Google chrome blocked in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan
People from Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan have reported that they are not having the permission to use Google chrome browser, not sure about the reason for that too.
If at all they could download the browser, they can not use it as IP is located and checked for the place of usage. Its something one would not expect from Google. Worldwide free software is not allowed for usage in some places.
Last year, Google Earth was blocked in Sudan and Google had presented the same reason for the block. Syrian government had blocked some websites like Skype, Facebook in the past, but they have no relation to this block. This intense act by Google is rather confusing for the entire web.
Why are only these countries targeted? As earlier once we heard that Yahoo and Microsoft had removed Iran from the dropdown list of countries for which people can register an email address.
Google says just this as the answer -
“In accordance with US export controls and economic sanctions regulations, we are unable to permit the download of Google Chrome in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan.”
The most interesting part of this, is that Google is still serving ads and advertising Google chrome download in these countries too, when its actually blocked there. One reason anyone can get is about some levels of encryption that is limited just to U.S. but when its internationally available, there should be some hard meaning for that.
November 11th, 2008 at 5:30 am
maybe for the counties againt america
November 13th, 2008 at 6:41 am
recently nkorea has been removed from us terror’s list….infact contries like iran rely completely on opensource soft….email and websoft is the least thing
November 13th, 2008 at 8:57 am
and maybe google forget that north korea is not in the list anymore
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:53 am
I hesitate to use even upgraded versions of Chrome, since my last experience using it (first version) left my computer compromised; have they fixed the security issues beyond all doubt?
January 8th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
This is some sort of like an embargo. Maybe there has been some sort of trade embargo between countries. I have visited The Emma Academy Project before, and a school will be built in Leer, Sudan to support the education of the children there.
January 9th, 2009 at 7:06 am
the solution to all this SRware Iron.SRware Iron is based on chromes sourcecode minus the googles objectives…no tracking ..no information is sent to google in any form…the latest version of iron uses latest webkit version ..latest chrome uses slightly older version…
November 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
This is very much to do with US embargos on those countries; those embargos are separate from the US’s list of state sponsors of terrorism (though there’s a lot of correlation between the lists). These embargos prohibit the trade of goods and services to those countries. More here:
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1655904
December 1st, 2009 at 7:12 am
Dear All, I am in Sudan and I have just downloaded and installed Google Chrome (Standalone Offline Installer) version 4. Nothing is really blocked from these countries – it is just more difficult to get what you want/need, that’s all! You need to search hard, try using languages other than English! In the end you’ll find what you want. I have all the latest updates for windows XP, of course not from MS! If there is a will, there’s a way. No strut! If google was really serious about this, they would block all of their service from these countries (notice my email account: …@gmail.com
) Cheers!