On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 09:08:12PM -0400, Henry Spencer wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin writes:
> > ...That obviously means, somewhere, there is a Canadian regulation
> > which states to what extent Canadian authorities will enforce the
> > export regulations imposed by the U.S.
> That certainly is the underlying intent, but the government does not want
> to formally define Canadian rules in terms of somebody else's. What the
> rules say, as best I could figure them out (I wasn't trying hard), is that
> *everything* of US origin is subject to Canadian export controls, except
> for (numerous) things for which the paperwork is explicitly waived by
> subsidiary documents. Same effect, but they don't have to say it out loud.
> > Wasn't PGP more hampered by the RSA patent than anything else?
> Only within the US, the one place where the export rules were not an issue.
I don't think it was hampered outside of the US (with the possible
exception of Canada) either since once it was outside the US, the US
export rules were not an issue either. Once outside the US, it spred
like wildfire. What was hampered was the exporting of the code to
begin with. That they later accomplished by publishing in a book and
legally sending THAT outside the country where it was scanned in and
then compiled. That took time, but time is all it was. Even before then
(the 2.x days) we had the international version of PGP (pgpi). The
export regs were not the problem (much to the embarrasement of the US
government).
PGP was hampered more by itself and its complex archane interface
more than anything else. RSA couldn't stop it or even slow it down
(and certainly not outside the US where the RSA algorithm wasn't patented).
The US government couldn't slow it down once it got outside the US
borders. The PGP interface was it's own worse enemy.
> Henry Spencer
> henry@spsystems.net
Mike
-- Michael H. Warfield | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@WittsEnd.com (The Mad Wizard) | (770) 331-2437 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/ NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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