Credit where credit is due - they have turned android into ios. They have locked bootloader, kernel patch protection and static and dynamic code signing.
ok , so DPRK is installing spyware on tablets that are sold in DPRK.
Reading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.
There is a big difference. A compromised device would mean that _everything_ you do is being open to surveillance. Passive taps limits the eavesdropper to rely on either the transport being unencrypted or vulnerabilities in related software. In other words, passive network surveillance will only reliably provide a limited subset of information, such as meta-data, rather then content of the payload which may or may not be available to the organisation undertaking the surveillance.
WhatsApp can't defend against screenshots on your device.
The article states -
It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.
Not necessarily, but unless every part of the stack is open, how can you truly be certain? For desktops it's not as big of a deal, since you can monitor the network activity through a router. But for a smartphones it seems like it'd be much harder to detect.
EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.
There's no concrete evidence of such a thing, but keep in mind that the ME is advanced enough and exerts enough control over the installed system that it can be hacked and a keylogger covertly installed.
Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.
Well truth be told, I think that's a more powerful mechanism of control because it provides an illusion of privacy and control to the user.
As horrible as it is, the censorship provides a means of protection for the end user. In the US we just let people access things, and then prosecute/persecute, them accordingly.
With the above said-- I'd still prefer to be in the US to the DPRK any day of the week, month, year, or century.
Ever heard of the Panopticon [1]? The NSA is a modern, digital, version of it.
There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes.
I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us.
> it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing
Here's one obvious way: the Norks "Viewer" app shows you what they've collected on you which is itself a form of control (though it could be used to hunt for blind spots). The NSA doesn't really want you to know what they know or how they learnt it.
That commenter doesn't have access to that country's internet. The commenter does have access to many of the rest. That supports the commenter's point already.
I don't know. While there's no literal comparison, I concede, it's possible the OP had a figurative one in mind.
Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.
Its only a different level because of the amount of control the NSA has over the technological infrastructure, and the degree of force that can be brought to bear - through multiple independent factions of the US military-industrial infrastructure - upon those whom the establishment deem, through surveillance, to be un-savoury.
You probably haven't been paying attention, but the US Gov't make dissidents disappear all the time. They just do it with a velvet glove on, whereas we're more accustomed to complaining about/being distracted by the heavier hand represented by the propaganda against North Korea.
The US gov't is not as innocent as you might think when it comes to handling dissidents. Its just very, very good at maintaining the facade that its all done 'for the greater good of the people of the United States and its possessors'. The USA is, after all, a PR-first nation.
Are we really comparing the DPRK with the US? This thread has jumped the shark. Anyone in the US could be a dissident -- it's called the first amendment. Unless you are from the People's Republic of Fantasia, there's a good chance your country isn't a shining example of freedom either. But, it seems that the fashion on HN is to complain about the US at every opportunity -- even within an article about North Korea.
This could be a story about Hilter and people would find a way to engage in moral relativism.
The point is that the USA is not the shining beacon of moral authority that it, and its peoples, claim it to be - and before we go off launching yet another military-industrial misadventure to 'solve' the problems of the world, we might ought to use some of those resources locally, at home, in our own - free, so far - societies, in order to improve the lives of our fellow humans.
It makes not one iota of difference if the human lives we improve are in Kaesong, North Korean, or Jackson, Indiana. Does it? Then, start at home: get rid of the NSA. Close Guantanomo. Cancel privatized prison systems that incarcerate more prisoners in the world than any other nation.
I prefer the version "not all that glitters is gold", otherwise it sounds like gold, which glitters, is not gold. Interestingly in Spanish both versions are also popular.
The word order "All that gli[t]ters is not gold" is taken from Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice), so that gives it quite a bit of staying power in English.
The one good, albeit tragic, thing about the existence of North Korea is that it serves as a constant reminder of what society can become if we're not vigilant about educating each generation about the dangers of certain ideologies and modes of social organization.
Can you go into more detail please? I am very much against authoritarianism and the state as a whole, though I am in favour of certain modes of social organisation some consider unorthodox.
I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things.
Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)
I mean it's this spot on earth where the nightmare reality of total authoritarianism lives today. We can look at it from without, to whatever extent possible, and remind ourselves that every generation earns the freedom that it has. Having something concrete like North Korea is much more powerful than a book like Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work of literature about some hypothetical place.
What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
Strong disagree. North Korea is a disastrous country run by a truly evil government. However, it does not perform the role you suggest. We merely look on it from the outside in, with all of our small and little prejudices, and selectively picked historical knowledge. From such a vantage point, authoritarian always seems wrong. From the outside, it's trivial to understand and trivial to criticize. From within, from a perspective where authoritarianism has hijacked our own cultural values, our own patriotism, our own media, our cultural history, and historical stories, where the truth is always disputed and considered unpleasant to discuss in social gatherings, where friends and families really believe in it, criticism becomes far more difficult. What we need is both fictional and nonfiction insight into what it's like to experience authoritarianism firsthand, not picture-book,elementary school level accounts of how evil North Korea is. I recommend Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism, Orwell's Politics and the English Language, and the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco as starting examples.
