North Korean animation outsourcing for Amazon, HBO Max series
38north.org
38north.org
> There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators. In fact, as the editing comments on all the files, including those related to US-based animations, were written in Chinese, it is likely that the contracting arrangement was several steps downstream from the major producers.
"I told X to get it done. What X did to get it done is not my fault/responsibility."
If I can't trust the bank to know more about the UBO of some rando after KYC what the hell are we doing this for?
A good outcome of this would be more restrictions on outsourcing to China since it’s been repeatedly shown that they will not maintain meaningful restrictions on North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc.:
> All three cities are known to have many North Korean-operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas.
Or is it the faith of hackers that any misdoing in the world should always be traced back and blamed on a tech giant? From the article:
"There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators."
If it's a subsidiary, that's another case.
So why is it different if they sell me floor tiles made with slave labor?
Global retailers like H&M and IKEA do do audits of their supply chain to try to stop labor abuse (although how effective they are at that is up to debate)
But if you unknowingly buy floor tiles that have been made with unethical practices, should you be held responsible as a customer? Of course not.
If you tell X to get something done and ALSO give X rules that they must follow and X gets the thing done but __breaks the rules__ then this is different. It is also different if you have reasonable suspicion to expect them to break the rules or are using subversive language to tell them to break the rules. These are different things and have different consequences.
If you are truely acting in good faith, then yes, it is a defense. But determining if that's true is not an easy task.
There is good faith, coercion, negligence, and willful negligence. These are different things.
This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals: - First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C - Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators - Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules. It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")
The verification process is exceptionally difficult. We're on HN and I think it should be rather common knowledge that attackers almost always beat defenders because the game is asymmetric. Attackers only need to find a single flaw while defenders need to find a large number of defenses. There is a huge difference in the resource expenditures between these two groups. This is related to the reasons why one single person can fuck shit up (e.g. a bad driver can impact tens of thousands of other drivers) but it is difficult for a single person to fix things. It is the nature of unstable equilibria.
A society, of any form, depends on trust. Like it or not, there are no trustless systems available to us. Certainly not at any meaningful scale.
This does not mean one should be negligent, but rather I'm saying that it isn't easy and the best intentioned can still be taken advantage of. We should recognize this and accommodate this fact when approaching solutions or we will end up with many undesired results.
We outsourced to company X, who is bound by law and contract not to engage in illegal actions. Company X, without our knowledge or approval subcontracted illegally.
The Amazon and HBO are the victims here. They were the ones harmed and deceived.
Companies like amazon are extremely powerful. They set the terms of the agreement, they set the project requirements and metrics, and then pretend that whatever happens has nothing to do with them.
Though, Apple has the exact same issue you claim Foxconn might have - funneling value to shareholders over laborers.
It is just a part of the nature of outsourcing. Your supplier might just choose to outsource himself and have the work done by companies you couldn't possibly work with. For a digital good this is extremely hard to monitor. How would a Californian studio possibly know what company their supplier outsources to?
If you outsource, have boots on the ground ensuring working conditions and no re outsourcing.
Pick one. Pretty straightforward.
But yes, please let management know that outsource is only attractive on paper. Every experience I have had with it is has been bad. The communication gap is just so much larger and your ability to oversee what gets done and how it gets done just evaporates. The ethical/legal problem is just one result of that, but even without it outsourcing often just costs far more in hidden expenses.
If this were codified into law I would suspect that it would quickly lead to monopolization. I can't imagine how the world would work without contractors. Imagine if Apple had to operate the mines, build the machines to mine the materials, to build the machines to build those machines, build the silicon foundry, and all the things along from dirt in the ground to the iPhone. Boy, you'd get nothing done. Because that's the world with no "outsourcing." It is too broad of a word.
"We only do X" is one of the best tools to manage complexity.
