SPONSORED: North Korea Is Asia’s New Start-Up Hot Spot

Slightly amusing, but this parody of The Atlantic's sponsored Scientology debacle doesn't really add much to the conversation. The one thing it parodies correctly is "Hey look, we too can publish things that aren't up to our normal editorial standards!" However, this piece blatantly makes up facts (i.e. Instagram & Epicurious opening offices), whereas the Scientology piece was opinionated and disagreeable, but not factually wrong.

In fact, countries have a long history of advertising in magazines under sponsored content. Items like "Come visit XXX" are a staple amongst travel and lifestyle magazines, though such pieces are usually differentiated via different fonts and layouts.

If techcrunch had somethign to add, I wish they had actually argued their point instead of hopping on the "Look, Controversy! Let's ridicule it!" train.

I haven't been following the news on the Atlantic's sponsored Scientology story, so I dont' know what the actual parody here is.

However, as a side note, I had a chance to visit North Korea in 2005 with a friend of mine, whose father was (and still is) running an orphanage there (my friend and I are both Koreans - South, but both have overseas citizenship).

(The city we stayed was not Pyoung Yang - the capital city of NK, but a much smaller & poorer place)

Seeing the state of the people was quite heart-breaking. Because of the shortage in electricity and water, the entire city was pitch black by 9pm.

As a programmer myself, the technological dark age that they are in is also a huge concern. At school, students most of the time either do not have computers or use a set of donated computers from foreign aids.

It would take a huge shift in almost all aspects of NK regime to make the Internet available to the people of NK. My heart aches.

Is this a joke off of the Atlantic scientology thing?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5057819