[2060] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: New Software Controls
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?=)
Sun Jan 18 21:18:15 1998
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 02:56:17 +0100
From: Ulf =?iso-8859-1?Q?M=F6ller?= <ulf@fitug.de>
To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19980117021618.007266e8@pop.pipeline.com>; from John Young on Fri, Jan 16, 1998 at 09:16:18AM -0500
> c.3. ``Software'' which provides the capability of recovering
> ``source code'' of telecommunications ``software'' controlled by
> 5A001, 5B001, or 5C001;
This regulation as well as the one about voice encoding at < 2,400
bit/s has already been in the Wassenaar arrangement as of July 1995.
Recall what Peter Gutmann wrote on the cryptography list a year ago:
> The export regulations as a whole are pretty bizarre. Because
> todays high technology is tomorrows museum curio, the regulations
> restrict a wide variety of items which are freely available and have
> no special significance - probably half the technology exports from
> any country violate at least one part of these regulations, and the
> only reason noone is prosecuted is that the regulations are so
> obscure and bizarre that noone knows or cares about them. For
> example a 20-year-old video game I have up in the attic violates
> 3A001.a.1 (the museum-piece 1802 microprocessor on it happens to
> qualify as "radiation- hardened"); most laptop computers violate
> 3A001.a.3.10.a (they have chips with more than 208 pins in them);
> some video-game-oriented PC graphics cards and possibly recent
> Nintendo and Sega video games (I'd have to check this, no two
> sources ever state the video performance of their toys the same way)
> violate 4A003.d (graphics systems with performance above a certain
> level); Linux violates (at least) 4D003.a (an operating system which
> supports multiple processors) and 5D001.c.4 (dynamic adaptive
> routing software); the routers used by many telcos violate 5A001.c.5
> (they handle ATM routing); many software development tools violate
> 5D001.c.3 (they allow decompiling of software). The list goes on
> and on. It would be interesting to get some PC suppliers catalogue
> and sit down with it and the regulations one afternoon to see how
> many rules and regulations you'd be breaking by shipping one of
> their PC's out of the country.
