As you probably know Google started hosting popular JavaScript libraries back in months. Letting Google be your CDN is quite cool, to quote the project itself (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/) using this service:
...your application has high speed, globally available access to a growing list of the most popular, open source JavaScript libraries...
Oh wait wait wait! Global? Then there's got to be something wrong with Google's definition of "global". As far as I know Iran is part of the globe, and I believe you have to tell your users clearly if your mileage varies than theirs. Google has to tell web developers that by "globally" they actually mean "the World minus some countries".
Here in Iran we get silly "HTTP Authenticate" popups upon each request to that service; not just clicking on "OK/Cancel" multiple times hurts - but not loading JavaScript libraries will break the web page entirely.
Here in Iran websites are categorised in one of these three:
- Those which are censored by the government
- Those websites which will throw us "Forbidden" (a.k.a 403) while visiting from Iran, and
- Those innocent ones which don't really believe we Iranians should not use their services, but they just consume hosted files in the services like one Google offers.
(well there's also some rare ones which works just fine, but come on they don't deserve a separate category )
So, please stop using Google's service (the other annoying one is Google code which does not let us browse project's pages, checking out from subversion repositories ...)
I call the web "broken", and it's all your fault Google.
Good lucky fighting Google!
../Frenck
I find it strange, though. Why would Google do that? Isn't it possible that it's some kind of restriction imposed by your ISP or the government?
Better complain to your own government's firewalls.
It is an issue which developers have to look at if they are expecting a significant amount of traffic from Iran, but the benefits can quite often outweigh the drawbacks in this case (use of a CDN vs however many visitors you get from Iran being buggered up).
A more 'perfect' solution would be to feed in URLs to your own hosted copies of the JS libs instead of Google's if you detect the user is from Iran or similar, I guess.
All kinda harks back to net neutrality I guess.
A developer could test if the libraries where successfully loaded � and if this fails could serve up the js from his own server.
so hereby i want to say a big 'thank you' to both Iran and US governments and of course to Google for the right decision!
One idea I can suggest to Amir is to set up a local web site with a mirror of the Google JS libraries. Then use a local web proxy server or even his local "hosts" file to redirect certain URLs to your local mirror.
That won't help you browse code.google.com svn projects, but it may be easy enough to maintain a mirror of more static content like the Google JS libraries.
I'm sorry that adversarial global politics keeps our countries isolated from each other. I don't think that isolation is good for peace or understanding.
Thanks for this informative post. This is an unfortunate event for Iranian developers that Google has caused it. A company with mission of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful! I hope to see a world with loyalty to principle of "separation of concerns"!
However, you can't say it's google's fault unless you mean it as a little joke to get some attention.
Google is providing this service also for your country, it's your country constitution that bans the access.
Whatever the reason is, that kind of CDN is still a problem and a risk. Imagine, one company hosting e.g. a JavaScript library (jQuery?) used by thousands of websites, perhaps some of them are banks. And one day, someone - just for fun or for profit - changes a few lines of code... Horror. Let's drop this idea at all.
Robert