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.

Re:The sad part of this

[Fat Casper]

I hadn't known that the Linux kernel was made in the US. I can see a qualm or two about sending software overseas- you know, exporting it. What I can't see is worrying that the software I'm running outside the US shouldn't have been exported from the US. Especially if that software is the Linux kernel.

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.

Corollary to Moore's Law

[gizmo_mathboy]

I wonder if there is a corollary to Moore's Law that might apply to how often the US government raises the theoretical computation limits for exported computers to Tier 3 nations.

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]
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View from right and left

Re:Bush?

[Ledge]

How dare you post links to sites containing useful & logical information in this bastion of Socialism? What are you? One of those wacky Capitalists or something? Follow the rest of the crowd and let your emotions lead you to starvation.

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?

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:Bush?

[Arandir]

Give me a reason to hate the president, I didn't vote for him!

You're supposed to hate the candidate you didn't vote for? No wonder this country is so fucked!