Internet
KCTV Facebook page deleted, but streams live on
Jun 14th
A Facebook page that claimed to be the official home of North’s Korea’s main national TV channel, Korean Central Television, has disappeared.
The page appeared to have been around for at least a month and content included links to KCTV news bulletins on the YouTube channel of the China-based Uriminzokkiri website, photos and stories from the government’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and some “behind the scenes” pictures from the TV station.
It was written as if it was being run from within the TV station in Pyongyang — something that appears to have fooled several major international news agencies — but More >
Live from Pyongyang, it’s KCTV on Facebook … or maybe not
Jun 10th
On Thursday, South Korea’s Yonhap reported on a new Facebook page in the name of the Korean Central Television, North Korea’s national TV station. (Updated. See below.)
Yonhap said, “North Korea’s state broadcaster started real-time Facebook broadcasting as the communist country moves to expand its propaganda efforts into the social networking realm, official sources said Thursday.”
In never divulged who the “official sources” were beyond describing them as people “who keep tabs on the North.”
Later in the day, Agence France Presse reported the same Facebook page, reporting on the news of Kim Jong Un’s visit to a mushroom farm in the first news bulletin of More >
Voice of Korea’s shortwave broadcasts now on-demand
May 28th
The daily English-language broadcast from North Korea’s international radio station, Voice of Korea, is now available on the Internet.
The programme is being carried by World Radio Network, a London-based organization that rebroadcasts material from international radio stations on its own satellite channels and via FM relays in several countries.
Most of the WRN programming is received in studio quality via satellite or Internet, but the Voice of Korea programs are a recording from the shortwave broadcasts.
That means they come with all the atmospheric interference and fading that is typical of shortwave.
For the daily news, the audio clips on the Voice of More >
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 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 >
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 >
Eric Schmidt and the North Korean Internet dilemma
Apr 23rd
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said a little bit more about his January trip to Pyongyang. [Updated: see below]
The “private, humanitarian” mission, as Schmidt termed it, surprised many and saw him turn up in Pyongyang with his daughter Sophie Schmidt, Jared Cohen, head of the Google Ideas think tank, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and Kun “Tony” Namkung, a U.S.-based businessman that acts as a go-between in some deals between the U.S. and North Korea.
Schmidt and Cohen, who haven’t said much about the trip since leaving Pyongyang, penned a dual-bylined article in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday about the trip. The article, More >
Thousands more DPRK-related website account details published
Apr 21st
The personal details of thousands of users of three North Korean-related websites have been published by hackers.
The details include names, email addresses, user names and in some cases addresses and phone numbers of people to the three sites: the Japan-based Choson Sinbo (조선신보, 朝鮮新報) newspaper, the China-based Ryomyong (려명) site and the U.S.-based Korea American National Coordinating Council (재미동포전국연합회).
The details were apparently stolen by hackers working under the banner of the Anonymous group, who have been attacking North Korean-related websites for the last few weeks.
The largest database dump was that of the Choson Sinbo, which contained 3,667 records. The Ryomyong database numbered just over 1,300 users More >
DPRK reconfigures its Internet connection
Apr 9th
Hot on the heels of a series of attacks that have seen its Internet connectivity severely disrupted, the DPRK appears to be adding an additional route through which it links to the global Internet.
The new link began appearing in Internet addressing tables on Monday and connects from Star, the country’s sole Internet service provider, to China Unicom Hong Kong’s network.
Most of the Internet traffic to and from the country already runs over a link from mainland China that is serviced by China Unicom. Almost exactly a year ago, a second connection was added via Intelsat satellite.
The new connection appears to More >
