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Remember that back in the late 1990s \/ early 2000s, the USA banned the export of cryptographic technology with a cipher strength of greater than 56 bits or some such.<\/p>\n
That affected people like open source developers who were working on OpenSWAN, OpenVPN, etc, as well as companies who were working on emerging internet-grade cryptography.<\/p>\n
Many of those companies and individuals left the USA at that point. The OpenSWAN project as a whole picked up and moved to Canada.<\/p>\n
Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested and jailed by the FBI for pointing out that the “encryption” found in Adobe e-book files was basically rot-13. That caused a major shutdown of cryptography research and development in the USA.<\/p>\n
Companies that did continue development were forced to offshore their development to countries like India, Mexico and Vietnam in order to continue to serve their world-wide customer base as well as that in the USA (oddly enough crypto tech could enter the USA but could never leave). Cryptography jobs in the USA dried up and so universities stopped teaching techniques because there was no market for them.<\/p>\n
The USA has never been able to climb out of the hole it dug for itself because for several years there was no work being done or teaching of encryption technologies in the USA, so when the restrictions loosened they were already 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the world, which in internet time counts as millennia.<\/p>\n
The hole in cryptographic technology and research basically paved the way for the current lack of cryptocurrency tech and research in the USA. Look at where the major crypto tech and blockchain projects are headquartered these days — outside of the USA, because US software engineers (and to an extent, mathematicians) lack the background to be useful contributors to such projects.<\/p>\n
You won’t find France on the list either. They banned encryption outright for many years. You can dig up an old copy of Windows 95 and set the system locale to “France” and it immediately disables all of the encryption in the system, including the SMB file system protocols, login\/password handling, etc. That’s the way that many of the Microsoft protocols, which would otherwise have been encrypted, were decoded pretty much from plain text, and a large part of the reason why software like Samba exists today.<\/p>\n
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Del Elson moved his life to Vietnam close to a decade ago and built since then extensive experience across various IT roles in the Vietnamese market as country manager, CTO, project manager, solution architecture and leading several software and DevOps teams.<\/p>\n
Del’s technical skills in software engineering and solution architecture come from an extensive career in IT in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and other countries.<\/p>\n