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From: BattenIG@CS.BHAM.AC.UK (Ian G Batten)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: UUCP to RUSSIA
Message-ID: <8710231332.aa13376@toby.cs.bham.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 23-Oct-87 08:32:21 EST
Article-I.D.: toby.8710231332.aa13376
Posted: Fri Oct 23 08:32:21 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Oct-87 15:23:09 EST
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>  Interesting point.  Many people write "freeware" or "shareware" these
>  days that is given away freely.  Since it's not commerce to not-sell
>  something, commercial export bans really can't apply.  (Can they?  I'm
>  not a lawyer, but this seems to fit into a legal nicety.)  What will
>  the government do when some 7-year-old hacker writes a DES system and
>  puts it on a free BBS?

I suspect that it can be stopped; however, even though our Suns don't
have the des software because of export restrictions, it's noticable
that almost everyone has a PD des on their machines these days.  It's
moderately hard to impose restrictions on physical hardware, harder
still on "actual" (ie tapes, disks, listings) on software; stopping the
flow of information is well-nigh impossible.  Since the des algorithm is
publically available, witholding the code that implements it is rather
pointless.

ian