Not exactly. They banned VLC because a bunch of Chinese companies were spreading illegitimate versions of VLC disguised as the real package, and installing spyware alongside the media player.
Not the best way to tackle the problem, but I think it's important to know exactly what happened. Also - I think the ban's gone - I just downloaded VLC yesterday. Probably because VideoLAN took the government to court.
That is exactly what the clown show is about. Say, some Russian hackers are spreading malicious versions of Chrome, so do you go about banning the legitimate Google Chrome. If the government doing that is not a clown I don't know what is.
This is a foolish argument, the government always try to contact the local representative of that organization so if this were to happen they would get in touch with Google and ask them to investigate why there is malware in Chrome, that would certainly be Google's responsibility and if not handled properly, deserves a ban.
The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
"clown show" means something not organized well, so it's not exactly a foolish argument. Why would you hold VLC creators responsible if there are third parties spreading fake versions of it, and what can VLC do about it, and how does it help banning the original version? Why they need to contact the "local representative of that organization" instead of catching/banning other illegal websites?
So if someone creates few fake currency notes, will they ban all the original currency notes instead of catching the culprit?
Oh well, on that note, I remembered they did ban all currency notes of Rs.500 denomination to fight corruption, and then released new notes of "Rs.2000 denomination".
I can understand how people who are not in the security domain might get confused by this.
The legitimate application's developer cannot do anything if their application is being trojanized by malware authors. Even if Modi himself releases a piece of software, anyone can just create a malicious version of that and distribute it on various platforms.
> The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
The important thing the country had to do was to sensitize people about the malicious versions being distributed and urge them to use only the application from the legitimate VLC website. Instead, they went ahead and banned the legit VLC website which just makes people to go to shadier websites to download VLC.
I agree politicians would not have this level of knowledge, but for the officials who assist the policy makers, this should be a basic 101 in security. Now what would you call the official in Cert-IN who issued the VLC ban ? A clown? definitely.
Very valid point! They banned all VLC impersonators alongside VLC, I believe. Again - definitely not how you solve the problem. I was simply clarifying what had actually happened.
Not the best way to tackle the problem, but I think it's important to know exactly what happened. Also - I think the ban's gone - I just downloaded VLC yesterday. Probably because VideoLAN took the government to court.