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Comment by nknight | Hacker News Reader

No, US law requires no such thing.

Receivers capable of operating above 18km and 515 meters/sec are export controlled, but then, so is cryptography software.

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Apparently they are not allowed to operate at altitudes higher than 60000 ft and speeds greater than 1000 knots.

http://blog.jgc.org/2010/11/gaga-1-cocom-limit-for-gps.html

That blog entry fundamentally misunderstands the restriction.

The relevant document is available here: http://www.armscontrol.org/documents/mtcr

Note that it refers to export controls, not any blanket ban on functionality.

Given that phones are sold worldwide and phone vendors probably don't want to deal with ITAR paperwork for features that aren't even officially supported, I'm betting they have crippled GPS.

HTC is a Taiwanese company. Their R&D and manufacturing are all done in Asia. They import phones to the US, they don't export them from the US. ITAR has rather limited relevance to them.

There's a decent chance (although it is not necessarily the case) the GPS receiver chips have some US-originated IP in them.

That would be irrelevant for export regulations though. A better reason for staying inside the export regulations, is that it would make it problematic to reexport it, so e.g. amazon would have to apply for export permit to sell it from the US and other countries that have signed the Wassenaar agreement, which is most western countries.

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