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Web Censorship Proposed For Norway
Aqwis writes "A Norwegian Web filtering system (link in Norwegian), comparable to the Great Firewall of China, has been proposed to the Norwegian legislature. It would, if enacted, block all Web sites and servers that contain hate material (racial hate, pro-Nazi sites, hate towards the government, etc.), most kinds of pornography (not only child pornography), foreign gambling sites, and sites that share copyrighted or other material that it is not legal to share (such as most BitTorrent sites and services such as LimeWire). Reactions have been mixed; however they are mostly negative."
There's a thoughtful comment based on a complete view of the facts of the situation if I've ever seen one.
If you'd RTNorwegianA, it says quite clearly that this is merely a suggestion by a panel at a cybercrime law enforcement agency, and has seemingly been universally panned by politicians, media, and the populace alike.
Tore - The Norwegian Guy.
toresbe
Nope. Norway is puritan country. Porn (people fscking) is illegal. Pictures of nekked boobies aren't.
Even so, this has been blown waaay out of proportion (Slashdot, sensationalist?! Nah...) It's just a proposal by a panel so far and what's more, of the 6 members of the panel 4 were against. The minority, i.e. the remaining 2 members, have demanded that the Justice Department consider the proposal anyway and present it to Parliament regardless.
Whether or not that will really happen remains to be seen. Needless to say, just about everyone else are up in arms over this.
Democracy in action, folks. Nothing to see here, move along.
IAAN (I Am A Norwegian) and IRTFA.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
The Liberal Party of Norway is currently a small-sized party in opposition, together with the conservatives (check out what sort of ladies can be in politics in Norway: how many milliseconds would she last anywhere else?) and Christian democrats. The thing most closely resembling the Republicans is the Progress party, a hate-spewing propaganda machine for the lesser mentally developed (yes, there is statistics showing Progress voters are less schooled than average; and yes, they actually bought the WMD bull back in 2003).
Current government is headed by the Labour party, the Socialist Left party (more or less like Labour, only more environment-focused and anti-NATO, and generally more left-leaning) and the Centre party (farmers).
I would not agree on the opportunity of using a link to Dagbladet to explain this issue (ok most people do not read Norwegian anyway), as Dagbladet is a low-quality tabloid focusing on flashy headlines. This article from Aftenposten indicates that censorship is a mindretallforslag, i.e. a minority proposition. The majority of the Datakrimutvalget (Authority for computer crime) actually voted against this proposal.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
On the Monty Python front - the Norwegians (initially) banned the film "Life of Brian". So in Sweden it was advertised as "the movie that is so funny, it was banned in Norway".