Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.coursera.org

359 pointszactral184 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

Alexa also has Top 1000000 sites, updated daily:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

How common are VPNs?

There are no statistics, but almost everyone use them. Facebook is very popular in Iran. Even there were some debates in parliament and government about not filtering it.

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 anti-censorship solution.

Facebook is censored in Iran, yet it is very popular. If you want to roughly estimate how many people circumvent censorship on a daily basis, just find out how many Iranians actively use Facebook. I guess it would be possible to find a number with Graph Search.

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?

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.

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.

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

Very very common, I can say +90% of students already use them in our university. others universities may not be any different.

About 4 years ago when I was leaving Iran, you could see physical establishments (i.e. shops) publicly advertising VPN access. While I'm not sure if you can sell VPN access as obviously as before, I'm quite sure that most internet user do use some sort of circumvention/proxying technology.

I, personally, was always very skeptical about the VPN services sold in the wild. Who knew what machine you were routing your data through was not controlled by the government themselves?

Is it possible to write a script to scan all the internet (or at least the popular websites) and determine which ones are blocked?

If you can find or make a list of websites you want to scan, you can script it. The biggest problem is doing it in a way that doesn't bring you to the attention of those doing the blocking.

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

Alexa's "top 1,000,000" list (~10.2 MB download) is at http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip

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.

It depends on the method used to block you from visiting a website.

If DNS-based blocking is used, you can use very small DNS lookups to identify whether or not a website is blocked — all of the hostnames of blocked websites will probably resolve to the same IP address. (You can check this with "nslookup www.website.com" in Windows or "host www.website.com" on Linux, OS X, etc.) If this method works, it's probably the best way — DNS requests are less likely to be logged than HTTP requests, and DNS requests and responses are small.

If the blocking uses a transparent proxy instead of forged DNS records, you could use HTTP HEAD requests and match against the "Server" header in the reply:

    Server: Apache/2.2.12 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.12 OpenSSL/0.9.7d mod_wsgi/3.2 mod_perl/1.29 PHP/4.4.1

The software listed in that "Server" header is terribly old, and I doubt you'll find any other web server on the Internet with that exact combination of software versions. So that could be a way to identify the server serving the "website blocked" page without downloading entire pages, but it might draw attention to you if you do it for thousands of websites.

Thanks. They do not use DNS-based blocking. I will try using the HEAD method if I find a way to do it anonymously.

If you have the option writing it to look for instances of US blocking that only incidentally finds local censorship may give you some ass-coverage.

Be careful, I don't think there would be a good way to do this anonymously without distributing the workload.

"...The biggest problem is doing it in a way that doesn't bring you to the attention of those doing the blocking...."

I think this is a HUGE issue that should not be taken lightly. A guy scanning certain websites from Iran IS going to attract some attention no matter how benign his motives. It just won't be taken lightly. That attention can land you on lists you don't want to be on.

I'm not saying that I don't sympathize with his/her situation... I just think that certain actions can be viewed by people with a security mindset as hostile. Indeed it may only increase the number of sites being blocked. As well as, SEVERELY restricting his/her ability to travel without being arrested. And if you attract enough of the right attention... you may find that being arrested is the least of your worries.

And all of this doesn't even take into account what Iranian authorities may do from their end.

Advice like this, given on a public forum via easily identifiable pseudonyms, should be taken with a BIG grain of salt.

Having lived the first two decades of my life, and naturally had to circumvent network blocking, in Iran, I can tell you that's not how they work. Most of the blocking they do is targeted at the masses, and most people actually do circumvent it. People who circumvent their internet blocking facilities do not generally face persecution, as it's basically 100% of the internet users.

Exactly.

گر حکم شود که مست گیرند

در شهر هر آنکه هست گیرند

Sorry, I couldn't help citing this particular piece of Persian poetry. Trust me, it's relevant.

"If they tell you to get drunk, everyone in the city is the boss"?

