North Korea's computer operating system mirrors its political one | Hacker News Reader

North Korea's computer operating system mirrors its political one

reuters.com

86 pointsdosshell66 comments

Custom crypto? That will work out well for them.

My first thought exactly.

Doesn't necessarily mean custom crypto, just "own version of encrypting files"; which could mean custom code using well known open source encryption libraries on files

It sounds like you think they want strong crypto.

But I think they want weak crypto that gives the NK government backdoor access.

You wouldn't say this about the US : we're not talking about a single individual here but a nation state. They can put a lot of people on this crypto and make it reasonably secure imo.

Link to the talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star...

Submission should probably be changed to that, as it is the primary source.

Considering that the article was written before the talk I'm not sure the talk can be considered the primary source.

and its spreading...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/27/north-koreas-co... with the discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10797927 and here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3yeuqy/north_koreas_...

http://europe.newsweek.com/north-korea-politics-computer-ope... with the discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3ygd3l/north_koreas_...

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/inside-north-koreas-totalit...

and one more http://recode.net/2015/12/27/north-koreas-version-of-linux-s...

I'm a bit late by now, but I'd still consider it the primary source because reuters must have gotten the information from them. These guys did the research. I'm not sure I agree that the primary source necessarily equals to the first publication.

I didn't see any computers running this OS during my trip to Pyongyang. I saw a few machines running Win2k and one that ran a bowling alley ran Win3.1. Comical stuff..

I saw multiple machines running RedStar OS, even took photos of me interacting with one of them, on my 2-week trip a couple of years ago.

I commented on another North Korea post here on Hacker News a while ago, where I also posted the URL to the photos, if anyone are curious. It even had IP addresses set and some sort of network (not Internet) access.

How did you end up getting a chance to visit North Korea?

There are plenty of tours that operate in North Korea.

Koryo Tours is one that I took a few years ago.

Also, the government occasionally allows a radio amateur to operate. Just this month, North Korea was active on HF (last time was 2002). They'll be active again in Feb 2016:

http://www.arrl.org/news/p5-3z9dx-concludes-demonstration-op...

http://www.eham.net/articles/35853

At risk of repeating other respondents, you can just go. You can find a tour organiser and simply book onto one of their tours, or you can organise your own through the DPRK state tourism companies. Going with an established tour organiser is by far the easier way to do it. I went with Koryo Tours in 2012 and it couldn't have been easier; filled in the form, emailed my details, paid a deposit and the rest at the start of the tour.

But to reiterate, you can just book on a tour. There's no problem or difficulty doing it.

Direct link so others don't have to look them up: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151143106612055&se...

Most old bowling alleys I go to use Brunswick with what appears to be a GUI drawn using box drawing characters

What is meant by Brunswick in this context?

Presumably http://www.brunswickbowling.com/products/sync/

The article has zero technical content, it's like a sandwich that's all bread and no meat. It's a shame too because it is a very interesting topic.

Not technical, but I thought it was interesting that it tags files with a record of every computer they have been on, even if it was not accessed. Or that privileged access is only really available to the government, and the operating system guards against many kinds of customizations that we think of as legitimate user actions.

The researchers put the tools they used and decompiled code on-line: https://github.com/takeshixx/redstar-tools

Seems like an extreme form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

DRPRK used to have dozens of <strong> tags in their HTML.. to show how strong they were, I guess.

The CCC talk included a link to https://github.com/takeshixx/redstar-tools, asking for people to help "lift the fog" even further.

>There's no sign in the operating system, the researchers say, of the kinds of cyber attack capability North Korea has been accused of.

What were you expecting to find? A text file named sonyhack.txt?

It means that they didn't find the technological prowess exhibited in the various cyber attacks that the DPRK has been accused of reflected in the OS. The key word in the sentence quoted is "capability."

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