A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet
38north.org
38north.org
* Logs every app and web page that you open.
* Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files.
* Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on the device that took them, while government-approved files can be shared freely.)
Among other things. Yikes.
I would think opening the camera and taking a picture of another tablet would draw suspicion.
Now, all of that being said that's not to say that the current state of affairs is good (and there's still plenty of other problems) but it's disingenuous to ignore that you have a choice with Android and you don't in North Korea.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near as bad as living in NK, but the "open" option is not at all known or available to what I'd estimate at 95+% of the population, and many fewer will actually use it.
It tracks the websites you've visited, the video's you've watched, music I've played, things I've searched, App's I've used (Camera for example), directions I've searched (google maps), ads I've seen, cards in my feed (google now), my location history (actually very cool and very scary)... There are probably a LOT more metadata they have on me that I don't know
I mean, they have a LOT of my data, they know probably more about me that I know about myself.
Of course we aren't blocked for using any apps or viewing files, but they know that we are using and viewing the apps/files. I think it's in their best interests not to block anything, as this way they get a lot of information they otherwise would not get.
You can compare the "my activity" with "Trace Viewer". It's just a matter of perspective. Don't get me wrong, I don't approve the NK way of blocking everything, but the tracking of the data happens in the West already too and we just "accept" it.
The penalty for attempting that with the North Korean tablet is going to be rather more severe than "can't say OK Google to do a web search".
A much crazier permission is phone access on Android. I recently noticed Facebook's Messenger had been uploading my call logs without ever mentioning it to me. Only realized when it recommended I call a contact back despite me not using messenger to call them - it saw the call in the phone's history and matched it against its database.
Also note that unlike North Korean tablets, your own link has the "Delete Activity By" and "Activity Controls" tabs that allow you to remove collected data or disable its ongoing collection.
Google gives you at least some measure of control, North Korea does not. As such I don't think these are really comparable.
Why do you complain about the company dumping waste in your backyard - just move to a nicer neighbourhood.
BlueCoat. They're called BlueCoat. As an aside, a subdivision of Intel actually runs the internet filters for some middle eastern country (due to some chain of acquisitions). Isn't that great.
The reality is way worst: some company from our countries accepted a contract with NK and built that for them.
I know that my country, France, is actually pretty famous for their surveillance technology. We have companies such as Amesys that have been caught blatantly selling huge systems for spying on entire countries. Nobody bats an eye because they make banks.
So the UK, Israel, the US or France probably made the tablet. Knowingly.
I'd be worried about getting free rootkit updates from the CIA and UK spooks.
But then again, commerce can make strange bedfellows.
My point is that it doesn't take that much manpower to build a working system, so it should be well within North Koreas reach. That their system is less polished matters little, as would-be competitors don't have access. And building their own system from scratch has a killer feature: None of the data will be slurped up by the US or its megacorps.
> And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a U.S. apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate.
Consider the response of white americans in the US after the Imperial Japanese bombed a military force in Pearl Harbor, with almost zero civilian casualties. It quickly became common sentiment in the US to respond by ridding the world of the "yellow scourge" after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson. They didn't drop it on the military which was massed in the southern parts of Japan, the US intentionally dropped TWO ATOMIC bombs on cities full of civilians!
How do they expect the North Koreans to just be appeased by their "apology"? It's crazy, crazy, crazy on the part of the US as well. It's actually insanity.
Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Wow, Its fascinating, the mental gymnastics people perform to rationalise the atrocities their side perpetrates while in the same breath deploring the atrocities committed by the other side.
If they didn't they wouldn't paint with such a broad brush.
You better not take that away, because what defines you if you do?
Wow, this is sounding terrifyingly similar to how suicide bombers justify their targeting of civilians. It's sad to see how easy it is for people who didn't grow up under the dogma of fundamentalist religion can still come to this way of thinking.
My friend, I implore you to think really hard about what you said, and take the time to recalibrate your moral compass. I can only hope that at some point in the future, you'll come to think that, war or not, enemy or not, killing civilians is bad. There is no shade of grey. It's only bad.
(Hint: its not banks..)
Governments and societies aren't 1-1 mappings of each other. You shouldn't mistake one as the other. And even if you do, it still doesn't take much thinking to ask: What about children?
As someone who isn't from America (and actually was born in a country which was subsequently bombed by America during peace time) I've never understood this idea that America is somehow justified in the belief that they are the moral arbiters of the world.
Who put you in charge? If the answer involves "we have a big military" it's interesting that a country obsessed with the concept of freedom is so willing fall back on "empire" when it's convenient. I guess Americans are still British at heart.
> Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.
This sentence made my blood boil. How fucking dare you. America bombing civilian residences in order to handle other country's civil wars is not helping anyone. Fuck you.
> The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Interesting rhetoric, given that America spends half a fucking TRILLION dollars a year on the military.
Absolutely yes, I'll say that. ISIS was created by the US bumbling about in Iraq, just like al Queda before it was created by the US intriguing in Afghanistan. But I don't expect the US will ever learn that bombs are the clumsiest of tools for shaping human history.
Looks like your perception of history is... a little bit skewed.
Number of Americans killed in the Korean War: 36,000
Number of Americans wounded in the Korean War: 105,000
Number of South Koreans killed in the Korean War: 415,000
Number of South Koreans wounded in the Korean War: 429,000
Estimated number of Chinese and North Koreans killed in the Korean War: 1,500,00013
I would like to hear more from historians as to what would have happened had the war never occurred. My guess is a united Korea would be in line as a periphery of China with their level of technology... with Kim Il Sung and his family long gone and irrelevant.
