to happen, as on their FAQ for bubble, it does address this very issue, and admits the servers are in Australia and it's OK. If they were to roll out servers in NZ, they would not be taking this position now.

It *REALLY* concerns me that we cannot send a e-mail from Huntly to Hamilton without relying on Australia and America, the whole development of the internet was a de-centralised network which can survive, and route around failures and now we are centralising the whole Australiasia e-mail to one City.

How are the government going to enforce SPAM Laws if the e-mail is stored in a different country. How are we ever going to know our e-mail is being opened by a foreign government if we don't even own or can physically see the servers.

It also makes us look on the world stage as a bit backwards "New Zealand, not big enough as a country to have local e-mail, it is hosted out of Australia."

Makes us sound like Rarotonga.

Latency is only an issue in the case of multiple connections or real-time data requirements, such as streaming or gaming. E-mail is one such a case where latency is really no big deal. It's a single connection to a server, unlike web browsing, gaming or VoIP.

OK This whole latency thing was me not using the right word. I actually meant server load, and pipe size. When everyone finally gets on this new server cluster, how big is the pipe, will it be enough, and how are the servers going to hold up with the traffic.

I know Telecom own a fair chunk of the SCC, so they can get a 10GBits link to the server farm, but I thought Telecom wanted more national peering, and keeping more local traffic local. Doesn't moving one of the only and biggest sources of local traffic (email) overseas go against this?

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

exportgoldman

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#83431 23-Aug-2007 01:54

bok007: ignoring my avatar completely
alien/terminator arepublic facing IP addresses to multiple virtual guests

Do you know if alien and terminator are still on the same network segment, or god I hope not, virtual machines on a big iron box?

What other hosts are on the same box?

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

cokemaster

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#83447 23-Aug-2007 09:23

exportgoldman:
The only way I can see cokemaster thinking this, and the backup solutions being OK, is if this was a rushed rollout, and Yahoo! do plan on hosting a cluster of servers in New Zealand. My feeling is this isn't going to happen, as on their FAQ for bubble, it does address this very issue, and admits the servers are in Australia and it's OK. If they were to roll out servers in NZ, they would not be taking this position now.

I would refrain from the 'suggested/said that they would', as just a hypothetic situation :)

It *REALLY* concerns me that we cannot send a e-mail from Huntly to Hamilton without relying on Australia and America, the whole development of the internet was a de-centralised network which can survive, and route around failures and now we are centralising the whole Australiasia e-mail to one City.

Like our dependence on Auckland? Or Wellington? Exisiting email servers, ISP infrastructures were often centralized in one city. Based on that, if Huntly and Hamilton were isolated, it is highly probable that you would not be able to connect to your email provider anyway.

I dare say if these two cities disappeared, you might be having problems with more than your email.

The very nature of a server is to create a centralized location for one to connect. While it could be possible to have servers in every city, could one think of the bandwidth used, just to ensure that local mail stores are up to date? Would be a waste of resources in many cases.

The point was, even if these servers were hosted in NZ, we would still have 'dependence' issues with them because if anything happened to the cities with the data centers - its going to have a similar effect.

How are the government going to enforce SPAM Laws if the e-mail is stored in a different country. How are we ever going to know our e-mail is being opened by a foreign government if we don't even own or can physically see the servers.

There is always going to be privacy issues when emails are sent or stored overseas. Particularly when emails between servers are sent in plaintext, all it takes is a compromised server on the other end or someone packet sniffing the mail servers connection. In saying that, the email server in question should be kept under NZ privacy laws as they are NZ customers which could be a little bit interesting when they are offshore.

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freitasm

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#83452 23-Aug-2007 09:51

cokemaster: The point was, even if these servers were hosted in NZ, we would still have 'dependence' issues with them because if anything happened to the cities with the data centers - its going to have a similar effect.

But then it would have to be something to the entire Auckland. Anyway, exportgoldman, if a cable between New Zealand and Australia stops working, users would still be able to access the servers through other routes. That's what the Internet infrastructure is about - resiliency. So if there's no direct route to Australia, who cares? It may take longer, but it will reach the server through the SCC to LAX, LON and SYD... Slower, but it will be there.

Now, if a cable snaps in the data centre - not much one can do about it, because this is a risk regardless of the data centre being there or here. But being Yahoo! (like Google and Microsoft) I wouldn't stress out too much, thinking that a single pipe would be their connection to the world...

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#83453 23-Aug-2007 10:01

freitasm:

Now, if a cable snaps in the data centre - not much one can do about it, because this is a risk regardless of the data centre being there or here.

Ted Stevens called, he wants his tubes back because too many people have been using them with their big trucks which slows down his personal internets.

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bok007

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#83456 23-Aug-2007 10:09

exportgoldman:
bok007: ignoring my avatar completely
alien/terminator arepublic facing IP addresses to multiple virtual guests

Do you know if alien and terminator are still on the same network segment, or god I hope not, virtual machines on a big iron box?

What other hosts are on the same box?

I think alien and terminator were the old DNS servers.
just because they had IP addresses 2 digits apart doesn't mean they have to be on the same network segment.
They were public addresses that would be NAT'd back to multiple machines on multiple boxes.
That would be best practise anyhow - I may be able to confirm this next week.
Cheers

exportgoldman

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#83462 23-Aug-2007 10:57

I think alien and terminator were the old DNS servers.just because they had IP addresses 2 digits apart doesn't mean they have to be on the same network segment. They were public addresses that would be NAT'd back to multiple machines on multiple boxes. That would be best practise anyhow - I maybe able to confirm this next
week.

I remember that Microsoft had DNS issues which brought down most Microsoft sites (including microsoft.com) for a few days, Xtra then had similar problems... the fault, the DNS Servers were on the same network segment. I had been saying this for years, so when it did happen, and the reasons for it... same network segment, I remembered it vividly. Fully thing is, they never changed the IP's... So they would have to do some funky layer 2 routing to physically seperate them.

The whole point of two servers, is that you throw them to either ends of your network to prevent failure.

Heres some references, the last one is a hoot, it explains where the alien and terminator names probably came from... The example scripts in the BIND Manual... Hmmmmmmmm. Did Xtra use the HOWTO when they setup their DNS Servers?

Xtra service crashes - Tuesday May 16, 2006
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10382021

GeekZone Xtra DNS servers, AWOL or what? 21st December 2006
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?ForumId=49&TopicId=10970

XTRA: DNS challenged :-)
http://10layers.com/2006/05/xtra-dns-challenged/

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

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barf

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#83513 23-Aug-2007 17:35

Bung: The default setting is/was to "receive all messages, including those that SpamGuard thinks are spam".
The problem with changing that to putting spam in the Bulk folder is that SpamGuard thinks that almost everything is spam (including email from Geekzone).

What the hell is SpamGuard? I use POP3 to download Xtra email - there are no folders in POP emailboxes. Am I now being forced into using the webmail facility if I don't want spam? Why the sudden change and increase in spam?

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