My grandfather was head of the main construction "trust" in Kiev and a member of the communist party. Thus he was head of all construction in the city. He was part and parcel of the system that all together constituted what really was rightfully called the Evil Empire. A true prison. Was he evil? No. For him it was his job. He had a passion for construction and building. But he did nothing to subvert the Soviet way of life, derived benefit from it, and most likely thought it was correct. Multiply that by millions and you get your average society, whether individuals are contributing to a Soviet Socialist State or a Western Society. You can't just run a country by fear. Many people must be on board, from the oligarchy to the top level beaurocrats to the mid level apparatchiks to the common man. Society is ruled by broad social currents. Mao didn't personally kill 65 million people. He and many other people set up an environment that manipulated common human features—cult worship, paranoia, herd mentality—and steered them in an evil direction. But the mob, the herd mentality was the grand perpetrator. And you'll find that common to all groups everywhere. That's why the Federalist Papers are so beautiful. Any group can slip from a civil society to a nightmare wreck.
PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time.
PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest.
I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
Thanks for your responses. I'm not often moved to make long comments but this "tablet computer" and the apparatus that was necessary to create it really hit me hard for some reason. So real.
The government of North Korea is one of the two puppet dictatorships established in the Korean peninsula after World War II. It was the will of the Korean people to establish a socialist democracy, not a Juche dictatorship, but in 1946 the USSR and USA decided that what the Korean people wanted was the least important concern. The point is that it wasn't the ideology of the Korean people that mattered, it was the clash of 2 imperialists and its result.
Dictators have come to power through many methods through history. Being given power by an outside force is only one possible route to totalitarianism. Many dictators start out popular and sometimes even democratically elected.
The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying.
That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.
There is more to it than that though, what do the North Koreans actually want? They want a federal Korea with two systems, two leaders, united as one country and with a seat at the U.N. for that one country. A united Korea would be a true world power within a generation, with GDP and population that would outshine all but one of the security council permanent members. None of the North's weapons point at the South, I think the North just want the USA out of the peninsula and for there to be an orderly reunification process without external interference.
The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover.
A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!!
It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North.
I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right?
If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.
This is one of the most interesting comments that I've seen on HN. Let me do some research on that when I am free.
Edit: After reading the wikipedia article on Korea reunification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification), I start to wonder why both countries are not actively pursuing this goal that is obviously beneficial to both now. Maybe some details are missing from the wiki article?
> And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a U.S. apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate.
Consider the response of white americans in the US after the Imperial Japanese bombed a military force in Pearl Harbor, with almost zero civilian casualties. It quickly became common sentiment in the US to respond by ridding the world of the "yellow scourge" after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson. They didn't drop it on the military which was massed in the southern parts of Japan, the US intentionally dropped TWO ATOMIC bombs on cities full of civilians!
How do they expect the North Koreans to just be appeased by their "apology"? It's crazy, crazy, crazy on the part of the US as well. It's actually insanity.
But what if they hadn't? Japan was invading most of Asia with mass killings along the lines of ISIS and the Nazis. Are you saying ISIS should also be left alone and America not try to stop them?
Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
>Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.
Wow, Its fascinating, the mental gymnastics people perform to rationalise the atrocities their side perpetrates while in the same breath deploring the atrocities committed by the other side.
That's what you get, when you give children an identity resolving around your moral high ground, you being the greatest, you bringing freedom to the world, praising veterans who defend you against constant threats (in itself a contradiction), having a romantic relationship with your flag and the list goes on and on.
You better not take that away, because what defines you if you do?
> Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Wow, this is sounding terrifyingly similar to how suicide bombers justify their targeting of civilians. It's sad to see how easy it is for people who didn't grow up under the dogma of fundamentalist religion can still come to this way of thinking.
My friend, I implore you to think really hard about what you said, and take the time to recalibrate your moral compass. I can only hope that at some point in the future, you'll come to think that, war or not, enemy or not, killing civilians is bad. There is no shade of grey. It's only bad.
Governments and societies aren't 1-1 mappings of each other. You shouldn't mistake one as the other. And even if you do, it still doesn't take much thinking to ask: What about children?
> Are you saying ISIS should also be left alone and America not try to stop them?
As someone who isn't from America (and actually was born in a country which was subsequently bombed by America during peace time) I've never understood this idea that America is somehow justified in the belief that they are the moral arbiters of the world.
Who put you in charge? If the answer involves "we have a big military" it's interesting that a country obsessed with the concept of freedom is so willing fall back on "empire" when it's convenient. I guess Americans are still British at heart.
> Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.
This sentence made my blood boil. How fucking dare you. America bombing civilian residences in order to handle other country's civil wars is not helping anyone. Fuck you.
> The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Interesting rhetoric, given that America spends half a fucking TRILLION dollars a year on the military.
Nanjing. Unit 731. Korean comfort women, Korean cultural genocide.
How do you propose we win a war against people like that?
It took not one, but TWO atomic bombs to force a surrender. Tokyo was prepared to fight to the last person. The only way to win that war was to bomb them into oblivion. That was a choice the Japanese made. The Japanese military engaged in unimaginable atrocities and despite being nearly annihilated militarily, they continued to fight. How do you stop an empire with absolute zero regard for humanity? The Japanese has plenty of opportunities to surrender but they kept fighting and fighting and fighting.
