5 ms·

> ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human

by vinni2 6y ago

> ISPs in Norway are imposing what the study calls “extremely aggressive” blocking across a broader range of content, including human rights websites like Human Rights Watch and online dating sites like Match.com. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway

na85 6y ago
>I don’t know where else to look. 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.
- vinni2 6y ago
  It probably does but it’s not easily searchable or finding this specific law with the information they provide in the article is very hard. Like the law jargon etc. it’s the job of the article to cite the link.
- birktj 6y ago
  It does, they even have a selection that is translated to english [1]. However I don't know what kind of terms I would search for. I tried "DNS", but it didn't give me anything. I also tried "internet blocking", no luck there either. [1]: https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk
  - doktrin 6y ago
    If I'm inferring correctly from the wiki page on Norwegian internet, the DNS blacklist is not made public as they mention it was posted to wikileaks back in 2009. At the time I believe this was exclusively a CP blacklist [1] 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_censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway#Internet_ce... [2] https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-norge/60659433 https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-nor... [3] https://lovdata.no/register/dommer https://lovdata.no/register/dommer
    - birktj 6y ago
      I believe it is the court case with ID TOSLO-2015-67093 [1]. Trough my old university account I still have access to lovdata pro so I was able to search for it and view it. I am to lazy to reupload it tonight, but if you are interested I could do it tomorrow. [1]: https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015-67093/KAPITTEL_4 https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015...
  - vinni2 6y ago
    Exactly same thing I mentioned. It is so hard to search and explore these laws.
blacksmith_tb 6y ago
Looking in the citations in the article itself, these are the references provided, neither of which seem entirely convincing to me: https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-gambling-restrictions/ https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-g... https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politicians-want-censor-internet-rule-34-pornography/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politic...
- doktrin 6y ago
  That PIA blog post is not exactly high quality. > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway
babas 6y ago
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.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It could be a mistake, not an intentional lie.
  - babas 6y ago
    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.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Could be. But I also don't recall any of the blocking in Poland they refer to.
ggggtez 6y ago
I believe they are saying that it happened in 2018, not today. 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.
- babas 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure it never happened. This would have been big news here. The technology press went ape when thepriatebay.org was added to a DNS blocklist. I have searched around and can not find any references to hrw or match being blocked by accident or not. Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.
  - ggggtez 6y ago
    Ok, so your gut feeling vs some scientific research? Could you try to debate the facts instead of a strawman journalist? 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.
- jml7c5 6y ago
  They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020: "Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"
arp242 6y ago
I know that in the Netherlands there is a specific very small ISP which caters to a certain religious crowd and blocks all sorts of "offensive" content (which is its main selling point). Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?
sdenton4 6y ago
This reminds me of the disinformation smear campaign against the Canadian health care system run by US insurance companies since the nineties to prevent single payer health care laws from being passed... https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada
zrth 6y ago
They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020: "Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"
Foxboron 6y ago
My guess is that they think DNS resolution failures are consorship. There where some insane numbers like 95% unavailability of pcgamer.com and worldofwarcraft.com in the article as well. It makes no sense.

by vinni2 6y ago

na85 6y ago

>I don’t know where else to look. 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.

vinni2 6y ago
It probably does but it’s not easily searchable or finding this specific law with the information they provide in the article is very hard. Like the law jargon etc. it’s the job of the article to cite the link.
birktj 6y ago
It does, they even have a selection that is translated to english [1]. However I don't know what kind of terms I would search for. I tried "DNS", but it didn't give me anything. I also tried "internet blocking", no luck there either. [1]: https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk https://lovdata.no/register/loverEngelsk
- doktrin 6y ago
  If I'm inferring correctly from the wiki page on Norwegian internet, the DNS blacklist is not made public as they mention it was posted to wikileaks back in 2009. At the time I believe this was exclusively a CP blacklist [1] 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_censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Norway#Internet_ce... [2] https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-norge/60659433 https://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/the-pirate-bay-stenges-i-nor... [3] https://lovdata.no/register/dommer https://lovdata.no/register/dommer
  - birktj 6y ago
    I believe it is the court case with ID TOSLO-2015-67093 [1]. Trough my old university account I still have access to lovdata pro so I was able to search for it and view it. I am to lazy to reupload it tonight, but if you are interested I could do it tomorrow. [1]: https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015-67093/KAPITTEL_4 https://lovdata.no/pro/#document/TRSIV/avgjorelse/toslo-2015...
- vinni2 6y ago
  Exactly same thing I mentioned. It is so hard to search and explore these laws.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago

Looking in the citations in the article itself, these are the references provided, neither of which seem entirely convincing to me: https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-gambling-restrictions/ https://calvinayre.com/2018/05/10/business/norway-approves-g... https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politicians-want-censor-internet-rule-34-pornography/ https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/norwegian-politic...

doktrin 6y ago
That PIA blog post is not exactly high quality. > 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Norway

babas 6y ago

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.

systemvoltage 6y ago
It could be a mistake, not an intentional lie.
- babas 6y ago
  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.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Could be. But I also don't recall any of the blocking in Poland they refer to.

ggggtez 6y ago

I believe they are saying that it happened in 2018, not today. 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.

babas 6y ago
I'm pretty sure it never happened. This would have been big news here. The technology press went ape when thepriatebay.org was added to a DNS blocklist. I have searched around and can not find any references to hrw or match being blocked by accident or not. Either the article writer is confusing Norway with another country or this is just "Journalistic flair" i.e. a lie.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  Ok, so your gut feeling vs some scientific research? Could you try to debate the facts instead of a strawman journalist? 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.
jml7c5 6y ago
They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020: "Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"

arp242 6y ago

I know that in the Netherlands there is a specific very small ISP which caters to a certain religious crowd and blocks all sorts of "offensive" content (which is its main selling point). Perhaps something similar is going on in Norway?

sdenton4 6y ago

This reminds me of the disinformation smear campaign against the Canadian health care system run by US insurance companies since the nineties to prevent single payer health care laws from being passed... https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/925354134/frame-canada

zrth 6y ago

They say Dec 2019 to Mar 2020: "Our anomaly detection alerted us to high scores in DNS blocking starting from December 2019 until March 2020"

Foxboron 6y ago

My guess is that they think DNS resolution failures are consorship. There where some insane numbers like 95% unavailability of pcgamer.com and worldofwarcraft.com in the article as well. It makes no sense.