Slashdot Mirror
Saudi Arabia Blocks Viber Messaging Service
another random user writes in with news about Saudi Arabia blocking a popular messaging service for not providing "a means to to be monitored." "The head of the messaging application Viber has said people in Saudi Arabia have had basic freedoms taken away, after his service was blocked there. Talmon Marco told the BBC he did not know the reason for the move, but that Viber would be restored soon. In March Saudi authorities warned Viber and other encrypted messaging services that they would be blocked unless they provided a means to to be monitored. Mr Marco said he had refused to provide data requested by Saudi officials. The fact that Viber's free phone and text messaging service is no longer working in the country is not entirely unexpected. The Saudi telecoms regulator had warned the firm — along with Skype and Whatsapp — that they would be blocked if they did not agree to be monitored."
Heads are gonna roll over this.
Trolling is a art,
Everybody needs to be using Tor on their mobile device and running lots of servers to help these people.
Man, I wish the summary would tell me, once and for all, whether the Saudi regulators warned these services that they'd be blocked. I have to know!
If you want to do business in a country, you have to follow the laws. Sounds like the Saudi authorities gave clear and fair warning that the service would be blocked if the capability for monitoring was not implemented, and yet Viber chose to disregard the warning. So they were blocked.
Having said that, I do NOT agree with these laws, clearly (because I'm on Slashdot). I'm also not one to just give a pass to any country's immoral laws because "that's just how they do things". The law sucks... but it's also clear what the law is in most countries and if you don't agree to do business and follow it, well, no surprises what will happen.
Not that it really matters too much. "Viber would be restored soon" translates to "we'll implement the monitoring requirements the Saudi's want, because fuck it, we like money and would rather kick up a fuss on the BBC than actually stick to our position and pull out of a hostile country."
Talmon Marco, ex Israeli IDF (he was the Chief Information Officer for the Israel military FFS) runs the company. They blocked it presumably because it is too-good-to-be-true free calls. Mostly likely surveillanceware paid for by the surveillance industry, since you have to pay for the servers somehow! You can't simply offer a free app and provide free servers and somehow everything pays for itself.
He moved to the UK, set up a lot of US companies, focussing on network management and VOIP. i.e. stuff suitable for intelligence gathering.
" Starting 1993, Mr. Marco served as CIO for the Israeli Defense Forces Central Command. In 1995, Mr. Marco Co-Founded Nortex Software, a developer of Civil Engineering software.In 1997 he Co-founded Expand Networks, a privately held, venture back, world leader in Application Traffic Management. Mr. Marco served as President at Expand Networks until 2004, at which point the company reached a run-rate of $20M revenue a year. In 1998, Mr. Marco co-founded iMesh, a social networking and music destination serving 10 million unique users, where he currently serves as President. Mr. Marco holds a degree in Computer Science and Management from the Tel-Aviv University."
http://www.chubbybrain.com/companies/guestcentric-systems/people/talmon-marco
If you look at the Wikipedia page, he tried to hide the origin of Viber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Quinta222
"Hello, Quinta222. It looks like you are currently engaged in an edit war at Viber; the page was protected recently to stop the string of reversions between you and Utlguy, but it appears to have continued again. Please stop reverting edits to this page, and make an effort to discuss the edit on the article's talk page."
Yet it's clearly Israeli and he is/was clearly Israeli Army CIO.
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000746993&fid=1725
Senator Dianne Feinstein, will no doubt defend it as legal.
"The head of the messaging application Viber has said people in Saudi Arabia have had basic freedoms taken away, after his service was blocked there.
OK, they only figured that the Saudi's have taken away basic freedoms from people after they blocked viber?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Really guys, I mean, really? The porn in that country consists of a girl showing a little ankle... and your service is named Viber. What did you expect?!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Diggin further
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expand_Networks
"Expand Networks, Ltd. was a Tel Aviv, Israel based provider of WAN Optimization solutions. The company was liquidated in 2011."
"Expand Networks was a privately held company, founded in 1998; initial financing was provided by Discount Investment Corporation, The Eurocom Group, Ophir Holdings, and a private group of investors, including Memco Software founder Israel Mezin. Additional investors joined in subsequent rounds of funding"
"In mid October 2011, following the requests of Plenus, one of the company's lenders, an Israeli court appointed a liquidator - Mr. Paz Rimer. The liquidator gradually terminated the company's employees [6] and eventually, on 11 January 2012 sold most of the assets of the company to Riverbed Technology, which immediately terminated all the company's products and ceased support.[7]"
Following the breadcrumbs, to Riverbed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbed_Technology
Riverbed bought up a lot of network surveillance companies and products, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverbed_Technology
"In 2010 Riverbed Technology purchased CACE[7] and took over as the primary sponsor of Wireshark. Ethereal development has ceased, and an Ethereal security advisory recommended switching to Wireshark.[8]"
Here they are buying a user graph analysis:
"Acquisition History...Mazu Networks...On February 20, 2009, Riverbed announced the completion of the acquisition of Mazu Networks. The Mazu products, which were renamed Cascade, analyze network traffic to provide information about the interactions of and dependencies between users, applications and systems."
