> Dafeng strange fruit spreads across the Great Hall won the People's love and young manhood of the world's largest hot in that reverence Kim Jong-un...
North Korean is a different dialect so it's no surprise Google struggles with it. It looks like a news/propaganda site.
Not just the dialect that's tough to translate, but also the diction. DPRK propaganda tends to use a lot of bombastic language -- it shows in their English press releases as well.
GNU actually refers to 'grand national unity' in this context, one of the three fundamentals for Korean unification outlined in the 1972 North-South Joint Declaration (the other two being peace and independence).
Based on the screenshots, gnu.rep.kp appears to be a website for the Pyongyang Broadcasting Station.
This is a bit misleading. According to Will Scott, who taught CS in North Korea, there are some 3000-5000 sites on the national intranet, but it is entirely disconnected from the internet at large. So these zones are ones that are intended for consumption by foreigners.
I find it amazing that you can actually read (yourself) all of the content of all the toplevel DNS zones of a country. In 2016. Two subdomains in .edu.
I think GP means it is notable that, in 2016, the zone list for NK is so small that it can be perused in mere seconds due to its short length (as compared to any other country).
2. It's not normal for the list of all the domains registered to a TLD to be readable by a human in a short timeframe. If you could get a list of all .com or .co.uk domains, you probably could not read all the domains which start with 'aa', much less the complete list.
Well if this happened in the US, wouldn't this count as hacking under the CFAA? For instance weev got 3 years for running some GET requests on a sequential number.
The Kim family has always placed a high priority on making movies. I believe it started out as a propaganda angle, as it has been in most communist countries (well...anywhere, really) and has sense moved onto full on fandom. The DPRK spends a good chunk of change on film production. Kim Jong-Il went so far as to kidnap a South Korean film director and actress.
That their intranet/internet is apparently pretty small, comprising only a few dozen domains, run off five Nameservers.
Also cooks.org.kp. I really want to go to the Facing grand slam popular restaurant, previously the Flavour bases loaded restaurant, but they're really embracing their new name apparently. http://cooks.org.kp/restaurants.php?rID=21
At my workplace, we route video and audio over Cat5 to specialized PCs with capture cards, running software that records and then streams or uploads to a video content server where people can log into an account and view a list of presentations on a content management application.
They still email to ask if I can tape their upcoming event.
Are you saying that North Korea would otherwise be keeping these domains out of sight from users that aren't in North Korea? So now that these domains are out there anyone can view them and lurk/spy/gather info?
Well, I hope for the head of the NK chief propaganda minister that the grand divine dictator's internet does not break down with all the traffic from Hacker News..
"Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, visited the Sohae Space Centre to inspect the ground jet test of a new type high-power engine of a carrier rocket for the geo-stationary satellite."
It sounds really hilarious, but it reminds me of the soviet era in the Warsaw Pact member states. Poor citizens. We are so lucky to have a degree of control over our supreme leadership..
It should remind you of that, since that's basically what they are. They're on the wrong side of Russia to be in the Warsaw Pact, but they follow the same basic model as other Soviet puppets, except for the part where they succumbed to revolution in the 90s.
Not quite. The SU started rolling back its support for NK in 1985, four years before the SU fell. In fact, it seems probable to me that NK didn't fall along with the rest of the SU precisely because of this.
But the point I was really trying to make is that calling NK anyone's puppet is not really accurate, and arguably never was. They are certainly dependent on China nowadays, but it is far from clear who is pulling whose strings.
They definitely don't seem to be now. I'm pretty sure China doesn't want them lighting off nuclear bombs, but doesn't know how to get them to stop.
In any case, "puppet" was incidental to my comment, and I'm happy to let that go. My main point was that they were set up very similarly to the Warsaw Pact countries, so the similarity in language is entirely expected.
[1] That is, without having a humanitarian crisis and state with nuclear explosives (and might have viable nuclear warheads) in civil war on their back doorstep.
