7 ms·
Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
- k-mcgrady 13y agoWhat 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!
- rikacomet 13y agoThis 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!
- icelancer 13y agoThis isn't on Coursera. Take it up with your elected officials.
- rikacomet 13y agoI would if I were in US.
- icelancer 13y agoIf you were in the US they wouldn't listen to you either, so don't feel too bad.
- davidw 13y agoBullshit. 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.
- placety 13y agoOh really? You can change decades-old embargo laws by writing to your elected local official? Really?
- MichaelGG 13y agoI 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.
- davidw 13y agoI 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=69038 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/ 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.
- 13y ago
- jnbiche 13y ago>Take it up with your elected officials. Yeah, how's that working out? But I totally agree this is not on Coursera.
- icelancer 13y ago>Yeah, how's that working out? It isn't, of course. But that's not the topic on hand.
- repsilat 13y agoYou 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.
- pitt1980 13y agoyou 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
- johnhess 13y agoActually, 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-blocks-access-moocs-countries-economic-sanctions http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/28/state-dept-blo...
- slazaro 13y ago> 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.
- bprieto 13y agoCuba 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.
- louhike 13y agoIran 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 13y ago[deleted]
- InclinedPlane 13y agoYou'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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bromagosa 13y agoUnlike 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.
- vdaniuk 13y agoPlease 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.
- wobbleblob 13y agoIf 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.
- joshz 13y agoThey restored full access for Syria.
- Sami_Lehtinen 13y agoIf I don't remember incorrectly Khan is running on App Engine and therefore already blocked.
- intortus 13y agoThe 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.
- camus2 13y agothe land of free enterprise, hey ?
- thorn 13y agoThis 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)?
- azernik 13y agoYes - 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-compliance-529411 http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/rbs-iran-sanctions-fine-ross-mcewan...
- f_salmon 13y agoIf 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.)
- bromagosa 13y agoExcept 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- samstave 13y agoCoursera should ONLY allow access to IPs from .GOV -- Clearly these are the most desperately in need of an education.
- impeachgod 13y agoSomeone should create a Coursera clone that's not hosted in the US.
- johnhess 13y agoI 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.
- onli 13y agoNo. Coursera should relocate into a country that values freedom, at least in respect to their mission and business.
- ad93611 13y agoInteresting 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.
- johnhess 13y agoThis 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?
- kfk 13y agoA startup in Europe should create a free proxy to use Coursera for these guys living in those unfortunate countries. Berlin, London, Munich, etc. anything?
- sentenza 13y agoSo that startup can have their Paypal account frozen? No thank you. Probably the best way is to create a Coursera competitor.
- johnhess 13y agoThat'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?
- sentenza 13y agoHeh. 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 http://timms.uni-tuebingen.de/Themen/Themen.aspx
- kfk 13y agoOK, 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.
- linux_devil 13y ago
- johnhess 13y agoWhat'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.
- caf 13y agoThis is why I upvoted this article - anyone selling online services from the US should be thinking deeply about their export control obligations.
- rdl 13y agoIt 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.
- xmonkee 13y agoYep. 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.
- rdl 13y agoBlocking 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.)
- c7b0rg 13y agoThe 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.
- zukunftsalick 13y agoCoursera could suggest (and eventually subsidize) non-US VPN services for those students.
- pjmlp 13y agoSuch attitudes only increase the hate from the affected countries towards US.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago"All students from Syria" Both in loyalist and insurgent areas? That's a Solomon solution, I have to admit.
- masterkain 13y agodark times
- apostolee 13y agoyeah, we're back to medieval ages...that's a shame...
- nichochar 13y agoI find this simply shocking.
- au_dude 13y agoDon'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.
- easytiger 13y agoWould you rather the US government shut them down for violating export bans?
- au_dude 13y agoDon'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.
- reuven 13y agoThe 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.
- schrijver 13y agoDo 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.
- ekianjo 13y agoWell most of their courses are free (as in free beer) while they have recently been expanding their "paying only" courses catalog.
- bambax 13y ago> 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.
- rdl 13y agoCriminal 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.
- testrun 13y agoThat 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?
- bambax 13y agoIt 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.
- smnrchrds 13y agoAs 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 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 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.
- draugadrotten 13y ago1. Where can I find a list of all domain names, top 1000, top 100000? Alexa http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites could provide you with data which is for the "top 500".
- smnrchrds 13y agoI know about Alexa, but 500 is too small for statistical analysis.
- Encosia 13y agoLook 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 http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
- droopybuns 13y ago"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 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."
- lispm 13y agoCuba? About time to get rid of the sanctions.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoWe mere vassals are happy to obey your wishes, m'lord.
- shervinrs 13y agoIn 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.
- mukundmr 13y agoThere 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-which-prohibits-massive-open-online-courses-moocs-including-students-sanctioned/dkpm2cyM https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/reverse-policy-whi...
- gms7777 13y agoI 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?
- donniezazen 13y agoThis will not only fail but both antagonize and radicalize youth in those countries.
- primitivesuave 13y ago"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."
- mavdi 13y agoAs 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.
- betterunix 13y ago"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-review.html http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/061399china-chips-revi...
- sazary 13y ago> 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.
- linux_devil 13y agoI don't understand the fault of students here. Are we still living in 90's? Udacity can be a good alternative.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- acd 13y agoPersonally 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.
- MisterBastahrd 13y agoThere'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.
- frankchn 13y agoDisclaimer: I work for Coursera as a Software Engineer. We have already lifted restrictions for Syrians as the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) has a general license for educational content (Syria General License No. 11A) issued. We are working with the State Department and OFAC for licenses or exemptions for the other affected countries and we hope to get the remaining blocks lifted soon.
- myzerox 13y agoThis 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?
- level09 13y agohttp://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-government-lift-some-of-the-sanctions-on-syria-that-are-affecting-the-people http://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-government-lif...
- sdfjkl 13y agoThis 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_investigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in... [2] http://www.myce.com/news/Elby-announces-that-CloneCD-emigrates-to-Antigua-6639/ http://www.myce.com/news/Elby-announces-that-CloneCD-emigrat...
- Grue3 13y agoIt's like it's the first time some of you hear about these sanctions. Shows how much you cared about these countries until now.
- level09 13y agoThis 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.
- Elrac 13y agoI 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.
- clamprecht 13y agoWhat if my proxy server is in Cuba?
- kriro 13y agoCall 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.
- somewhat_drunk 13y agoFucking governments, always fucking shit up.
- strictfp 13y agoWhy block the whole site? The notice mentions that some activity falls under export restriction. Why then block every course?
- shashikiran 13y agoThought 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.
- cdoxsey 13y agoGood luck re-engineering an entire human society. Though for an ancient approach checkout Plato's Republic.
- sazary 13y agoas 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.
- atmosx 13y ago> 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 :-)
- macco 13y agoThis is sad and not very clever. If you want to destroy this regimes: educate the people. Period.
- VLM 13y agoFollow 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?
- mathattack 13y agoThis seems counterproductive. Access to western educational services should advance our causes there, not harm them.
- Anevenua 13y agoKNOWLEDGE 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.
- znowi 13y agoApart from the usual VPN advice for those affected, I'd like to suggest a EU based competitor to Coursera - https://iversity.org/ https://iversity.org/
- volune 13y agoGod forbid someone in Sudan gets an education.
- xamdam 13y agoBlocking 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.
- linuxhansl 13y agoYeah, 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.
- blackRust 13y agoWhy 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.