The campaign posters of the Peace & Justice Party (Fred og rettferdighet, FOR) on the Oslo Metro have garnered a lot of attention the past few days. On Monday, May 19th, the party’s website experienced downtime, the news publication Dagen reports.
The party itself states that the downtime is due to a cyberattack.
“Peace & Justice’s website is currently being attacked. We apologize if our website has bad functionality,” a message on the website reads.
The Peace & Justice Party created much ado over the weekend as campaign posters appeared on the Oslo Metro. The party is campaigning in fall’s parliamentary election, and believes that the 85 billion NOK that the Storting plans to use on support for Ukraine, should instead be spent on welfare in Norway.
The campaign may have costed 1.4 million NOK, but the party has only registered 50,000 NOK in campaign donations, according to VG. The party has thus far refused to say who has financed the campaign.
So there we have the answer to something I remarked on in my previous news translation earlier today: FOR is experiencing a DDoS attack (or maybe another kind of attack, but a DDoS seems most likely).
The website is working for me now, though. https://partiet-for.no/peace-and-justice-party/ for the English-language version of the site.
Some people — obviously not people who actually agree with the party — are suggesting a bit conspiratorially that the downtime was actually self-inflicted, basically another way for the party to attract attention to itself. I doubt this, because if there were people willing to tear down their posters, then there are people willing to DDoS them; but the fact remains that, yes, the site’s downtime has managed to attract even more attention to the party. I’m also struck by how this very short article is really pretty neutral about the Oslo Metro posters situation — could it be that as the party receives more coverage, that the constant cries of “Russian asset!” or “Trash party!” will become so tired that they hardly warrant a mention? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things unfold.
Also, I made an embarrassingly sloppy mistake in my previous post, as I wrote 1.4 billion kroner instead of 1.4 million kroner, and even provided a currency conversion. This has been corrected now but I will need to be more careful about that sort of thing going forward. That wasn’t the first time I misread a word and translated it without thinking too hard. Going forward I might need to use a machine translation as reference.
I hate the long scale/short scale thing, I always mess that up too when trying to quickly translate something to English. Millionen/milliarden, mil milliones, etc.
Don’t beat yourself up about it, you’re doing great!