I can see both sides to the dispute over how to handle DPRK. If Mexico got very politically unstable and started making nuclear explosions and likely had a missle-portable warhead, the U.S. would get touchy if China started proposing actions that could easily touch off a Mexican civil war. In hindsight, I hope they realize that they should have pushed the DPRK harder earlier and run a higher risk of a civil war in the pre-nuclear-explosive DPRK in exchange for heading off warhead development.
Agreed, it's a huge mess and I see no good way to clean it up. We should probably just rip the band-aid off ASAP and get it over with. I think the non-nuclear window of opportunity is still open there. They have weapons, but I don't think they yet have the means to deliver them. In any case, I doubt anyone is willing to do that, and I can't blame them at all. The other hope would be that somehow either the regime becomes less crazy on their own (like China did) or a successful revolution happens without spilling outside the country too much. Neither possibility seems likely.
On the other hand, I remember how the Soviet Union seemed like it was here forever, right up until it wasn't. That didn't turn out great, but it stayed contained and nobody got nuked.
A puppet state is one that is set up to look like an independent state but is in fact entirely de facto controlled by (i.e. cannot do anything without the approval of) another state. Iran between 1953 and 1979 was a U.S. puppet. Syria seems to be on the road to becoming a Russian puppet. SK is not a US puppet, and NK is not really a Chinese puppet either (that's what I meant by the "Chucky" comment).
It has generally become unfashionable to have puppet states nowadays. They're too hard to maintain.
Are you repeating n-th hand propaganda? I kind of don't blame you since Google refuses to dig up the story of "Soviet-Iranian Agreement of Cooperation" of 1966. This agreement was reached because the West refused to support Iran's industrialization program under the Shah, so the "puppet" went ahead and reached an agreement with USSR.
Wikipedia lists the Republic of Texas as one, and South Vietnam as a potential one. Assassinating an uncooperative leader while a bunch of American soldiers were in the country certainly seems like the sort of thing that would happen in a puppet state, anyway.
Eh, Cuba after the Spanish-American War, Panama immediately after their revolution, and of course the Banana Republics of late 19th - early 20th century fame.
As interesting as this is, I really don't think that IP blocks which are supposedly in North Korea are the limit of what their government/state apparatus has. I would not be surprised at all if significant blocks of IPV4 belonging to the Chinese upstream ISPs just across the border are also in use in locations geographically within North Korea.
I'm not fucking kidding, but after I've visited cooks.org.kp my internet is slow and I've some packet loss and timeout...but nothing weird on little snitch
And we're not helping 25 million prisoners escape from this starvation cult run by a megalomaniac child because?
1) China would get mad
2) No one would want the refugees
3) There's no will to help people you largely can't see
4) After deposing the Kim regime no one knows how to nation build while avoiding the usual quagmires.
5) Would cost too much money
Am I missing anything or does that about cover it?
2 and 3 are some of the biggest issues for any developing nation. We all tend to spend our internet discussion time with people who are "like us" which means it's easy to turn away from the suffering of others. And even when you can see them (Syria comes to mind), 2 is still a big motivator that generates all sorts of excuses at best or outright fabrications at worse.
You are phrasing this as if it were possible to just magically make the Kim regime vanish, and the only reasons we aren't are self-serving and wrong.
Your point #4 is far more important than any other:
> "After deposing the Kim regime no one knows how to nation build while avoiding the usual quagmires."
The fact is, if the west went in and blew up Pyongyang, do you really think there would be a peaceful transfer of power? I highly doubt it.
Furthermore, Seoul is within easy artillery range of the North. No matter how quickly a hypothetical strike on the North was executed, Seoul will likely be at least partially obliterated.
6) We respect the sovereignty of nations and don't randomly invade countries that are no threat to us
Also, 4 is a really big point. Unless you annex NK and make it a colony, almost all precedent tells us that your plan would end in decades of civil war and a lot of suffering (or an equally brutal "democratic" regime).
