Unlocking North Korean songs on a karaoke machine | Hacker News Reader

Unlocking North Korean songs on a karaoke machine

northkoreatech.org

186 pointsgaws72 comments

The last paragraph is both funny and so so in phase with a lot of security by obscurity found everywhere:

"The V700 consults both “/proc/cpuinfo” to learn the CPU serial number of the device it is on, and a binary file associated with the device file system structure as part of its method for determining its AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) key. It then ignores all of these device-specific items, and reverts back to a static key “87654321” stored in the binary."

That's the stupidest encryption key I ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-NhD15ocwA

Somewhere, hypothetically deep inside NK, someone is probably thinking "That's amazing, I've got the same combination on my luggage!"

Do NKers have suitcases? It's not like (at least in my head) many of them travel for leisure. What percentage can even leave the country? For the rest, it seems like the country is such a police state that no one would try to open your bags, making a combination lock unnecessary.

A quick google just now does tell me there are NKers who travel overseas for work or studies..

North Korea has both a middle/upper class and criminals. Foreign tourism may be rare, but domestic travel is a thing.

Oh boy, it sure does have an upper class! They are super hardcore about it.

>A quick google just now does tell me there are NKers who travel overseas for work or studies..

I recall reading something along the lines of their being tens of thousands of North Koreans working in Russia, more or less in slavery, doing things like construction where the work is so dangerous that even the locals won't pick it up.

The nobility get to travel. The serfs have to stay and work for their lord.

Kind of like the US, then?

Not really gues like the cost of a few bags of cheetos will get you on a train halfway across the country

North Korea is nothing like the US. What a ridiculous comment.

Not the first time something like this has happened.

I believe it was the PS3 that was hacked to get Sony's private key because the ECDSA algorithms random factor 'k' always picked 4.

https://xkcd.com/221/

<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam

<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

http://bash.org/?240849

The problem with tying encryption to the serial number is that it becomes harder to distribute the material in the first place - either you need to know the serial number of the device you're going to put a drive into so you can pre-encrypt the data, or you need to have extra code to encrypt the data on first boot (and then make very sure that first boot happens in the factory). Moving to a static key makes it much easier to handle all of this. Anyone who's able to reverse engineer the system well enough to obtain a static key would probably be able to figure out the dynamic algorithm anyway, so the practical outcome isn't terribly different.

This is the problem. Even if it used the real key, they could just change it. It's slightly harder, but not much.

When I read this, it sounded very familiar. This is also how some Allwinner tablets derive their MAC address. And wow, it turns out it is an Allwinner based device!

I found it out because we sold Allwinner devices and customers complained that after an update the MAC address changed. The MAC address is set at boot time, but the algorithm used was different in the binaries we got from Allwinner, and the source we used for compiling the update. They do have a reputation for not taking GPL too seriously.

I could imagine in this case, the source-code version of libcdx_stream was supposed to give the proper machine ID that Allwinner uses in other places, but somebody sloppily patched it out for their encryption scheme.

Makes sense to me, who could be bothered to clone drives and then have to wait for them to be re-encrypted per device. Instead of just modifying the firmware once?

Especially considering the devices would be sold to strangers and it's quite unlikely the harddrive would make it into the hands of someone without access to the paired system.

I suppose the re-encrypting could just be a second key, but still would require processing that is not worth anyone's time.

I'm betting they started with per device encryption and then someone in management figured out they'd need to generate one image per device and that would cost too much, so they left the code already written in and just added the hard coded key at the end.

TIL about the CNC song: https://archive.org/details/tianchi-v700-ktv-940280

Beautiful. NK can keep those three minutes and nine seconds of my life I lost watching that.

I was going to ask about translations but I’ve realized that I don’t want them. I want to enjoy the mystery and wonder.

If you are interested in the translations, another copy of the video [0] on YouTube has baked-in English translations.

Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean, so cannot vouch for their accuracy!

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPPlTX2a974

This one has subtitles and a parade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpupc4zxlTo

It turns out that translations only enhance the mystery and wonder.

Side note: I've never seen an account quite like that one before.

From their recent uploads

> Armed police forces preparing to take on the violent anarchists and trotskyists on the streets of Hong Kong. Drill took place 29 August in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong.

> About: Anti-imperialist.

I'm quite familiar with anti-imperialists of various sorts. They generally don't start ranting about Trotskyists. That makes this person sound decades out of date.

I can read a little Hangul, so let me give it a shot: "All other countries have inferior potassium..."

At least you can sing along every time "CNC" is shown on the screen...

>TIL about the CNC song

If you want to see it performed on-stage in all its glory, including live orchestra.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if60FlQ2FEo

Gotta love NK bands subjecting themselves to cultural imperialism by playing western instruments.

