North Korea: On the net in world's most secretive nation

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20445632

by mih • 14 years ago

83 51 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

paullth• 14 years ago

I wonder if they have a module BigKimJongUn.js or just cnp that function about the place. And what browser do they have? So many questions...

eloisius• 14 years ago

In the article it says they have a rebranded version of Firefox called Naenara.

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

And Naenara, or 내나라, means "my country". It's also the name of the official web portal of the DPRK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naenara

laumars4• 14 years ago

Red Star (the OS used on many North Koran PCs) is a Linux distro running KDE3.x and skinned to look like Windows XP.

It's been a while since I've seen any leaked demos of it, but I seem to recall it supporting / running MS Office via WINE. But I might be wrong on that.

[edit] I think I'm mistaken about MS Office. Glancing through some Russian blogs, it looks like it's Open Office. But due to the XP skinning efforts, it looks very much like MS Office: http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html

fla• 14 years ago

This article seems to provide Red Star donwload links (untested) http://www.openingupnorthkorea.com/archives/325

IsaacL• 14 years ago

Looking at, http://www.naenara.com.kp/en/periodic/times/index.php?conten..., it's actually just a

"The readers will be aware of the might of the DPRK that is advancing bravely towards world standard, united single-mindedly around <font style="FONT-SIZE: 17px">Kim Jong Un</font>, supreme leader of the WPK"

Looking at the rest of the code, it seems North Korea has no need for our inferior capitalist stylesheets and favours inline styles. Who knew?!

mokash6• 14 years ago

I quickly put one together. http://mgakashim.com/405/kim-jong-un

demetrius2• 14 years ago

I’ve tried to adapt your code snippet into an UserScript: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/154080

It works OK, but I’ve run into a problem with textareas: if a textarea contains the name of the Great Leader, after script executes, the name in textarea is simply deleted.

Maybe you have an idea how this can be fixed?

P.S. By the way, you should consider installing the snippet yourself on your site: unfortunately, your page doesn’t follow the proper typographic rules! :(

taligent2• 14 years ago

I actually briefly saw someone using this when I was in Pyongyang recently.

They have mostly older PCs (with CRTs) and the forums are reminiscent of the internet back in the Netscape 4 days. But from what I saw it is very much an intranet that even had a dating forum. But really it is just a toy for the sons/daughters of the elite. See they very much know about the outside world and so this helps them feel like they aren't missing out on something.

Apparently though Indian workers who have been brought in to work on government construction projects e.g. the pyramid hotel can access the 'proper' internet. But I believe the governments sets up a custom WiFi network.

Also since there were no mobile phone towers around I suspect they may have an underground fibre optic network with lots of microcells around.

mtgx• 14 years ago

This is why we need to keep the Internet as free and open as we can. Progress and innovation happens on the Internet because of that reason. Imagine if the whole Internet was as restricted as the one in North Korea. It makes me very angry that UN is trying to restrict it even a little bit (or maybe a lot) right now. And ironically they say they want to do it to "accelerate" Internet's growth, which sounds very unlikely, and the opposite seems more likely.

taligent2• 14 years ago

I wish people would stop talking about the UN as though it is some third party government. It is a democratic organisation that is merely a reflection of the agendas of the 193 member countries.

So rather than blaming the UN instead blame the specific countries who are pushing for changes that you don't agree with.

leoh• 14 years ago

Hope I am not being too nosy, but why were you in NK?

codeka• 14 years ago

As a tourist? Lots of people go, it's a fascinating country.

EliRivers5• 14 years ago

"Also since there were no mobile phone towers around"

When I was there in April there were people on the streets in Pyongyang using mobile phones (I've got a picture showing it somewhere), so the towers must be there.

kijin• 14 years ago

Could they have been faking it, to impress foreigners?

This article [1] tells the story of an entire department store that was faked to impress tourists. But that was 20 years ago, so maybe this time it isn't fake.

[1] http://blog.skepticaldoctor.com/2010/01/15/classic-dalrymple...

yequalsx• 14 years ago

Why were you in North Korea? As a tourist?

North Korea is probably the most evil regime in the world. Going there as a tourist supports this regime and as such is profoundly immoral.

jmsduran• 14 years ago

I wouldn't go as far as saying visiting North Korea is "profoundly immoral". Would I consider North Korea dangerous to visit though? Yes. The country is still technically at war with South Korea, meaning at any given moment the two nations can dive right back into active combat, which has the potential to become an instant hostage situation for any traveler unlucky enough to be visiting North Korea at that time.

sparkie• 14 years ago

What metric are you using to define evil?

