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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

#41

Post by reuven »

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 seems less a case of the US trying to stop citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria from being educated, and more a case of the law not keeping up with the times.

It would be nice if the US Justice Department, or whoever is in charge of enforcing such sanctions, could give a clear waiver to education-related companies. I doubt that this will happen, though.

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

#42

Post by rdl »

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.

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.

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...).

Sanctions which are targeted to dual use technology, e.g. not selling advanced routing and firewall equipment to countries which are engaged in repression and murder of their own populace are more of a grey area (oops, Syria and I believe Libya...); selling to the government directly is generally out, but it's often ok to civilian businesses as long as you're able to document that it's not going to end up in the hands of the government.

General "punishment" economic sanctions are a lot more rare, and even then they generally try to weight them so the leadership is disproportionately affected (I believe the ruling cadre's favorite brands of cognac, etc. are embargoed to North Korea, which wouldn't affect normal people; regular food is not restricted.)

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

#43

Post by bambax »

> Why has this not been an issue in the past?

> Until now the interpretation of export control regulations as they relate to MOOCs has been unclear and Coursera has been operating under the interpretation that MOOCs would not be restricted. We recently received information that has led to the understanding that the services offered on Coursera are not in compliance with the law as it stands. Accordingly we have instituted a restriction...

I don't understand such a proactive respect of the law. Why don't they wait to get sued instead?

Laws are not always meant to be respected; they're meant to be broken and challenged in court.

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

#44

Post by smnrchrds »

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 are blocked, I can either not use the internet or find a way around it. Of course I chose the second option. Most Iranians have been using proxies and VPNs for the past few years. This blockage would not affect us much.

P.S. Please stop using Google Code. Edit: Also App Engine. Udacity has been inaccessible to Iranians since the beginning because they use App Engine for hosting. This is what I get when I try to access Udacity: http://i.imgur.com/zUecPHk.png

P.P.S. I am curious what percentage of the internet is blocked in Iran. When you try to access a blocked website, the censorship system shows a page explaining that the website is blocked and some links to Iranian websites. Is it possible to write a script to scan all the internet (or at least the popular websites) and determine which ones are blocked? Here is what I get when I try to access YouTube: http://git.io/HG3nsQ

I have two questions:

1. Where can I find a list of all domain names, top 1000, top 100000?

2. Is it possible to conclusively determine censorship from headers only or do I have to load the whole page and compare HTML code with a sample? Bandwidth is very expensive here.

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

#45

Post by droopybuns »

"The Department of State and Coursera are aligned in our goals and we are working tirelessly to ensure that blockage is not permanent."

Tirelessly: indefatigably: with indefatigable energy; "she watched the show indefatigably" http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=tirelessly Two thoughts:

1) Does anyone really think that the word "tirelessly" can honestly be applied to any work done by the state department?

2) Tirelessly is one of those weasly pr words that I am promising never to use again. Usually when a business says they are "working tirelessly," it turns out that the real meaning is "We want you to feel like we're working towards a solution, but this is pretty much out of our control."

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

#46

Post by rdl »

bambax wrote: post #43

> Why has this not been an issue in the past? > Until now the interpretation of export control regulations as they relate to MOOCs has been unclear and Coursera has been operating under the interpretation that MOOCs would not be restricted. We recently received information that has led to the understanding that the services offered on Coursera are not in compliance with the law as it stands. Accordingly we have insti…

Criminal liability for the company (and executives/officers). If it were civil, perhaps they could take a principled stand.

The same law applies to selling weapons to terrorists, basically.

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

#49

Post by draugadrotten »

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…

1. Where can I find a list of all domain names, top 1000, top 100000?

Alexa http://www.alexa.com/topsites could provide you with data which is for the "top 500".

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

#50

Post by smnrchrds »

draugadrotten wrote: post #49
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…

1. Where can I find a list of all domain names, top 1000, top 100000? Alexa http://www.alexa.com/topsites could provide you with data which is for the "top 500".

I know about Alexa, but 500 is too small for statistical analysis.
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