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Original URL: The Register has an article on fiddling by the US with an agreement set to negatively impact the IT security.
The period for comments on proposed amendments to the Wassenaar Arrangement – which governs the export of guns, lasers and proper weaponry, and computer hardware and software – ends today. So far, the tweaks concerning IT security products have received an overwhelming thumbs-down from the technology community.
In May the US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) suggested altering the Wassenaar Arrangement to include controls on the selling of state-sponsored or commercial surveillance software among the 41 countries that abide by the agreement.
But the amendments were so loosely written that they would also ban the trade in vulnerability exploits, including possibly making bug bounty programs illegal, and criminalizing many of the tools used by legitimate security researchers to test software for flaws.
The BIS called for a 60-day public comment period, which closes today, and the response from both individual researchers and companies in the field has been overwhelmingly negative. On Monday Google went public with its objections, calling the proposed changes "disastrous."
"We believe that these proposed rules, as currently written, would have a significant negative impact on the open security research community," said Neil Martin, export compliance counsel for Google and Tim Willis from the Chrome security team.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by penguinoid on Wednesday July 22 2015, @12:53AM
the Wassenaar Arrangement – which governs the export of guns, lasers and proper weaponry, and computer hardware and software
Wait, are computers and software considered weapons now? What's next, will they declare algorithms to be munitions?
RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Wednesday July 22 2015, @01:20AM
"What's next, will they declare algorithms to be munitions?"
Already were encryption programs were banned for sale for the longest time being classified I think as weapons at the time of the ban.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @01:53AM
Not weapons. Munitions. Yes really, for those new to the security game cryptographic algorithms were considered munitions and most could not be exported legally until quite recently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @03:01AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 22 2015, @05:19AM
I am not going to obey them. I hope I can burn some of them alive before they "get" me.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday July 22 2015, @04:25PM
Uhh that really isn't so outrageous considering the US military was using Playstations for a supercomputer [cnn.com]. Just to play devil's advocate here (as I am a big proponent of free speech) there is a lot of nasty applications that require a lot of computing power, from coming up with working atomic bombs to working on gene sequences for a bioweapon so I can see why the military might be a little..worried about handing it out to just anybody, especially when there are countries like NK that are really only being hampered in their desires for ever nastier weapons by lack of the tech to make 'em.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23 2015, @03:43AM
H bombs were miniaturized without much help from computers, fucking idiot.