North Korea has begun blocking access to Twitter and Facebook on domestic Internet connections offered to foreigners, according to a report last week. If correct, the move is apparently the first active blocking of Internet access by the North Korean government and comes at a time when it appears to be slowly tightening the screws on…

 

North Korea has banned the use of satellite Internet connections and WiFi networks by foreign embassies and international organizations unless they get government approval. The switch, which came in mid August, gives credibility to an earlier report that unencrypted wireless networks at embassies were being used by North Korean citizens to gain uncensored access to…

 

North Korea’s sole 3G mobile network operator has moved to plug a potential gap in the country’s considerable national censorship regime. The loophole could have provided North Koreans with unrestricted access to international phone calls and Internet access and relied on the prepaid SIM cards that have been available to tourists since February 2013. The…

 

South Korea’s top court has upheld the acquittal of a free-speech activist for retweeting North Korean tweets, according to several local media reports. Park Jung-geun, a Seoul-based photographer, was arrested under the country’s anti-communist National Security Law for a series of tweets posted in late 2010 and early 2011. They included retweets from Uriminzokkiri, a China-based website with…

 

A hackathon that aimed to find new ways to get information in, out and around North Korea took place over the weekend in San Francisco. The event, called “Hack North Korea,” was organized by New York-based charity Human Rights Foundation and brought together programmers, human rights campaigners and defectors. Several teams spent the weekend working on ideas…

 

North Korea’s state-run news agency issued a sharp criticism over the weekend of U.S. funding of technology projects that attack censorship. The commentary, published on Saturday, points to dissatisfaction among the North Korean elite with U.S. funding of projects that enable the free flow of information and bypass Internet censorship. It comes as U.S. State Dept.’s Bureau of Democracy,…

 

Three of North Korea’s state security and censorship organizations have been called out by Reporters Without Borders in the organization’s latest ranking of “Enemies of the Internet.” The report was published on Wednesday, which RSF and Amnesty International have named world day against cyber censorship. The three organizations named by RSF are the Central Scientific and…

 

Will Scott, a computer scientist from Washington state, just returned from several months as a guest lecturer at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). In an interview with North Korea Tech and in posts on Reddit, Scott spoke about what it’s like to be at PUST. This is part two of a three-part…

 

Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) is one of the more ambitious international ventures in North Korea of the last few years. Almost ten years in planning, PUST is the country’s first privately-run university and backed with funds from evangelical Christian organizations in the U.S. and overseas. It currently has several hundred students and…