I think what the other poster is referring to is specifically the practice of companies to have work done by workers in areas of the world where labor is cheap. That particular practice is something very different than e.g. buying chips from a foundry. Specifically buying parts from q supplier involves very little management, outsourcing work means you have to actively involved in the management of the offshore labor.
Sure, but part of what I wanted to (albeit indirectly) convey is the difficulty of creating a meaningful rule about this. Even if you locked work within a country's borders (I imagine this would have terrible consequences too), this concept scales.
I understand the complaint, but I think we need to also recognize the complexity of the issue if we're to do anything meaningful about it. Trivializing it will get us nowhere and often leads to bad laws that get more abused than the original ones.
In general it is very easy and safe to work with companies in the same country as you, as they are bound by identical laws to you and litigation and control is relatively easy. They also can't legally re-outsource to companies you can't outsource to. Similar things are true if the company is in a broadly aligned country. E.g. the US and Germany.
The further away, physically, ideologically, linguistically and legally away the country of the other company is the worse it becomes and the harder it is to effectively control them.
Yeah, I agree that this is definitely a weighting factor. But neither do I think it is good to return to isolationism. Globalism, despite its many flaws, has clearly contributed to the long peace. Encourages negotiations at the table rather than on the battlefield given that in the end, wars are primarily economically driven. Better to destroy economies than people, even if the former can indirectly result in the latter. (wish there were better solutions and a larger gain, but that's a whole other conversation fraught with far more complexity)
But given your response I think there maybe confusion as to what is being referred to when discussing "Long Peace." It is not the absence of war, it is the absence of __direct__ war between __major powers__. This may not be clear since being born into long peace (as presumably you are <80 years old), is that this is the only type of war we've experienced and directly know. Prior to this, major powers directly fought, and quite frequently. Usually this is discussed with respect to Europe but the general trend is true elsewhere and similar patterns exist on the Indian subcontinent as well as Asia and even in the Americas. It is also worth noting that even wars between these smaller powers has decreased (likely due to the connections with larger powers and how many are unwilling to go to direct war with larger powers).
While sanctions certainly aren't absolutely effective, that's not entirely the point either. The point is to make these actions more resource intensive, not impossible. Even our direct discussion about NK is illustrative of this, as they have to spend resources to be covert and it is clear that this sub-sub-...-contracting would be more economically fruitful were they not have to operate though these sidechannels and could operate directly. I mentioned in another comment about how society operates in unstable equilibria and how this is why there's a clear imbalance between red teams and blue teams, where the blue team has a much harder job. The same is true here too. Just because they can bypass sanctions also doesn't mean they are ineffective. It is important to not binarize things.
And to clarify, globalism isn't necessarily American dominance, but rather that countries are negotiating on the economic table. While described by Pax Americana there have also been Pax Britannica, Pax Romana, and others which saw similar trajectories but never before at the global scale as the world was not operating globally previously. In that sense it is often explained how this trend has happened through human history and correlates heavily with globalization.
If you're going to make an argument I'd suggest one about delay, as (in my opinion) one can more easily create a stronger argument about how the proposed explanations of long peace (note that there is not a singular one, and no serious person believes a singular factor is the cause, as should be apparent by the initial lines in my comment), rather displace the inevitable wars and death. That these result in growing tensions where the pressures accumulate and result in large scale and more horrible war. But we must also explain the much longer historical trend and it isn't unreasonable to believe that issues like these are more akin to a damped oscillator rather than a clear monotonic decay (which is measured to not be true but also confounded with the suggested argument).
Is your ignorance a defense? Should we hold you accountable for the entire supply chain that goes into what you consume?
Or can we just say that you should put in a reasonable amount of effort towards avoiding this (with reasonable being defined by the legislature and the judiciary)?
It may be useful to see how others linked to this news - the original place I found this was at Engadget, which had this title: "Some Amazon and Max cartoons may have been partially animated in North Korea" https://www.engadget.com/some-amazon-and-max-cartoons-may-ha...
Which linked to Reuters: "North Koreans may have helped create Western cartoons, report says" : https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-koreans-may...