As far as America's military budget, the raw numbers are irrelevant, what is relevant is percentage of GDP. The US ranks 11th in the world at 3.3% with 18 countries at 2% or higher. So the "half a trillion" hyperbole is silly. The US also spends a half trillion on government-funded R&D spending and spends a higher percentage (and raw amount) than the entire EU. The US also is ranked number 2 in spending on renewable energy. The US also spends more on swimming pools, airports, and education than any other country. They spend more in health care than anyone else as well.
My point, citing half a trillion as some kind of outrageous amount is ridiculous given the US GDP is $18 TRILLION per year. The US also ranks 18th in the world on per capita GDP behind such countries such as Luxembourg, Ireland, Monaco and Brunei.
The US military is highly visible and obviously subject to a lot of criticism, but how many people talk about the French Army's frequent and continual adventures in Africa? France has forward deployed troops all across sub-Saharan Africa. How about the British Army in the Baltics and Poland? The British Army in Kenya and Sierra Leon?
It's fair enough to debate military tactics, however acting like the United States is some kind of military outlier just isn't supported by the facts. On a per capita basis and as a percentage of GDP, the US military isn't all that remarkable in terms of expenditures.
Particularly when it's not even true. The Japanese wanted to surrender long before the Bomb was dropped, on condition that the Emperor remain in place.
The US insisted on unconditional surrender, prolonging the fighting and resulting in the atom bomb attacks, then ended up accepting the Japanese condition anyway.
As I said in my post, the essential Japanese condition for surrender was that the Emperor remain in place.
After rejecting that, thus prolonging the war and using the atom bombs, the US ended up keeping the Emperor in place (ie accepting the previous Japanese condition) anyway.
I may be wrong, but I believe the Japanese wanted the Emperor to remain in place and retain his power - the US was merely willing to not kill him as long as he remained a figurehead and publicly renounced any claims to authority.
Whatever may have eventually been negotiated, and perhaps nothing would ever have been agreed, it disproves the myth (used to justify the atom bombs) that only being nuked forced them to consider surrender.
The recording of the Emperor's surrender had to be sneaked out to NHK studios past a military coup in progress, so certainly not everyone was convinced.
Personally, I tend to believe that the nukes, the potential cost of defending against an invasion of the mainland by the US, and Russia's invasion made surrender look like the obvious choice, but remember that the initial plan for Pearl Harbor assumed a negotiated surrender with the US which, Japan hoped, would let them keep certain territories necessary to maintain supply lines for their colonial wars, which was what they really cared about.
Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation (the Japanese people, the Western world and the rest of Asia basically hated Japan's government by the end,) drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
Although, I also believe the main reason the US dropped the atomic bombs is that we had them, and therefore needed to justify the expense of making them by using them. It's likely that, without Japan's surrender, the US would have used nuclear weapons and invaded Japan at the same time.
> Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
That doesn't seem to be what you were originally arguing:
> It's odd how [Japan "fighting and fighting and fighting"] is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.
Since you're asking me what's in it, I assume you haven't read it. Why not do that now; it's not hard to find online.
After that, please read some basic WWII history before stringing this thread out any longer, if you're seriously unaware of anything but the atom bomb that didn't go Japan's way in 1945.
> The point is Japan's militarism combined with their utter over-the-top brutality and expansionist agenda.
Everything Japan learned about Imperialism it learned from the West, though. The Empire of Japan may have been brutal, but the Allies were hardly angels in comparison, or lacking in their own expansionist ideals.
> the Allies were hardly angels in comparison, or lacking in their own expansionist ideals
Well quite. How was Japan able to attack "the USA" (itself established by over-the-top brutality and expansionism) in the first place? Because the US had earlier overthrown, occupied, suppressed and militarised territories that are actually closer to Tokyo than Washington DC.
How dare some Asian country think it could colonise Asia, when Asia belongs to the US and Europe.
On HN, please don't react by going into a rage when someone else says a terrible thing. It does no good and only pulls us further into a downward spiral.
Are you saying ISIS should also be left alone and America not try to stop them
Absolutely yes, I'll say that. ISIS was created by the US bumbling about in Iraq, just like al Queda before it was created by the US intriguing in Afghanistan. But I don't expect the US will ever learn that bombs are the clumsiest of tools for shaping human history.
> The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson.
Looks like your perception of history is... a little bit skewed.
The US dropped more bombs on North Korea than we dropped on all of Europe and Japan during WWII. Proxy wars between superpowers never work out well for the actual people affected, and we should not be so forgetful of that.
Number of Americans killed in the Korean War: 36,000
Number of Americans wounded in the Korean War: 105,000
Number of South Koreans killed in the Korean War: 415,000
Number of South Koreans wounded in the Korean War: 429,000
Estimated number of Chinese and North Koreans killed in the Korean War: 1,500,00013
I would like to hear more from historians as to what would have happened had the war never occurred. My guess is a united Korea would be in line as a periphery of China with their level of technology... with Kim Il Sung and his family long gone and irrelevant.
