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

The sad part of this

[moosesocks]

The sad part of this is that many hardware manufactures foolishly bundle their products with cryptographic software, which remains illegal to export to many countries (and with good reason). The cryptographic software in question is typically of extreme trival nature. Take my sound card for example, why the *&$% should I not be able to download drivers for it in some of these contries? It's completely absurd.

The sad part of this is that many of these hardware companies place the cryptographic export limit on all of their drivers, simply because they are afraid of legal action from Uncle Sam.

You CAN export the hardware.... it just won't do anything with the manufacturer's official drivers.

Thankfully, kernel.org has instructions for removing these bits of code from the Linux kernel, making it legal to use anywhere there is a computer that can run it.

And what does an MTOP correspond to?

[slashdot_commentator]

How does the gov't measure or categorize an MTOP?
How many MTOPs can an AMD 1900+ do?
How many MTOPs can an IBM S/390 do?
How many MTOPs can a Sun 4500 or Starfire do?

How many terrorist countries will care about MTOP restrictions when they can cobble together 500 bargain basement PCs (say $150/machine) to make a (beowulf) super computer?