I linked the original report, which makes no mention of animation, but is the obvious focus of the article. The point isn't who did the outsourcing, but what was done, IMO.
The length limit on HN titles sometimes makes nuance difficult - maybe I should have added "may have been outsourced" instead. I was not going for clickbait/misrepresentation.
There’s a lot you can hide with outsourced software engineering. With animation it’s all on display.
But anyway studios have been outsourcing animation work to Asian countries for a while now.
You might have seen some of the work product from one of the larger Japanese animation studios: TMS Enterainment who has worked on things like Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures in addition to shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Transformers in the 80-90s.
Some more recent(ish) examples are Cartoon Network outsourcing the animation for Steven Universe to Rough Draft Korea located South Korea and Nickelodeon outsourced some of the work for Korra to a Japanese company called Pierrot.
I'm just rambling at this point so I'm going to just leave a few links below that can do a better job of illustrating than I'm able to.
Wikipedia, Outsourcing of Animation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourcing_of_animation
[DCAU Fandom Wiki, TMS Entertainment: https://dcau.fandom.com/wiki/TMS_Entertainment,_Ltd.
Reddit thread, Stylistic differences between two studios: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheLastAirbender/comments/1m4wbn/st...
AnimeNewsNetwork, American animation outsourced to Japan (2015): https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2015-11-02/.94920
https://www.awn.com/animationworld/tom-jerry-produced-prague
https://www.today.com/popculture/simpsons-rides-seoul-train-...
That said, companies frequently misstep determining where they can safely outsource and where they must keep things integrated.
But for studios where mastery of a certain animation style is critical to their work, vertical integration makes sense too.
Consider that most game development studios outsource most development on a per-project basis.
Consider that most car manufacturers outsource most of their parts manufacturing to other manufacturers.
Basically: It's more unusual for a business to not be outsourcing their line of business.
That it was unintentional should be quite obvious, anything else would have been a major scandal.
(and whatever the opposite of "click bait" is, that's how I'd describe the original title!)
That is the beauty of the subcontractor shell game and one of the top reasons why companies do it, no one has to take responsibility.
In this case does the original company just not care at all?
But how do you verify who does the work? Contracts are nice and all, but how do you make sure they are followed?
My experience with outsourcing has always been it becomes a contract game / poor incentives based around contract metrics and in the end a complete waste of money.
I wonder if the IP in Spain was related to Alejandro Cao de Benós
Didn't think they were covering up their North Korean animators though lol.
I enjoyed it anyway (I liked the comic, and this is playing out like a “second draft” with some stuff tightened up, so that’s really cool to see) but it’s one of the worst-looking animated anythings I’ve seen. It’s on par with the bottom half of amateur Flash animation in the ‘00s.
Like in one episode an alien spaceship blows up and a static gif of an alien goes spinning around.
Just compare that to the animation in Xmen '97 which has a similar episode count.
Companies building things in China have been caught in that trap multiple times and somewhere down the line the work was allegedly done by highly mistreated populations, potentially in slave like conditions. Certainly no company would want this to happen, as it is obviously a major PR disaster, but it is just very hard to oversee.
i.e. don't be efficient. Outsourcing always gets a bad reputation, but holistically it's the best way for the greatest number.
There’s very little you can do at minimal cost. They could have on-site auditors or collocated employees, but that cuts into the margins. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing: each poorly-monitored subcontractor is a security risk and likely hiding labor law or environmental violations so an outcome of less outsourcing to China would be a net-win.
Even for tourists who they are trying to extract lots of hard currency from, the food quality is notoriously poor.
You go there to work remotely. Food/labor/rest are super cheap.
Everyone is starving to death there, to the point where meth is casually used by most people to stave off hunger pangs.
Not to mention, if they decide they may just get some fun leverage out of a foreign hostage, they may just decide to claim you committed a crime and beat you half (or 3/4's) to death.
