New Software Controls

TH points out that there's a broad new provision in the
BXA Wassenaar rule for controlling telecommunications
software under Category 5, Part I - Telecommunications, 
quote:

   You might want to highlight the following section ... not sure of the 
   entire context ... but this isn't something that I'd seen before. It looks
   like control of any software that can transmit data.

       c.3. ``Software'' which provides the capability of recovering
       ``source code'' of telecommunications ``software'' controlled by
       5A001, 5B001, or 5C001;

For the citation see: 

   http://jya.com/bxa-wa/cat51.htm#5D001c3

---------

We've broken the rule into several components for easier
access to the Commerce Control List revisions. See:

   http://jya.com/bxa-wa-rule.htm

(Wasenaar discussion...)
>>    You might want to highlight the following section ... not sure of the 
>>    entire context ... but this isn't something that I'd seen before. It looks
>>    like control of any software that can transmit data.
>> 
>>        c.3. ``Software'' which provides the capability of recovering
>>        ``source code'' of telecommunications ``software'' controlled by
>>        5A001, 5B001, or 5C001;
>Export ban on decompilers?  Disassemblers?  Debuggers?
>These tools are general purpose, so this seems particularly weird.

It's only weird if you assume the authors have a clue...
Depending on the overall context, telco software companies and their
customers may find this section interesting as well.

If they were thinking at all when they wrote this, they were probable concerned
about products that let people ship exportable binaries and patchtools
that let users recover the source code to undo the limitations.

But as you say, general purpose tools work fine.  The special purpose
tools I've seen have been the ones that patch the binaries of Netscape
40-bit versions to reenable 128-bit capability, and they just use binary.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639

[ObNote: the cypherpunks list is not at toad.com]

John Young <jya@pipeline.com> information terrorist writes:
> TH points out that there's a broad new provision in the
> BXA Wassenaar rule for controlling telecommunications
> software under Category 5, Part I - Telecommunications, 
> quote:
> 
>    You might want to highlight the following section ... not sure of the 
>    entire context ... but this isn't something that I'd seen before. It looks
>    like control of any software that can transmit data.
> 
>        c.3. ``Software'' which provides the capability of recovering
>        ``source code'' of telecommunications ``software'' controlled by
>        5A001, 5B001, or 5C001;

Export ban on decompilers?  Disassemblers?  Debuggers?

These tools are general purpose, so this seems particularly weird.

Adam