If you consider one evil, for example, the number of state sponsored murders of foreign citizens, then NK is pretty far down the list. On the other hand, the supposed "free country" would be dead first.

Then isn't it profoundly immoral to visit the USA?

thejsjunky• 14 years ago

I can appreciate this sentiment, and to some extent agree, but it strikes me as overly simplistic. The reality is probably more complicated. Just leaving them to their own devices, isolated, is arguably just as bad in terms of propping up the regime. The NK regime is built on control, particularly of information. Any sort of relations with the outside will inherently have something of a subversive nature.

meaty2• 14 years ago

Very interesting article.

I'm quite surprised that they appear to use a customised Linux distribution rather than build their own from scratch properly. If you look at the East Germany in the 1980s, the various "VEB" state industries were even chucking out 8086 and VAX clones with every component built in the Eastern Block and even cloned UNIX operating systems!

Couple of links to show the scale of their industry back then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEB_Robotron

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rob...

Luyt• 14 years ago

I always found it surprising that certain people and governments from the East condemn the West for everything and anything, while embracing the technologies which were invented and developed in that same West.

meaty2• 14 years ago

Well in the case of East Germany at least, most engineering standards were already established so it made no sense to change them.

The problem that they had was ultimately the political and social system that produced the manifestation of the designs. The underlying designs were sound.

I'm slightly inclined to agree with the principles of Marxism-Leninism but it suffered from one of the many things that the human race is good at doing: Good specification, bad implementation.

devcpp• 14 years ago

I doubt that these people know anything about technology. The governments generally hire some companies to do the obscure technology "magic" thing. As for people, most of them have probably never learned a thing about the technologies they use.

jbooth• 14 years ago

The Nazis invented rocketry.

Are you saying that the moon missions were a hypocritical endorsement of the values of national socialism?

Mechanical tools and politics are generally orthogonal.

BasDirks• 14 years ago

I'd love to get my hands on that Red Star OS.

edit: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/5803379/

vmialik• 14 years ago

hacker at heart. For those that do not want to bother with downloading installing and possibly being watched by the En Kay via their new installation: found a review on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUnYQyxjv4s in case you want to consider the pro's and con's of this operation system to win8 or osx before you make your switch

mokash6• 14 years ago

"There's a curious quirk on every official North Korean website. A piece of programming that must be included in each page's code.

Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out."

http://mgakashim.com/405/kim-jong-un

suhastech2• 14 years ago

Are you from NK or an admirer from the outside?

mokash6• 14 years ago

Just a bored student from the United Kingdom.

suhastech2• 14 years ago

I was honestly curious as I didn't catch the sarcasm :/

And,.. I'm getting down-voted.

laumars4• 14 years ago

That part of the article is misleading. It's not Javascript that does it, it's just CSS. North Korea do have a small few websites available to the outside world, so I've taken my example from one of them: http://www.kcna.kp

goHome.do (HTML)

   <nobr><span class='spanT'>Kim Jong Il</span></nobr>′s Whole Life Devoted...

kcna.css (CSS)

    .spanT {  font-size: 120%;}

mokash6• 14 years ago

The script automatically adds the span around the name saving you from manually adding it every time.

demetrius2• 14 years ago

One could make an user JavaScript out of this (I guess replacing «span.className= 'kju';» with «span.style.fontSize = '150%';» should be enough) and enjoy the correct typesetting all over the Internet!

pzaich• 14 years ago

I currently live in South Korea. It's interesting to note that I cannot visit any of the DPR government-sponsored North Korean sites. The only way to view content was using Google's cache. Periodic restrictions like this make me appreciate how truly 'open' the internet still is in the United States.

www.korea-dpr.com/

http://i47.tinypic.com/4zw11v.png

jnsaff2• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that posting korea-dpr.com link here has not had the HN effect and crashed it.

aj700• 14 years ago

They have a facebook that the secret police adore and that is controlled by a corporatist elite.

We have an actual facebook that various security agencies adore and that is owned by Goldman.

One can make the argument... but I'm not making it. I'm just pointing out a similarity.

North Korea: On the net in world's most secretive nation

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