This is just the news stories I can recall off the top of my head as well...
The food supply is prioritized for the military. Food insecurity is frequent for civilians.
A pattern we have seen play out many times: NK makes a threat of some sort. The West and its allies try to talk them down. As part of negotiations they demand food. Sometimes they get it.
If a nation demanding food not to blow up its neighbor is not dealing with food insecurity in its society at large I will eat my hat.
Here's a choice quote:
>The four lived together in a two-bedroom house outside of Pyongyang, where they were forced to study the writings of then-leader Kim Il Sung and were subject to regular beatings. They were also featured prominently in propaganda magazines and movies.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188656665/travis-king-north-...
And dresnok said the opposite and retired fat and with alcohol cirrhotic liver and a nice stolen wife and downtown apartment, which is far more than he would've got in USA as such a lazy, stupid, criminal that he was. He even become a local celebrity as a movie star playing as a white devil.
All of that being said that when those in power think you made a single mistake, you're dead.
Not saying I'd do it. But it might be attractive to the right person.
Since this seems like an open secret, idk it just boggles my mind. Like I constantly see articles about it happening, but I have yet to see anything about why it is the way it is.
Obviously cheap labor is one thing, but I wouldn't think even China can ignore the threat of North Korea working on missiles?
It also makes me wonder, if the people writing these comments know that they are working with people from North Korea or if they just assume its another company.
You're the one outsourcing, so it's your responsibility. The entire chain.
In other words, when a problem like this is discovered, the US State Department will assign more blame to the company if their attempts to avoid violating sanctions fell below a threshold; what is that threshold for the arts industry.
The same as you were employing them directly.
Boeing used to make airplanes. Now they outsource the work of "make the airplanes" and all it cost them was their reputation.
Less outsourcing, more just doing the work please.
Think about exactly where this ends.
But sure, even in case of ore you have a responsibility to make sure it isn't being delved by slave labour.
Do you have to check that the tablets, keyboards and mice used by your employees and those of outsourcing companies were not made in North Korea? Do you have to check that the ink used on the keyboards weren't made in North Korea? Do you have to check that the coal for the power station for the keyboard factory didn't come from North Korea?
There isn't ever a sense of "I'm doing enough and therefore the sanctions violations happening are no longer my fault". It's somewhat up to you to determine your risk and tailor your compliance program to address them and to adjust if you're ever wrong.
How guilty you are is a function of how good a job the state department thinks you're doing trying to avoid sanctions violations.
Is the standard for this codified in clear language anywhere, or is it merely based on the whims of some federal prosecutor/judge? If I make digital watches, and I buy coin cell batteries from a supplier who buys battery precursors from a supplier who buys LiCoO2 from a manufacturer who buys lithium-rich brine from a supplier who buys lithium mining equipment from a sanctioned entity, how much of the full brunt of Uncle Sam's retribution can I expect to come crashing down on me?
Worst sin is angering the gods. I would imagine most the time theyll probably just ask nicely for you to stop, then bury you if you don't, but for political or convenient targets they seem fine going straight for the throat.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/01/goatse-security-trol...
They were too bumbling to actually do anything that serious but being too broke to run a stock scam isn’t exactly a great character testimonial, and all of that is well outside of professional ethical boundaries in the infosec community.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/04/appeals-court-re...
It’s certainly possible that a court might have found his actions did not violate the relevant laws, but that was not the case in the first trial where he had full opportunity to challenge the prosecution’s claims. You might characterize that as “misguided rhetoric” but that should be your cue to ask whether it’s really true that you understand the situation better than his real legal team.
They can let you keep making money until it's promotion time, or an example needs to be made for an election campaign or they find out your watches seem to be the chronometer of choice of the latest insurgency.
Smaller companies from other countries may not be so lucky so they may actually refrain from such activities.
Taxes go to the regime, anywhere, that’s the definition of taxes. You get benefits from them like infrastructure.