I would also like to add that Americans know nothing of modern war never actually having had to live through it or having to deal with its consequences on their livelihoods, economy, or psychology. War for Americans is stuff that happens to other people... where they send oblivious young men to fight who are usually forgotten as soon as they are sent off to protect "freedom".
However the JCS denied all such requests and remarkably there were only two or three violations during the entire war, such as the August 1950 strafing-attack on Antung airfield. The USA offered compensation afterwards despite that being the home of over 100 MiG-15s engaged in the war.
Maybe they even hang out in Stack Overflow...
After all there is a lot of commercial surveillance software that sold to authoritarian regimes. Of course that doesn't mean someone work directly with NK.
edit: Even simple surveillance features like file tagging are already deployed within the US, and is how the FBI claims to track stolen documents to Chinese hackers. Although, the system the FBI uses to track document content traversing the internet is likely quite a bit more sophisticated. The prototype system can even be a rootkit spying system used by corporations to spy on their employees and/or their consumers and customers.
The chain of sales is almost certainly from Silicon Valley, to a Chinese front, to North Korea or [ SV and China ] to North Korea. SV, US, and China work closely together in regards to surveillance, the only real difference is their rhetoric and how they sell it to their citizens.
It's not the problem of whether North Korea is implementing these features, as North Korea did not create anything original but rather see's these features already being provided. The problem that Silicon Valley and the US has is that companies (err... countries) like North Korea are implementing (or have implemented) it before their own companies have and that diminishes their capacity to claim IP to related implementations.
* targeted: meaning they can target individuals, and various sizes of groups based on sophisticated and targeted profiling. Trump's campaign used this to divide and conquer the 2016 election.
Reading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.
WhatsApp can't defend against screenshots on your device. The article states -
It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.
EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.
Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.
As horrible as it is, the censorship provides a means of protection for the end user. In the US we just let people access things, and then prosecute/persecute, them accordingly.
With the above said-- I'd still prefer to be in the US to the DPRK any day of the week, month, year, or century.
There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes.
I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...
Here's one obvious way: the Norks "Viewer" app shows you what they've collected on you which is itself a form of control (though it could be used to hunt for blind spots). The NSA doesn't really want you to know what they know or how they learnt it.
Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.
You probably haven't been paying attention, but the US Gov't make dissidents disappear all the time. They just do it with a velvet glove on, whereas we're more accustomed to complaining about/being distracted by the heavier hand represented by the propaganda against North Korea.
The US gov't is not as innocent as you might think when it comes to handling dissidents. Its just very, very good at maintaining the facade that its all done 'for the greater good of the people of the United States and its possessors'. The USA is, after all, a PR-first nation.
This could be a story about Hilter and people would find a way to engage in moral relativism.
It makes not one iota of difference if the human lives we improve are in Kaesong, North Korean, or Jackson, Indiana. Does it? Then, start at home: get rid of the NSA. Close Guantanomo. Cancel privatized prison systems that incarcerate more prisoners in the world than any other nation.
See "Whataboutism"
They should just come with this system to open market, make a company that is worth billions from the start, because every BigCo would love to buy.
They have all kinds of embedded Windows and Linux there, but they have more holes than Swiss cheese.
For white-collar workers you can integrate this with e-mail and workflow solutions, needs additional work but will make that company worth $10B.
I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things.
Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)
What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time.
PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest.
I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying.
That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.
The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover.
A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!!
It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North.
I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right?
If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.
Edit: After reading the wikipedia article on Korea reunification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification), I start to wonder why both countries are not actively pursuing this goal that is obviously beneficial to both now. Maybe some details are missing from the wiki article?
Smartphones are so bad.
Tricks or truth, reality or fiction. What make your phone?
To use a German example: I don't think anyone would argue that the firebombing of Dresden was moral. It was effective... but that's not the same thing.
Of course... this is war we are talking about. So, morality is already about shades of grey.
"According to the Declaration of Independence, the government gets its power to govern from the people that it governs. As the Declaration says, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
First, this is a bannable offense on Hacker News. Please don't do it again.
Second, please stop posting unsubstantive comments on inflammatory subjects. We don't want those here.
This is a widely accepted truth, throughout history and international law - so while I do agree that the poster you're warning is a bit rude, I don't agree that their position is unsubstantive, one bit. I can understand their exasperation at the many claims that "governments can just get away with whatever they want to do because the people are powerless anyway."
There are many in the HN crowd who would like to see civilisation improve itself for the better - failing to take responsibility for ones government and its crimes against humanity is not going to produce that result. I would urge you to reduce your comment to pointing out the posters' rudeness - and remove your tacit censorship of their, very valid, point.
It's quite a reliable effect, which is why we're so clear about asking people not to do it.
However, it has to be stated that the entire basis of American society started with the Declaration of Independence, which frames the argument in entirely substantive terms leading to the conclusion that there is no government without its people - thus the people are responsible for their government whether they like it or not.
I feel that this point is valid in this conversation, because there is most definitely groupthink involved in not taking any responsibility, whatsoever, for ones governments' actions. Especially in the HN crowd, this is a vital issue and one that is no doubt bound to create diversion. But, doesn't that mean we need to continue the discussion, not censor it?
> Civilians are responsible for their governments.
So the attack on the WTC was justified in your opinion?
that's the poetic point
"All that glisters is not gold— Often have you heard that told. Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold. Gilded tombs do worms enfold."