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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (85973)	8/21/2000 9:06:26 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

This seems to me to be something approaching madness: what kind of government restricts its own exports? Do they think that Bad Chinese People are going to upgrade their missiles with the help of $3000 laptops? I have mixed feelings about this... I recognize what they think they are doing but suspect that the restriction they are attempting is probably impossible. A software engineer can hook a bunch of CPUs up into a networked supercomputer. The SETI project is doing this with a screen saver that lets you be part of their processing network. I think the reality is that if you want a high end CPU, you can get one. The spook community doesn't like it and has fought encryption and every other technology that seeks to hide things from someone else's snooping eyes (except the spooks, of course). There similar issues regarding various version of PGP. Ones in the U.S., were dumbed down. Ones in Europe weren't and as a U.S. citizen, you weren't suppose to have the European version or distribute it. The government went from site to site and eventually closed all U.S. distribution ( I watched this happen over a course of months). Because I was doing an encryption project for my company, I started researching the area of cryptography. It turns out that cryptography and random number generators are closely related. If you study one, you end up learning about the other, and vice versa. Similar things were attempted with various export restrictions on CPUs of certain speeds. I was talking to a friend who works at a national laboratory about an article I found about electromagnetic pulse weapons powered by conventional explosives; the site was Australian and I came across it by accident due to an Altavista Advanced search on a non-weapons, but similar topic. These weapons could be truck mounted and the paper was quite complete with diagrams and whatnot. I asked, if this type of information is out there, why would we restrict information on the same topic from our national labs. It's not rational. The, reason he offered, was to not support its distribution. By being a stone in the river, it won't stop the river, but it will slow it down. Yeah, there's one site. But, not two or more. And we aren't helping. I guess from an information science POV that is probably true. A kind of bandwidth restriction constraint. It doesn't seem logical but there is probably some truth. Is it effective? I doubt it. It might take 10 minutes longer to find it. BFD.