Hacker News Reader

Comment by LionTamer | Hacker News Reader

When was this done previously?

You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647...

You'll probably have to dig quite a bit to find the latest rules and regulations.

These regulations go back to at least the Export Control Act of 1968. Every CPU/GPU maker would have a legal team that understands these rules.

Hmm I’ll have to check that out, thanks for sharing

In many (most?) manufacturing industries there is an upper limit on export product performance. If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology. If you make microphones there is a limit on those that might be used in sonar arrays. Certainly all manner of limits exist in aerospace. Even game consoles have been limited (Iran). This is not an unusual regulation.

> If you make steel, there are a bunch of types/grades subject to limits related to their use in nuclear technology.

Assuming said steel is actually of the quality it's certified as [0]

[0] https://asiatimes.com/2017/10/nuclear-tentacles-kobe-steel/

There are all kinds of things subject to export restrictions:

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/regulations/export-adminis...

For example, high resolution analog to digital converters have restrictions. In the past strong cryptography even had restrictions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Even travel for US citizens was restricted. I have relatives who were in the semiconductor and aerospace industries during the 1980s. They were advised by the government to not attempt to travel to the Eastern Bloc. Some kinda related reading:

https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/43/1/57/5068654...

I knew about the previous cryptography restrictions, but I also knew that the Supreme Court overruled them by ruling (as I understand it) that “code is speech”. I’ll have to check out the other links though

Not the Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit in a subsequently-withdrawn opinion.

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

(Because the opinion was withdrawn, it's "persuasive" but not "binding".)

Good catch

This brings back memories of a t-shirt I had that had big red letters on it "Export Controlled" and an implementation of RSA in perl on it.

    #!/usr/local/bin/perl -s-- -export-a-crypto-sardine -RSA-6-line-PERL-fish
    '\~.         __......--------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-------....____
     \  ~.__---~';($k,$n)=@ARGV;$m=unpack(H.$w,$m."\0"x$w),$_=`echo  "[o~~-._
      \  ]s!16do$w 2+4Oi0$d*-^1[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*La1=z\U$n%0]SX$k"[$m*]"\E[     ~.
      /  ]s!szlXx++p"|dc`,s/^.|\W//g,print pack('H*',$_)while read(STDIN,$m," .'
     /  .-~~--.._" +($w=2*$d-1+length($n||die"$0 [-d] k n\n")&~1)/2);'  __..-~
    ,/.~         ~~~~----........._______________________.......-----~~'

The opposite was of course done when the US sold a ton of Xeon Phi accelerators to China when they built the Tianhe-2 supercomputer.

My favourite conspiracy theory is that this was done deliberately by the US, since Xeon Phi was a large pile of steaming turd, so the Chinese wasted money on a machine with high theoretical FLOPS but crappy real world performance, and also wasted the time of their scientists and programmers who were porting code to a programming paradigm that went nowhere fast.

Intel processors were always a waste of money.

US tried to block PlayStation 2s from going to China as they were too powerful: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/review/0...

Apple made a fairly big deal of the fact that the G5 processor, when they started putting it into their machines (or maybe it was when they went to dual G5s?), had just recently stopped being export-controlled by virtue of being classified as a "supercomputer".

(What really happened was that the Feds revised the definition of "supercomputer", and suddenly the G5 configuration they were using didn't qualify anymore... it had nothing to do with anything Apple did, except perhaps lobbying for it so they could build computers in China.)

Close, but it was actually the G4 where they started doing that.

They made a big deal about it in their commercials at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoxvLq0dFvw

There was also a ban export of strong cryptography. So Java couldn’t use string ciphers and algorithms without adding some additional jar which basically just turned the `enableStrongEncryption` flag on. This isn’t necessary anymore but I don’t know what changed legally.

I believe this is what changed legally: > One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...

Let's not forget that these policies fostered the development of encryption in Canada, Australia and other countries (See SSLEay for example). So it ended up being counter-productive. The simplest way to stop competition is to subsidize a product. In this case, offer the tools openly.

Check out the limitations ITAR places on exported electronics.

Since the creation of the United States of America. One famous in the computer era is the banning of encryption algorithm.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com