Slashdot Mirror
Cryptographic Software in Debian's Main Archive
Cine writes: "James Troup and Sam Hartman recently sent a note to all debian mirror maintainers, to inform them about the current situation and future plans. Sometime after March 8th, crypto software like OpenSSH, SSL support, and many other enhancements will be integrated into the debian main archive. This is in accordance to legal advice the Debian project received."
No reverse lookups needed. There are publicly available IP mappings databases. If the IP has been assigned to a banned country, then it IS in the list.
& me thod=getCountry&nonblocking=true";
I suggest the debian maintainers should check at LEAST this site.
http://caida.org
If you want to testdrive the acuracy of the mappings, why not check if it works fine for your connection. Just inset your IP number and go!:
http://netgeo.caida.org/perl/netgeo.cgi?target=
unfinished: (adj.)
For the Debian end user, getting stuff like OpenSSH has been very easy, contrary to what some posters have said. There is little or no benefit for most end users in this change; and a huge increase in trouble and inconvenience for some end users, who happen to be citizens or residents of a country like Cuba that the Bush regime doesn't currently like.
US crypto regulations are not only a nuisance, they're also volatile. "Things are getting better", we hear. Bullshit. Things are changing unpredictably. Few people (and certainly no software developers) have any idea what US policy will be next year.
The only sensible policy is to keep the crypto archive in a country that has never had export regulations for crypto software (there are many).
Unless I am missing something, this won't have any real effect on end users.
It will have benefits for end users, though probably not highly visible ones.
Cryptographic software packaged for Debian is available (and has been for a long time already) through non-us.debian.org , but crypto-in-main will make further integration of crypto possible. A number of packages in main will get enhanced functionality once crypto is in main. E.g. CVS can start supporting Kerberos for authentication.
The functionality enhancements made possible by crypto-in-main are not limited to the direct benefits of crypto, as I can illustrate with the Gnumeric package. The Gnumeric spreadsheet can be built to be able to fetch data from databases using GDA, the GNU Data Access library. Currently the Debian package is not built with GDA support. The reason for this is that Debian's GDA packages are on non-US (because their source package requires the PostgreSQL development package; PostgreSQL is on non-US as it is built with SSL support). Once we have crypto-in-main, I can build Gnumeric packages that have GDA support (probably in a separate plugin package).