North Korea Tech

For those who would like to follow North Korea on a more than casual basis, these sites are likely to be of interest: * NK News (http://nknews.org) * DailyNK (https://www.dailynk.com/english/index.php) And perhaps especially since this is HN: * North Korea Tech (https://www.northkoreatech.org)

Rather than spawn a whole bunch of different submissions on this same story, I am replying to this submission, the first I have seen on this breaking news story, with some links to other reporting. The Washington Post blog report is titled "North Korea’s Internet is going suspiciously haywire" and links to some other online sources. Verge reports "North Korea's internet is having serious problems"[2] linking to one of the same sources, a site called North Korea Tech.[3] The New York Times reports, "Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses."[4] Most of the usual news outlets are confirming this story now. I suppose once the breaking news aspect of this story is followed up some more, there will be the usual rounds of speculation and claims and counterclaims about what is going on and who is causing the apparent country-wide Internet outage. I'll refrain from speculating here until I have gathered more news. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/22/north-kor… [2] http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/22/7434201/north-korea-internet-proble… [3] "North Korea's Internet link is flaky today" http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/12/22/north-koreas-internet-link-is… [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/23/world/asia/attack-is-suspected-as-no…

According to this report, NK's 3G network is about to hit 2M subscribers (almost 10% of the population): http://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/26/koryolink-nears-2-million-sub… It mentions offering (NK-only) web browsing and most people have dumbphones, but there is a network there. I think it'd be pretty suicidal to conspire using that though as I'm sure it's monitored. I think there's probably a lot more dissent than you're assuming, but agin, it'd be suicidal to express it if one of your neighbors would just rat you out. Apparently, smuggling in Chinese and increasingly South Korean smart phones is already quite common: http://newfocusintl.com/chinese-mobile-phone-dominates-north-korea/ http://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/smartphones-11142013185158.html I posted earlier about this, but it seems that these phones would be pretty valuable as media playing devices - preload kiwix w/ KR wikipedia etc - it'd allow you to much more easily/discretely distribute/exchange microSD cards. Some sort of mesh protocol could be incredibly effective in allow communication while maintaining anonymity. But any sort of message passing/communication would have to be designed under the assumption that it's being monitored.

My wild guess is: they might not have had any internet connection at all. But it really depends whether the Koryo Tours guys thought the extra cost would be worth it. I don't have any updated pricelist from Nosotek (the North Korean/Dutch joint venture outsourcing firm which wrote Pyongyang Racer), but back in 2010 they charged an extra €40 to €60 per day surcharge to clients if they wanted their team of two outsourced Pyongyang programmers to have direct internet access; otherwise the team would work "in a cleanroom environment and can not connect to the internet" and all email contact would be with the Nosotek managers only. http://www.nkeconwatch.com/nk-uploads/nosotek-pricelist.pdf To put this in perspective, that charge is almost the same as the charge for one of the programmers themselves. My guess is, Nosotek most likely have to pay for a third guy from the government to watch the browsing habits of the first two, and that third guy has to belong to both the set of political reliables and the set of internet-savvy people --- two sets which are already small in North Korea and whose intersection is even smaller. Not to mention the cost of the extra computer and internet connection itself More links about Nosotek: http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/ http://www.northkoreatech.org/tag/nosotek/ http://nosotek.com/

Sure, the web sites are blocked, but radio waves couldn't be. And traditionally there were always enough radio stations carefully built and sufficiently financed to cover the target areas. RFA: https://www.rfa.org/about/info/frequencies.html VOA: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https:/… A nice example of what one U.S. journalist knew regarding the coverage of North Korea in 2013: https://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/11/us-wants-voa-rfa-transmitter…

Here's an analysis of the data from North Korea: https://www.northkoreatech.org/2018/01/29/strava-heat-map-north-korea/

a probably very different person from the speaker has since released RED STAR OS 3 as a torrent. http://pastebin.com/cHAzyTE7 http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/12/30/red-star-3-0-desktop-the-inst…

Dammit, you opened up a can of worms. Now I've been at this for hours. http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/08/01/whos-using-north-korean-airsp…

In case anyone is wondering here is a good list of domains/servers based in North Korea: http://www.northkoreatech.org/the-north-korean-website-list/

> 2. It actually is North Korea. We've been led to believe that they exist in a technological dark ages of sorts, with most of their infrastructure relying on technology that would horrify the average HN user. They're certainly belligerent enough, but now suddenly we find that they have not just the technology to pull it off, but also the talent? How does that kind of talent even develop under a strictly regimented government like North Korea's? What kind of ability do they actually have? See, this really isn't the case, and why most people believe this is beyond me, when a google search would suffice. I'm not criticizing you, actually, just pointing out that there's an incredible amount of misinformation out there about North Korea. Look at these photographs of a technology trade fair in Pyongyang this summer, for example: http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/06/23/another-look-at-the-spring-tr… Most telling, IMO, is that a 32G usb is being sold for USD20, where at the time of writing, the same product was nearly USD16 on Amazon US. That's a remarkably low markup for a product, especially for one in North Korea. Also considering that it's a high volume, low price product with so little of a markup makes me think that other technologies must be very available and accessible, and that NK is hardly the technological dark ages that popular discussion has us think it is. Of course, this all isn't to say that NK performed the hack, but I hardly think that a lack of…