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Comment by olivierduval | Hacker News Reader

It's funny: it reminds me of "strong cryptography export ban" in the 2000's (btw, Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly)...

Obviously, it failed! You can stop a single vendor with unique technology to provide hardware components with bans, but you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!! People come and go, meet, talk, write, exchange knowledges... so sooner or later (and more soon now as long as the internet is not limited to US) the software will implement these ideas.

The only one that will be challenged will be "big corps" relying on IP protection. But if i remember correctly, Google has a research center in China... so knowledge will aleady be in China and won't even need to be "exported"

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> Oracle java still have it: you must download strong crypto package separatly

Not true since java 8u161, and similarly for 7 and 6. And not true for every java > 8.

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce...

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/8u161-relnotes...

True, though this update occurred only relatively recently, in 2016.

I've worked with OpenJDK 7 and had to install the strong crypto package for use with Tomcat...

It depends on update version.

Since 8u161, 7u171, and 6u16 you don't need to do that.

As gross as the government-meddled Java crypto libraries made me feel, the fact that the meddling-free workaround library was called "bouncycastle" really made my day.

http://bouncycastle.org/

> Here at the Bouncy Castle, we believe in encryption. That's something that's near and dear to our hearts. We believe so strongly in encryption, that we've gone to the effort to provide some for everybody, and we've now been doing it for almost 20 years!

I don't think the government actually wanted to stop math [1] from leaving the border. It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm

The intentions of laws vs the real world implications are so often disconnected. There's been a million cases where the mere side effects of laws have caused more trouble for the intended target of the good intentions than it actually helped itself (see rent control laws in NYC and Toronto ultimately significantly reducing low income housing for over a decade in the 70s and 80s because no developer would build there, significantly increasing average rents by reducing supply).

Thomas Sowell wrote a quite a few good books about this.

I have no doubt it applies equally to export laws.

No it makes it a pain to export any products abroad. In today's world where your market is probably not just the US anymore it is insane to have such rules in place.

> It was just a tool to use against people they suspected being involved espionage. Just another reason to put you in a cell. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_algorithm

The wiki link you provided does not have the words "export" or "espionage". Are you trying to imply that R,S, and A were suspected of espionage? You'll need a real source for that..

The link is for simple English Wikipedia, which does not use those words. Perhaps the standard English Wikipedia article would be a better reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)

Remember what he did? Software was specifically listed under export controls.

So, he printed the code in a book to be OCR’d and further compiled into the software.

No export controls on a book.

Cryptography devices (including software) were on the US Munitions List, which meant that it was on par with exporting guided missiles. There was an interesting episode of Darknet Diaries on this topic that covers some of the crazy restrictions, such as professors not being able to teach cryptography classes to foreign students.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILl8ozWuxnFYXIe2svjHhg

Feedback and control systems can be described in a couple pages of text and a handful of simple equations. Suppressing knowledge is never an effective strategy. We shouldn't hoard the Krabby Patty Secret Formula.

That was the theory, but I don't recall courts ever actually ruling on this.

There was also the RSA t-shirt. The originals are no longer being sold, unfortunately, but these days it's easy enough to do a custom design for your own made to order. My take: https://www.customink.com/ndx/?cid=jxu0-00bx-9p0k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States

Thank you, my memory was hazy on this. So there was a court case, but it sounds like it was ultimately undecided, since the original opinion (that it constitutes protected speech) was withdrawn?

> The Ninth Circuit ordered that this case be reheard by the en banc court, and withdrew the three-judge panel opinion ... almost nine years after Bernstein first brought the case, the judge dismissed it and asked Bernstein to come back when the government made a "concrete threat"

> you can't stop a whole field spreading knowledge!!!

Is it foolish that the US government continues to try to restrict the spread of nuclear engineering?

Actually, nuclear KNOWLEDGE is quite widespread BUT nuclear ENGINEERING is not because it requires a lot of specific (so controllable) physical ressources and technologies (values, tweaks and hacks), that is controlled by a few states monopoly. So engineering is more easily restricted efficiently.

A parallel reasoning would be with face recognition: the algorithms are quite widespread (the knowledge) and new algorithms build on shared knowledge of the field, but the tuning of the parameters, of the input datas, the access to top hardware to speed up learning process, evaluate new strategies, and access to big databases are not.

The problem for a state to get the face recognition technology is either to obtain the parameters or to invest time and money to build it. So it's not really "bannable" because theses resources are available everywhere (and lots of companies are ready to provide it).

A more "bannable" tech would be "quantum computer" because it relies on new engineering tech, not only on knwoledge.

Probably yes. They're clearly not succeeding at it and in return this has probably caused feuds between countries and peoples that will last decades if not centuries.

As a person in the US who is not a PR or citizen and has worked on things the US Government likes to know are being exported, even exposure of the knowledge to a citizen of a target country is "deemed export." Google will probably have to reorganize its research center to comply with this and bring AI research that falls under this restriction back to the US. I don't disagree that it's futile though.

And just think if we lived in a country like China they may be able to in force this better...

They can prevent NVidia from selling their GPUs abroad, I suppose.

As if those chips weren't manufactured abroad...

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