The literal translation would be something along the lines of "if they rule to arrest drunk people, they'd have to arrest everyone in the city."

I was referring, mostly, to what American authorities would think of an Iranian IP address port scanning web servers. That will get the attention of American authorities... and not in a good way.

You just don't go port scanning and probing willy nilly in the US. That's DOUBLY true if you are port scanning and probing sites that the US government has blocked... AND you are doing it from inside Iran.

You're just BEGGING for Homeland Security to take a closer look at you. It's very foolish.

You may know your Government... but I know mine. I can tell you that an Iranian probing sites whose access from Iran is blocked by the American government for security reasons... that's not bright. Authorities here will not take kindly to it.

> P.S. Please stop using Google Code.

Why?

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.

Make sure your DNS lookups are also routed through the VPN.

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.

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.

Honestly, living in China where blogspot/wordpress.com was blocked without a VPN was particularly annoying, I fully support the Iranian guy who says its a pain. USA should realise that people don't give a damn who's at the other end. Speaking of which, look at the freedom USA gives trade and tourists: No Cuba, no iran, no N.Korea, etc. Come off it, most passports are not half as restricting its almost as if your government is as restricting as N. Korea and you call USA a land of freedom?

Exactly! The US (or the land of freedom), doesn't let you in if they find out you've as much as visited Cuba. That's why Cuba gives you your visa in hand (as opposed to stuck in a page in your passport), so that you can still go to the US if you want to.

That is, unless you're Cuban. In that case you can go to the US and they'll welcome you to Miami with a red carpet and fool you with what freedom and cars and big houses and laptops you'll be able to have.

While there might be broad laws and regulations out there, you have to go out of your way to implement technological measures to restrict access to a certain service. Not all services are created equal: I think it is reasonable to advocate use of services that are more passive in implementing idiotic pieces of legislation and discourage use of the ones that are more restrictive, for whatever reason. It's pure pragmatism, especially when there are alternatives like GitHub. Absorbing legal risks is part of the value a service provides.

Google in particular has been one of the hardliners when it comes to restricting access to users with Iranian IPs. There are other big US companies (like Microsoft, for instance) that are much less active in banning IPs.

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.

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.

If you're going to perform a comprehensive scan (i.e. not just to sample alexa's 1M), there's a lot of crap waiting for you in the long tail -- you may want to use my subset of alexa's rankings instead, which contains only names that have been on the list for the last 322 days (it's ~700K rows): http://www.szejda.pl/pub/alexa-20130313-20140128.bz2

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.

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).

But in this case, its the US blocking Iran not Iran censoring itself..

That's interesting - I assumed they would block card payments, as well.

Hell, I have trouble paying for stuff in the EU with a US card...

Anyway, VPN providers are NOT your friend for privacy and escaping surveillance/censorship. They actually cooperate with the authorities!

Hidemyass and Astrill used to openly state they will provide any and all details of your identity and activities if the authorities request it!

There's no need for honeypots when all these companies give up your identity with a single call from the police.

They also discriminate against automated tools and robots for whatever reason, as if paying a human to do the work is better :-)

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.

Forgive my ignorance, but who is doing the blocking? Is it American sites willingly censoring for legal reasons, or is the Cuban government blocking them for the country's own ISP?

American sites willingly censoring for legal reasons

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.

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.

Well most of their courses are free (as in free beer) while they have recently been expanding their "paying only" courses catalog.

There are no "paying only" courses on Coursers.

yes they do. recently started.

No, there are not. Please provide link to courses that are accessible only with a fee.

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 online masters program, too. Not sure about their other offerings, or about edX.

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.

Coursera doesn't own it's courses - just the platform. They belong to the partner universities.

Guaranteed they're not "open" in any way.

> 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).

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 recommended him Coursera and EdX.. and now this..? This is shit!

Whats next? Edx, Khan Academy follow course!?

