Why the Iranians have blocked?

[abbasnaghdi (Abbas)]

Why the Iranians have blocked?
Is free and open source language golang?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

golang.org is hosted by Google. Google is a US company following the US embargoes:

United States embargoes

[nathankerr]

GopherAcademy runs reverse proxies for these sites:

• https://golang.gopheracademy.com
• https://godoc.gopheracademy.com

[careuno (Carlos Merchán Carmona)]

Try using a proxy or VPN

[jra (Jeff R Allen)]

Except that those are hosted at Digital Ocean in the USA, so it is unclear how they would help with the embargo.

[nathankerr]

IANAL.

The embargo does not require blocking access to everything, just somethings like crypto technologies.

My guess is that google’s lawyers determined that golang.org was covered by the terms of the embargo and that access should not be allowed from embargoed countries.

I don’t know what the legal liability is for running those proxies, I just heard they were accessible from Iran.

[dc0d (Kaveh Shahbazian)]

It’s possible to browse golang.org from Iran, also the download page (I skip the screenshots). But it’s forbidden to actually download Go binary:

Also godoc.org is forbidden:

gotools.org is available.

A mirror of golang.org is available at https://golang.gopheracademy.com/. Also a mirror of godoc.org is available at https://godoc.gopheracademy.com/ (Thanks to Brian Ketelsen).

This very website times-out (as quora, a blocking technique):

And youtube is blocked/filtered:

And so on and so forth.

The most hilarious one is chrome which is forbidden on Ubuntu (16.04) but it is available for Windows (including updates).

Developers at Iran pretty much have to always use some sort of unblocking software (VPN, proxies, tunnel things etc etc) because bannings come from both sides.