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Honorable mention for the ITAR regs that prevented Phil Zimmerman from exporting PGP 128 bit encryption until Zimmerman and MIT press printed the source as a bo
by mmaunder 3y ago
Honorable mention for the ITAR regs that prevented Phil Zimmerman from exporting PGP 128 bit encryption until Zimmerman and MIT press printed the source as a book protected by the first amendment, exported it, and this enabled others to OCR it, and recompile it offshore.
Also that ITAR enabled Thawte in South Africa (where I’m from) as a business to completely dominate sales for 128 bit SSL certs outside the US. Thawte was eventually acquired by Verizon for $600 million and the founder Mark Shuttleworth used the cash to become an astronaut and then founded Ubuntu.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago[flagged]
- halJordan 3y agoITAR is quite sensible. We can make mistakes and we can be sensible but wrong.
- FactKnower69 3y ago[flagged]
- alexdunmow 3y agoMaybe you just have a faulty sarcasm detector?
- bongodongobob 3y agoIt's no longer possible to tell. Some of the ideas that avg Americans have on the way just about anything works is frightening. My favorite lately is that the US was the real bad guy in WWII because we used nukes.
- int_19h 3y agoThat US was a "real bad guy", or that nuking cities was an evil and unnecessary thing? The latter, while not universally held, is a fairly common take, and has been that way for a few decades now.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y agoI wasn't being sarcastic.
- rpmisms 3y agoI know. We definitely aren't a nation founded on outright treason and insurrection, and thumbing our nose at authority and doing the moral thing isn't in our DNA in any way, shape, or form. Frustrating that some people think otherwise.
- Andrex 3y agoThere can be moral reasons for treason. The founding fathers certainly considered themselves moral and principled. Your frustration is misguided. Simply do not confuse illegality with immorality. Human beings generally want to feel like they're doing more good than bad. As for "the DNA of a nation," we would probably spend a few hours figuring out the definition of what that even is just for starters.
- samstave 3y agoThey were by facetious and sarcastic. ;-)
- makeitdouble 3y agoFrom the outside, unironically calling any group of politicians "fathers" feels so weird. I know it's a super common turn of phrase, and that's kinda what gets me. > Human beings generally want to feel like they're doing more good than bad We're experts at convincing ourself that what is beneficial to us is also "good", whatever this actually means.
- Andrex 3y agoWe can either rage against the era we were born into, or we can accept what we can change and what we cannot. One path leads to less frustration than the other. Be careful that you don't find yourself enjoying irritation.
- rpmisms 3y agoIt's because they created a nation from whole cloth. Also, forefathers is a common term.
- deleted 3y ago
- int_19h 3y agoIt really depends on the kind of law that you have. As the Soviet joke goes, "severity of the laws is mitigated by not having to follow them".
- inquirerGeneral 3y agoI didn't know any of this. Thanks. "The U.S. Munitions List changes over time. Until 1996–1997, ITAR classified strong cryptography as arms and prohibited their export from the U.S.[5] Another change occurred as a result of Space Systems/Loral's conduct after the February 1996 failed launch of the Intelsat 708 satellite. The Department of State charged Space Systems/Loral with violating the Arms Export Control Act and the ITAR.[6][7] As a result, technology pertaining to satellites and launch vehicles became more carefully protected." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Munitions%20List%20changes,launch%20vehicles%20became%20more%20carefully%20protected https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_....
- 3abiton 3y agoDoes that make crypto nerds arms dealers?
- CWuestefeld 3y agoAt the time, I had a t-shirt that said "this t-shirt is a munition", because it also had on it the RSA public key algorithm encoded as a barcode.
- e40 3y agoCane to say the same thing. It sparked a lot of interesting conversations over the years.
- mmaunder 3y agoHaha I remember that. OG fist bump!
- dramm 3y agoHad the same t-shirt with the barcode readable source code on it. I think prompted by seeing Greg Rose wear one, may have gotten it from him/mutual friends. As an foreign citizen I was never brave enough to wear it through a USA entry airport.
- a-dub 3y agoi seem to have vague recollection of a variant of this shirt that had a perl script on it? or was the perl script for decoding the barcode?
- T3OU-736 3y agoMemory claims: It was RSA in Perl, text shape of a dolphin, but it may be wrong.
- sillywalk 3y agoPicture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(front).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Munitions_T-shirt_(f... The code: http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/design/ http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/design/
- p-e-w 3y agoI never understood the story about the book-printed PGP source code. Isn't source code protected speech under the first amendment anyway, regardless of the form in which it is transmitted? All kinds of media receive first amendment protection, including things like monetary donations, corporate speech, art, etc. I've never heard of there being a requirement for the printed form. Did the interpretation of the first amendment change recently in this regard?
- int_19h 3y agoThe idea was to make it blatantly clear that it's not a "munition".
- p-e-w 3y agoWhy would that matter, if source code is protected speech anyway? And why is it more "clear" with a printed book vs. an emailed text file?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoThis was a time when we were happy when they managed to get congresspeople to understand that the internet is not like a truck, but more like a series of tubes. I think anchoring it to something old school like a book was a good call.
- rfw300 3y agoI think if you’re looking for a logical answer from first principles, you won’t find one. It’s more that the legal system runs on precedent, and a book fits far more squarely in the fact patterns of previous First Amendment cases. Likely the source code case would end up with the same outcome, but it doesn’t hurt to make it more obvious.
- int_19h 3y agoLegally speaking, it didn't really matter. But symbolically, having the feds argue that a book constitutes "munitions" would be bad optics for them in a way that is more understandable to the average American, compared to more legal arcane arguments about software having 1A protections.
- networkchad 3y ago[dead]
- tjoff 3y ago> [...] and this enabled others to OCR it, and recompile it offshore. Did it? Or did it just give them plausible deniability? I remember playing with OCR as a kid and all the software I could get my hands on gave horrendous results, even if the input was as perfect as one could hope for. And even today I sometimes run tesseract on perfect screenshots and it still makes weird mistakes. Would be interesting to know if the book had any extra OCR-enabling features. I'm sure the recipients would get access to proper tools and software but OCRing source-code still seems like a nightmare back then.
- consp 3y agoBanks used it on checques for ages, why would it be that difficult? You do need a compatible typesetting though.
- ryaniscool 3y agoWhere did you get your information? MICR lines, the line of numbers at the bottom of the check, use magnetic ink. The acronym stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. So for ages, they didn't use optics at all. In the modern day, cheque OCR is monopolized by one company, Mitek. They may use tesseract somewhere in their stack but I've never read that anywhere.
- MereInterest 3y agoNot so much plausible deniability, as a clear First Amendment argument. If you’re forbidden from exporting computer code, that was some new-fangled magic thing that nobody could possibly understand. If you’re banned from exporting a book, well that has some clear and obvious precedent as a restriction of free speech.
- bouncycastle 3y agoRSA = Republic of South Africa
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoRSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) is a public-key cryptosystem, one of the oldest widely used for secure data transmission.
- T3OU-736 3y agoThawte happily sold certs to US entities like universities (I was a sysadmin at one of those universities with such a cert :) )