This is almost like that rule that was imposed back in 2003-2007 era.. when all rpg players with name Osama/Usama were banned, or forced to change their usernames. People who had their legimate natural name as Osama/Usama way before 9/11.

Talk about overkill!

This isn't on Coursera. Take it up with your elected officials.

I would if I were in US.

If you were in the US they wouldn't listen to you either, so don't feel too bad.

Bullshit. If you work at it, you can change things. Sometimes it's not as fast, or as much as you want. And it's likely to be a lot of hard work. But you can help change things for the better.

Oh really? You can change decades-old embargo laws by writing to your elected local official? Really?

I think that's what he alludes to with "hard work" and "not as fast". If you invested huge amounts of capital and campaigning, bought advertisements, setup protests, got on the news, etc. etc. perhaps enough people might notice. Doesn't mean it's effective to write a letter.

I helped change a law in Italy despite not having a lot of money or "knowing anyone". Myself and others worked on it on and off for about two years before getting a foot in the right door.

http://www.governo.it/Notizie/Presidenza/dettaglio.asp?d=690...

We're not really satisfied with the new law, but it is a small step in the right direction, and we continue to work to improve things:

http://srlfacile.org/

It's kind of a minor issue, and low hanging fruit, but still, I'm proud of it.

You are right on about writing letters. Go ahead and do it, but know that it's not enough.

Look at the civil rights movement in the US. I'm glad they didn't just decide that, having written a letter or two, and not having seen any change, that it was impossible and to give up.

You can change things, but sometimes it's better to walk around the brick wall or climb over it, instead of having a conversation with the wall asking it to please move out of the way for you.

[Edit: Can't reply to message below so I'll clarify here - my intent was that instead of arguing with politicians, they could consider options that wouldn't even involve politicians. Coursera could close their US business and move to a country that does not have the same restrictions. Doing so may also help persuade US politicians that their policies are having the reverse impact of what they want.]

It's been hauled out a thousand times, but here it is again:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Now, not every issue has to be everyone's fight, and for some things for some people, maybe skirting the issue is the best bet. We all owe a debt of gratitude to those who stand and fight, though.

>Take it up with your elected officials.

Yeah, how's that working out?

But I totally agree this is not on Coursera.

>Yeah, how's that working out?

It isn't, of course. But that's not the topic on hand.

You need to do more than just vote. Voting provides one bit of information to the electoral process, and you split that one bit between all of your political convictions. Worse, most of that signal is lost in the electoral laundry.

The best info that politicians can get on this sort of thing comes from polling, and people only poll on electoral issues. If you want specific policy change you need to help bring it to the attention of elected officials and electoral candidates.

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

Actually, edX did something like this a while ago too.

edX is, however, working on opening its doors to anyone who wants to learn:

> Tena Herlihy, edX’s general counsel, said the company has since last May worked with the U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and has so far applied for and received company-specific licenses for its MOOCs to enroll students in Cuba and Iran (a third license, for Sudan, is still in the works).

source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/28/state-dept-blo...

> 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.

Cuba is not well off in (lack of) oppression.

Not at war right now, and not suffering famine, but also right now there isn't war or famine in Iran.

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.

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

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.

Sounds fantastic. So how is it living in Cuba? When are you moving there?

Actually, other stuff came up, but after a first trip in 2003 I almost did. Got friends who went there to study and another friend who was exiled there as a political refugee.

Please recommend your RPG acquaintance the following mooc platforms that won't have those absurd regulations:

Open2Study - Australian universities alliance MOOC platform.

Futurelearn - UK universities alliance MOOC platform.

Iversity - European coursers.

Content is still limited as these platforms are younger, but they are getting more courses and polishing their platforms.

If these services don't block students from Iran, it may just be a matter of sloppiness rather than policy. When the sanctions started, our (Europe based) university was forced to remove Iranian postgrads from sciences like Physics, presumably to prevent them from gaining access to the kind of knowledge that ends up being published in magazines if it's any good. I don't see how it could serve any purpose other than to annoy and harass.

