Back in August, Indian authorities banned the official VLC media player website “www.videolan.org” across the country without an explanation for the ban. Now, VideoLAN, the publisher of the VLC media player, has issued a legal notice to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeiTY) in India.

After the ban, MeiTY received a Right to Information (RTI) request from VideoLAN with assistance from the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). MeiTY answered by stating that they do not have any information regarding the ban. According to IFF, VideoLAN was not provided a warning or an opportunity to be heard. After that, VideoLAN has now sent these two government organizations a legal notice.

Although the government hasn’t provided any information or justification for why the VLC website was blocked in the nation, it has been reported that the government forbade downloading VLC from the program’s official website because some cybersecurity experts asserted that a hacker group called Cicada, based in China, used VLC to distribute malware. According to reports, the Chinese government supported the strike. Over the years, the hacker group has accumulated notoriety for attacking NGOs.

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VideoLan Client or VLC for short is one of the most used software for playing videos on PC and other devices like Android and iOS. Its specialty is the wide range of supported codecs and the highly versatile interface.

Now, according to a recent report, the VideoLAN Project’s VLC media player has allegedly been banned in India. The ban was reportedly issued earlier this year (around 13th February) in a silent manner, and neither VideoLAN nor the Indian authorities provided any information on the matter.

In accordance with the ban, ISPs have blocked the official VLC media player website “www.videolan.org” across the country. It’s worth noting that users can still get the media player from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, indicating that the ban hasn’t been fully implemented.

According to some reports, VLC Media Player has been banned in the country because the platform was used for cyber attacks by the alleged China-backed hacking group Cicada. Security experts discovered Cicada was using VLC Media Player to deploy a malicious malware loader as part of a long-running cyber attack campaign just a few months ago.

The situation is quite peculiar as the VideoLan Project team is based in Paris and has no apparent connections to China. Currently, there is no official word from the government of India or the VideoLan Project team regarding the alleged cyber attack. As for users, if you already have a VLC media player installed on your PC, it will continue to work as usual. For people looking to download the app, you can still access the mirror sites that are still available to access in India.

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The post VLC Media Player website banned in India – what we know so far appeared first on Gizmochina.

VideoLAN’s VLC media player is a very popular, free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and others. The app for Android devices is available on the Play Store for download but if you own a new Huawei smartphone, the app won’t be available on the Play store for you. That is because VideoLAN has announced on Twitter that it is blacklisting Huawei models. This is the result of several negative reviews its app got from Huawei phone users who complain that the VLC app doesn’t work as they desire on the phones

The thing is, VLC needs to stay open in the background to work but Huawei phones usually kill all background app processes in a bid to save battery. This has resulted in lots of complaints dropping on its user forums and the Play Store. Since the fault isn’t from its end, the decision to ban some Huawei devices seems to be the only option available. The announcement did state that no all Huawei phones are banned but the specifics of models this would affect were left out. It was only stated that the ban will affect recent Huawei phones.

PSA: @HuaweiMobile phones are now blacklisted and cannot get VLC on the Play Store.
Their ridiculous policy of killing all background apps (except their own) breaks VLC audio background playback (of course).
See https://t.co/QzDW7KbV4I and many other reports…@HuaweiFr

— VideoLAN (@videolan) July 25, 2018

Read Also: Huawei dominates China smartphone market in Q2 2018 with 27% shares – Canalys

Apart from the VLC media player, there are several third-party players available on the Play Store. But if you are a fan of VideoLAN’s VLC player, there you can still download the APK file directly from its website. The only snag is that you won’t receive updates to new versions automatically. Every time something new is released, you will need to go download the latest version of VLC and manually install it. We’ll have to watch for how Huawei would respond to this but we doubt if the company will lose sleep over the issue.

(source)

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