Bush Administration Loosens Computer Export Laws

An anonymous reader contributes: "The State Department has issued this statement detailing the Bush Administration's approval for sharply raising technical specifications of exported computers to a group of more than 40 countries including Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel. The threshold for export without a license to Tier 3 countries will rise to cover computers capable of 190,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPs), up from 85,000 MTOPs now. The change is exptected to take take effect in January or February of 2002."

Comments

Re:Bush?

[Almace]

Bush making a good decision...I must not understand the issue fully
:snip Sounds like a case of the latter
Stop being a moron and become informed on issues!
Worth reading daily
[bias but for once not to the left]
be an informed voter
View from right and left

Re:And what does an MTOP correspond to?

[DarkZero]

IANAE (I Am Not An Expert), but I believe that 190,000 million theoretical operations per second would be approximately 190 first-run Mac G4 processors. So we're definitely talking about the supercomputer range. Somewhere around the computing power of a 130GHz processor system (extremely rough estimate).

Re:The sad part of this

[Arandir]

A) Acquiring Linux from a US distributor counts and a US export.

B) Many countries have import or usage restrictions on encryption.

C) Just like guns, when you restrict exportation (or importation), you only restrict the law abiding citizenry, because the criminals will export/import anyway.

D) This whole regulation of encryption thingy, regardless of which nation does it, is absurd.