Mark Zuckerberg celebrates the end of WhatsApp ban in Brazil

Access to WhatsApp has been restored in Brazil, roughly 24 hours after telecom providers began blocking the messaging app in response to a court order. A judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe ordered local phone carriers to block access to WhatsApp for 72 hours, but his ruling was overturned on appeal.

Mark Zuckerberg celebrated the end of the countrywide ban and called on Brazilian citizens to support legislation that would prevent a ban from happening again.

“WhatsApp is now back online in Brazil! Your voices have been heard once again. Thank you to our community for helping resolve this,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “That said, the idea that everyone in Brazil can be denied freedom to communicate the way they want is very scary in a democracy. You and your friends can help make sure this never happens again, and I hope you get involved,” he added, calling on Brazilian citizens to show up before the nation’s Congress tomorrow and support the introduction of laws that would prevent courts from blocking services like WhatsApp.

“Brazilians have been leaders in connecting the world and creating an open internet for many years. I hope you make your voice heard now and demand change,” Zuckerberg wrote, linking to an event hosted by the Internet Freedom Caucus. He also linked to a Change.org petition against the WhatsApp block, which calls on Brazil’s Congress to support a free and open Internet and has already garnered over 100,000 signatures.

Prior to yesterday’s ban, WhatsApp access was last cut off in December. That block lasted only 12 hours and was the result of a similar dispute over government demands for WhatsApp data. WhatsApp has argued that it cannot provide the data because it is encrypted.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that banning the service “punishes more than 100 million Brazilians who rely on our service to communicate, run their businesses, and more, in order to force us to turn over information we repeatedly said we don’t have.”

During the block, Brazilian users turned to other encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram and iMessage, and used VPN services to access WhatsApp.

GitLab-Digital Ocean partnership to provide free hosting for continuous online code testing

GitLab.com users have always had free access to the Gitlab programmer’s toolset including GitLab Runner. Today it announced a new feature called Gitlab Runner Autoscale that allows continuous code testing at scale, and to make that even more palatable, the company teamed up with cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean to provide free hosting for testing that code.

Yes, it’s really free.

“We are introducing Gitlab runner Autoscale [and we are teaming with DigitalOcean] to provision more servers as you need them. We will make sure there are enough machines to run your code,” Sytse ‘”Sid” Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab told TechCrunch.

DigitalOcean gets access to a developer community it craves and by showing them their skill set around fast server deployment, they are likely hoping to convert some percentage of the free users into paying customers.

The idea is to solve a real problem around code testing bottlenecks that can result in delays in deployment.

“Companies can go from zero if nobody is pushing code to hundreds of runners if everyone is submitting code. They can hook into a DigitalOcean account and provision as many servers as they need. Because it’s fast, they never start in a queue. It’s secure because you deprecate the server when you’re done testing. And it’s cost-effective because you don’t have to run the servers the entire time,” Sijbrandij explained.

These runners are actually an ideal cloud use case. They require a number of servers with often intensive computing requirements, but usually only for a short period of time while testing. When they’re done, the servers can go away.

In an in-house data center, there is a limited amount of server space for this type of testing and that can result in a bottleneck where coders have to wait in a queue for access to servers to test their code. In a time of agility and constant updating that kind of bottleneck makes little sense.

The DigitalOcean deal is good for a year, then both sides can revisit it. GitLab actually has tens of thousands of users, but only a small percentage are paying. Those customer happen to be deep-pocketed enterprise customers who are willing to pay for more advance features and service, which helps support the open source project.

It’s worth noting the paying customers won’t get free DigitalOcean access. They will have to negotiate directly with them or another cloud provider to get the same type of elastic access as the open source users.

GitLab launched in 2011, but became GitLab, Inc in 2014. It was a member of the Y Combinator class of 2015 and has grown from the 9 employees it started with in YC to over 70 today. It’s raised over $5.5 million.

DigitalOcean launched in 2011 and has raised just over $123 million in equity financing. Its most recent funding came in the form of $130 million in debt financing last week.

GoPro launching new virtual reality camera, online platform

The race to create both the hardware and the software that will drive the emerging virtual realitymarket is heating up, and now GoPro has unveiled its latest plans to support VR filmmakers and fans.

At this week's NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) event in Las Vegas, the company will unveil a new VR camera and launch a new VR platform for sharing immersive videos.

First, GoPro will show off its new Omni VR camera, which features six synchronized cameras in what the company calls a spherical array, but the housing itself looks more like a rounded square.