One of the most interesting questions surrounding North Korea’s Samjiyon tablet is its source. State media reports not withstanding, the tablet is almost certainly not made in North Korea — the country just doesn’t have the electronics manufacturing capability to design products like tablet computers from the components up. And anyway, why bother? Companies in Taiwan…

 

North Korea, like the rest of the world, is getting hooked on tablet computers. In the last year, state media has highlighted three different tablet computers that are now, according to the reports, available in the country. The latest of these, the Samjiyon (삼지연), is also on sale to foreigners and one of the tablets…

 

North Korea’s main evening news featured a minute-long report on the tablet computers on Thursday night. The report, which focused on the Samjiyon tablet, interviewed a man identified as the chief engineer of the tablet from the Multimedia Technology Research Institute of the Korea Computer Center. The tablet first made an appearance in September at…

 

The Korea Computer Center, one of North Korea’s leading centers of computer studies, showed off a tablet PC running electronic library software at the recent Pyongyang International Trade Fair. The trade fair, which happens in the spring and autumn each year, is a showcase for the latest products from North Korean companies and from international organizations…

 

Japanese police suspect a consignment of 1,843 used computers and monitors allegedly exported to North Korea could have been used in a 2009 week-long attack on a handful of South Korean and U.S. websites. The computers, allegedly exported in violation of Japanese sanctions, were shipped to the Pyongyang Informatics Center (PIC), a unit of the state-run…

 

 

Japanese prosecutors have indicted two people over alleged exports of personal computers to North Korea, Kyodo news agency reported Wednesday. The two are accused of exporting 8.2 million yen (US$108,000) worth of computers from Japan in violation of the Japanese government’s trade sanctions. Japan has imposed a complete ban on exports to North Korea since…

 

The North Korean state TV evening news recently provided a glimpse at one slice of the country’s PC manufacturing industry. (Update: A similar PC has been spotted in the U.S. Read below) The report took viewers to the factory and introduced the three computers being made, two of which are laptops and one of which…

 

North Korea’s dot-kp top-level Internet domain was reassigned after the company running it, KCC Europe, ended service and went months without replying to queries from Pyongyang, according to a report released this week. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which oversees country-level domains and the IP address system, switched control of dot-kp from the Korea Computer…

 

North Korea’s dot-kp domain space could be back on the Internet soon. Domain name servers responsible for dot-kp have been offline for several months as have a handful of websites that used them. With no servers the entire dot-kp address space, which only amounted to a handful of sites, has been out of operation. On…