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U.S. Eases Computer Export Controls
wbackous writes "C|NET's NEWS.COM has this article concerning the export of high performance PCs. The article also notes that some countries, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brazil to be exact, were moved to the low-risk catagory." The dumb thing here is that almost anyone, almost anywhere, can put together a Beowulf network out of commodity PCs. I mean, computer export controls are obsolete, so why bother with them at all?
... that's why we build commodity supercomputers out of Alphas. And yes, we can beat SGI and Cray machines on a wide variety of problems.
Wow! Short, to the point! With witty ripostes from his followers like these I can see why Pres Clinton is such a popular figure.
The reality is this, though. China is the biggest threat that the US and other western nations will face in the coming century. To think otherwise is to be either naive or foolish. Through his actions and his inactions, Clinton has made it more likely that these conflicts will end in China's favor.
The current regime in China is the largest evil facing civilized societies. It is a repressive government with the blood of MILLIONS on its hands.
Perhaps its time to file lawsuits against the FBI individuals responsible for lobbying bad laws. Every time they harass a legitimate company or individual, the agents responsible get sued.
Send them a message that we arent going to take it anymore.
Would a class action lawsuit be effective?
Logic and common sense will tell us many things:
a) computer export controls are obsolete
b) tariff systems increase taxes without protecting anyone
c) taxes on corporations are passed as a sop to the masses who haven't figured out that only people pay taxes
Logic? Common sense? In goverment? Rarely, if ever , are these qualities found among so-called public servants.
It's good to see some relaxation of constraints occuring, but we would be ill-advised to hold our breath for the repeal of export controls. For one thing, relaxing export controls must, of necessity, lead to relaxed import controls, unless we wish to anger the other G7 countries. And when relaxed import controls are mentioned, the average American will have a knee-jerk negative response.
This isn't about logic and common sense. These issues relate to power games among those who think that they can and should control the lives of others. Power corrupts. Even when it isn't absolute power.
--- Bill
Fun though they may be, Beowulf clusters do not work for for many interesting classes of problems. The inter-processor communications are just too slow.
That aside, it *is* ludicrous to ban export of system which are basically commodity items. If Joe User can go to mom and pop's PC emporium and purchase a machine which is export controlled, how does the government expect to actually enforce the rule?
Chalk one up for government stupidity.
- Ken
I would like to posit (again, I'm not at all an expert) that individuals, not nations, pose the most significant threat to U.S. security.
But this is exactly why computer export controls should be maintained. Look at a hypothetical situation. Let's say you have a fanatic Middle Eastern terrorist organization hell bent on destroying the US (there's quite a few of them), and they want to build a nuclear bomb or missile to vaporize a large American city. The research and construction of said nuclear weapon will require a supercomputer. Now, if export controls were removed, the terrorist group, funded by some sympathetic oil baron, could easily buy a used supercomputer and have their numbers in a few days time. But with the export controls in place, they are forced into a more difficult situation. Programs like Beowulf may seem to make the solution simple, but do they really? First you'll need people familiar with maintaining a Beowulf cluster, and programmers capable of writing the needed software for Linux. This means more people will know about the plot (bad thing), and besides, how many Linux geek terrorists are out there? Also, what happens if you have a network or unit failure while the calculations are running (figure on a few days per calculation)? They'd have to start over.
Fact is, it's easy for a large country to develop or build up the computing power needed to create nuclear weapons (look at Pakistan and India). For terrorist groups, it's a lot more difficult. The US government knows that there are ways around the export controls, but the idea is to make it such a huge pain in the ass that they won't bother. So far, it's worked.
Oh, and while I do support export controls on supercomputers. I don't support them on encryption. Two different issues.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Roblimo must die! He seems to have come onto /. when it was acquired by Andover. It's good that we can shut off his stories, but /. has gone down hill a lot from when I started reading it over a year ago. At least it won't distract me as much from getting work done.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
What'll be next Farenhiet 454? Only re-adjusted for the burning tempriture of Silicon instead of books. I'm feeling a wee bit paranoid now.
