VLC media player banned in India | Hacker News Reader

VLC media player banned in India

indiatoday.in

307 pointssaikatsg161 comments

President of VideoLAN here: we got banned since a few months, and we don’t know why. (According to my stats, it is since the 13 February 2022).

We’ve asked the Indian government and we got no answer. We probably did not ask the right place though. I wish I knew how to ask properly.

The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government?

VLC and VideoLAN are quite apolitical (we only fight against DRM and for open source) and VLC is a pure tool that can read anything.

>The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government?

Pretty much. My ISP doesn't block half the stuff the Indian government has banned, while my mobile data provider has - it's genuinely very weird.

Regarding contacting the government - maybe https://pgportal.gov.in should help? File your grievance with the section of the government you want to complain to - in this case, I'd guess that's the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

> maybe https://pgportal.gov.in should help? File your grievance with the section of the government you want to complain to - in this case, I'd guess that's the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

I will do that again then.

A internet freedom activist group had filed a Right-to-Information(RTI) query to know why VLC was banned. The ministry responsible says they have no data on it. https://twitter.com/sflcin/status/1539877804116168704

> My ISP doesn't block half the stuff the Indian government has banned, while my mobile data provider has - it's genuinely very weird

That's quite normal. Your ISP is probably much smaller than a telco and so drives much less scrutiny from law enforcement.

This is unfortunate, sorry you had to go through that.

The article made a claim that VLC is owned by a Chinese entity. That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is French. Is that the case?

Maybe they corrected it, but for me it says the opposite.

> Notably, VLC Media Player is not backed by a Chinese company. It is developed by VideoLAN, a Paris-based firm.

The article basically states that the reason the government banned it was because Chinese actors were using VideoLAN products (VLC) to deploy malware loaders onto citizens' devices.

I don't understand why they banned videolan.org though. It's a French website, and I'd assume the Chinese actors were bundling malware when VLC was installed from another website and not videolan.org.

Videolan.org is EXACTLY where VLC should be downloaded from to ensure the software you download is malware free - ironically, I'd expect banning the VLC website to increase VLC downloads from alternative sources, and thus increasing the possibility of the user downloading malware.

It says

> The reason behind blocking these apps is that the government feared these platforms were sending user data to China

Maybe they have some CDN or some service in China?

None whatsoever.

> It is developed by VideoLAN, a Paris-based firm.

Non-profit, not firm.

you work and ethics have been an inspiration to many

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jbk "JBK VLC" (search) ... French.

> That surprised me because I thought VideoLAN was and is French.

It is a French non-profit whose address is my parents place :)

Thanks for all of your hard work and for not selling out. I love you folks.

Reading this made my day. Thank you, from my heart, for this software - it is precious to me.

I have relied on it since 2002 as my everyday media player on every device I have ever built. I have evangelized whenever and wherever I can.

I know it's kind of funny to ask this, but have your parents received any weird legal mail from the Indian government that might be about the block?

lol. I actually checked with them :)

A fun conversation to imagine. "How's your health? The family? Have you gotten any mail about my project being a Chinese cyber weapon? No? Well, that's confusing."

Clearly VideoLAN isn’t trying hard enough!

/s, in jest, in case that isn’t clear haha

This is just awesome to hear. I have been using VLC since I was a kid. Love your work.

Thanks for all your efforts. VLC rocks. Period.

I greatly appreciate the resource you've built for everyone. Thank you!

When the project got this large, I'd say it's safer to use an actual business address before too late than a private one as any weird people may target your parents' house for no good reason.

Wayyy tooo late for that.

Not sure if your parents even feel comfortable?

It's never too late than never?

No one cares :)

Some reports suggest that VLC Media Player has been blocked in the country because the platform was China-backed hacking group Cicada was using it for cyber attacks. Just a few months ago, security experts discovered that Cicada was using VLC Media Player to deploy a malicious malware loader as part of a long-running cyber attack campaign.

Incorrect, Cicada deployed a custom version of VLC which was hacked.

Use VLC from our website and you’ll be safe.

But maybe the indian government did not care to differentiate?

Or lack the competence to take a good decision.

Unrelated, do you have a stance on Ninite as a distribution method?

No, should we?

It must be because VLC allows people to watch pirated content. Which would be the most ridiculous reason to get banned for.

Sssshh! Please keep that opinion to yourself... we dont want thr Australian Government to get any ideas!

Well if that is the case they would ban torrent clients and other video players

Ban the internet in general IMO

Why stop there, ban electricity!

so does windows media player lol

Please watch my FOSDEM talk from 2020, it explains the similar effect in Russia: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/sdnpof/

The most likely explanation is: the government does not want to block your website, it is collateral damage. They want to block something else, but there is no technical possibility to block that without also blocking your website. This also explains variation between ISPs: there is no centralized solution for blocking. Some of them are using IP-based blocking because they have no technology that would look deeper, some of them block on the DNS level, and some on the TLS SNI level.

The video wasn't loading for me there, here is the YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6SwxXhZGv4

It wasn't loaded because the CDN that hosts it redirects from HTTPS to plain HTTP.

I hold a Class B ISP license. We get letters (not emails, physical letters)from Department of Telecommunication asking us to block http://www.example.com

We don't bother with blocking http://example.com or its https cousin.

In this case we have not received any letter for VLC

Do they not also ever request blocks on particular IP addresses? A lot of collateral damage happened due to blocking whole ranges from AWS and such when Russia was trying to ban Telegram.

We haven't received request for blocking blocks of IPs till date. Maybe it happens with upstream ISPs or peering exchanges, I'm unsure.

In the past, we have received requests for single IP addresses

Thank you... It's a good reminder that censorship always has collateral damage.

I was at FOSDEM that year but unfortunately missed your talk. Just watched the video of it and it was very well explained, taught me a thing or two about CDN's and SPOF's, thanks for that.

VLC is one of the most commmon softwares in India, it's a "peoples' software". The ban won't last long, just try to contact I.T. ministry and explain your solution.

Do you use Cloudflare? If yes, this could be the cause, but I'm not sure. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12091900

No, we don’t.

Because The Great Dictator said so.

> The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government?

Please, please, please don't include these sentences in any email you send to Indian govt. My ISP usually doesn't listen to the blocking instructions and most sites are unblocked, if you ask these questions directly to the government maybe they will go all in and enforce this rule. This blocklist is quite lax and not enforced with much severity, but if my government figures it out that there are many local ISPs who don't use the blocklist, the government they might start enforcing it more severity.

Although I'm not sure, this [1] could be the reason. TLDR: A chinese hacker group took the official exe, added a malicious dll in it and distributed it to NGOs and government institutions, most likely through a clone website or phishing email. Purpose was said to be espionage.

[EDIT]

Ofcourse the Indian media reported that the official VideoLAN org was controlled by the said hacker group which leveraged it's position to distribute malware.

[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/chinese-hacke...

> The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case? Are some ISP not listening to the government?

From experience being blocked from time to time in many countries...

Most countries that block things ocassionally just aren't very good at blocking things. They might not consistently communicate with all ISPs; it's pretty common that all mobile ISPs will do blocking but no wireline ISPs do it. Sometimes only the major ISPs get asked. Sometimes they get asked and don't block for whatever reason. Sometimes ISPs take a long time to update block lists. Sometimes they'll block things from DNS, but only for people using their DNS servers.

Best in class at blocking is probably the great firewall, but they sometimes do inconsistent blocking on purpose.

As a sibling said, it's best not to bring up the inconsistencies if you find the right people to ask. If you haven't already contacted the TRAI (telecom regulatory authority of india), that's where I'd start, but I dunno.

Indian here - you will have to go to the indian court to get your site unblocked. (Talking to our government will be like talking to a brick wall). As other's have pointed out, I too believe your site is just collateral damage in the fight against piracy. Now that the indian film industry is feeling the pinch of piracy because of the growth of high speed internet in India, and streaming platforms too are being aggressive against pirate sites (who they see as competitors), many torrent websites and pirate streaming platforms are now banned in India. The usual process for this is that the right holder can go to court and provide a list of URL's and ask for it to be blocked. The court then orders it to be blocked after conducting their enquiry (which often doesn't have any representation from the other party as most of these sites are foreign and many obviously will choose not to defend themselves in court unless they are not doing anything illegal).

I speculate that in your case one of these people saw a link or reference to VLC in one of these pirate sites (many pirate sites do openly recommend VLC if someone complains they are unable to play their video file), and figured they'd include your site too (either out of ignorance, or deliberate malice to create hurdles for non-techies to watch the videos).

> The weirdest is that some ISP are blocking it and some are not. So why is that the case?

Because India. Laws are merely guidelines here.

>VLC and VideoLAN are quite apolitical

While both VLC and VideoLAN were started and mostly based in Europe ( France ) . It still takes a lot of courage in today's tech world to say you are apolitical. Which is partly forbidden because apolitical stance in itself is political, or so I have been told.

The Indian government (and Indian courts) is infamous for these random harebrained stunts. In the past, it has banned archive.org [1], continues to block the French ISP free.fr, etc. VLC was likely banned because people use it to watch pirated films (the same reason free.fr continues to be banned [2]). And it's plain f*cking stupid to just ban videolan.org, because it can be downloaded from numerous other websites [3], not to mention the repositories of every major Linux distribution.

[1] http://blog.archive.org/2017/08/09/statement-and-questions-r...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/74lqug/why_is_free_a...

[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=download+vlc+-site:videolan.org

I can't wait until the Indian government tries to ban debian.org

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/vlc

They have a Debian derivative called BOSSLinux, so Indians can just use that if Debian gets blocked.

https://bosslinux.in/

That's not a mainstream distro, it's just a standard-issue OS for govt office computers.

I'm just waiting for them to ban breathing itself.

FWIW, Indian website blocks are usually DNS-based, so you can easily get around them by using a different DNS provider from your ISP's or DNS-over-HTTPS.

It is cute to see non-indians trying to guess the reason. We were like you once.

It is an exercise in futility. Our government is run by monkeys. They are stubbornly uneducated about science and technology, at the same time pretending to know everything about it. How does our government take decisions? My best guess is they consult a successful team of astrologers.

Funny and painfully ubiquitous. Probably really well-paid monkey astrologers too.

If they are succesfull, then they must be good!

governments write their own checks and set their own pay rate. You can bet they are quite rich.

Actually, that’d be great. The most likely reason it got banned is because of corruption. One reason for corruption is that politicians aren’t paid well. What smart competent sane person would rationally choose to be a politician? Maybe if it paid competitively. I wonder if there is a study on the ROI?

What a wild idea. Corporations and wealthy people are also corrupt. It turns out that it is a lack of morals. Or in many cases a complete dismissal of them for the pursuit of profit.

Most people's morals can be bought, it's just a matter of cost. Increasing salaries for government employees increases the barrier to entry for corruption.

Whether or not a typical state can actually afford it is a completely different issue altogether.

The poor politicians got together and plotted against VLC. Now it's all making sense.

The tree-pruners in the major city near me make 150k a year. I'm guessing that's pocket change to those wacky astrologers. Didn't really mention anything about politicians.

It is indeed funny to see nerds attempt to ascribe some factual, logical reasoning to why such actions are taken by certain politicians.

When you learn first hand how grossly ignorant of the internet many politicians really are, in almost any country, it can be quite the wake up call.

It feels the same way over here in the US far too often.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

+1. Around 2005/6 there was some news story that some minister was asking why long distance phone call taxes were dropping and someone explained that corporates were using Skype now. His response was that they are still required to pay the taxes. facepalm

Recently, in an op/ed article about something different the journalist said "India is a first world country with a third world government."

More on topic: I didn't know about VLC until an Indian coworker introduced it to me.

> More on topic: I didn't know about VLC until an Indian coworker introduced it to me.

That's an odd remark. VLC is open source software, of course you're going to learn about it through word of mouth.

> Our government is run by monkeys. > My best guess is they consult a successful team of astrologers.

I feel great sympathy for you. From JPN.

I absolutely love your username.

> Our government is run by monkeys

except the fine print is decided by bureaucrats, and not politicians themselves. your bias against the current government is blinding your logic.

Have you encountered any Indian bureaucrats recently? They are so far detached from technology and science it's hilarious. But they are very smart (cunning) in imitating whatever the ruling government is doing. So if government is trigger-banning everything, bureaucracy will do the same (and double down in most cases) without ever questioning it.

The Indian government has a long and well documented track record of trying to arbitrarily ban or block things they don't like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_India

Including journalists

Aren't India a democratic country？

Democratic countries ban things all the time. A more interesting question is if it is principled, and to whose benefit or cost.

Democracy is the dictatorship of the democrats.

Representative "democracy" with so much hierarchy that you don't have any say over anything after the vote has been cast.

This is the way representative democracies work, including the US. Some places have tools such as recall elections that people can use in extreme cases, but usually, it is a matter of voting for someone else next time.

That is a valid form of democracy. In my opinion it's a better one than a grassroots one.

There, every idiot that has no clue about the topic can vote on an important issue. Brexit is the most obvious one, but there are lots of topics where an expert is better suited at voting.

But why wouldn’t they like VLC?

ignorance, these laws are being applied by politicians who have no clue of the actual internet or gpl/bsd licensed software

it would be like trying to ban GIMP because somebody used it to photo retouch some porno images.

Pretty much every government does that. Here's a spot on quote from a quite good movie:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HxiU4D1YdVY?start=16&end=20

It reminds me how Turkey banned imbd.com. A musician/movie artist submitted some links to a court that the following links were streaming his movies. In fact IMDB did not stream his movies but because it was up in the search results they have banned imbd.com. And to this day imbd.com is still banned. Back in those days imbd.com had only one page without any content. Yeah, it was typo!

Or like how Turkey periodically freaks out when some european or north american sources publish something about the Armenian genocide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide

The list of other apps included contains an interesting app: Camscanner

The app is apparently Chinese (also mentioned on the wikipedia page [0])

IMHO making an app like this is really smart to try to gain access confidential documents when they are scanned.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CamScanner

True. A lot of corporate policies are to never handle physical client documents. Scan them and send them to a secure drive.

the real problem which plague's India is over zealous "babu's" aka bureaucrats. It is very difficult to do actual good things with regards to policy so they settle for the most hype thing "ban X" and label it as patriotism and feed the narrative to the media machine which takes and runs with it . Now the government gets to pat itself on the back and the "babu" gains notoriety as a patriot its a very "notice me senpai" thing. They will continue to do this cause they are looked up to by everyone in the country as a educated elite . In reality they are a bunch of cockroaches who collectively share 3 brain cells to make what i like to call "dad joke style policy". If every there is a gaping flaw in modern democracies it is the unaccountable and ever powerful bureaucrat.

It's fascinating that attempts at censorship often seem to quickly founder in incompetence of all things.

It turns out that actually banning the right things and not the wrong things seems simple on the surface and then turns out to be problem of nearly unsolvable scale and complexity, to the point where the system often falls down through the utter humiliation of how badly it is working.

Banning quickly, then unbanning slowly, usually by special request, works just fine for authoritarians. If it matters to enough people, you'll hear about it, and if it matters to important or wealthy people it will create an opportunity for graft/partnership. So, now that VLC (for example) has called you to get you to unban their software, you can call them later to get a feature removed or put in, or just free/discounted consulting on how to block objectionable streams (for example), with a vague threat of rebanning hanging over the discussion.

Indonesia just banned the entire foreign internet (without the west caring), and is requiring sites that want to operate within the country to apply for whitelisting.

edit: https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/internet-freedom-in-indonesi...

background: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/indonesias-proposed-on...

My guess of what would have happened is this:

Some movie producer tried to find places in which their movies were pirated, and did google search and made a list and did a court case. Now some random judge who doesn't understand/like internet asked the sites to be blocked. And videolan.org was middle in that list and it got overlooked. Then they handed that list to ISP. Few ISP found the issue and decided not to block it, but many blocked it without looking.

From India.

I think this is probably inconsistent across ISPs. I was able to access VideoLAN website and the download link just now.

https://www.meity.gov.in/ : This is the website for the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, the government body that issues orders under the relevant IT Act in India. They have a grievance section to file a grievance.

Past order banning 118 apps from 2020 (doesn't seem to list VLC) from Press Information Bureau (the communications division of the Govt. of India) https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1650669

I wonder if using a Ninite.com installer bypasses this?

It does

Slightly off topic but man do I love Ninite. Every couple of years when I reinstall Windows I remember it exists and it's magical every time.

Maybe its VLCs built in streaming services like shoutcast directory, maybe a stream on shoutcast is blacklisted in India, so they blacklisted the app. (Icecast actually)

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-stream-radio-stations-in-vlc...

Streams would be my top guess. I use VLC mostly for a hundred internet-radio streams (today there are over 30,000! relayed by many services!) Imagine the authoritarian nightmares that unfettered access to world-wide radio in dozens of languages might arouse. Unfiltered news! Hedonic music! Other cultures!

Wait! we can blame foreign hackers !!

Whatever the Indian state doesn’t understand is either banned or taxed to death.

Shame that a country with such a young and technically literate population is governed by an army of one-finger-typing tech illiterate boomer bureaucrats.

I really wish there was an independent lightweight mesh network for data, unblockable by design. Of course we still will need a broadband for heavy lifting, but the idea of governments deciding what we can access and what not on a technical level (domains, IP ranges) seems ridiculous for me, connected since 1990s.

Interesting. Tried to access https://www.videolan.org/ .. didnt work... after hitting refresh continously for 10-15 times, the site loaded fine :)

I’m currently in a trip in the south of Brazil, and I can’t open the 2600.com website since I’ve been here. I’m not sure if it is some kind of government filter or just 2600’s firewall blocking Brazilian ips.

$5 it’s about a version name or something stupid and political.

Seems like a mistake, otherwise they would have banned the Android version too

Seems like just an oversight or mistake given nobody's given any details

India banned in VLC media player is impossible, thankfully

Just rehost it / mirror it elsewhere..?

On a slight tangent, mplayer is dead right?

They had a release earlier so, no?

https://mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

I don't think it's under as much active development as it was 10-15 years ago, though.

Whoa, must try. Thanks.

It was superseded by MPV https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv.

Maybe try banning windows?

Finally, year of the Linux desktop!

Say what you will, but I have been using Linux as my desktop machine very happily for over 20 years, and I'm no wizard. VLC is a big part of that!

Same for me, but about 7 years.

Far more child pornography touches Windows than any other piece of software. Someone needs to think of the children.

Open source might consider banning Linux in India in response.

That wouldn't even make sense even remotely like on several levels.

Your realize there is no Open Source committee that sits around deciding these things, in fact Open Source at it's heart is designed to ensure the exact opposite of what you suggested.

Anyone anywhere can get the code compile and run it.

I think they were joking

You missed the joke. Chill, it's a Friday.

It's really not that obvious considering a few months ago people were seriously proposing banning russians and/or the russian government from using open source software.

In case you weren't joking, one of the tenets of open source is no discrimination against groups of people. So it wouldn't really be open source if India were banned from using Linux.

https://opensource.org/osd

https://pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetail.aspx?PRID=1637701

They have listed VLC as an alternative to Chinese apps but then they banned the website. I think its a mistake and someone needs to report this.

Maybe they changed their mind :)

https://www.techradar.com/news/everyones-favorite-media-play...

A friend of mine got a new laptop so I was installing some important apps and the VLC site wouldn't load. So I checked it on my phone and this came up.

Most likely a blanket Blacklist of url containing the keyword video along with unverified source.

Yeah, I had also faced this problem a few days back. After that I used a VPN to download it.

Seems to be at ISP level or my local ISP isn't adhering to govt rules. Oh well.

The last time I downloaded it in Windows 11, a popup suggested that I use the store instead, so I wonder if India also banned that installation path.

F-Droid also carries VLC, and I doubt they will ever take direction from the Indian government. On the rare occasion that VLC will not play some file, F-Droid also has the Nova Video Player, but the Nova listing carries a warning that it will track and report your activity.

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