India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has lifted the ban on the VLC Media Player website after a nine-month ban. This means Indian users can continue to download the popular open-source multimedia player for free.

Since February this year, the Indian governmentshieldThe website and download link of the VLC player project.Indian users accessing the website will display the message “The website has been blocked by order of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the IT Act 2000”.

Last month VLC player developers threatenedprosecuteThe Indian government, alleges that the Indian agency did not notify them or give them a chance to explain before blocking their website. Therefore, they asked the Indian government to explain the blocking of its domain name https://www.videolan.org/, give reasonable reasons and hold a virtual hearing. If the Indian government refuses this request, the VLC player developer will take legal action.

Recently, the Indian government lifted the relevant ban on the VLC website.According to foreign media Techcrunch, the announcement of unbanning VLC did not come from the Indian government, but from the New Delhi-based advocacy organization, the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), which is the developer of VLC. VideoLAN FoundationProvide “legal support”.

From the beginning of banning VLC to the current lifting of the ban, the Indian government has not made any statement.Also did not provide the VideoLAN Foundation and the Indian people with a reason to block VLC,But all telecom operators in India have complied with the ban.Most of the media speculated that the reason behind this move was that the Indian governmentA misunderstanding of a security warning from earlier this year.

Security firm Symantec has pointed out that VLC was used by the Chinese hacker group Cicada to launch cyber attacks. Security experts have discovered that Cicada leverages the VLC player to deploy a malicious program loader. Therefore, the Indian government wants to ban the download of VLC from the official website.

but Jean-Baptiste Kempf, Chairman of the VideoLAN Foundation It pointed out that the Chinese hacking activity was disclosed in April, and that the blocking of the VideoLAN domain name occurred a few weeks before that, and that the Chinese hackers were using a modified version of the old VLC player.