KNOWLEDGE DOESN´T MEAN PRIVACY... what da hack with U.S ?? Politics plays laws, Knowledge plays proudly.
There´s too many ppl in America from those conuntries, so... they will feel it too.
Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
161–170 of 196 posts
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#162This 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.
I don't mean to take sides here, but maybe the creation and existence of workarounds like Google Proxy, which eventually turn into open secrets, can be a way of communicating that there's a problem, which may in turn motivate people to think about solutions?
I think a workaround doesn't necessarily preclude a "real" problem solution; rather, it could serve as a prototype.
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 lo…
But in this case, its the US blocking Iran not Iran censoring itself..
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#164Thought Experiment: Imagine a large cohort of reasonable, well intentioned, creative, knowledgeable and empowered people came together and asked each other this question: How can we as Homo sapiens, organize society, design and deploy systems, create technologies that allow us to live and pursue the lives that we want on a day to day basis. More urgently, how can we as well save ourselves from eventual but certain de…
Good luck re-engineering an entire human society.
Though for an ancient approach checkout Plato's Republic.
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#165Apart from the usual VPN advice for those affected, I'd like to suggest a EU based competitor to Coursera - https://iversity.org/
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#166The 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…
Do they license their course materials under an open source license? If so, other parties could easily redistribute the material. If not, I guess we once again feel the pain of universities selling out their knowledge to commercial gatekeepers.
Coursera doesn't own it's courses - just the platform. They belong to the partner universities.
Guaranteed they're not "open" in any way.
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#167This is sad and not very clever. If you want to destroy this regimes: educate the people. Period.
Follow the money. How would you make money if your business revolves around having an enemy, FUD about the enemy, "protection" from the enemy? You'd need to find new enemies, or new ways of earning a profit, and who profits off that kind of pointless paper shuffling?
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't on Coursera. Take it up with your elected officials.
>Take it up with your elected officials. Yeah, how's that working out? But I totally agree this is not on Coursera.
you know what?
this is actually something that we should contact our elected officials on
what has to happen here? someone at the State Department has to sign off on it?
that sounds like the sort of thing the right congressman or senator making a phone call could make happen
that also sounds like the sort of thing that many congressmen and senators would enjoy bragging about accomplishing
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think both countries are run in the same way, I know they are not. What I don't know is how you inferred I did think in that way from my comment.
I don't know, could it be the way you sarcastically drew parallels between the two as if they were the same? If you had just said what you meant, instead of trying to be clever or cute, maybe there wouldn't be such room for misinterpretation.
Could be that, but that would indeed be a misinterpretation. Could also be that people who don't agree with a reasoning tend to try to twist other people's words to make their arguments look wrong.
Anyway, I'll try to be stupid and mean next time so there is no ambiguity.
Re: Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is ridiculous. Are you purposely ignoring the ____NOT ALWAYS____ in the qoute? Do you understand what this picture is? http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/11/jackson-ms-sit-in.jpg Do you understand the good that comes from Google disabling censorship in China even though it was not lawful under Chinese law to do so? I'm not going to get into some silly pedantic debate about who gets to decide right & wrong. If you don't…
I will make this simple: 1. Not always means that you have to make a decision, the question is on what principle do you decide to challenge a law in court, and why that principle will be superior than somebody else principles. 2. I did not discuss this with you at all, I am asking bambax, so if you want to jump into a discussion, and suddenly decides to throw a tantrum, good luck to you. 3. Google censorship or radge…
Of course it depends on your "belief system". It's called morals. And what makes a certain set of moral rules superior to a certain other set? That's a centuries old question that will probably not be settled in this forum, but a good approach is the wideness of its adoption among the population. There's probably much more consensus on murder being wrong, than on providing free education being wrong.
But you're welcome to challenge both in the courts of justice and public opinion.