This university wasn't based in the US, but was threatened with sanctions: US based companies and institutions would have been banned from doing business with this Europe based university if they didn't comply. The irony is that US based universities are not restricted in this manner.

They restored full access for Syria.

If I don't remember incorrectly Khan is running on App Engine and therefore already blocked.

The overkill is at the level of the US State Dept and how it implements sanctions on countries that it designates as "state sponsors of terrorism." In some ways it's better to offer education to 99% of the world instead of going to prison and offering it to no one.

The US regime never ceases to amaze me.

Power projection at all levels of an ordinary human's life, from privacy to education.

I'm dumbfounded they are self proclaimed defenders of freedom. How can such cognitive dissonance run rampant within the US.

What's really chilling about this is:

>Federal regulations prohibit U.S. businesses from offering services to countries subject to economic sanctions -- a list that includes Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan

On this message board, I can imagine that "U.S. businesses" includes a substantial number of us. You're all blocking those IPs, right?

The State Dept. set a dangerous precedent when it didn't immediately respond to edX and Coursera with an "Of course a web application filled with educational content doesn't constitute doing business with the enemy."

It leaves those of us without a legal team in a real pinch.

This is why I upvoted this article - anyone selling online services from the US should be thinking deeply about their export control obligations.

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't so specific. IANAL though, particularly not an export-compliance lawyer.

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.)

All but six nations have ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, so they shouldn't be producing or possessing chemical weapons, let alone selling them to anyone.

> 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 ? Should the US sanction themselves? :)

> Should the US sanction themselves? :)

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

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.

If you are smart enough everything is dual-use. Hobbyist quadcopter to surveillance mesh of quadcopters is not so far. But in this case it is just the low that is outdated and not real reasons. Kinda like with encryption in times past.

These types of generic sanctions are not there for military purposes. They are there under the theory that they will be onerous enough to promote regime changes. Cuba is a good demonstration of how they don't work. On the contrary they create an excuse for these regimes for pretty much any domestic problem.

The whole Cuban blockade is utterly pointless anyway and deserves to die. After all Germany killed 100,000+ Americans - now our friends. Japan also - now our buddies. China (via Korea) also mostly friends. Vietnam killed 52,000 - now favorite trading country. Etc. Etc. Cuba - no one from the US killed (other than stupid Bay Of Pigs) - not a friend. Why, other than a tiny loud minority of people in S. Florida? If we just opened Cuba and sent them Disney and GM, we'd change their government in a heartbeat. Dollars change everyone's government.

I agree that the Cuban blockade doesn't help and would ideally be ended; the problem is that Cuban-Americans are a powerful voting bloc and highly concentrated in a single swing state. Plus the policy has been around for a long time. The ideal would be to have some kind of fig leaf event in Cuba (change in leadership didn't seem to do it?) which everyone can use as a face-saving excuse to end the sanctions and normalize relations. Cuba remaining Communist in the way Vietnam is communist would be a great outcome for everyone. Cuba transitioning to some form of socialist-capitalist hybrid would be even better.

Arguably the fall of the USSR would have been an ideal time to end this, even with Cuba remaining communist. Certainly a healthy Castro stepping down would have been a major favor in the 1989-1992 period toward this. I wonder if there was any effort at the time.

As an Iranian I can't really blame them. They are forced to comply with the law, and unfortunately the law is very broad. Can't really blame the US government for this sort of blanket ban either because exceptions to laws create loopholes. It won't take long until people find ways to ship missile chips as educational material.

Maybe if our government didn't threaten other nations with annihilation, this sort of shit wouldn't happen to us. Who knows.

"It won't take long until people find ways to ship missile chips as educational material."

We already lived in fear of that sort of thing once before:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/061399china-chips-revi...

