Nothing new

Zed — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:16:10 -0400

I did hear of a presentation at UTexas that said the government was planning to start audits, but I haven't been able to confirm that anywhere else.

Any update on the status of the proposed BIS EAR changes?

Anonymous — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:32:28 -0400

I'm unable to find any further information on the proposed changes you describe, and the Federal Register article is gone. Heard anything new?

- Gregg TeHennepe

What I wrote to the BIS

Zed — Mon, 09 May 2005 22:39:19 -0400

Quoting myself, Regulations.gov #: EREG - 48:

I am the head system administrator for the Department of Mathematics at LSU, and I am gravely worried by these changes. Most universities have UNIX-based labs with authentication based on a single login, and due to their ability of each machine to receive batch jobs remotely, these labs constitute a de-facto computing cluster. Most operating systems do not have the ability to prevent a user from logging into multiple machines at once, which is what would be necessary to prevent their use as a supercomputing cluster. While this doesn't so much affect anyone from a Tier 2 country, the limits on Tier 3 countries (and obviously Tier 4) are so restrictive that having 20 cheap PCs from Dell (as common Pentium 4 processors are now producing more than 10k MTOPS) in such a lab will mean that universities will be unable to provide accounts (or jobs administering or performing simple maintenance on these machines) to students who were born in Tier 3 or Tier 4 countries -- even if they are now US citizens!

This change in regulation may very well have the net effect of forcing universities to no longer accept students from Tier 3 and Tier 4 countries at all, as access to computing labs has now become a requirement for many courses. I think this will be bad for the United States, and bad for the scientific community in general.

I also believe that this will have little to no effect on securing technology. Anyone capable of turning the computational results from 20 desktop computers into a weapon will also likely have the resources to export that many high-end laptops (or even desktops), simply by leaving the country with them one at a time. I should also note that Intel has manufacturing plants in Israel itself, a Tier-3 country, and thus making university computers unavailable to Israeli students or professors is a futile and wasteful gesture at best.

Cheap clustering technology has made this regulation obsolete; the computers are already available worldwide. I respectfully suggest that rather than attempting to enforce strict rules about usage within the United States that harm those within the United States much more than they harm the enemies of the United States, that you look instead into finding ways for us to better benefit from the full use of our own technology.

Commerce Department Will Restrict Computer Access to Foreigners?

Zed — Mon, 09 May 2005 21:40:22 -0400

If my reading is correct, the proposed rule changes by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in the Department of Commerce that were posted in the March 28 Federal Register contain changes that appear to be designed to prevent many foreigners in the US, specifically including foreign students, from having access to more than very basic computing power. I have written a quick analysis.

Resonant Information - Commerce Department Will Restrict Computer Access to Foreigners? - Comments

Nothing new

Any update on the status of the proposed BIS EAR changes?

What I wrote to the BIS

Commerce Department Will Restrict Computer Access to Foreigners?