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

blog.coursera.org

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

#121

Post by gtirloni »

smnrchrds wrote: post #76
antihero wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How common are VPNs?

Government has tried blocking all anti-censorship technologies, so normal PPTP and L2TP VPN services will not work. VPN vendors now offer their own software which I assume uses non-conventional ports and settings to circumvent it. But VPNs are not the only solution. Most people use software like Psiphon or Freegate to access the internet. I don't know about general population, but everyone I know uses some kind of an…

Here in Brazil we have many laws that have not "caught on", that means nobody follows them and the government doesn't care to enforce it. Of course that is bad, but sometimes these laws are very stupid and that's why it is the way it is.

In Iran with the censorship, could the same thing be happening? Someone created it, the government sees some uses for it, an organization was tasked with enforcing it but since there are a lot of ways to circumvent it and everybody knows how, that might show this organization does not actively care enough to update it's filter. That is, it's there because someone someday had the stupid idea of creating a big firewall, but there is less and less support to actually make it real and effective?

Would I be right in assuming this much?

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

#122

Post by mjn »

reuven wrote: post #41

The problem here is that Coursera is a for-profit company. If they were an educational non-profit, my guess is that they could find a way to somehow work with individual citizens of these countries. But the sanctions are in place to stop US companies from doing business with these countries, and it probably never occurred to anyone that a for-profit company, in the US, would want to educate people in Iran. Thus, this…

> If they were an educational non-profit, my guess is that they could find a way to somehow work with individual citizens of these countries.

Yeah, in academia we've generally been told (at more than one university) that educational contacts with individual students and researchers at universities in these countries are ok, barring a bunch of exceptions. Exceptions include: there must be no financial relationship (we can't hire someone in Syria, send them equipment, etc.), no relationship with business entities in those countries (no assistance to spinoff commercial research, etc.), the contacts can't involve certain "sensitive" subjects that are subject to technological export controls, and the contacts can't involve "specially designated nationals" who are specifically blacklisted. Oh and you should probably forget it if your lab has any DARPA contracts and/or any staff with security clearance. A bit of a minefield, but I know people who have worked with individual students and professors on research without complaint from the university legal department (or the U.S. government). One common angle recently is that individual Syrian students will try to find a non-Syrian academic collaborator to publish a paper with, in order to build a CV that can get them into a graduate program abroad (and thereby getting a visa to get out of Syria).

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

#123

Post by [deleted] »

louhike wrote: post #27
slazaro wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kids in these countries are already suffering under oppression/war/famine/ you name it.. Just a nitpick. Maybe in the other three countries this is true, but Cuba is pretty well off in those respects. Especially education wise.

Iran is in a good situation also, and I think Syria was ok before the war. The problem was the oppression mostly. I've met several students from upthere. They complained about the lack of freedom but they did not about lack of education, war or famine. They were even pretty well educated.

[deleted]

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

#124

Post by myzerox »

MarkTee wrote: post #120
myzerox wrote: post #93

This is the worst possible measure to deal with those sanctioned countries. As we've seen in the Arab Spring or currently in Ukraine, extremist regimes have to replaced by bottom-up grassroot movements, by the will of the people. Having said that, what could be a stronger weapon than access to education?

You're assuming that the US wants those regimes to be replaced.

Yes, my assumption is that's what the US people want.

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

#125

Post by testrun »

bambax wrote: post #115
testrun wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an extremely interesting philosophy. So how does this work? If I don't like somebody and shoots him, I can challenge the notion of manslaughter/murder in court?

It means you don't surrender your conscience to your government. So for example if your superiors, some official from some agency, or the President, asks you to torture suspects, or to monitor the private conversations of every citizen, or to keep so-called "National Security Letters" secret, and they say you have to do it "because it's the law", you can either hide behind authority or try and think for yourself. It…

Interesting. So what it means is that depends on my believe system I can do whatever I want? If I am a psychopath I can kill people, if I believe in saria law women need to cover up their faces and so on. What makes my believe system superior to yours or anybody else?

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

#127

Post by kriro »

Call me naive but I always assumed access to more information and education was a strong driving force towards less oppression and more freedom.

I guess US brass disagrees and would rather put a nice "rogue" label on things and replace governments with worse governments over and over instead of supporting generic change that comes from the people.

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

#128

Post by smnrchrds »

gtirloni wrote: post #121
smnrchrds wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government has tried blocking all anti-censorship technologies, so normal PPTP and L2TP VPN services will not work. VPN vendors now offer their own software which I assume uses non-conventional ports and settings to circumvent it. But VPNs are not the only solution. Most people use software like Psiphon or Freegate to access the internet. I don't know about general population, but everyone I know uses some kind of an…

Here in Brazil we have many laws that have not "caught on", that means nobody follows them and the government doesn't care to enforce it. Of course that is bad, but sometimes these laws are very stupid and that's why it is the way it is. In Iran with the censorship, could the same thing be happening? Someone created it, the government sees some uses for it, an organization was tasked with enforcing it but since there…

The situation is quite different in Iran. Traditionally the government had control over all media. Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance reviews all books before publishing and may remove the parts it doesn't like or prevent books from being published altogether. Same for newspapers and magazines, except they don't review them before publishing, but if they find something offensive they close the newspaper. The only entity allowed to operate TV or radio channels is Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting(IRIB) which is part of the government, etc.

When internet became popular, the government monopoly got threatened. Since then they did everything in their power to restrict the use of internet. First they passed regulations that forced private ISPs to buy their bandwidth through a government organization and deployed a censorship software (rumored to be Chinese) on all of it, so blocking is national not per ISP. The they passed a law restricting home users to 128 kbps (yes, kilobits per second not even kilobytes). Then they criminalized providing anti-censorship solutions (but not using them, although it is debated). In some occasions (like after 2009 election), they make the internet so slow it is virtually impossible to use. HTTPS traffic is always slower than HTTP and occasionally completely blocked.

It is all about maintaining power to control the narrative. As I said, it hasn't worked as well as they have expected. Now they are building something called National Internet. They say they don't plan to block access to the internet but I am not so hopeful.

It has been a decade-long battle between government and freedom of information and speech. Most people who are affected aren't dissidents, but simply people who want to update their Facebook status.

It is sad because we are a fairly developed country. There is no war or famine, our healthcare system is good, we have powerful industries, good universities, big cities with good public transportation and interstate highways, etc.

The problem is that over the years since the Islamic Revolution our nation has become more liberal in general while the government remains rigidly conservative. It will be a long answer to describe where we are and how we got here, but I think this short comment is enough to answer your question.

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

#130

Post by BugBrother »

dispense wrote: post #105
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 mo…

I'm not going to support breaking security, but it seems like it would make it hard to ID dissidents if Windows viruses sometimes accessed random sensitive DNS addresses (I assume things like Danish cartoons, democracy/atheist information, how to change religion, etc). Maybe only if in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Something similar from China, but with a different hotlist.

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