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Re:WhatsApp Blocking Encrypted Calls to All Saudi Numbers by dogma1138 on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @04:22PM (#12089360)
There are plenty of DPI/TM solutions that identify and classify the protocol very quickly and efficiently, every ISP today does it. It's highly unlikely that a Saudi or any modern telco would would not be able to analyse the traffic and extrapolate the exact protocol and application from it as well as other information such as if it's an encrypted stream or not (heck testing if data is encrypted or not is as simple as running compression on random samples and checking the compression ratio, you'll have to classify if the data is compressed to begin with but if it's not compressed data and it's not compressible it's quite likely to encrypted).
Re:WhatsApp Blocking Encrypted Calls to All Saudi Numbers by eridius on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @04:35PM (#12089465)
This would work for a call in-progress. The gist explicitly claims the calls are blocked during the handshake, which would be before there's enough data to analyze. It appears from other comments that what's really going on is calls simply use a different port and that port is blocked.
Re:WhatsApp Blocking Encrypted Calls to All Saudi Numbers by tptacek on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @05:43PM (#12089908)
The root comment on this thread resolves that distinction: it might make sense from a UX perspective to block calls that are known in advance not to be workable. WhatsApp can sensibly be reacting to something that occurs once a session is in steady state.
Re:WhatsApp Blocking Encrypted Calls to All Saudi Numbers by eridius on Wednesday July 13, 2016 @05:59PM (#12090000)
Sure, though I think there's still merit in the OP's request for WhatsApp to detect when a customer with a Saudi number is actually in another country and allow the call to go through (though I don't know how easy it is to detect that).