I would also like to add that Americans know nothing of modern war never actually having had to live through it or having to deal with its consequences on their livelihoods, economy, or psychology. War for Americans is stuff that happens to other people... where they send oblivious young men to fight who are usually forgotten as soon as they are sent off to protect "freedom".
In a recent talk by Chomsky, he described US Air Force literature or rather documentation of the Korean conflict. Apparently the bombing was so thorough, they ran out of targets in North Korea. Not only military, but infrastructure and cities as well, as I recall. One of the impressive things about post '53 North Korea is that they did a complete rebuild.
There was a lot of pressure from the operations level to expand bombing into China, which tactically made a lot of sense; NK and Chinese MiGs retreated across the Yalu River each night and there were plenty of worthwhile targets such as supply dumps and routes.
However the JCS denied all such requests and remarkably there were only two or three violations during the entire war, such as the August 1950 strafing-attack on Antung airfield. The USA offered compensation afterwards despite that being the home of over 100 MiG-15s engaged in the war.
This is a terrifying manifestation of what technology makes trivially possible. This device:
* Logs every app and web page that you open.
* Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files.
* Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on the device that took them, while government-approved files can be shared freely.)
It would seem other tools will fix that "loophole".... The first is a piece of software called “Red Flag.” It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.
I would think opening the camera and taking a picture of another tablet would draw suspicion.
So, basically Android? Except, you don't get shot in the back.
With Android, it automatically syncs Contacts and photos to the "Cloud", unless you disable it. But, you cannot do it 100%, because it's turn on by default when you first sign in. Also, it's not a secret that Google logs your locations history.
As an aside, not all Android ROMs operate in that way. I'm currently using OmniROM with microG, and none of my information is linked to a Google account (specifically on this phone). All of my contacts and calendar are synced with my NextCloud server using DAVDroid, and I use AOSP or other FDroid-approved apps to access my email, contacts and calendar.
Now, all of that being said that's not to say that the current state of affairs is good (and there's still plenty of other problems) but it's disingenuous to ignore that you have a choice with Android and you don't in North Korea.
You have a choice here if you're tech savy and a ROM is available for your specific baseband. I've so far been unlucky with my S6 because I have a rather obscure baseband.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near as bad as living in NK, but the "open" option is not at all known or available to what I'd estimate at 95+% of the population, and many fewer will actually use it.
Don't get me wrong, the "open" option is complete shit at the moment. The fact that Replicant (and _actually_ free Android distribution) supports so few devices (and has so many caveats) is horrifying. There is effectively no way to use a modern smartphone and also exercise your software freedoms.
I don't fully understand that this comment is downvoted. He has a point there. We are all being tracked, just see your history [1] on the google website.
It tracks the websites you've visited, the video's you've watched, music I've played, things I've searched, App's I've used (Camera for example), directions I've searched (google maps), ads I've seen, cards in my feed (google now), my location history (actually very cool and very scary)... There are probably a LOT more metadata they have on me that I don't know
I mean, they have a LOT of my data, they know probably more about me that I know about myself.
Of course we aren't blocked for using any apps or viewing files, but they know that we are using and viewing the apps/files. I think it's in their best interests not to block anything, as this way they get a lot of information they otherwise would not get.
You can compare the "my activity" with "Trace Viewer". It's just a matter of perspective. Don't get me wrong, I don't approve the NK way of blocking everything, but the tracking of the data happens in the West already too and we just "accept" it.
The difference being that an informed Android user can disable all that logging, or at the very least prevent it being relayed to Google. I don't even have a Google account yet have four fully-functional Android devices nearby.
The penalty for attempting that with the North Korean tablet is going to be rather more severe than "can't say OK Google to do a web search".
I don't disagree with you, but i think that technically we're still trusting Google to not collect it anymore. I don't see it anything other than "Please google do not track this". Are we able to verify 100% that data is still not being collected?
A really weird moment for me was when I took away the ability from my phone to access my microphone from all apps, and yet when I say "Ok Google" the "Google" App opens up and then tries to ask me for Microphone access. I'm running an LG G5 with all stock Android and updates installed. It's a little creepy that an app with no access to my Mic can ask for said access when I say something to my Mic. My guess is the "Ok Google" functionality is at the OS level and not at the App level.
that's actually an optimization it seems, at the processor level there is a low power keyword listener for "Ok, Google" but it just fires the app it doesn't get anything more since you didn't grant it mic access.
A much crazier permission is phone access on Android. I recently noticed Facebook's Messenger had been uploading my call logs without ever mentioning it to me. Only realized when it recommended I call a contact back despite me not using messenger to call them - it saw the call in the phone's history and matched it against its database.
Keep in mind that you're comparing an oppressive regime with... android. The open source phone operating system. And you think this is a sensible comparison?
There is a difference between opt in and getting yourself and your immediate family killed in the process of opting out. You can also install custom ROMs, or just use android without the google apps and not worry about any of this. You can do this in like an hour. If you're stuck in North Korea, there is damned little you can do other than get shot for sending a text message about it (if that is even possible). Which is what we should be discussing here.