Well, there is certanly no need for supercomputing power to construct a A-bomb. But if you like to do simulations of nukes going of in cities, harbors or underground some real numbercrunching is required. This was the reason that US could stop the live testing one year ahead of France. (live test gave parameters for the simulations)
If a small terrorist group would like to use a nuclear device its much easier to get the hands on a former Soviet charge.
If they would like to construct a device from scratch the biggerst problem is to get the 235U (or plutonium). Look at Saddams "little" project. I don't think that some supercomputers would have helped him much.
The basic design of a A-bomb is well known and can be made by anyone who can take some radiation. (some knowledge about normal explosives help)
I can post a description of the Hiroshima bomb if anyone whats it.
A high speed CPU is nice but a balanced system needs high bandwidth I/O and memory systems. Take a look at these benchmarks of memory bandwidth.
Your typical high performance PC has 200-300 MB/s of memory bandwidth. A NEC SX-4 has over 400 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In addition, if you try and simulate something like the stretching of plastic, it's an inherently linear problem. No amount of parallelism can speed that sort of thing up.
Beowulfs just don't deal well with closely-related parallel tasks... they're just fine and dandy with things like mandelbrot sets, though, where none of the iterations depend on each other.
The research and construction of said nuclear weapon will require a supercomputer. Now, if export controls
:)
were removed, the terrorist group, funded by some sympathetic oil baron, could easily buy a used supercomputer and have their numbers in a
few days time. But with the export controls in place, they are forced into a more difficult situation.
Seems that some people have missed the point here.
Supercomputers may be required to develop nuclear
bombs, that part is right. But why to use bombs
when there are MUCH MUCH easier ways to threaten or destroy great number of people?
If you haven't yet figured out, I'm talking
about chemical and biological weapons. About
developing chemical weapons I'm not so sure, but
at least biological ones are quite easy to obtain
or make. No massive research or chemical plants are required. Just some commonly available "biomaterial" (I don't more about it) and information which I think is available also on our precious Internet..
you really do mean "Quayle quotations" not quotes...quotes are the symbols around a quotation.
... Taco, I'm sure you or I or any number of people who read this webpage could throw together a beowulf cluster, or other multi-computer system to tackle problems in a country that, according to the USA government, isn't supposed to have good technology.
These laws (good or not) keep the people who are inclined, but not determined, from doing something. They make the stupid, determined people get caught and put away, and the smart people jump through the appropriate hoops to not get caught. I think building a beowulf cluster to simulate the processing power of a computer that cannot legally be exported to a high-risk country would be like the latter - jumping through hoops to accomplish something that braindead beaurocracy doesn't want you to. Just putting a photo-radar detector or your car, sticking drugs up your butt to get them over the border, working from home for five minutes a week so you can claim your rent on your taxes as a buisness expense, or anything else people do to sidestep authority.
Because thermonuclear devices provide far more bang for the buck, if you consider safety, maintenance, reliability and destructive potential.
Biological weapons are, right now, fairly tough to deploy. Among other things, they have to come in contact with, be inhaled by, or otherwise be transmitted to each and every one of your victims. You also have to take precautions when preparing them, and to keep them alive until you have enough to actually do damage. There aren't that many groups that can use these as WOMAD, methinks.
Chemical weapons might be easier, if you don't have to worry about leaks.
A nuclear device of reasonably modern size, however, can obliterate an entire city without anybody seeing it. You can use a variety of delivery mechanisms that don't require direct exposure to your intended victim populace. Heck, you could probably have it concealed in the basement of a building for a few years... It'll probably be more difficult to get the parts, but the effect could be dramatically greater. It's also probably more difficult to nuke yourself by accident...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
They are moving in the right direction--but for the wrong reason. They should be doing it because it is the right thing to do or because the people want it, not because the businesses told them to do it. But at least we are moving...
ufdraco (unable to log in) /. to get well again.
cid 1, but I'd happily trade it for
Why restrict anyone anymore ? The Clinton administration has basically handed our most advanced bomb technology to the Chinese and from there it can go to virtually any trouble making state in the world. Computing power is no longer the threat it once was. It's now only the atomic secrets that need to be protected (and has been sold out for a few million dollars which delivered the election.) Anyone for impeachment two ? No, thought not.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Simply because Beowulf clusters are nowhere not nearly the fastest computers built
But Beowulf clusters are faster than super computers that were built when the export controls went into effect some years ago. Right?
