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TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

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Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#31

Post by jacquesm »

zwarag wrote: post #20
dak1 wrote: post #4

These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…

> It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys boom, encryption done wrong!! Look at PGP, source code is open. Nobody can crack it yet. But DO we know if Apple is really on "our" side or are they just marketing it? Well, if our governments could see into the code. They could tell us. And if you tell me. Well there could be some people working for the government that co…

> Well, if our governments could see into the code. They could tell us.

They could but they never would.

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#32

Post by 15155 »

stingraycharles wrote: post #28
xg15 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but you shouldn't need access to a car's source code to measure its emissions. The test is broken, not the software.

Expounding further - what government agency has the time or money to actually sift through mountains of source code?

From a pure financial standpoint, there's no possible way that it isn't cheaper to just measure real emissions than attempt some kind of software analysis for every version of every vehicle on the market.

Furthermore, an agency inspecting source code has absolutely no way to tell whether or not that the source they've been given is actually what's running on a car.

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#33

Post by peteretep »

xg15 wrote: post #15
dak1 wrote: post #4

These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…

It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.

That doesn't seem unreasonable. How much do you trust arbitrary 3rd world country's transport department to keep your trade secrets really secret? Any answer other than "hardly" suggests you haven't spent much time in poorer countries...

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#35

Post by dataker »

This shows how the TPP could've been something great.

Sure, TPP uses the power of governments to impose interest of certain corporations.

In the other hand, TPP gradually weakens national governments by limiting their power over the individual.

Had it been restricted to providing economic cooperation and freedom between countries, it would have been amazing.

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#36

Post by jessriedel »

chronial wrote: post #22
saurik wrote: post #7

The "parties" of a treaty are governments. This has nothing to do with GPL. This is saying that a government can't say "you aren't allowed to sell software in the country of Frain as a non-Frainian unless you provide the source code for that product (whether to the end user or to the government)". They leave an exception for "critical infrastructure", because it was hard to argue that the government of Frain shouldn'…

I can't see how this about capitalism. Showing source code to anybody (government or end user) does not make you loose your rights to that source code or the compiled application. This is about freedom and the right to self-determination of governments/citizens (and thus also about democracy). I would like to point out that our patent system is basically something like this: We as a society will protect your intellec…

> I would like to point out that our patent system is basically something like this: We as a society will protect your intellectual property rights for your machine only if you show us your blueprints.

Sure but, right or wrong, the general consensus of developed countries is that software is protected even if it is closed source. (That is, they have decided that patent protection requires disclosure but copyright protection does not.) A few other countries may disagree, but the whole point of TPP is to harmonize disagreements because (it is claimed) the frictions they introduce are worse than the micro-optimizations that individual states make.

Incidentally, in practice these sorts of disclosure agreements are used by states like China for protectionist reasons, not as part of some open-source ideal.

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#37

Post by jessriedel »

stingraycharles wrote: post #28
xg15 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but you shouldn't need access to a car's source code to measure its emissions. The test is broken, not the software.

But you can imagine an internal AI that can tell whether it's being watched by the government with arbitrarily sophisticated means. In fact, that's just an extreme example of how VW broke rules. It wasn't, as I think you might be imagining, a case where the emission measuring device was lazy and just took the car's word for it. Rather, the car's software determined that it was being tested (based, I think, on various cues from how it was being driven), and lowers emissions in those situations.

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#38

Post by maxerickson »

xg15 wrote: post #15
dak1 wrote: post #4

These are rules for States. It has no bearing whatsoever on the GPL. This prevents a country from forcing somebody like Microsoft or Apple to give up their source code for "inspection" in order to access their market. It also helps to prevent States from demanding and acquiring encryption or other private keys (there's a separate section that also explicitly forbids mandating backdoors be added). Not everything in th…

It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.

The text draws a distinction between mass market software and infrastructure.

I haven't studied it closely to see how narrow those meanings are, but it seems like emissions control software might fall under infrastructure (I also guess that mass market is talking more about shrink wrap software than embedded software, you don't use an ECU in the same way that you use a word processor).

Re: TPP banning requirements to transfer or access to source code of software

#39

Post by ajuc »

stingraycharles wrote: post #28
xg15 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also would prevent government agencies from demanding i.e. the source code of a car's ECU to verify its safety and emissions behavior. The only way out of this would be to declare car ECUs (or other systems) as "critical infrastructure", the definition of which I'm sure will be subject to many political tug-of-wars once this is implemented.

Playing the devil's advocate here, but you shouldn't need access to a car's source code to measure its emissions. The test is broken, not the software.

You want repeatable conditions for tests so that you can compare results between models, and against the norms.

When you have repeatable conditions - software in the tested product can detec that and act differently in these conditions.

That's exactly what happened in VW case.

It's nontrivial to fix the test so that it is still repeatable and hard to fool by company determined to fool it.

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