Has it ever been demonstrated that these bans actually hinder terrorists or criminals?

It does feel like they would just move to the next app/protocol or even roll their own or use VPNs... so why are governments still penalizing 99.9% of the population which use these only to communicate normally (and use privacy protocols because they don't like the idea of being surveilled)?

Are governments trying to funnel non-criminal people towards apps they can surveil completely to be able to control them even more? To what end?

India is a clown show. They recently banned VLC for piracy.

60% politicians hold criminal records. Most are illiterate. Almost all are super corrupt.

Politics rewards dishonesty. All of the incentives are there. What else can be expected?

Of course, true believers in Democracy will say, "We'll just vote out the bad ones". How is that working out?

> true believers in Democracy will say, "We'll just vote out the bad ones". How is that working out?

Better than no democracy at all. I think anyone can see the problems with it.

I'll never get tired of saying it: politicians are the same as the citizens that vote them in. In India they won't vote out corrupt politicians because the citizenry is corrupt itself.

Let’s just say education might be an issue.

It's cultural, and I'm not sure I agree that it's an issue. Different cultures behave in different ways.

I think there is some truth in this.

Politicians distribute huge sums of corrupt money to poor and lower middle class population just before elections.

And your average Indian would love to get a government job that has scope of corruption.

All in all you have culture where corruption in normalized.

Give the country and its democracy some credit (Indian here).

We’ve voted out charismatic leaders, we’ve voted in huge coalitions, we’ve ignored sympathy waves after political assassinations, power transfers have been uniformly peaceful since we gained independence.

If this cultural/endemic corruption at work, I think most people in most countries would prefer this to whatever oligarchy, junta, theocracy, ruler-for-life-god-on-earth-ocrasy they suffer under.

India should be copying China from the foundation -- since Deng.

European citizens voted in genociders. According to this logic, europeans were also genociders

As someone said, Democracy is bad but not as bad as the other options.

Wow, that is shocking.

> Almost all are super corrupt.

And do you think that is different from politicians in other countries?

Yes. because on top of corrupt they are criminals most of them

>And do you think that is different from politicians in other countries?

You are not alone - it is kinda similar in other countries. The only thing worse than a politician is someone that voted for them.

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.

So they banned the original source after finding out that there were illegitimate versions of VLC disguised as the real package?

How did it solve the problem? Don't you think that after they banned the original, there would have been even more illegitimate versions?

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.

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.

did they use phones to communicate too ? they should ban that. And what about their voices ?

Anyone know which other messenger apps are affected? The article (and the other one that the article refers to) don't say anything in this regard.

List of 14 Apps Banned in J&K by Central Government

As per the source, the GoI has banned a total of 14 apps and they are as follows:

    Crypviser
    Enigma
    Safeswiss
    Wickrme
    Mediafire
    Briar
    BChat
    Nandbox
    Conion
    IMO
    Element
    Second line
    Zangi
    Threema

From : https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/full-list-of-14-messenger-...

Thanks, so Signal is not among them? Interesting. Or was it already banned before?