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WhatsApp might be on the verge of being banned in China

By Cookie Monster - on 21 Jul 2017, 12:00am

WhatsApp might be on the verge of being banned in China

More than a week after China ordered state-run telcos to block personal VPNs by February 2018, the "Great Firewall" strikes again and the latest victim is WhatsApp. 

A person familiar with the situation told The New York Times (NYT) that the Chinese government initiated the blocking of WhatsApp in the country. Security experts whom NYT spoke to also confirmed that the government's internet filters are to be blamed. This has led many users in the country not able to send text, photos and videos. The spokeswoman for WhatsApp declined to comment on the report. 

“According to the analysis that we ran today on WhatsApp’s infrastructure, it seems that the Great Firewall is imposing censorship that selectively targets WhatsApp functionalities,” said Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a cryptography research start-up.

Although WeChat is still the most widely used messaging app in China, the encrypted messaging in WhatsApp attracted many people to use it for communication or doing business outside the country or in Hong Kong. The partial censorship of WhatsApp could be a prelude to a complete ban based on the Chinese government's track record with foreign social networking services such as Facebook and Google.

Source: The New York Times 

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