Indeed a success story, but under much better circumstances. People were subjected to Hitler's propaganda for only 12 years. Loosing two major wars in just three decades, having most cities bombed to the ground and a leader who committed suicide on defeat all didn't inspire much hope for rebellion. On top of that "behaving well" held the promise of quickly rising back to the top at least economically, and within four years the world spoke of the German Wirtschaftswunder. On top of that the country had 15 years of experience with a real democracy just prior to Hitler's regime.
Your conditions for establishing a new, stable democracy don't get much better than that.
Did nobody think to use archive.org on these sites while they were still up? :( Or was that not possible. Something like HTTrack would have been useful, rather than a few people screenshotting the sites.
104 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadNorth Korean is a different dialect so it's no surprise Google struggles with it. It looks like a news/propaganda site.
Based on the screenshots, gnu.rep.kp appears to be a website for the Pyongyang Broadcasting Station.
Edit: Awesome find, and monitoring project btw. Thanks!
Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-teach-computer-scien... (super interesting, suggest reading it)
1. It's not normal to allow global zone transfers on most country-code nameservers, which enables other Internet users to get the full list of registered domains. Yes, some do it: https://github.com/mandatoryprogrammer/TLDR/blob/master/READ...
2. It's not normal for the list of all the domains registered to a TLD to be readable by a human in a short timeframe. If you could get a list of all .com or .co.uk domains, you probably could not read all the domains which start with 'aa', much less the complete list.
This hasn't even happened yet...
airkoryo.com.kp.
cooks.org.kp. // receips are important
friend.com.kp. // facebook clone? :D
gnu.rep.kp. // yay at least their software is free
kass.org.kp.
kcna.kp.
kiyctc.com.kp.
knic.com.kp.
koredufund.org.kp.
korelcfund.org.kp.
korfilm.com.kp. // movie4k clone at least there it is legal, lol
ma.gov.kp.
masikryong.com.kp.
naenara.com.kp.
nta.gov.kp.
portal.net.kp. // yahoo clone ;)
rcc.net.kp.
rep.kp.
rodong.rep.kp.
ryongnamsan.edu.kp.
sdprk.org.kp.
silibank.net.kp.
star-co.net.kp.
star-di.net.kp.
star.co.kp.
star.edu.kp.
star.net.kp.
vok.rep.kp.
don't seem that much
That 1990s style animated banner.. THE PYONGYANG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL. I bet a ton of celebs visit that!
That said they had some surprising entries:
> In 2006, the Swedish horror comedy Frostbiten was shown at the festival, the first foreign horror film to ever be shown in North Korea.
Who wouldn't?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abduction_of_Shin_Sang-ok_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_North_Korea
It's apparently "The website of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries".[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kp#Usage
Also cooks.org.kp. I really want to go to the Facing grand slam popular restaurant, previously the Flavour bases loaded restaurant, but they're really embracing their new name apparently. http://cooks.org.kp/restaurants.php?rID=21
They still email to ask if I can tape their upcoming event.
Are you saying that North Korea would otherwise be keeping these domains out of sight from users that aren't in North Korea? So now that these domains are out there anyone can view them and lurk/spy/gather info?
This unusual (mis-) configuration allowed to enumerate those domains exhaustively.
But now that this has happened anyone can?
Now that this has happened, you know all of the domain names and no longer need a friend in North Korea to tell you what they are.
The data can be found here: https://github.com/benediktkr/nk-scans
"Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army, visited the Sohae Space Centre to inspect the ground jet test of a new type high-power engine of a carrier rocket for the geo-stationary satellite."
It sounds really hilarious, but it reminds me of the soviet era in the Warsaw Pact member states. Poor citizens. We are so lucky to have a degree of control over our supreme leadership..
But the point I was really trying to make is that calling NK anyone's puppet is not really accurate, and arguably never was. They are certainly dependent on China nowadays, but it is far from clear who is pulling whose strings.
In any case, "puppet" was incidental to my comment, and I'm happy to let that go. My main point was that they were set up very similarly to the Warsaw Pact countries, so the similarity in language is entirely expected.
[1] That is, without having a humanitarian crisis and state with nuclear explosives (and might have viable nuclear warheads) in civil war on their back doorstep.
