Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

blog.coursera.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 196 posts

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#101

Post by dsuth »

xmonkee wrote: post #38
rdl wrote: post #24

It would be nice if there were a safe harbor for open source/educational/non-dual-use materials even to individuals in a sanction-restricted regime. I doubt the Government of Cuba (the true target of the sanctions) would get material benefit from free courses for their populace. Certainly only the most indirect and limited military benefit. Unfortunately, as far as I'm aware, the treasury and state restrictions aren'…

Yep. Surely an uneducated adversarial population is more dangerous in the long run than an educated and productive one? I cannot possibly fathom the intended outcome of this sanction. Keeping a few kids from doing programming courses is not going to help the US ever have friendly ties with them. And it's not like this is an issue about which the opposing govt will care enough about to change their policies.

Don't these bans typically have to do with things like exporting cryptographic softer or techniques? This is the first thing that popped into my head.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#102

Post by sdfjkl »

This export rule nonsense can be bypassed, as demonstrated successfully by Phil Zimmerman[1], who ended up getting crypto legislation changed. Also in a similar case about European laws that prohibited bypassing DRM, the developers of CloneCD moved their development to Antigua[2] (and named the new company Slysoft).

Coursera, please investigate such avenues of bypassing this nonsense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in... [2] http://www.myce.com/news/Elby-announces-that-CloneCD-emigrat...

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#104

Post by joshz »

rikacomet wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous! What is the use of being the premier institute in the world, and do just about nothing about such a obvious immorality!? The kids in these countries are already suffering under oppression/war/famine/ you name it.. things you won't want upon yourself, much less on your kids.I know a guy who plays a rpg with me who is from Syria, he is 14 year old, and his school is defunct. Just few months back I r…

They restored full access for Syria.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#105

Post by dispense »

smnrchrds wrote: post #44

As someone who lives in Iran, this is sad but not news. I have gotten used to see half the websites blocked by my government(Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, etc) and the other half by your government(Java SE or anything else from Oracle, Google Code, Google Play Store, anything from Xilinx, etc). If one of my favorite websites was blocked, I may have considered not using it anymore. When virtually all websites…

If you would like me to, I can set up a Tor bridge for you. Unfortunately, YCombinator doesn't have a private messaging system, so we'll have to figure out a way to communicate the details securely. Cryptocat is blocked. If you're familiar with GPG, we could use that right here. IRC is possible too. Email is not safe.

I would not recommend you to do a mass censorship scan from your own IP. It's a given that one or more of the top 100,000 sites triggers some kind of flag, apart from the fact that such activity itself may mark you as a person of interest.

Another thing to consider is that the government can likely link your YCombinator account to you because there are few YCombinator users in Iran, and from that subset, only a small number (maybe 1) matches your posting timestamps. I'm of course assuming that they keep such traffic logs. Syria's surveillance system did/does.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#106

Post by level09 »

This should be followed by a speech from a US official bragging about internet freedom and equal access to knowledge.

Seriously, instead of starting projects like Google Proxy (to help people in these countries bypass their government blocking), it would be better to start a project that actually helps changing those ridiculous US laws.

Maybe offer some educational courses to those officials behind these laws.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#107

Post by smnrchrds »

sdegutis wrote: post #100
smnrchrds wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, it blocks anyone coming from Iran. I think it does not solely rely on IP address, because I can't access it with my normal VPN service, even though it gives me a Canadian IP.

Sorry I should have been more clear, I meant, why are you singling out Google Code over the other ones?

Most HN visitors are programmers. Some may have projects hosted on Google Code, thus inaccessible to parts of the world without them even knowing. In the past, whenever I encountered a project hosted on Google Code which I needed, I contacted the developers and explained the situation. When I saw this discussion here on HN, I decided to use the opportunity to ask everyone who has a project hosted there to move it to a more international-friendly alternative like Github or Bitbucket.

I don't think it is probable that Oracle, Xilinx or Google change their policies. Yet it is in the developer's power to decide where to host a project.

I like to ask everyone who has a project hosted on Google Code or is thinking about using it for future projects to use another service if possible.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#108

Post by hrktb »

sdegutis wrote: post #100
smnrchrds wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, it blocks anyone coming from Iran. I think it does not solely rely on IP address, because I can't access it with my normal VPN service, even though it gives me a Canadian IP.

Sorry I should have been more clear, I meant, why are you singling out Google Code over the other ones?

Perhaps because it does some extra effort to detect VPNs and accurately block people accessing it from blocked regions? I'd imagine he's frustration is that Google isn't just reluctantly putting a dumb block to obey some external injunction, but seems to put some effort in it.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#109

Post by repsilat »

smnrchrds wrote: post #62
Encosia wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look for the link there to download a list of the top million domains (according to them, of course). Edit: http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

Thanks.

If the blocklist is manually curated then the probability of a website being blocked will depend on its popularity. I wouldn't just be interested in "X% of sites blocked," I'd look at "Sites seeing Y% of web traffic blocked" etc.

Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria

#110

Post by pekk »

bromagosa wrote: post #85
InclinedPlane wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clueless about what goes on in Cuba. Informers for the secret police are everywhere, nobody dares speak their mind in public. People are limited by a maximum wage. There are regular inspections of people traveling to ensure that they aren't sneaking illegal food, especially meat, around. And so on. It's as oppressive a totalitarian dictatorship as they come.

Unlike in the US, where the government doesn't spy on the citizens, everybody has free access to education, free universal healthcare, guaranteed housing and... oh wait.

If you think the way that Cuba is run is the same as the way that the US is run, there is no evidence that will ever change your mind
Post reply on HN