Saudi Arabia Blocks Viber Messaging Service 83
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."
It's a surveillance app from Israel (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: It's a surveillance app from Israel (Score:5, Interesting)
Since the army service in Israel is mandatory, this ridiculous claim is that every Israeli company is working for the army.
Coming from another leading Israeli VoIP company myself - I can state that the only security forces ever approaching us were American - with their CALEA program.
We refused to cooperate.