Google on North Korean maps
May 18th
The recent addition of North Korea to Google’s Maps service made up a small part of the company’s presentation to developers at its annual conference on Wednesday.
Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps, spoke about adding data and what it meant during at keynote speech at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.
North Korea had been a largely white area of Google Maps until it started publishing user-supplied data. Now a little information on Pyongyang and some of the major towns is included in the service, although it’s still far from complete.
Curtis Melvin’s North Korea Uncovered, even in the latest More >
Schmidt’s Washington speech on North Korea, Internet and dictatorships
May 13th
Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, speaks at the company’s Big Tent event in Washington, D.C., on April 26, 2013.
Google has posted video of Eric Schmidt’s remarks at the recent “Big Tent” event in Washington, D.C.
The Google-organized events act as idea summits and have been running for about three years and the D.C. event took place on April 26.
During his speech, the chairman of Google talked about North Korea and the impact that the connected world, and the Internet in particular, would have on authoritarian countries.
“In North Korea we visited with the government, of course that’s all there is in North More >
Anonymous attacks North Korean sites again
May 13th
A weekend attack on North Korean websites staged by members of the Anonymous hacker group appears to have caused some problems for the sites.
Connections to several major Pyongyang-based sites, including the Korean Central News Agency and Voice of Korea, were slow although successful in several tests done in the first few hours of the coordinated attack, which began at 1am GMT on Sunday.
Those results are in contrast to a previous series of attacks that took the sites offline for days. That difference was acknowledged by an Anonymous Korea Twitter message:
North Korea has reconfigured its Internet connection since the last round More >
Anonymous promises more website attacks this weekend
May 11th
Members of the Anonymous hacking group say they are planning to re-launch attacks on North Korean websites from Sunday. [Updated. See below.]
In messages posted to Twitter, several Anonymous members said the “#OpNorthKorea” attacks would resume on May 12 from 1am GMT, that’s 10am in the morning Pyongyang time.
OpNorthKorea first began in late March, shortly after North Korean media said relations between it and South Korea were “at a state of war.” It took the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves flooding a website with so many requests for data that it becomes overloaded.
The attacks were successful in More >
US sees no special help to DPRK from Chinese military
May 8th
David F. Helvey, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, briefs reporters about the military and security developments involving China during a news conference at the Pentagon, May 6, 2013. (Photo: Aaron Hostutler/DOD)
The Chinese military isn’t providing any special help to the Korea People’s Army (KPA) on a regular basis, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia.
David Helvey was speaking to the press in Washington on Monday afternoon after the department published its annual report on military and security developments involving China. North Korea comes up just twice in the unclassified version of the More >
Father, son indicted on exports of banned machinery to DPRK
May 7th
U.S. prosecutors have indicted a Taiwanese father and son on charges related to the supply of machinery to North Korea that could be used in the production of weapons of mass destruction.
Hsien Tai “Alex” Tsai, 67, and his son, Yueh Hsun “Gary” Tsai, 36, were charged during a Monday afternoon hearing at federal court in Chicago. Both were arrested last week.
Alex Tsai was picked up in Estonia, where he remains in custody awaiting extradition to the U.S., and Gary Tsai was arrested at his home in Glenview, Illinios. Gary Tsai is a legal permanent resident of the U.S.
In two almost More >
Hacker publishes North Korean website hit list
May 7th
An unidentified Internet user posting under the name of the Anonymous hacking collective has published a “hit list” of North Korean websites.
The list is said to be related to a coordinated attack that hackers appear to be planning for June 25. The action is part of “OpNorthKorea,” which previously took sites in North Korea and China offline in a series of distributed denial of service attacks.
The message appears to have been translated from another language, probably Korean, into English and includes sites based in China, Japan, the U.S., Spain and a single website in Pyongyang.
The source of the list is unclear More >
Spring International Trade Fair set for next week
May 6th
Pyongyang’s Spring International Trade Fair is due to open next week, the state-run Korea Central News Agency reported Monday.
This year’s event will run from May 13 to 16 and will bring together companies from Germany, Malaysia, Mongolia, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Italy, Indonesia, China, Poland and Taiwan, KCNA said.
Vendors will show machines, electric and electronic products, light industrial goods, foodstuffs, medical instruments, medicines, building materials, chemical goods and vehicles, the report said.
Last year’s event saw the debut of a tablet computer said to have been developed by the Korea Computer Center image, right).
The number of Chinese companies attending the event has been growing in More >
No surprises in DoD’s DPRK report to Congress
May 6th
This week the U.S. Department of Defense published its annual report to Congress on military and security developments Involving the DPRK. The 20-page unclassified document provides a good if brief overview of the current state of North Korean armed forces. For tech-watchers, it doesn’t include any surprises.
The country’s cyber warfare capabilities were addresses in one carefully worded paragraph. The DoD noted the allegations made in South Korea that the DPRK was behind several attacks, but didn’t itself assert any involvement or disclose any knowledge of the country’s actual capability.
In fact, the DoD noted that finding the ultimate source of a cyber More >
DPRK moves up a point, but still worst for press freedom
May 2nd
DVDs being smuggled into the DPRK have gained the country a point in an annual ranking of press freedom. [Updated, see below]
The ranking, by Washington, D.C., -based Freedom House was published on Wednesday and this year gave North Korea a score of 96. That still leaves it at the absolute bottom of the survey, this year tied with Turkmenistan, but its a point higher than last year.
The extra point came, “as a result of increased attempts to circumvent stringent censorship and the use of technologies such as smuggled DVDs to spread news and information,” Freedom House said in the report.
Recent years have seen a More >