> Maybe if our government didn't threaten other nations with annihilation, this sort of shit wouldn't happen to us. Who knows.

yes, you can blame our government, even when US is putting the pressure on our people, not the government. it makes prefect sense.

"Mr. Secretary, how can we show these democracy-haters that we mean business?"

"I've got it! Let's go after the studious ones by blocking their access to online education! Let's force them to overload their VPNs and proxy servers while chasing their aspirations to improve the social and political climate in their countries of origin! That'll show them."

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...

Interesting that coursera mentions that they only have a IP address block. It seems like they just want people to workaround that and access the courses.

This gives you a good idea of how difficult it is to comply with regulations in the US. And, conversely, how (in)effective regulations which don't respect the underlying technological capabilities can be.

A few things to think about: -What if students try to access once from a blacklisted IP? Is their account now blacklisted? -Does Coursera need to comb its logs for past accesses from those countries? -What if a student mentioned their home country on the message board? -What if the person claims to be an American working in Sudan?

> 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.

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.

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 doesn't mean you have to break every law; when thinking for yourself you may arrive at the same conclusion as the legislator, that torturing suspects is indispensable to get the information you need, for example, and that, in your opinion, there is no better option.

But it does mean you lose the excuse of doing something morally objectionable just because someone told you to do it; from that moment on, you do it because you want to.

The reason you don't go around shooting people should be because you find killing human beings repellent, not because you fear getting caught.

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?

Why these extreme examples? OP said "not always" and we are talking about viewing webpages here, not killing people. Nobody is saying to just do whatever you want but sometimes you should reflect on what you're being told to do.

Remeber this? http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870411730... >>Google Defies China on Web. Search Giant Stops Censoring Its Results

Did you know the excuse "I was just following orders" is no longer a valid defense 100% of the time? That means you need to consider sometimes not following rules/orders if it seems unethical.

Also, if you're protesting something you believe is unethical there can be situations[1] that breaking the law on purpose brings about progress. I think Google alm

1. http://radgeek.com/gt/2008/11/jackson-ms-sit-in.jpg

____

P.S. I don't understand how anyone doesn't already know this. The law is not absolute. You don't just follow it unquestionably & unthinkingly. There are countless examples of people breaking laws that are unethical to bring about progress in a society. I suspect you're just trolling.

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

As quoted from parent.

So if I ask the OP to explain, that is trolling? What do you define as discussion?

And my question still remains, who decides what is good or bad?

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 undestand those 2 examples and what the OP is saying, then ....good luck to you.

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 radgeek does not add to this discussion, all I want to know is what makes bambax decide when to challenge the law and on what principle.

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.

"We recently received information" might be a nice way of saying "The US Attorney's Office told us they'd sue if we didn't comply." Even if that isn't the case, others have pointed out that they're covering their arse by doing this.

More generously, it could also be construed as a proactive manoeuvre to get the law changed by upholding it to the letter. They did say they were working with the State department.

Personally I do not understand the hard grudge against Cuba. My girl friend met a car mechanic from Cuba temporarily living our country who really struggled to make a living and trying to ship home some money for their family. Yes communism is shit bad, that doesn't mean we should shield them from our culture and knowledge. I think opening up our culture to these countries as much as possible makes for the maximum possibility of influencing the local people to want change.

The other countries on that list I'm more skeptical too especially when they are not fully peaceful as knowledge can be miss used.

There's nothing wrong with communism. There's everything wrong with communist dictators for life. When one dude basically owns everything in the country, the country ceases to become communist.

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.

Coursera should ONLY allow access to IPs from .GOV -- Clearly these are the most desperately in need of an education.

In Iran there are restrictions on downloading articles from IEEE and ACM databases, not that we cannot access them, but our universities cannot renew their subscriptions. But there are always some ways to get what you need. It won't be different for Coursera. But it's not fair, because facebook, youtube, gmail and services like these are always available, and in here people are very good at hating US for making these differences.

