At 9:33 PM 3/21/96 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
From: denning@cs.cosc.georgetown.edu (Dorothy Denning)
The Commerce/NSA study did acknowledge that the existence of foreign products claiming strong encryption could have a negative effect on U.S. competitiveness. However, by allowing encryption services to be sold separately from the applications software that uses them, CAPIs will make it extremely unlikely that general-purpose software will be substantially effected by export controls.
Which side is Dr. Denning _on_ here? At present, software using CAPIs is not exportable under the ITAR, since the CAPI is a "component of a munitions system"; is she now advocating legalized export of software using government-approved CAPIs only?
Case in point. I recently had a client ask me to locate a reference implementation of SSL. I fired up AltaVista and quickly found two of them. One was available thru Netscape, and the other was Eric Young's from Australia. Now, in good conscience, do I give them Netscape's non-exportable version, or Eric's already exported version. Of course I gave them Eric's. They were delighted since they can just point their foreign customers to Eric's site and avoid the whole export issue. I would like to publicly thank Eric for making his code available to US sites. I hope that this description, in some small way, helps to overcome the idiocy of not being able to export what is already freely available abroad. Regards - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bill Frantz | The CDA means | Periwinkle -- Computer Consulting (408)356-8506 | lost jobs and | 16345 Englewood Ave. frantz@netcom.com | dead teenagers | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA