One of the media players, VLC, has been reportedly said to be banned in India. Though the media player is running fine on your mobile phones, laptops, or computers, the new members will not be able to install them. The government has blocked access to the official VLC media player website “www.videolan.org”. Having said that, you can still download the media player on Windows devices.
The government has not yet provided any formal explanation for why access to the VLC website is prohibited in India. Although the VLC website is blocked by all major ISPs, including Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone Idea, and others, you may still access it on your phone or laptop by utilising a VPN service.
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Moreover, according to the news reports, the VLC Media Player was apparently banned around five months ago without any notice either from the government or the VideoLan organisation. As the VLC apps continued to work as usual in India and only access to the website was restricted, the subtle ‘ban’ went unnoticed.
The reason the media player was taken down has not been disclosed by either the government or VLC Media Player. Several accounts, however, imply that the action was done as a result of Cicada, a hacking group supported by China, using the application for cyberattacks. According to reports, as part of a bigger cyberattack campaign, Cicada utilised VLC Media Player to install malicious software on target computers.
Hundreds of Chinese apps, including PUBG Mobile, TikTok, Camscanner, and others, were outlawed by the Indian government in 2020. In fact, the newly withdrawn BGMI version of PUBG Mobile from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store has also lately been banned in India. The government decided to restrict these apps because it thought the platforms were transmitting user data to China. Notably, a Chinese corporation does not support VLC Media Player. It was created by the Paris-based company VideoLAN.
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