Re: New crypto regulations
At 09:57 AM 12/30/96 -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
The regs, as Lucky pointed out, do hint at restrictions on OCR fonts in the future. However this is obviously doomed since as OCR technology advances the distinction between OCR and non-OCR fonts will vanish. I imagine that a special purpose character recognition engine could be built to work on any known, monospaced font, as is typically used for source code.
It seems to me that the authors of the regulations have come to the same conclusion. Which is why the ban on scannable text is not in the current version of the regs. But the regulators want to see scannable source banned that much is clear. At the same time, they do not want to run up against the wide ranging protections printed speech enjoys. I expect the solution ultimately employed to use a method similar to what is currently used in color copiers and digital audio mastering equipment. Normal color copiers will copy just about all colors except the particular shade of green used in US currency. Consumer digital audio recording equipment makes use of copy protection features. Only hideously expensive "professional" equipment has the copy protection turned off. We might see something similar for printed source and OCR programs. Printed source will have to be printed in a specific font. A font that OCR programs are required to not recognize. OCR programs that do recognize this specific font will of course be export controlled. -- Lucky Green mailto:shamrock@netcom.com PGP encrypted mail preferred Make your mark in the history of mathematics. Use the spare cycles of your PC/PPC/UNIX box to help find a new prime. http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
At 12:07 PM -0800 12/30/96, Lucky Green wrote:
I expect the solution ultimately employed to use a method similar to what is currently used in color copiers and digital audio mastering equipment. Normal color copiers will copy just about all colors except the particular shade of green used in US currency. Consumer digital audio recording equipment makes use of copy protection features. Only hideously expensive "professional" equipment has the copy protection turned off.
We might see something similar for printed source and OCR programs. Printed source will have to be printed in a specific font. A font that OCR programs are required to not recognize. OCR programs that do recognize this specific font will of course be export controlled.
I doubt this. This would be too absurd even for the feds...a special font to be used in books? As I said, hand-entry of text and code is already very cheap....and any code fragments desired to be exported can be trivially taken out in any of the zillions of floppies and disks crossing the borders each day, or the Net of course (stego, hidden, remailed, whatever). The whole book thing is an oddity...no meaningful crypto is going to be helped or hindered by the book exception. What _could_ conceivably happen is that export of some code fragment could be given plausible deniability that an export violation occurred by having a paper version distributed widely. "Honest...we didn't send PGP 3.0 to Europe! Someone must've OCRed or manually typed in the code we published in "PGP 3--The Text."" This strategem would work even if the feds mandated some special non-OCRable font (which I doubt could exist...if humans can read the font, so can trainable OCR programs, which of course don't rely on having libraries of particular fonts). --Tim May --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Mr. May said:
At 12:07 PM -0800 12/30/96, Lucky Green wrote: Net of course (stego, hidden, remailed, whatever).
The whole book thing is an oddity...no meaningful crypto is going to be helped or hindered by the book exception.
I disagree. The thing about exporting crypto code in book for is that it allows budding anarc^h^h^h^h^h cryptographers and crypto-programmers specific examples of algorythm implementation. It allows people outside the US to learn about and write good crypto. I, for one, don't care _where_ the code gets written, as long as I can get it, and use it. France, Libya, Russia, or Albania, it doesn't matter WHERE the keyboard is, with the internet it is all 30 or 40 hops away. Of course, that is the problem. Soon we will see the banning of IMPORT of strong crypto. These people are either very stupid, or very bright. Either way, they are not on friendly terms with freedom. Petro, Christopher C. petro@suba.com <prefered for any non-list stuff> snow@smoke.suba.com
participants (3)
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Lucky Green
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snow
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Timothy C. May