Aren't the Beowulf clusters still faster than what is allowed? If so, this shows that the export control guidelines fail to take that into account.
> The dumb thing here is that almost anyone,
:)
:)
> almost anywhere, can put together a Beowulf
> network out of commodity PCs. I mean, computer
> export controls are obsolete, so why bother
> with them at all?
Simply because Beowulf clusters are nowhere not nearly the fastest computers built, when it comes to the sort of tasks we'd like to prevent some foriegn government from partaking. Beowulf clusters may be sweet for Monte Carlo codes and the like, but for a big simulation of an explosion, I'll take a 1024 processor Origin 2000 any day of the week.
The inter-processor communications speed of Beowulf are not high enough to efficiently sync up the boundary conditions between fluid elements in the simulation.
(Granted, Beowulf machines can be made useful for these sorts of tasks, but you can't simply scale a code like this up by chucking a few more K7s or PIIs onto the system, beyond a certain limit. A real supercomputer, like an Origin, will let you utilize new processors more effectively.)
Now, if SGI is serious about make Linux handle ccNuma, we might eventually be able to scale to those sizes.
Btw, sorry for the flame, but who is this Robilimo guy? Maybe I'm being too rough, but his comments always seem flaky to me. Oh well, I guess I can shut his stories off.
All of these export controls, whether they be restricting hardware, software, or cows are related. The repeal of any one of them is hypocrisy. The solution is the repeal of them all.
Perhaps many of you already know this, but something similar happens with encription algorithms. You cannot export an implementation, but the algorithm is free for all to view. So all you need is some brains and some spare time.
:)
I think that most of those rulings where born out of paranoia than from racional thinking.
- Raider
P.S. Please excuse my spelling, I've been reading to many Quayle quotes lately
+Raider of the lost BBS
The U.S. government seems to be stuck in the cold-war mentality that its enemies are countries -- meaning, governments, militaries, or other large groups of official people who meet around big tables. I would like to posit (again, I'm not at all an expert) that individuals, not nations, pose the most significant threat to U.S. security. As hyperprotective mothers repeat day after day, anyone with a brain and a computer can make herself a menace to society -- and that goes for anyone outside the country, too. It's ridiculous for the government to assume that U.S. citizens are automatically to be trusted with supercomputering power and non-U.S. citizens aren't. The point is, one person, anywhere in the world, can constitute a security threat. Export controls are based on the idea that the government can identify them, and that's just not true. All they're doing is forcing the computer industry out of certain international markets.
The nation state as seen today is a creation of only a couple hundred years ago. Before that it was unimaginable. Today the sovereign state is patently absurd.
I would like to see a movement towards local rule and communes, organized into a massive senate (that would probably find itself unable to respond to all but the greatest problems, thus making it ideal), a world bank, and a world judicial system, each of these with some form of check upon the others. This way we have the advantages of a single overall legal system and currency without the problem of a powerful and effective government.
Rob wants to know why the US government has export controls when they're obsolete; I want to know why we have sovereign states when they are obsolete.
Who was it that said "Government is what you get when anarchy breaks down"? A very little ruled world would not be the chaotic bedlam people generally associate it with. Society exists separate from government, and generally checks itself.
Or focus on your own international PC sales, have website will vend. You are stuck with a ten day lag on shipping but that's not too detrimental. The market for home PCs just might be exploding again. Maybe this time we can get people to use a good (read: free and open) OS.
+&x
Isnt this a little old? We have already discussed this about a month ago... Pete
What's a sig? Pete Brubaker
Big Brother....
Need I say more?
