Coursera blocks access to students in Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria
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).<p>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>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: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/zUecPHk.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/zUecPHk.png</a><p>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: <a href="http://git.io/HG3nsQ" rel="nofollow">http://git.io/HG3nsQ</a><p>I have two questions:<p>1. Where can I find a list of all domain names, top 1000, top 100000?<p>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.