What the hell is going on in Brazil?
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Elon Musk’s X skirted a ban of the social media network in Brazil though an automatic update of its software, an association of Brazilian internet providers said Wednesday.
Access to the platform abruptly returned overnight for many in Latin America’s most populous nation after a Brazilian Supreme Court judge ordered it blocked last month in a clash with Musk. After waking to find X suddenly functioning again on their phones, Brazilian users were abuzz Wednesday with speculation on whether or not the ruling had been revoked.
The Brazilian Association of Internet and Telecommunications Providers, or ABRINT, explained later in the day that in its update X had changed its structure to use IP addresses associated with Cloudflare, a cyber security company in San Francisco. The internet-infrastructure provider works with millions of websites, helping many to route their traffic.
The structural changes in X “make blocking the app much more complicated,” ABRINT said in a statement. The group said that under X’s previous system, the platform used specific IP addresses, which can allow internet companies to identify where data is coming from.
Many of the IP addresses currently being used by X “are shared with other legitimate services, such as banks and large internet platforms, making it impossible to block an IP without affecting other services,” ABRINT added.
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