I wonder how they actually detect North Korean IP addresses. Besides the fact that there is no Internet access available to the citizens, all Internet connectivity in the country comes from China.

"the internet knows no borders" ... brave new world!

For Cuba, I was the fisrt to do a report of the fact. In french but directly and live from Cuba the day the download was available:
http://www.boxsociety.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-404-not-found/

Even free stuffs and open source stuffs are subject to such US regulation?
Amazing?

The US restricts the export of any technology involving cryptography no matter the cost or license.

Wow, what a surprising story, you mean Google needs to obey US laws? Seriously: When there's an export embargo against a country, you can't just ignore it because you are a software company, so this comes to no surprise.

Thanks to Google, the chrome was available in Nepal. abeen0.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chrome-nepal.

[URL didn't work, unlinked.]

Andy Wong: I'm not sure. Is it just Chrome, or Chromium too? And if it includes Chromium, perhaps it would only be illegal for US citizens or other entities that fall under US jurisdiction to export.

So if they Blocked the access to Cuban,Korean,Syrian and others,
does it really reflects the concept of Open Source...i wonder why they do this...

I'm do work for a fortune 500 company and data and export controls are very serious. We even have positions for just that very job. Definitely don't want to piss off the government. They are just discouraged from downloading it via the traditional means. Because of various firewalls and install problems, there are complete downloads that these guys can install all over the web.

[siganture removed]

> Wow, what a surprising story, you mean Google
> needs to obey US laws? Seriously: When there's
> an export embargo against a country, you can't just
> ignore it because you are a software company, so this
> comes to no surprise.

Fred, not everyone's an expert on US laws like you may be, so when laws affect Google it may be of interest to some of us to learn something in relation to Google – just as it's of interest, IMO, to point out that the government may secretly* poll Google for information as part of the so-called "Patriot Act" and Google's privacy policies make it explicit by stating they may hand out data if required by laws. But here's a question for you: inhowfar do the export regulations cover web apps? (Google search, Google Docs, Blogger, etc.)

*As in, Google may not even be allowed to tell they've been polled.

not only Chrom also Google toolbar and all other software from Google restricted by Google to this country.

its more than a week that Im looking for "Google Gear" around the web and cant download it :(

Shame on google.

We had to look into this when setting up Uclue, which has servers in the US.

Basically, informational services are not affected, so you can provide search engine services to Cubans, North Koreans, etc, and you can let people from those countries browse your websites. Google, of course, even provides "Google Cuba" at http://www.google.com.cu/

Beyond that, it's a minefield involving thousands of pages of complicated rules and regulations. There are some specific exemptions (such as sending medicines to Cuba), but even they involve enormous amounts of paperwork, delays and approvals. Software certainly counts as a "product" from the point of view of export controls.

In the end we could not find a way to do business with people from those countries while complying with the requirements, so Uclue refuses account registrations from Cuba, Sudan, North Korea etc. It hurts me that this is the case, because it's natural human behaviour to want to spread knowledge, but hey I didn't write the laws.

Personally, I think these politics are silly like how the United States didn't participate in the Moscow Olympics in the 1980's. But this is not Google's fault. There are very very stiff penalties for violating export control laws and Google is just abiding by those laws to avoid huge financial and criminal violations. Explanation here:

http://www.surfchrome.com/index.php/home/news-list-mode/89-google-chrome-blacklists-syria-iran-north-korea-and-more

Google gears not google gear lol.