North Korea's "secret cyber-weapon": brand new Red Star OS (Linux-based)

rt.com

22 points·quant18··7 comments

Hm. North Korea has Red Star Linux. South Korea is a Windows monoculture.

Even Steve Ballmer's worldview is right once in a while.

While the article's content uses the phrase, nothing suggests that this distribution, which appears to be a very loosely-rebranded stock Linux, is any sort of "cyber-weapon" in terms of digital warfare.

This could be good. Whether they are North Korea or not, imagine the pace and polish Linux could pick up with an entire country dependent upon it! Assuming, of course, they submit to upstream.

I think you may be overestimating the standard of living and technical sophistication of North Korea.

I wonder if they are complying with GPL. The "secret cyber-weapon" can't be so secret if they are also supplying source code, right?

Then again, I'd imagine it would be tough to put legal pressure on the DPRK when the combined diplomatic efforts of the West can't get them to budge....

Well, from reading the article I'd say it's neither secret nor a weapon either way.

I doubt DPRK cares about the GPL at all. I imagine the app suite that's "similar to OpenOffice" is OpenOffice, perhaps slightly reworked. A full OpenOffice-like suite would take a lot of time and people to build from scratch, for no real benefit.

I think the same counts for the browser (which was firefox), the IM app ("pidgeon"? Pidgin, probably), the windows emulator (wine?) and so on and so forth.

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