So instead of a potentially interesting thread about this device, what it (supposedly) does, how it compares to tech or practices here, we should have another all-been-said-before-1000-times discussion re-stating the boringly obvious about how grim life is in NK?
This comment thread isn't about any kind of NK tech. It's another all-been-said-before-1000-times discussion re-stating the boringly obvious about how Google is evil.
He has a point but "So, basically Android?" is a bit over the top.
Also note that unlike North Korean tablets, your own link has the "Delete Activity By" and "Activity Controls" tabs that allow you to remove collected data or disable its ongoing collection.
Google gives you at least some measure of control, North Korea does not. As such I don't think these are really comparable.
Not sure why you single out Android since most "modern" commercial OS send data home in order to develop predictions about it's user. In the western world, it's called assistance. Android/Google at least give you a hint and some control over what kind of information is being collected.
And am I reading this article correctly when it say the Trace Viewer app is visible to the user, so they can see all this logging? That's the most terrifying bit.
If suppressing certain behaviour is the goal then the victim has to be informed somehow whether it is a beating after the behaviour is discovered or a notice beforehand.
That doesn't read much different from a security/DRM feature list of the latest Apple, Google or Microsoft operating systems. I'm sure the North Korean government also only has the best of intentions for the safety of their people ;)
In that it wasn't as such... but it was also totally understandable.
To use a German example: I don't think anyone would argue that the firebombing of Dresden was moral. It was effective... but that's not the same thing.
Of course... this is war we are talking about. So, morality is already about shades of grey.
How can you even say that when you are replying to a comment talking about totalitarian regimes like nazi germany? This is one of those horrible "im more cartoonishly pessimistic ergo realistic than you" internet ideas.
Can you really maintain such ignorance in the face of the political reality, that governments gain no powers from the ether but rather - directly - from the support of their civilian populations? Are you stupid, or just young and haven't gotten to that part in civics lessons yet?
Perhaps in your weathered age you've heard of and maybe even read the Declaration of Independence (in the case of the USA)?
"According to the Declaration of Independence, the government gets its power to govern from the people that it governs. As the Declaration says, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Whats unsubstantive about their point of view that the people are responsible for their governments?
This is a widely accepted truth, throughout history and international law - so while I do agree that the poster you're warning is a bit rude, I don't agree that their position is unsubstantive, one bit. I can understand their exasperation at the many claims that "governments can just get away with whatever they want to do because the people are powerless anyway."
There are many in the HN crowd who would like to see civilisation improve itself for the better - failing to take responsibility for ones government and its crimes against humanity is not going to produce that result. I would urge you to reduce your comment to pointing out the posters' rudeness - and remove your tacit censorship of their, very valid, point.
On HN that point is unsubstantive because it's generic. We've learned from long experience that generic ideological discussions go nowhere interesting. Worse, users compensate for the inability to say anything new or interesting by fulminating, which leads to rants, incivility, and flamewars. That's how you get to arguments that population X deserved atrocity Y in one or two hops, and then outraged responses and outraged responses to outraged responses.
It's quite a reliable effect, which is why we're so clear about asking people not to do it.
Seems to me that its something that should be written up somewhere, since it is such valuable knowledge. I mean, I've read the posting guidelines, but your succinct description of the effect is far more useful.
However, it has to be stated that the entire basis of American society started with the Declaration of Independence, which frames the argument in entirely substantive terms leading to the conclusion that there is no government without its people - thus the people are responsible for their government whether they like it or not.
I feel that this point is valid in this conversation, because there is most definitely groupthink involved in not taking any responsibility, whatsoever, for ones governments' actions. Especially in the HN crowd, this is a vital issue and one that is no doubt bound to create diversion. But, doesn't that mean we need to continue the discussion, not censor it?
If you wage war on foreign nations, and allow your government to do so, then you shouldn't be so surprised when it comes back to roost. No, the WTC attacks were not justified. But they were definitely to be expected, given the carnage around the world that the USA has been propagating now, for 80 years. When your nation maintains its moral authority to indiscriminately wage war around the world, you should not be surprised when that war comes to your footstep.
Definitely puts a dent in the distributable flash drive plan that many activists have been working on implementing. Unless some kind of self signing flaw is discovered and exploited seems unlikely subversive media will be as widely distributed.
Reading this the engineer in me was impressed at their thoroughness. I believe it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking of the North Korean government as grossly incompetent, and this isn't necessarily true. If these assumptions extend to Western leaders, it could one day have a disastrous result.
I do wonder where they source the talent and expertise with these platforms necessary to pull something like this off. I understand that's kind of a naive question—any functional state has sufficient resources to solve such problems for itself—but one does wonder. I can only assume there was extensive Chinese help. They definitely have the critical mass of engineering ecosystem for that sort of endeavour.
If you think about, the NSA, GCHQ, etc probably run similar software on their own devices to monitor employees and be able to trace back where any leaks came from. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a commercial company that sells this type of software.
> I wouldn't be surprised if there is a commercial company that sells this type of software.
BlueCoat. They're called BlueCoat. As an aside, a subdivision of Intel actually runs the internet filters for some middle eastern country (due to some chain of acquisitions). Isn't that great.