A startup in Europe should create a free proxy to use Coursera for these guys living in those unfortunate countries. Berlin, London, Munich, etc. anything?

So that startup can have their Paypal account frozen? No thank you. Probably the best way is to create a Coursera competitor.

That's tough. Not because the software isn't out there (see open edX), but because of the content. The big attraction is that this is content from premier universities. If you open Coursentenza, how could students (or employers/colleges) down the road assess the quality of the education you offer?

Heh. Coursentenza. Not all that bad for a site name.

Probably the best way would be to build a solid network of non-english speaking Universities and then, once the kinks are worked out, have them also publish their english-language courses.

There are quite a bunch of Universities out there that already publish lectures, and I'd imagine that with time there will be more and more. A particular example of quality is TIMMS[1], which has been around almost as long as MIT open courseware.

[1] http://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/Themen/Themen.aspx

OK, since we are doing bar talk here. I have a gut feeling that North European Universities will jump into this soon enough. They want to be innovative, if they had a good platform with some kind of official back up, they would be adding courses in a blink of an eye.

Udacity ?

they can use Bitcoin

There are a few alternatives to PayPal now: Paymill and Sellfy are European companies, for example.

lots of the same export rules apply in europe

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.

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.

If first World countries can do 1 evil, it's suppressing/eliminating education for the oppressed and/or poor. (So they have no chance for future equality and can continue to be dominated by us.)

Except that Cuba is not an uneducated country... the other way around actually, with universal and completely free access to university.

By the way, unlike Coursera, they even offer free college education to other third-world countries. Something to think about.

There is a petition going on to stop these kinds of blocks. You should vote for the petition if you want a change.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reverse-policy-whi...

I signed the petition (before I found your comment actually), but I'm generally cynical about the effectiveness of such things. I'm more than willing to call/write to my state's senators/congressmen, but I feel as though since this is an issue of the state department, they're a quite a bit removed from the issue. So I'll throw the question out to the crowd: Who should I contact here?

> How is Coursera identifying students in sanctioned countries?

"Coursera has implemented an IP address block that prevents users in sanctioned countries from logging into a Coursera account. When attempting to sign in, these users will see a message explaining that we cannot allow them to access the site due to U.S. export control restrictions. In rare instances, students with IP addresses bordering on but not geopolitically within the bounds of these countries will be affected. Our engineers are working to mitigate this issue while pursuing a broader solution to the restrictions."

Translation, the USA gov is acting kinda stupid, we can't help it. Use a proxy and you're fine.

NOTE: A link to TOR would be nice :-)

This is very sad news. Restricting education access for some people looks like very bad move for whole MOOC community. I wonder what made them to do that? Would Coursera be sanctioned or even close otherwise?

I wonder what is the process how those restriction are being applied to the company and what are the consequences if you not follow this (law)?

Yes - they would be violating US sanctions on the countries in question, and would be subject to heavy fines. For an example of a company being penalized for violating these sanctions, see http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rbs-iran-sanctions-fine-ross-mcewan...

Cuba? About time to get rid of the sanctions.

the land of free enterprise, hey ?

Such attitudes only increase the hate from the affected countries towards US.

Someone should create a Coursera clone that's not hosted in the US.

I suppose they could, but they'd fall into the copyright netherworld in most every case.

Some faculty have chosen to release MOOCs under creative commons and other similarly permissive licenses, but those are few and far between.

No. Coursera should relocate into a country that values freedom, at least in respect to their mission and business.

What a stupid thing to do. I'm hoping (but not holding my breath) that the USG will change the export laws to accommodate businesses like Coursera. I don't really agree with the US export bans at all but banning an educational service just seems really dumb. If you want people in a country to agree with your ideals what better way than to allow them to access educational resources for free!

It's like it's the first time some of you hear about these sanctions. Shows how much you cared about these countries until now.