Payment for animation from North Korea goes 100% to Kim so he can fund things like his harem.
It's not like theyre happy about a dictator running the country doing international crazy stuff and oppressing them.
I feel like we should be supporting any capitalistic effort they make so that they can build up resources to combat their dictator from within.
The enemies are consuming more than ever before in history.
At the end of the day though, politics is complex, and it's also tied to the people who participate in it. So while many people can suffer as result of a systemic change, the people who brought that to action might have different incentives, might not had the foresight, might have weighed the pros and cons and calculated with it, might sacrifice short-term good for a longer good... might be corrupt even.
TL;DR it's complicated, and it probably has an official, and a real reason as well.
One wonders where (ugh) Kissinger's Realpolitik would have led us. Regardless, what we do know is that the Norks are hardly pro-american after years of indoctrination.
>It's not like theyr'e happy about a dictator running the country doing international crazy stuff and oppressing them.
As are we. It'd be way worse too if not for The Leader's clearsighted vision in acquiring nuclear capability, against our best efforts.
Edit: Interesting to see that this particular thread is getting heavy traffic and attacked. I'm not sure I've seen this happen on HN before, at least not a front page post. @Dang, I guess we can add a signup filter to prevent similar usernames being generated within a timeframe, since presumably these come from different IPs. Should be a simple regex filter and provide some warning system? Anyone else know?
It isn't. That's been explained in many threads of his comments, I feel reasonably sure some as previous replies to you.
Well __I__ can visually distinguish a username more easily with @ in front of it. Just the same way as I, and many others, use various typographical marks to indicate various things. It does also make a *manual* thread search easier.
I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of people doing this are not expecting @dang to be pinged, but are just using it either due to habit and/or a visual indicator. Either way, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal and worth more than a single exchange. Potentially someone doesn't know, it is okay to inform them, but after "I know" or "I didn't know" there is no more to be said.
The other, probably more important reason not to do it is that it gums up threads with pointless meta which runs against the site conventions. If a comment starts with @dang, it probably doesn't belong in the thread. Just like that meeting, it could have been an email.
It seems like we are complaining about the same issue. Again, why does this conversation exist since it has clearly been established that I am aware and that anyone reading is aware. If you got a problem with how I use typographical indicators, sorry, I'm going to keep doing it. You can keep starting these metas if you want, but it seems hypocritical to me. I'll just stop responding to prevent more metas, because I've been given no indication that anyone thinks it actually pings @dang other than people who get upset at people using "@". Seems like a classic assumption, where people try to solve a problem that doesn't exist (or exists in a very small percentage).
And as you can read, I did not start with @dang. It was an edit, and into the edit. And as you can read, I was going to send an email but then saw several users note they did, so wish to not spam the email any more.
I think we're done here and have derailed the thread enough. I don't think anyone's opinion is changing, and that's perfectly fine.
That's the thing, they aren't.
I've been given no indication that anyone thinks it actually pings @dang
You can find lots of comments by people who think that and replies by dang explaining it does nothing. The idea that we just have no clue what the effects of this are and why moderators think it is best avoided is just an odd one. The busybodies repeat this because the moderators do. Well, that and they're busybodies.
I did not start with @dang.
It doesn't matter, editing your comment to add meta is the thing that ends up derailing comments and threads. It's spamming your own comments, effectively - such comments are regularly moderated to the bottoms of threads.
In terms of the actual story I think that we should be careful not to introduce insane KYC for contractors just to avoid the NK boogeyman.
If such measures were introduced, that would seriously restrict the ability to work with people from around the world. I also fear that scammy companies such as id.me will lobby for such measures in order to extract profit from companies who want to contract abroad, all the while not actually stopping sophisticated threat actors.
It isn't, the spam is spread across multiple front page stories. There might be some IP address rotation but I'm not sure why it's allowed to get through when it would be so easy to filter.
> video interviews
From what I hear, the live deepfakes are getting good enough to make these near worthless.