BlueCoat is used in private industry for security / DLP, certainly, but IC agencies have their own comprehensive systems in place to ensure sensitive data access is highly controlled and audited.
It would probably be a massive scandal if they were not protecting their endpoints and networks in any way they feasibly could, due to the sensitivity of the information being handled.
No. They killed they intellectual elite and added a system in place to make sure they will never grow a new one.
The reality is way worst: some company from our countries accepted a contract with NK and built that for them.
I know that my country, France, is actually pretty famous for their surveillance technology. We have companies such as Amesys that have been caught blatantly selling huge systems for spying on entire countries. Nobody bats an eye because they make banks.
So the UK, Israel, the US or France probably made the tablet. Knowingly.
The people who say "I could build that app in a weekend".. You know some of them are actually right? What they maybe couldn't do is get it 100% as polished, and they may lack the marketing skills to make it go big, or the VC connections, or any other important factor.
My point is that it doesn't take that much manpower to build a working system, so it should be well within North Koreas reach. That their system is less polished matters little, as would-be competitors don't have access. And building their own system from scratch has a killer feature: None of the data will be slurped up by the US or its megacorps.
Funny thing capitalism, I have a more robust version of this on my work PC (seriously, makes this look amateurish). Except of course I have the "choice" to not accept it and go work for someone else.
I think the idea is that most big tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc) generally have custom spyware built into the hardware they distribute to employees.
You highlight choice like you're being sarcastic, but is there anything that stops you from looking for a job? If it's a big deal to you you'll make it a priority, if it's not a big deal to you you'll stay where you are.
The North Korean developers who worked on this must be privileged beings with access to the open Internet. I can't imagine developing such a complex system without documentation and references.
There is good chance it's actually developed by developers seating somewhere in Bay Area working for some VC-funded company with inconspicuous name.
After all there is a lot of commercial surveillance software that sold to authoritarian regimes. Of course that doesn't mean someone work directly with NK.
I doubt it. They would be too scared of implemented backdoors. They might outsource some parts, maybe to china or india, but they will likely assembly it in NK - to have full control over it.
They're likely a test-bed for a prototype surveillance system already being developed and/or deployed by the Silicon Valley of the West for Western regimes and dictatorships.
edit: Even simple surveillance features like file tagging are already deployed within the US, and is how the FBI claims to track stolen documents to Chinese hackers. Although, the system the FBI uses to track document content traversing the internet is likely quite a bit more sophisticated. The prototype system can even be a rootkit spying system used by corporations to spy on their employees and/or their consumers and customers.
The chain of sales is almost certainly from Silicon Valley, to a Chinese front, to North Korea or [ SV and China ] to North Korea. SV, US, and China work closely together in regards to surveillance, the only real difference is their rhetoric and how they sell it to their citizens.
The company called Facebook has already implemented features within their services to allow censorship, control, targeted* and mass propaganda efforts, monitoring and surveillance, etc... on targeted* and mass user bases, and is already selling these features to regimes for access to their citizens, and to provide regimes in-depth surveillance access to the social networks. Including, the regime apparatus within the US such as FBI, CIA, etc... Facebook is an "intelligence" product sold both to the US and to other nations. Their company has people who were high executive officers in the "intelligence" and surveillance apparatus in the US (CIA, etc...).
It's not the problem of whether North Korea is implementing these features, as North Korea did not create anything original but rather see's these features already being provided. The problem that Silicon Valley and the US has is that companies (err... countries) like North Korea are implementing (or have implemented) it before their own companies have and that diminishes their capacity to claim IP to related implementations.
* targeted: meaning they can target individuals, and various sizes of groups based on sophisticated and targeted profiling. Trump's campaign used this to divide and conquer the 2016 election.
The university in their capital, which teaches CS, allegedly has access to the open internet via China (although it is worth noting that they are only likely to allow access for "elites" there such as children of Party members).
It would be illegal in many countries. E.G: france law consider that an employer can't watch private documents even when opened by an employee, during working hours, using the company equipment.
But this way, employee can't even open private documents! Which makes transgression impossible. Any document that can be opened is a company document, which can be watched.
It would mean that any document sent by a client or a peer would need pre-approval which would make you very, very improductive. In NK, you can get away with it because you have basically no competition. In our countries, the company doing so, unless everybody is doing the same (or only if secrecy/security is part of the value of it's business) would make it completly uncompetitive.
Weirdly, I actually liked the part where you could browse through the data the device tracked. I wish I could do this on normal Android, because I know I am being tracked by Google and other apps but I have no way of knowing what they actually recorded.
There's a positive project for the CIA/NSA. Flood the North Korean market with smuggled privacy protected versions of the same model of tablet that work on the DPRK network. And maybe a worm that fixes the other tablets.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadReading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.
WhatsApp can't defend against screenshots on your device. The article states -
It runs in the background and takes a screenshot every time the user opens an app.
EDIT: Active spying might be pushing it too far, but backdoors? It wouldn't surprise me to learn my hardware has a few backdoors.
Knowing what I know of enterprise coding standards, the likelihood is greater that it is being abused than it isn't.
As horrible as it is, the censorship provides a means of protection for the end user. In the US we just let people access things, and then prosecute/persecute, them accordingly.
