I have no trouble accessing hrw.org and match.com in Norway. I wonder is it specific to some ISPs? I also couldn’t find any law that was passed to block certain pornogrpahic websites in Wikipedia [1] and I don’t know where else to look.
They should really check thier sources. My guess is that they tested on a network that has a filtering firewall.
Now that that is said. Norway is not perfect. The biggest ISPs use a easy to bypass DNS blocklist by the judiciary. The list contains CP-sites, gambling, piracy, terrorism. This is bad enough. Why lie about match.com and hrw.org? Jeez.
The problem is that they blow it up HUGE both in the paper and the article without cursory checking. That is as bad as lie. Maybe even worse.
From The paper 7.1.2: "Censored Planet data reveals extremely aggressive DNS blocking of many domains in Norway, with many blocks being consistent in all of our vantage points. During the four month period of increased censorship, 25 ASes observed blocking of more than 10 domains in at least six categories. We observed the most rigorous activity in AS 2116 (CATCHCOM) where more than 50 domains were blocked."
Blocking more than 10 domains in 25 ASes I have no reason to doubt. As I said there is extensive DNS blocking. So they write in a way that makes it sound like all the ASes are blocking hrw.org and match. But it's probably only on CATCHCOM. This is a ISP for mostly huge corporate environments where blocking may be by customer demand. So they take one single source of "anomaly" and blow it up. Pretty much a lie.
I'm sure you got it wrong and what they actually block is Ninja sites.
Lol. Blocking kickstarter.com for G20? It must be false positive or ISP's DNS server is just suck.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/isps-in-au-and-nz...
What's interesting is the Prime Minister made it explicitly legal for ISPs to do this. Couldn't find the exact news on this but a search turned up the following article which is sort of what I remember https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/04/soci-a04.html .
https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-g...
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politic...
> Norwegian politicians from the Christian People’s Party are shocked that there is porn on the Internet, and want it eliminated – censored off all the Internet pipes as though the pornography doesn’t exist.
There's some truth here, but it's presented in a shoddy way. Yes, KrF (Christian People's Party) has at various times made noises about pornography DNS filters. I don't recall all the specifics, but various proposals have included opt-out DNS filter and/or filters in schools and such. While I don't support these proposals, I think the language used really exaggerates the reality (and few or none of these measures have ever gained much headway, either at the national or local level)
> If you read the Norwegian Christian paper, though, it is expressing itself very positively toward this censorship (which is somewhat weird for a newspaper, any newspaper – those generally oppose censorship vehemently and defend any and all freedom of the press).
They really dug deep on this one. The paper in question (Dagen) has a circulation of slightly over 10,000. That's not even among the top 20 in the country [1]. I'd be skeptical of assigning much weight to their coverage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway
Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?
Does Norway not publish its corpus of law online? Even in Canada where our government motto is "yesterday's technology today" we have websites where you can look up all legislation and read it.
The mandate to block torrent sites came about as a result of a court order following a lawsuit brought forth by Hollywood studios against Norwegian ISPs [2]. I tried to find the specific text on lovdata, but came up empty as they don't have a comprehensive list of local court decisions. [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway#Internet_ce...
[2] https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-nor...
[1]: https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015...
It's possible that it was a mistake, and corrected, but it should still concern you that it was done to begin with.
Telecoms should not be the arbiters of what content you view.
Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.
Why do you say this journalist is lying, but lack of evidence from other journalists must mean this one is wrong?
Pirate Bay is a big site, and journalists and the population would notice. But they might not know to look for other sites being censored. Just food for thought. I don't know whether to believe it either, but I'm willing to leave it to others to fact check more rigorously.
A perfectly reasonable explanation that obeys all the facts could be that a single telecom blocked access for a short time by mistake, was alerted, and silently fixed it before journalists noticed. I doubt many people are visiting hrw.org on a daily basis, and an outage like that could be mistaken for temporary website issues. A journalist would probably not assume it was a country-wide block and so wouldn't think to write an article about it.
"Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"