In August, the Government banned VLC media players’ official websites in India. Authorities suspected that VLC has Chinese connections, whereas it was an open-source software released by a France-based group. But after a few days, the bank has been lifted.
VLC Media Player Lifted By The Government
Informed by the non-profit organization, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), and VLC Media Player’s official Twitter handle, the ban has been lifted.
What Is VLC Media Player And Why It Was Banned?
VLC Media Player is an open-source advanced streaming player that works on android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux devices. VLC supports both video and audio formats of different kinds such as, “MPEG (ES, PS, TS,PVA, MP3), AVI, ASF / WMV / WMA, MP4 / MOV / 3GP, OGG / OGM / Annodex, Matroska (MKV), Real, WAV (including DTS), Raw Audio: DTS, AAC, AC3/A52, Raw DV, FLAC, FLV (Flash), MXF, Nut, Standard MIDI / SMF, Creative™ Voice” according to the official website. Moreover, VLC Player cannot only stream media files but can also transcode multimedia files, compress video and audio formats, and convert videos into different streaming formats.
VLC Media Player was banned after the Government suspected that it was being hacked by a Chinese hacker group named Cicada to forward malware. As per cyber-security researchers at Symantec, the victims of the Cicada scam are found in India, the US, Canada, Israel, Hong Kong, and several others. These researchers found that China-based hackers via VLC media player were injecting the malware on compromised devices.
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The Government of India didn’t provide any reason for banning VLC, and even now, there is no information given on why they have lifted the ban.