In the old days in the intel community, there was rather a lot of friction between the sneakers and the peepers. A good example of this was between (in CIA) the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Science and Technology. The sci/tech people liked the NSA and worked closely with them and were obsessed with elint (electronic intel) and they would be. Despite the fact that they were for all intents and purposed an entering wedge of the DoD in CIA, the rest of CIA tended to believe that they were all a bunch of Liberal Democratic pansies. This may say more about the Directorate of Operations than anything else. As time went on, the friction decreased, as the good ops people left or were kicked out of CIA as the various Directors tried to please the liberal congress. This left CIA in a major bind, because the ability to watch stuff happen didn't let them actually DO much. So, after the Church Commission raped CIA, they started a)contracting the dirty work to recently dismissed people from CIA (problematic, as many were very, very bitter), b)foreign national cutouts (problematic, as many of them were either mercenaries or mafia, and the boundaries there are pretty loose, especially in Europe), and c)other nation's intel machines which weren't hampered by idiots in their respective goverments nearly as much as we were (bad, as it build up major debts). Even worse, CIA, which had generally looked the other way when it came to crime, started to use the criminals regularly, especially criminals with money that they could no longer get from the liberals in congress. Meanwhile, the sci/tech weenies grew fat and happy and very out of touch (want to know why we didn't see the Berlin Wall falling well ahead of time? Because you can't typically see national disgruntlement from birds until the nationals in question start rioting and/or tearing down stuff like, well, walls).
The situation remains the same. Good people leave CIA because the work is fantastically unfulfilling (they have actual quotas for recruiting foreign nationals, and you have to make your quotas or you get a bad review)(it doesn't matter if the foreign national can GIVE you anything useful -- you have to meet the quotas). The people really good at playing the internal paperwork games stay. CIA is not growing unable to do what they were supposed to do -- this has already happened. And so any dirty work gets shoved off to DoD for Army or Navy ops people, which is an incredibly dangerous idea for a number of reasons.
This, and things like it, are examples (sad ones, at that) of the beaurocrats still wedged behind their desks trying to keep control of a world that is less and less amenable to control from elint and is more and more in need of humint and specialists. Which we no longer have, recruit, or are able to keep, when one happens to wander in (there are a lot of very smart people in the SEALS and Special Forces; generally, they leave and get degrees and never look back because there really aren't too many places in today's military for good, smart operators apart from NSA, and the NSA culture is, well, a little uptight). The export regulations for encryption, the MIPS restrictions for export, the software resrictions -- they all depend on making sure that we can have a seriously long lead time in case someone decides to get frisky. The lead time is needed because the only options left to us when we, say, discover a terrorist in Spain planning to blow up a 747 is to a)alert the local authorities (the Spanish will just shoot him) and b)alert our embassy personell ("In case the Spanish don't shoot him, stay of 747s for a few days. Thank you."). When we had plentiful assets abroad, we would find him and kill him. Total elapsed time? A few hours, as opposed to a few days (and the Spanish would say "Thank you. Who was he?"). Now, we have no choice. This is not OK. Sometimes we have no time. But that doesn't matter to the desk-jockeys who are trying to make sure that strong encryption "doesn't get out" (yes, that is a quote from late last year from a senior NSA guy who claimed that, as of November last, that strong encryption wasn't generally available outside of the US), because they are not now nor have they ever been the ones who got killed.
It is interesting to me (not surprising, but interesting) that, apart from George "The Clueless" Bush, that the people that have done the most damage to American intel have been Democrats (Carter and Clinton) and that no one seems to notice this. Scratch any '60s liberal and you will find a totalitarian, and not a very bright one at that. Expect more before the next election.
AC (definitely)
I have to apologize to Roblimo. I flamed him too quickly.
Sorry Roblimo!
John
I guess I wasn't clear. I don't mean to say we should keep the current caps. I was just trying to refute Roblimo's comment that removing the caps would make no difference.
John
I guess I wasn't clear. I agree with raising the caps. I was just trying to refute Roblimo's comment that removing the caps entirely would make no difference.
John
(Sorry about the repost. Like an idiot, I accidently hit submit instead of preview.)