Roland is a Japanese company.

I never would have guessed that! Props to them for going with a name many Japanese people would struggle to pronounce.

From Wikipedia:

> The "Roland" name was selected for export purposes, as Kakehashi was interested in a name that was easy to pronounce for his worldwide target markets. The name was found in a telephone directory, and Kakehashi was satisfied with the simple two-syllable word and its soft consonants. The letter "R" was chosen because it was not used by many other music equipment companies, so would stand out in trade-show directories and industry listings. Kakehashi did not learn of the French epic poem The Song of Roland until later.

"Sony" has an interesting history as well. The official line is that it was a mixture of "sonus" and "sonny" boys (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony). But I have it on good authority from people in the know in the company that the real reason for the name Sony was that it sounded like an American company name to Japanese ears. America was cool. That is, namewise Sony was the Japanese equivalent of Haagen-Dazs. It's even written in Katakana, the script for foreign words.

Like Røde mics

Or Superdry, 極度乾燥（しなさい）

See this list for more examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_branding

What's difficult to pronounce about ローランド for a native speaker?

Rourando

Obviously it’s the English pronounciation that is difficult for them. See also how Japanese try to avoid saying “reflex” in relation to cameras: An SLR is an 一眼レフ Single Lens Ref and Nikon’s camera with a reFlex mirror is the Nikon “F”. Mirrorless seems to have fared better, but I have seen shops selling them as 一眼カメラ, Single Lens Cameras.

NK doesn't exactly like Japan.

Gotta love westerners gatekeeping things they consider "theirs".

At the 25 second mark: isn’t that one of the high end Roland electronic drum kits?

I find it interesting that they haven't rebranded "CNC" as something in Korean.

I'm surprised they call it CNC, in English. Isn't that admitting they didn't invent it?

Yes, I don't think they pretend to have invented it, given the lyrics of the song. One of the lines is about how they are advancing towards the cutting edge of the world, which does admit they're not a leader.

> TIL about the CNC song

Your memory is slipping 082349872349872, watch those cosmic bit flips

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596922

aargh. What's-his-name's disease striking already?

Wow, how did you find this?

Seems normal to me.

https://youtu.be/Rpszgytqkck

Theory I've heard is CNC mills and the like aren't banned for import into DPRK by UN or others and so it's like the most advanced industrial component they can import there, so it gets a song!

It is funny how despite all isolation they do not have a Korean term for CNC and just use a Latin TLA verbatim.

USSR sucked at that kind of stuff but it did have its own term for these devices (ЧПУ)

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32481916

Someone needs to start a campaign going to make that the next Christmas Number 1 somewhere.

If you have never witnessed the glory of the mentioned "CNC Song", congratulations, you are one of today's lucky 10,000.

Mass Games version:

https://youtu.be/xpupc4zxlTo

Music video version:

https://youtu.be/K6O33icSM3o

Of course the Chinese song is Little Apple, I should have known. The most ubiquitous Chinese song ever, soon 10 years running. So ubiquitous, it has an English wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Apple_(song)

Knowing that's the song, I am no longer surprised it made it to North Korea.

the history of Chinese songs only goes back 10 years?

The peak of Chinese population was last year, more or less

So, why the encryption? Is someone in NK really afraid that their stuff will be stolen?

Hmm I guess the answer is in that word "steal", some Chinese supplier probably has monopoly of the NK market and is using the encryption to prevent cheap Chinese karaoke machine makers to just copy their data. (Insert the word "other" in the previous sentence.)

Yeah. A lot of the karaoke systems (even cheap ones) have their own weird "encryption". It is really just to stop other manufacturers from copying their song collection.

Is there a torrent of the whole collection? I don't see a way to do that from the IA page, only for single videos.

I wish there was some way to get Chinese karaoke songs in the US apart from spending hundreds on importing a physical karaoke machine. All the apps such as 全民K歌 are region-locked, and the songs on YouTube vary in quality --- they often do not have properly timed lyrics and are rarely the instrumental version without the vocals, and newer or less popular songs are nowhere to be found at all.

It's not a torrent, but I think the best way to retrieve the entire collection is using the internetarchive "ia" command line tool. Here's a couple pointers:

https://blog.archive.org/2020/10/21/want-some-terabytes-from...

https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html

This was a fun project. It's good to know that a lot of the north korean consumer technology does propagate at least to the border areas with China, and so has a chance to be archived and kept available into the future.

I wonder what are "Hana and a competing Mokran". Are these North Korean record labels or TV channels?

I’d to have more context about the state of the entertainment industry in North Korea.