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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

#151

Post by phaer »

ekianjo wrote: post #79
rdl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking classes like this is like 0.0001% of what the sanction is for. It's an unintended consequence of a blanket sanction. The sanctions exist for two reasons: to directly prevent "enemy" nations from gaining weapons (or economic infrastructure) to use for bad purposes, and to put pressure on the foreign government (directly on members of the government, and indirectly through the population) to provoke change. Sa…

> Sanctions which are directly targeted against weapons are pretty obvious -- don't sell chemical weapons to middle-eastern dictators with a history of gassing parts of their own population (oops, Iraq and Libya...). Interesting, wasn't the US an ally of Iraq in the past, and completely closed their eyes on the gassing of Iranian populations during the Iraq-Iran war, as well as the gassing of Kurds living in Iraq ? S…

> Should the US sanction themselves? :)

They do, you can't export from the US to the US, can you? ;)

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

#152

Post by ekianjo »

repsilat wrote: post #114
ekianjo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes they do. recently started.

Don't just disagree, provide information if you have it. I think you were talking about Coursera's "specialisations," which are essentially a grouping of "signature track" courses with a project or exam at the end. All of the courses can be taken for free if you don't care about the special certificates, but the project is just for paying customers. Udacity is running some "pay only" courses with Georgia Tech for its…

Ok I am not 100 percent sure about that but it does seem that some courses in specializations are only available in this way.

EDIT: ok, so you were apparently right. The specialization courses stay free, but it's not so obvious when you are looking at them from the specialization page.

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

#153

Post by dispense »

smnrchrds wrote: post #116
repsilat wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is a combination of manual and automatic blocking. Facebook censorship is manual. Dick Cheney Wikipedia page being blocked is because they have added Dick to their automatic blacklist, so it gets censored regardless of the context.

So you can't connect to Wikipedia using HTTPS? What's the policy on HTTPS in general?

Edit: Never mind, you already answered it in another comment.

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

#154

Post by ultramancool »

jotm wrote: post #146
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…

How do you pay for the VPN?

Many VPN providers these days accept Bitcoin, just buy it locally and send it around a little and you're good to go. Though I doubt the government cares enough to look into everyone who buys VPN via other means anyways.

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

#155

Post by ultramancool »

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…

Yeah, typically the trick here is to run OpenVPN on port 443/TCP (HTTPS, which almost no one bothers to examine), you can also stunnel it if by some chance they're doing deep packet inspection and blocking OpenVPN connections.

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

#156

Post by xr09 »

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…

Hi! Cuban here, pretty much same situation as you, I feel your pain, every time I see the little broken robot when attempting to get anything from Google Code I thank we have Github and Bitbucket.

If Github gets blocked we should get something on, If only blocked governments took this issue seriously and had these essential services covered, but I guess something as amazing as github takes real starters and not some lame government founded dev group.

Anyway, just saying, we blocked people should hang around more often.

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

#158

Post by lispsil »

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…

AirVPN has obfsproxy, or you can rent a cheap vpn that takes bitcoins, check the bitcoin wiki, and set up obfsproxy yourself. It camoflauges traffic to look like regular http to bypass censorship.

Pretty sure most coursera vids and materials are ripped and avail via torrent too. If not could wholesale rip the site and mirror it free on yandex cloud. Russia laughs at US petty sanctions

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

#159

Post by smnrchrds »

dispense wrote: post #153
smnrchrds wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a combination of manual and automatic blocking. Facebook censorship is manual. Dick Cheney Wikipedia page being blocked is because they have added Dick to their automatic blacklist, so it gets censored regardless of the context.

So you can't connect to Wikipedia using HTTPS? What's the policy on HTTPS in general? Edit: Never mind, you already answered it in another comment.

We can use HTTPS, but it is usually slower and less reliable. If you are uploading a 10 MB attachment to gmail using HTTPS, you should expect it to timeout and fail 4 or 5 times before you either succeed or give up. With HTTP there is usually no problem. When I was downloading some large files from S3, I noticed that the transfer speed was 10-15 kB/s. I changed the URL to use HTTP and immediately got a 4x speedup (almost the nominal speed my ISP offers). Sometimes HTTPS is almost as good as HTTP. Usually it is 3-5x slower. Near special occasions (election days, etc) it is so slow you would get a timeout error 9 times out of 10.

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

#160

Post by smnrchrds »

jotm wrote: post #146
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…

How do you pay for the VPN?

Here is the strange part: with debit card. Theoretically the government can identify and arrest all VPN providers in 24 hours. For some reason they have never made a single VPN-related arrest as far as I know. This has led many (including me) believe that VPNs are government honeypots. People are going to circumvent censorship one way or the other. If they provide VPN for those who are really seeking it, they will lose their power for censorship but not surveillance. I assume they don't care so much about people watching porn as they care about citizen journalists writing for BBC (many of whom have been arrested).
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