Elon Musk’s X Corp. is back up in Brazil after the government blocked the app under orders from the country’s Supreme Court.
Earlier this month, Brazil’s 28 million or so X users found themselves without a platform after the government ordered the National Telecommunications Agency to block access to the app. X’s owner Elon Musk cried foul, saying the country was acting like a dictatorship, while the government blamed X for not taking down a number of “far-right” voices, including political opposition.
Now X is back, but not on the back of an invite. The company has managed to get around the block by moving service to servers hosted by Cloudflare, according to ABRINT, Brazil’s leading trade group for Internet Service Providers.
This makes it much more difficult to uphold the block, said the group, since it uses dynamic internet protocols that are constantly changing. The former system used by X relied on static Internet Protocols.
“Many of these IPs are shared with other legitimate services, such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services,” explained Basílio Rodriguez Pérez, an ABRINT advisor. He added, “There is no doubt that this could have happened by chance or unintentionally.”
It seems Musk is keeping quiet about the latest move, although he was quite outspoken during the original flare-up with Brazil’s political establishment. He had originally refused to take down his satellite internet provider Starlink, although Starlink later back down.
It seems that right now, there’s no simple solution to deal with X’s workaround, although one would think it has to be short-lasting. Or, maybe not.
“In technology, almost anything is possible, but there is also the issue of time and budget,” said Thiago Ayub, technology director for Sage Networks, one of the people responsible for X’s original block. “If we take a team of IT geniuses from Brazil, give them an unlimited budget, and ask them to create a solution, it may be possible, but it also may be prohibitive.”