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Comment by babas | Hacker News Reader

When I read that, I immediately dismissed the whole article. Both HRW and match.com are available on the 4/5 ISPs I have access to ATM. Home (Telenor), mobile (Telia), server host (domeneshop), my office (Telia, wired) and a customer network (Not sure about the downstream ISP). On the last one match.com is blocked by a firewall not the ISP.

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.

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I agree from a Japanese point of view. I never heard any ISP censorship except child porn. Censoring news sites must be huge news but never heard.

> During the G20 period, we observed increased blocking of domains in the news media and E-commerce category in Japan. DNS blocking was observed in both categories while Echo blocking was seen in the E-commerce category to a smaller extent. The domains being blocked during this time period included popular news domains such as online.wsj.com and washingtonpost.com under the news media category and kickstarter.com and marketwatch.com under the E-commerce umbrella.

Lol. Blocking kickstarter.com for G20? It must be false positive or ISP's DNS server is just suck.

Yeah, the article mentions some news sites being banned temporarily in Japan, but as someone who reads those sites near daily, I never noticed it happening.

Here is an example from Australia:

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 .

It could be a mistake, not an intentional lie.

Probably. After reading the paper I'm pretty sure they messed up their testing.

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.

Could be. But I also don't recall any of the blocking in Poland they refer to.

I also did not notice it. Will need to check OONI Probe.

It’s such an egregious mistake that you’d have to assume the rest of their data is similarly worthless.

I agree. I mean, were I not a skeptic I'd be walking around dropping the interesting tidbit that "Norway blocks match.com" - it's as bad as the info-memes with nonsense on them people quote from facebook.

I checked as well (Globalconnect wired; Telenor mobile). It's a fairly ridiculous claim, one which if true would have attracted instant media attention.

Piracy sites? That's strange. Why would Norway block sites like: http://t.ly/TdrE ?

I'm sure you got it wrong and what they actually block is Ninja sites.

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