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China blocks WhatsApp users from sending photos and video
- MarkMc 9y agoI find it odd that the Chinese authorities allow text but not photos.
- wsr 9y agoPhotos and videos are harder to spy on. However, this might be changing too... https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-stopchat-censors-can-now-erase-images-mid-transmission-1500363950 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-stopchat-censors-can-now...
- suramya_tomar 9y agoText can by monitored using automated tools, however the same capability is not as well developed for video/photos. Also, pics/videos have more impact. If I describe the results of a beating it will not have as much of an impact as the photo of the broken bleeding person will have. So for a government that is trying to control the narrative the ability to control the images being transferred becomes key.
- mderazon 9y agoIf messages are end to end encrypted, how does this work ?
- detaro 9y agoYou might be able to catch images/videos just by the fact that suddenly a lot more data is transferred. Or part of the metadata is not encrypted, uploads might happen over a secondary connection, ...
- suramya_tomar 9y agoMaybe they are constantly interrupting the connection. Text messages would go through as the connection to the server to upload a text is for a very short duration whereas the image/video would require them to be connected for a longer time and the interruption would kill the upload. (This is all conjecture obviously)