Folks in India are struggling to obtain the enduring VLC Media Participant, however no official cause has been launched to date.
VideoLAN, the Paris-based firm behind the open-source video participant, has confirmed that its official web site has been blocked since February 13. This was found when the positioning noticed a drop in visitors of 80% throughout the South Asia market, the corporate’s president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf mentioned to TechCrunch (opens in new tab).
“The weirdest [thing] is that some ISP are blocking it and a few usually are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the federal government?” wrote Kempf on the Hacker Information discussion board (opens in new tab).
Customers who’ve already downloaded the media participant can preserve utilizing it with none points because it does not have to be linked to any of their servers to perform. And, whereas VLC remains to be out there to obtain on Apple Retailer, Google Play and mirrored websites, individuals may want an India VPN to have the ability to accomplish that on its official web site.
VideoLAN is now asking for help on social media, hoping to have the ability to have some solutions to the matter.
In case you are in India, please assist us. https://t.co/rOpIjlx0q9August 12, 2022
As talked about above, the Indian authorities has to date failed to provide an official cause for its resolution.
Digital rights advocacy group Web Freedom Basis confirmed in a tweet (opens in new tab) that the India Ministry of Electronics and IT responded to its inquiry on July 14 saying that “No info is accessible.”
On the similar time, some studies are speculating that the ban could also be as a result of hacker group Cicada – allegedly backed by the Chinese language authorities – utilizing a faux model of VLC Media Participant, amongst others purposes, to launch malware assaults.
“VideoLAN are fairly apolitical (we solely combat towards DRM and for open supply) and VLC is a pure instrument that may learn something,” mentioned Kempf.
He additionally added that if that is the actual motivation behind the ban, it could do extra hurt than good because it’s pushing customers to obtain their service through much less safe websites as a substitute.
Consultants…Blocking the primary web site will simply push customers to weirder web sites, and subsequently in direction of shady variations of VLC.These specialists are incompetent… https://t.co/QNVQwh8HF2August 16, 2022
VideoLAN mentioned that 10% of all VLC customers worldwide are primarily based in India.
An increasing number of web customers are actually calling the India Ministry of Electronics and IT on social media to carry the ban.
