On Thu, 9 Jun 1994, Steve Rich wrote:

> Date: Thu, 09 Jun 1994 15:12:00 -0400
> From: Steve Rich <rich@utkux1.utk.edu>
> To: Manuel Eduardo Correia <mcc@ncc.up.pt>
> Cc: macbsd-general@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu
> Subject: Re: MacBSD ftp mirror down 
> 
> In message <199406090927.AA23497@ciup1.ncc.up.pt>you write:
> >	The only reason I see for this law is just to keep stupid
> >Americans happy with the tax dollars that are being spend in this
> >nonsense.
> 
> Yes, there are stupid Americans, just like there are stupid people in
> most countries (as can be seen from some of these postings).  There
> are few in this particular county who are happy with the export
> restrictions.
> 
> >   Oh Yeahh !! And the CIA is doing the same thing in Japan !!!
> >Stealing industrial secrets for the American Auto Industry... What a
> >country !!!
> 
> Like we would need CIA to inform us of how screwed up our auto
> industry is...
> 
> >	The only thing you get with this obtuse politic is to make a
> >lot of ignorant people happy with a false sense of security and
> >really cripple yours software companies. If I can buy an European Unix
> >system with all the encryption algorithms in place why bother with the
> >American's 8-)...
> 


 Well, having settled that, what is the best solution at present for 
European people who are in such an environment that they cannot have the 
standard "crypt" libs?

 I am mostly involved myself at present with the Amiga NetBSD project. 
The solution we used their was very simple:

 A distribution was created containing everything but crypt(). A readme 
file was in this directory warning users that it did not possess the 
library due to U.S. export regulations.

 The library is _not_ however illegal to possess in Europe, and having it 
on one's site is not illegal. So libcrypt was placed in another directory 
which had a no_export message in it.

 This is a perfectly legal solution, though it might make some site 
admins nervous for no good reason. It is the same as how I can ftp to a 
site in Britain, and get books which are still copyrighted in the U.S. Of 
course I would never do that :), but the point remains. The possession is 
not illegal, so if one happened to say, "find" a copy of crypt, or some 
library which functioned in an identical manner in Europe, it could be 
kept as a side distribution, if the proper warnings were issued.

 If any Europeans have any doubts about this, I recommend you ftp to 
gatekeeper.dec.com, and you will see that this is exactly the set up that 
they are using. It is an honor system, which of course we can be sure 
everyone honors.


Charles Ewen MacMillan  | Tezcat.COM - The Good Guys
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