With the above said-- I'd still prefer to be in the US to the DPRK any day of the week, month, year, or century.
There was a time when a person could go online to look up recipes or shop for backpacks [2] without thinking twice about it. Not anymore, Panoptes has eyes on us all. Our minds know this, and in turn, our behavior changes.
I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, and living under the DPRK is absolutely worse than NSA surveillance. But, there are unseen repercussions to the death of privacy that are often overlooked, or downplayed. Ahead of everything else, the NSA and the DPRK control our devices by controlling us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...
Here's one obvious way: the Norks "Viewer" app shows you what they've collected on you which is itself a form of control (though it could be used to hunt for blind spots). The NSA doesn't really want you to know what they know or how they learnt it.
Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.
You probably haven't been paying attention, but the US Gov't make dissidents disappear all the time. They just do it with a velvet glove on, whereas we're more accustomed to complaining about/being distracted by the heavier hand represented by the propaganda against North Korea.
The US gov't is not as innocent as you might think when it comes to handling dissidents. Its just very, very good at maintaining the facade that its all done 'for the greater good of the people of the United States and its possessors'. The USA is, after all, a PR-first nation.
This could be a story about Hilter and people would find a way to engage in moral relativism.
It makes not one iota of difference if the human lives we improve are in Kaesong, North Korean, or Jackson, Indiana. Does it? Then, start at home: get rid of the NSA. Close Guantanomo. Cancel privatized prison systems that incarcerate more prisoners in the world than any other nation.
See "Whataboutism"
that's the poetic point
"All that glisters is not gold— Often have you heard that told. Many a man his life hath sold But my outside to behold. Gilded tombs do worms enfold."
I think we should educate each generation on the influence of power on people, the benefits and drawbacks of democracy, care for one's fellow man, the societal structure of capitalism, among other things.
Edit: preferably via Priestly, Orwell, Wilde, Bernard Shaw and H.G Wells :)
What's interesting about total authoritarianism is that it never stems from one person but actually depends on a whole large group of people to perpetuate the social order that makes it possible. Authoritarianism is as much a collective phenomenon as the maintaining of free elections in free countries. Once organized in a certain way, people seem to maintain that inertia of organization no matter who or what is served by that mode, interrupted in their organizational mode by revolutions that shift societies from track to track.
PS Thank you from the recommendations. I've tried some of those and couldn't get in to them. Will try again maybe it's the right time.
PSS > However, it does not perform the role you suggest.
I think that depends on who's looking, and at what. The OP is what really got me. Can't imagine having an app called "Trace Viewer" on my phone. Really brought me in to that day to day. And maybe my perspective on NK is different because I was born in the Soviet Union, and despite leaving at age 5, that has been the backdrop to my entire life.
The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying.
That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.
The South also expect unification to happen one day, it not being a hostile takeover.
A united Korea with nuclear weapons would be deserved of veto rights at the U.N. and I don't believe the U.S. wants someone else at the top table. So a war is very much being fought, Korea can't be allowed to be united!!!
It is easy to condemn the crazy Kim guy and slag off North Korea but I think that we are the ones propagandised against as much as them. In all my decades of watching and reading the news I have not once been told what the goals of the respective sides are regarding unification. None of these newsreaders have told me the implications of a united Korea either. I wonder if the U.S. is at war to keep Korea divided, as opposed to keeping their South Korean buddies safe from those crazies up North.
I also think that North Korea is okay to censor out capitalism in its many advertised forms from the web since they are very much under siege/at war with the U.S.A. Would you want your people to be using electronic devices that the CIA could 'Arab Spring' a faux revolution from? Would you want your population drowning in fake news? Is it really that bad to just ban the mainstream media?!? To Ad-Block everything, for everyone? Is access to Facebook or being able to tweet now a human right?
If the international community wanted to resolve North Korea it could be simple - unification - let Korea become a united country with the U.S. taking their tanks out, sorting out their issues by themselves with those pesky nukes swapped for a top seat at the U.N.
Edit: After reading the wikipedia article on Korea reunification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_reunification), I start to wonder why both countries are not actively pursuing this goal that is obviously beneficial to both now. Maybe some details are missing from the wiki article?
> And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a U.S. apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate.
Consider the response of white americans in the US after the Imperial Japanese bombed a military force in Pearl Harbor, with almost zero civilian casualties. It quickly became common sentiment in the US to respond by ridding the world of the "yellow scourge" after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson. They didn't drop it on the military which was massed in the southern parts of Japan, the US intentionally dropped TWO ATOMIC bombs on cities full of civilians!
How do they expect the North Koreans to just be appeased by their "apology"? It's crazy, crazy, crazy on the part of the US as well. It's actually insanity.
Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Wow, Its fascinating, the mental gymnastics people perform to rationalise the atrocities their side perpetrates while in the same breath deploring the atrocities committed by the other side.
If they didn't they wouldn't paint with such a broad brush.
You better not take that away, because what defines you if you do?
Wow, this is sounding terrifyingly similar to how suicide bombers justify their targeting of civilians. It's sad to see how easy it is for people who didn't grow up under the dogma of fundamentalist religion can still come to this way of thinking.
