BankingBanking & FinanceBusinessBusiness & EconomyBusiness Line

India has banned the VLC Media Participant. Is there a Chinese connection?

Any individual who has ever frail a PC, has positively frail the VLC Participant at one level or the opposite. On the opposite hand, the usual video playing app is it looks now banned in India and a file suggests that the ban has been in region for spherical six months. Some imagine that the app modified into as soon as banned alongside with 54 Chinese apps in February this yr. Ironically, no one is conscious of precisely why the app has been banned.

“Most most most considerable ISPs [internet service providers] are banning the positioning, with various suggestions,” VideoLan president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf mentioned of the blocking in India, in an e-mail to TechCrunch.

Additionally Read | TikTok and other Chinese apps compile info

Kempf says the VLC web remark and the hyperlink to install it have been down in India since February 13. “We’ve asked the Indian government and we got no reply. We doubtlessly did no longer quiz the upright region though. I wish I knew easy the very most attention-grabbing formulation to quiz successfully,” Kempf wrote on Y Combinator-dash Hacker Info. 

“The most weird is that some ISPs are blocking it and some are no longer. So why is that the case? Are some ISP no longer listening to the government?” he added.

The VLC web remark, videolan.org, has been blocked by the government on Home windows systems and that you just can perchance secure a message asserting that “the positioning can no longer be reached”.

Is there a Chinese connection?

So the VLC app itself doesn’t attain from China and is an beginning supply machine from a France-based fully community. On the opposite hand, it has a Chinese connection though. Cicada, a hacking community that is allegedly backed by the Chinese government, makes voice of VLC Media Participant to deploy malicious malware. Symantec, a cyber security analysis firm says that it has came across victims of the a connected in India, Canada, Israel and several other nations. 

Kempf says the ban is purely a misunderstanding of the Chinese security peril. He additionally added a note of caution asserting that the ban will push Indian voters to “shady net sites that are running hacked model of VLC. So that they are endangering their very own voters with this ban”.

Additionally Read | ‘Place away China Apps’: Tool to delete Chinese apps from cellular telephone goes viral in India

Ironically, the mobile app has no longer been banned. The reason within the attend of is that since mobile apps are hosted on Google’s PlayStore and Apple’s App Store servers rather than the servers where the desktop versions are hosted, they’ve been termed safe. Additionally, customers who already have the app on their desktops can continue to make voice of it.

(With inputs from agencies)

Content Protection by DMCA.com

Back to top button