I can see both sides to the dispute over how to handle DPRK. If Mexico got very politically unstable and started making nuclear explosions and likely had a missle-portable warhead, the U.S. would get touchy if China started proposing actions that could easily touch off a Mexican civil war. In hindsight, I hope they realize that they should have pushed the DPRK harder earlier and run a higher risk of a civil war in the pre-nuclear-explosive DPRK in exchange for heading off warhead development.
On the other hand, I remember how the Soviet Union seemed like it was here forever, right up until it wasn't. That didn't turn out great, but it stayed contained and nobody got nuked.
China's interests are preventing NK from getting too far out of hand and China ends up flooded with millions of NK refugees.
It has generally become unfashionable to have puppet states nowadays. They're too hard to maintain.
Are you repeating n-th hand propaganda? I kind of don't blame you since Google refuses to dig up the story of "Soviet-Iranian Agreement of Cooperation" of 1966. This agreement was reached because the West refused to support Iran's industrialization program under the Shah, so the "puppet" went ahead and reached an agreement with USSR.
Intelligence Memorandum, CIA, June 1967: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000381440....
Quite possible. The document you cite was news to me. Maybe there has never been an actual U.S. puppet state, I don't know.
"There is a deeply disturbing trend in the world of ever increased deference to power. The free press is ..."
I respectfully suggest to you that this is no "trend".
Could be many things, of course. But if Hacker News traffic is enough to overload an entire country's Internet...
I know it's childish but I couldn't help but laugh at this.
That being said, I doubt North Korea is sitting on too many unknown browser exploits.
Your point #4 is far more important than any other:
> "After deposing the Kim regime no one knows how to nation build while avoiding the usual quagmires."
The fact is, if the west went in and blew up Pyongyang, do you really think there would be a peaceful transfer of power? I highly doubt it.
Furthermore, Seoul is within easy artillery range of the North. No matter how quickly a hypothetical strike on the North was executed, Seoul will likely be at least partially obliterated.
1. They can reach Seoul with conventional weapons
2. Ideologically aligned population loyal to Kims. This is still true.
Also, 4 is a really big point. Unless you annex NK and make it a colony, almost all precedent tells us that your plan would end in decades of civil war and a lot of suffering (or an equally brutal "democratic" regime).
Your conditions for establishing a new, stable democracy don't get much better than that.
http://masikryong.com.kp/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masikryong_Ski_Resort
; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-9+deb8u6-Debian <<>> +tcp @ns2.co.kp axfr 178.45.175.in-addr.arpa ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd 178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN SOA ns1.kptc.kp. root.kptc.kp. 2013082903 28800 86400 1209600 86400 178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN NS ns1.kptc.kp. 178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN NS ns2.kptc.kp. 170.178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN PTR smtp.star.net.kp. 55.178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN PTR smtp.star-co.net.kp. 178.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN SOA ns1.kptc.kp. root.kptc.kp. 2013082903 28800 86400 1209600 86400 ;; Query time: 1628 msec ;; SERVER: 175.45.176.16#53(175.45.176.16) ;; WHEN: Wed Sep 21 03:56:19 UTC 2016 ;; XFR size: 6 records (messages 1, bytes 223)
; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-9+deb8u6-Debian <<>> +tcp @ns2.co.kp axfr 179.45.175.in-addr.arpa ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd 179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN SOA ns1.star.edu.kp. root.kptc.kp.179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 2013082900 28800 86400 1209600 86400 179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN NS ns1.star.edu.kp. 69.179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN PTR mail.star.edu.kp. 76.179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN PTR ns1.star.edu.kp. 179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 432000 IN SOA ns1.star.edu.kp. root.kptc.kp.179.45.175.in-addr.arpa. 2013082900 28800 86400 1209600 86400 ;; Query time: 465 msec ;; SERVER: 175.45.176.16#53(175.45.176.16) ;; WHEN: Wed Sep 21 03:56:25 UTC 2016 ;; XFR size: 5 records (messages 1, bytes 194)
You forgot to dump the PTR records for their IP ranges