Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
techcrunch.com
Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
1–10 of 168 posts
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#2If you go ahead and read the article, you'll realize that it's more about Facebook complaining their business will be more heavily regulated in Brazil than outright censorship.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#3Telegram reports 1.000.000 new users 4 hours after the block started, 1.500.000 new users 1 hour ago: https://twitter.com/telegram
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#4Telegram reports 1.000.000 new users 4 hours after the block started, 1.500.000 new users 1 hour ago: https://twitter.com/telegram
John Gilmore's oft quoted in these cases: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." When, if ever, will politicians learn this? Will it take a generation that has grown up on the Internet and watched this to make them realize these actions are pretty futile?
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#5The news is misrepresenting what is actually happening.
A judge ruled for a 48 hour ban of WhatsApp from telcos to try to coerce WhatsApp into releasing private chat information for an ongoing criminal investigation (wild guess: they want information from politically exposed actors due to the recent corruption investigations). There are precedents, and that's a tactic local judges are using to try to get cooperation from international private companies.
This is the actual fact, but the article is conflating that with Marco Civil and other regulatory attempts that have nothing to do with this particular court ruling.
TL;DR TechCrunch publishes unchecked, alarmist news.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#6That's crazy. I was in Brazil for a month. everybody was on whatsapp. Facebook a distant second for message volume.
SMS wasn't even on the radar.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#7This is insane, this judge must be on a power trip. WhatsApp is now part of Brazilian social life and economy. Everyone here is part of many groups of friends, family or workmates, that is where most instant communication happens.
In my company, our deployment engineers, who usually are on very remote places with bad and unreliable internet, rely on WhatsApp. I'm not saying this is the best practice, but this is simply the way Brazil works right now. Even the mobile phone companies offer plans with free WhatsApp connection, because that is what most people here care about. Another example: In Brazil, 9 in 10 doctors use WhatsApp to talk to patients (http://www.cityam.com/230372/digital-health-wearables-and-ap...).
To disregard all the people and businesses that rely on WhatsApp for whatever reason is unbelievable. But this is not without precedent, once another Brazilian judge blocked YouTube for a whole day because it refused to take down a celebrity video.
This says a lot about the over-sized, inefficient, and stupid state we have, always meddling and intervening.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#8It wasn't Congress that decided that.
It is a single judge that gave an order to block the service for 48 hours.
It can be reversed if another judge decides the "liminar" (I don't know how to say this in English, it's a temporary decision) shouldn't been given.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#9This is the place the Olympics are going to be this summer. I can't help but hope the people use it as a stage to protest, but would imagine the media would largely ignore it.
Re: Brazilian Judge Shuts Down WhatsApp for 48 Hours
#10From someone living in Brazil, this article is a clickbait full of misinformation.
First off, we are nowhere near "shutting down social web". WhatsApp was shutdown by a court order because they did not comply with a subpoena to hand over information from a user in July and August. I recently submitted a link with a local (Brazilian) newspaper explaining the issue.
>If Brazil’s conservative Congress gets its way, they’re going to take down the entire social web as we know it, with bills circulating through the legislature to criminalize posting social media content and to allow the government to spy on its citizens.
Conservatives are not the only ones trying to censor the internet in here, absolutely every politician wants it.
>It’s an about-face from last year, when President Dilma Rousseff approved Marco Civil, a groundbreaking Internet “Bill of Rights”, as a response to the Snowden revelations that the NSA was spying on Brazil. The landmark bill, Brazil’s first internet legislation, protects net neutrality, user privacy and freedom of speech.
On the contrary! Marco Civil threatens user privacy (more below), and the "net neutrality" part has lead to just the same that happened today: Mobile companies were forced to shutdown their "free WhatsApp and Facebook" plans, making millions get blocked from WhatsApp[4]. Anyway, back to the privacy issues, article 11 of the text[1] is the more worrying one. Some highlights:
§ 2º A autoridade policial ou administrativa poderá requerer cautelarmente que os registros de conexão sejam guardados por prazo superior ao previsto no caput. § 4º O provedor responsável pela guarda dos registros deverá manter sigilo em relação ao requerimento previsto no § 2º
It says basically that police can require records of visited CONTENT without a court order and the ISP is required to supply that without informing the user. Somewhere else in the text it forces ISPs to store user history for a year. If the text really wanted to protect user privacy it would say something about cryptography, which isn't mentioned anywhere in the text.
Article 2 says there must be a "social purpose" for websites and that gov. may take websites down if it feels it doesn't serve the public interest. Brazilian govt. already has a history of censoring YouTube and Facebook videos involving politicians, judges or celebrities[5][2][3].
[1] http://www.camara.gov.br/proposicoesWeb/prop_mostrarintegra?...
[2] http://oglobo.globo.com/tecnologia/para-nao-sair-do-ar-no-br...
[3] http://www.conjur.com.br/2012-ago-08/google-retirar-ar-video...