Internet
AP’s Jean Lee on social media in North Korea
Mar 15th
Fresh from becoming the first person to tweet and Instragram on Koryolink’s new 3G data service, Associated Press Korea Bureau Chief Jean Lee was at the SXSW Interactive event to speak about social media in the DPRK.
She’s a great person to speak to on the subject.
Her pioneering posting as the first accredited correspondent of any western news organization in Pyongyang has seen her make numerous trips to the country. The opening up of the 3G network to tourists and then a few weeks later data service for foreigners — a story she broke — was widely followed.
As with just about More >
Internet problems due to attack, says ITAR TASS
Mar 14th
Russia’s ITAR TASS news agency says problems experienced on Wednesday connecting to North Korean web sites was down to a cyberattack. [Updated, see below]
The report, which is datelined from Pyongyang, is just two sentences long and offers no evidence or details for the assertion. It’s credited to an unnamed and unidentified “informed source.”
“Internet resources of the country have come under a powerful hacker attack from abroad,” the news agency reported.
The lack of information makes it difficult to weigh the claim and the unwillingness of the source to go on-record adds a doubt.
In the past South Korea has quickly blamed North Korea for More >
North Korean sites inaccessible for now
Mar 13th
All of the North Korean web sites that target audiences outside of the country were in accessible Wednesday morning Korean time.
The reason isn’t clear.
Reports of a single server being inaccessible are common, but the site will often come back online within a few minutes or hours. It’s presumed those single outages are usually for maintenance or a reboot of the computer on which the site runs.
This time the outage is more widespread.
The small handful of web servers in North Korea is connected to the rest of the world via two links: a main link through China Unicom and a satellite backup More >
The North Korean YouTube List Updated
Mar 10th
The North Korea YouTube List, a listing of YouTube channels carrying DPRK-related content, has been updated. The new version includes a couple of newly discovered channels, reordering with the most watched channels at the top and the separation of dormant channels that haven’t seen an upload in the last six months.
The “DPRK Music” channel, which apparently comes from a user in Russia, is still the most watched channel with an impressive 11.7 million views for its 286 videos. The second most watched channel, the “DPR of Korea Official” channel (which doesn’t come from the government, despite the name) has 7.6 More >
Pirate Bay comes clean on North Korea hoax
Mar 6th
A little less than 24 hours after it first claimed to have set up shop in North Korea, The Pirate Bay website has confirmed what most observers suspected: it was all a hoax.
Writing of the announcement and user reaction to its earlier claim, the site said it was a “stunt.” It even chastised some users for expressing support of the supposed move to the DPRK.
“We’ve also learned that many of you need to be more critical. Even towards us. You can’t seriously cheer the “fact” that we moved our servers to bloody North Korea. Applauds to you who told us More >
The Pirate Bay says it’s gone to North Korea
Mar 5th
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre than Dennis Rodman hugging Kim Jong Un, the operators of The Pirate Bay site claimed Monday that they are now running from the North Korean Internet.
The Pirate Bay is one of the Internet’s longest surviving pirate sites. It links to Bit Torrent files of thousands of movies, TV shows, songs and other multimedia and is a major thorn in the side of the commercial content industry. The actual pirated content is located on user machines, but the main website acts as a sort of index to all these bits of More >
YouTube zaps another Uriminzokkiri video
Feb 21st
Another Uriminzokkiri video has been removed from YouTube for copyright infringement. This time it’s a propaganda video that borrowed its soundtrack from the video game “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.”
The takedown, confirmed by a message when users attempt to access the clip, comes just two weeks after a previous propaganda video was removed after a copyright complaint by Activision. That video used a computer-generated animation clip from Activision’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.”
The latest removal comes after a copyright complaint from ZeniMax Media, a Maryland-based computer game publisher that puts out the game under its Bethesda Software division.
Uriminzokkiri regularly More >
Exclusive: Nosotek website hacked
Feb 11th
The website of Nosotek, the foreign-North Korean software programming joint venture, has been hacked. The site was hit sometime late Sunday or early Monday and its front page was replaced with a message in French, English and Korean attacking North Korea. [This story has been updated. Please see below.]
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea believes in an Atheist system of Communism, and promotes only the worship of its leaders. Why then, does Iran choose to work with them while claiming to be an Islamic state?”
Underneath were a couple of pictures of Kim Jong Un, one of him on a horse More >
KCNA website down? No, it’s still there
Feb 9th
If you’ve been looking for the Korea Central News Agency website over the last day or two, you’ve probably been unable to reach it.
Most browsers are returning an error message similar to this one in Chrome: “Oops! Google Chrome could not find www.kcna.kp.”
But the site is there.
An analysis by NorthKoreaTech.org has revealed the site is unavailable not because the server is down, but because it’s address is missing from the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). DNS converts easy-to-read addresses like “kcna.kp” into numeric addresses that computers use to route traffic.
In this case, typing the numeric address in yourself will pull More >
Activision cuts short North Korea’s space dreams
Feb 6th
That didn’t last long. U.S. video game maker Activision has filed a copyright takedown demand with YouTube resulting in the removal of a video that sees a North Korean man dream of reunification, Korean domination of space and the collapse of the United States.
Uriminzokkiri is a semi-official North Korean web site based in China. It speaks for the North Korean government and carries much of the output of state media, but it also produces its own content. The video was one such original piece.
The clip, posted on the Uriminzokkiri YouTube channel and website over the weekend, attracted a lot of interest on More >