Don't live in any of those countries (Australia) but Coursera should take a very hard look at themselves. I have a few friends from those countries and they are great scientists/engineers cause they recognize that through education and improving learning standards the world could truly be their oyster. Thanks for taking it away.

Would you rather the US government shut them down for violating export bans?

Why doesn't Coursera do what corporations that export far more dangerous goods than education do: Have a subsidiary in another country where export restrictions permit you to work with Cuba, Iran, Syria and Sudan.

To not try to counteract this political manipulation is almost more outrageous than the political manipulation itself.

Thought 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 destruction, in the event that we are too complacent to venture outside planet earth, remaining fragile to cosmological scale events that other evolved animals couldn't survive?

Run a 1000 simulations in 2014 January, include whoever you think is smarter than you or Obama - say Gates, Page, Musk, Zuckerberg, Jobs - Snowden, Theil, Kurzweil, Hawking, Dawkins or anyone who you think is competent.

Solution: First - Invent the Nation State. Create ~200 Nations of random sizes, resources, people, but create a bureaucratic institution that nobody takes seriously called the UN. All nations will be treated equally. Then create armies, spend billions on mutually assured destruction. Create a fake crime called 'sedition', create concepts of espionage. Use the nation state to justify everything, like a modern religion. Inspire democides and dictatorships. Prevent access and create isolation. Prevent Spotify from running anywhere, make ibooks store in most countrues have only titles without book covers from the victorian era 'because they are in public domain'. Have people blocked or restricted access to BBC because they are not in britain so they can't appreciate a neuroscience documentary. Create visas and passports and foreign embassies and diplomatic immunities. Restrict movement on land air water and radio waves or optic fibres. Have people do paperwork to see Niagra falls or prove their nationality before they are allowed to apply for a ONLINEprogram...

Then finally restrict and kill access to knowledge, with NO paywalls.

Can someone please tell me if they think this solution would show up?

Common, we have to recognize that the best invention since the wheel was not a stupid technology like the nation-state. Even if it was, this is ample proof that we've lived with it to a point where it's maladaptive. I hope we can see the writing on the wall and convince ourselves that we need to dissolve and bury this human invention, like most religions.

Our survival is literally at hand.

Good luck re-engineering an entire human society.

Though for an ancient approach checkout Plato's Republic.

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.

http://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-government-lif...

"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."

Apart from the usual VPN advice for those affected, I'd like to suggest a EU based competitor to Coursera - https://iversity.org/

Yeah, that's smart. The best tool against poverty and violence is education. By enforcing export restrictions on this (and other things like software) the US is doing itself a disfavor.

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.

Blocking educational content from countries which we would like to improve relations with seems like a terribly dumb idea. There are not even sales involved here - WTF.

We mere vassals are happy to obey your wishes, m'lord.

Why block the whole site? The notice mentions that some activity falls under export restriction. Why then block every course?

This seems counterproductive. Access to western educational services should advance our causes there, not harm them.

as an iranian, i dont give a damn. i already route all of my traffic to my vps in US, so i can access everything that is blocked to me either by iranian or american government. but this kind of sanctions, just like financial sanctions on iran, increases the hatred of americans in iran, and shows their hypocrisy.

"All students from Syria" Both in loyalist and insurgent areas?

That's a Solomon solution, I have to admit.

I don't understand the fault of students here. Are we still living in 90's?

Udacity can be a good alternative.

dark times

yeah, we're back to medieval ages...that's a shame...

This 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?

Coursera could suggest (and eventually subsidize) non-US VPN services for those students.

That would be a near guaranteed way of facing criminal charges.

Coursera advising and/or helping sanctioned individuals sounds like the kind of thing that would blow up in their faces and make the overall situation worse, not better.

This will not only fail but both antagonize and radicalize youth in those countries.

I find this simply shocking.

God forbid someone in Sudan gets an education.

What if my proxy server is in Cuba?

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