North Korea's Digital Underground | Hacker News Reader

North Korea's Digital Underground

theatlantic.com

129 pointsphilk23 comments

Just last night I watch "The Vice Guide to North Korea". If you want to see video of NK from the inside I highly recommend it, really creepy.

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/the-vice-guide-to-travel/vice-guide-...

And if you ever want to see NK yourself from the inside, check out http://www.koryogroup.com - took a tour with them a couple years ago and was an interesting experience.

This is really interesting. How much did it cost? What was the experience like?

Once you get to Beijing ($600-1400 from SFO), a 3-6 day trip costs $1-3k depending on EUR/USD, exact itinerary, and when in the year you go (winter trips are cheap). I know a few people who have gone and loved it, although I'd prefer an Antarctic cruise.

torrent for it:

http://btjunkie.org/search?q=Vice+Guide+to+North+Korea

Most computers, which generally run on pirated Microsoft software, come from China. The country’s only computer-manufacturing company, Morning Panda, produces barely 10,000 a year. If computers are rare, printers are even more so. They are closely monitored because of their potential for spreading anti-regime documents.

I'd love to see a Morning Panda computer in action. Anyone have a picture?

A Russian blogger who visited NK last year bought a copy of the NK-produced "Red Star" operating system (in reality, a flavor of Linux), but he doesn't show the hardware: http://ashen-rus.livejournal.com/4300.html

a little birdy told me they are just a crummy Lenovo desktop clone, which isn't surprising they are just copies, the NKs are exceptional counterfeiters and copiers

When I learned to program I used a clone of Apple II. At that time it was the only way to produce computers in my country (former communist one). http://www.pravetz.info/images/pravetz/photo-imko-2-1.jpg

I hear former Soviet people had to buy US manuals to understand how to program for their copied systems. But they had to claim they were "theoretical" guides, because the copied systems weren't officially copies.

And that they could study Western economics, as long as they filled it under "mathematics".

I was surprised by the last scene in the video. In most countries no police officer on duty would tolerate being verbally and physically assaulted. Is he afraid (the woman being a party official), or is there another reason (e.g. cultural differences - with angry woman hitting man during conversation).

I'd love to see a documentary based on this underground material.

North Korea seems to be among the trending, non-tech-related topics on HN. Really interesting stuff.

I think China's attitude has changed, so they are letting reports come out through the border.

Or the article could be right - the flood of second-hand electronics has changed some North Korean citizens' attitudes.

If you want to put a face to the suffering of north koreans, check out the young man in the middle of the embedded video. Quite unlike anything I've ever seen.

those pirated copies of windows are probably so dangerous, who knows what kind of malware comes along for the ride, it would be like passing the same women around to millions of men...

Without internet access, does it really matter?

I pray you don't work in IT...

I get the impression there aren't many corporate IT departments in NK. Not sure what your point is.

In any case, most malware these days is designed to either steal information and phone home or make the infected computer part of a botnet or both. Without an internet connection (whether the PC is in a LAN or not), the practical risk is pretty minimal.

NK would still be vulnerable to something similar to Stuxnet. A highly-targeted sneakernet-based attack could be used to very, very slowly migrate information from flash drive to flash drive into and out of NK, or for sabotage.

Oh, absolutely. But a targeted attack with that level of sophistication is hardly going to let a few Windows updates get in its way.

Key point everyone forgets in today's IT sector and you said it yourself is LAN. To say NK lacks LANs is foolish, to maintain any kind of the military or industrial operations they have, requires some form of LAN, as do any type of similar thing anywhere in the world. Plus forgetting the internal LAN setups, NK has it's own state run nets used for commerce and operations with neighboring China.

The article was incorrect on this account - NK distributes its own flavor of Linux.

Is this the North Korean people's chance to do the hump?

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