Resonant Information - Worried - Comments

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

Authorization

Zed — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 12:36:20 -0400

If you have a link providing evidence that the National Guard was only allowed to enter on Wednesday, I'd appreciate seeing it.

For the record, I don't

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 08:33:23 -0400

For the record, I don't think that perception was correct, but it came from the top, which is one reason I have called for the resignation of both Chertoff and Brown. Regarding, the Blanco request, though, she made a money request at that point--she only authorized the guard from other states to enter LA on Wednesday. Gail at ST

Just to clarify, Maggie and

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 08:23:29 -0400

Just to clarify, Maggie and I were both quoting from her husband's message to her. He is a national guardsman who was scheduled to go to NO and was explaining what he knew about the situation. Gail at Scribal Terror

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.

Alberto Gonzales is Not Fit to be Attorney General

Zed — Fri, 28 Jan 2005 04:40:50 -0500

I've submitted this node to a page collecting links to weblogs opposing the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales. If you have a blog of your own and want to show support, you may want to have a look.

Not, I imagine, that this will have any impact on the Senate, but there may be other value in having a central hub connecting all the criticism.