Riverbed seem to also be in the cloud business too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_storage_gateway
"A cloud storage gateway is a network appliance or server which resides at the customer premises and translates cloud storage APIs such as SOAP or REST to block-based storage protocols such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel or file-based interfaces such as NFS or CIFS.[1][2]"
"As of 2013, the key vendors dominating this market space are CTERA Networks, Emulex, Nirvanix, and Riverbed Technology.[4]"
Interesting, they seem to sell exactly the sort of kit the NSA must be buying in shedloads, plus a lot of network appliances industry must be buying. They even bought the company that owns the protocol that military uses to talk to its satellites! How that fits with the business, I don't quite know.
Taking a look at the Viber app, "Viber allows you to text, call, and send photos and video messages worldwide for free to over 200 million users using 3G or Wifi"...." the app syncs with your mobile contact list"...
So the app grabs your contacts lists, there's the graph data right there, 200 million users a lot of expensive servers.
Trying to install it, it requires your GPS location, Microphone (no surprise there, its VOIP), Camera... Your accounts, Your Phone Calls, Directly call numbers, read phone status, and identity. Your social information, modify contacts, read call logs, read your contacts, read your social stream, write call logs, write your social stream....
It even gives itself permission to run at startup.
Motherload!
With all the excuses of FUD, the NSA is only one step from doing this now, in the US.
So how free are we, really?
I fear for our countries future. History shows us that we are starting down a slippery slope
handing down such powers to secretive branch of the government without any verifiable
checks and balances.
Not just a Saudi problem - Obama thinks snooping on messages is just fine and dandy as long as it is not done to members of his Master Race. So far. May I once more bring people's attention to the Open and Free SMS encryption via the Textsecure Android app, and the disaster- (and government-) resistant mesh networking of Project Byzantium which now runs on a Raspberry Pi. They are becoming more and more relevant, and soon we shall have to switch to darknets to do anything non-commercial. Get with the program early, folks.
Try running a skype-like service on US soil that leeches info from you. And give the government NO way to tap into it. See what happens.
Now, imagine that service is run by ex-al-quaeda members. Or pakistani extremists.
Of course, they would let them do as they please! It's the land of the free after all!
The Israeli Government has uploaded viruses into almost every cell phone in Islamistan. The malware monitors audio around the phone, and sends it back to Israel via Israeli satellites and underground drones. Most insidiously, the software is triggered by the words Allah Akbar. So mum's the word, Muslims. You never know just who might be listening and recording.
Oh how I wish this were true
Not if you're using a bridge relay. A very powerful adversary could determine the existence of relays and flag you if you talk too much to them, but that's beyond the power of even a rather rich Middle Eastern country. https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges
Now, they could try to ban https as a way of indirectly banning Tor but I don't think that will go over too well for security reasons.
"Since the army service in Israel is mandatory, this ridiculous claim is that every Israeli company is working for the army." ... the ex IDF CIO, sets up a company in *Cyprus*, with lots of companies providing free services that collect info in exchange, Wikipedia flags an edit war with a user trying to hide the Israel link.... the obvious question pops up, who pays the bills for these free apps, whose the customer for that data. It's a surveillance app, because these apps capture data in exchange for the use of the app. I have a few samples of the browser plugin they install now on my machine for analysis. The question then becomes the customer, I assume its Israel because of his history, the Cyprus link, the names, all scream Israel. That doesn't mean *every* Israel business is doing that.
You are "Moshiko Nayman" presumably, of Partner Communications Company Ltd?
I'm not vouching for your company, but when I dig into it, it looks like a company to me, a regular boring company. Something the digging into the Viber app doesn't suggest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partner_Communications_Company
Boring ordinary company. If you want to defend Viber feel free, the more I dig, the more alarm bells go off with that company.
I hope one day we will get rid of all these closed, proprietary messaging protocols.
Too bad it's not for the good reason in this case.
Does this article suggest that all other messaging that are operational in Saudi Arabia are being monitored? Would something like Facebook chat, if it's transported over SSL, be considered encrypted? If it's operating in SA (not sure if it is... just asking) does that mean that the SA government has been given the "keys to the castle" so to speak?
Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time: http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/
I originally read the article title as "Saudi Arabia Blocks Vibrator Messaging Service".