My friend, I implore you to think really hard about what you said, and take the time to recalibrate your moral compass. I can only hope that at some point in the future, you'll come to think that, war or not, enemy or not, killing civilians is bad. There is no shade of grey. It's only bad.
(Hint: its not banks..)
Governments and societies aren't 1-1 mappings of each other. You shouldn't mistake one as the other. And even if you do, it still doesn't take much thinking to ask: What about children?
As someone who isn't from America (and actually was born in a country which was subsequently bombed by America during peace time) I've never understood this idea that America is somehow justified in the belief that they are the moral arbiters of the world.
Who put you in charge? If the answer involves "we have a big military" it's interesting that a country obsessed with the concept of freedom is so willing fall back on "empire" when it's convenient. I guess Americans are still British at heart.
> Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.
This sentence made my blood boil. How fucking dare you. America bombing civilian residences in order to handle other country's civil wars is not helping anyone. Fuck you.
> The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.
Interesting rhetoric, given that America spends half a fucking TRILLION dollars a year on the military.
How do you propose we win a war against people like that?
It took not one, but TWO atomic bombs to force a surrender. Tokyo was prepared to fight to the last person. The only way to win that war was to bomb them into oblivion. That was a choice the Japanese made. The Japanese military engaged in unimaginable atrocities and despite being nearly annihilated militarily, they continued to fight. How do you stop an empire with absolute zero regard for humanity? The Japanese has plenty of opportunities to surrender but they kept fighting and fighting and fighting.
As far as America's military budget, the raw numbers are irrelevant, what is relevant is percentage of GDP. The US ranks 11th in the world at 3.3% with 18 countries at 2% or higher. So the "half a trillion" hyperbole is silly. The US also spends a half trillion on government-funded R&D spending and spends a higher percentage (and raw amount) than the entire EU. The US also is ranked number 2 in spending on renewable energy. The US also spends more on swimming pools, airports, and education than any other country. They spend more in health care than anyone else as well.
My point, citing half a trillion as some kind of outrageous amount is ridiculous given the US GDP is $18 TRILLION per year. The US also ranks 18th in the world on per capita GDP behind such countries such as Luxembourg, Ireland, Monaco and Brunei.
The US military is highly visible and obviously subject to a lot of criticism, but how many people talk about the French Army's frequent and continual adventures in Africa? France has forward deployed troops all across sub-Saharan Africa. How about the British Army in the Baltics and Poland? The British Army in Kenya and Sierra Leon?
It's fair enough to debate military tactics, however acting like the United States is some kind of military outlier just isn't supported by the facts. On a per capita basis and as a percentage of GDP, the US military isn't all that remarkable in terms of expenditures.
It's odd how this is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.
The US insisted on unconditional surrender, prolonging the fighting and resulting in the atom bomb attacks, then ended up accepting the Japanese condition anyway.
What?? Japan was forced to accept Allies' condition.
After rejecting that, thus prolonging the war and using the atom bombs, the US ended up keeping the Emperor in place (ie accepting the previous Japanese condition) anyway.
Personally, I tend to believe that the nukes, the potential cost of defending against an invasion of the mainland by the US, and Russia's invasion made surrender look like the obvious choice, but remember that the initial plan for Pearl Harbor assumed a negotiated surrender with the US which, Japan hoped, would let them keep certain territories necessary to maintain supply lines for their colonial wars, which was what they really cared about.
Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation (the Japanese people, the Western world and the rest of Asia basically hated Japan's government by the end,) drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
Although, I also believe the main reason the US dropped the atomic bombs is that we had them, and therefore needed to justify the expense of making them by using them. It's likely that, without Japan's surrender, the US would have used nuclear weapons and invaded Japan at the same time.
That doesn't seem to be what you were originally arguing:
> It's odd how [Japan "fighting and fighting and fighting"] is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.
How is this a myth if nukes were mentioned in emperor's address as a reason to surrender?
Because, as I've said, at least twice, they were already considering surrender even before the atomic bombs were dropped.
After that, please read some basic WWII history before stringing this thread out any longer, if you're seriously unaware of anything but the atom bomb that didn't go Japan's way in 1945.
That's not the point, obviously. The point is Japan's militarism combined with their utter over-the-top brutality and expansionist agenda.
Everything Japan learned about Imperialism it learned from the West, though. The Empire of Japan may have been brutal, but the Allies were hardly angels in comparison, or lacking in their own expansionist ideals.
Well quite. How was Japan able to attack "the USA" (itself established by over-the-top brutality and expansionism) in the first place? Because the US had earlier overthrown, occupied, suppressed and militarised territories that are actually closer to Tokyo than Washington DC.
How dare some Asian country think it could colonise Asia, when Asia belongs to the US and Europe.
Absolutely yes, I'll say that. ISIS was created by the US bumbling about in Iraq, just like al Queda before it was created by the US intriguing in Afghanistan. But I don't expect the US will ever learn that bombs are the clumsiest of tools for shaping human history.
Looks like your perception of history is... a little bit skewed.
Number of Americans killed in the Korean War: 36,000
Number of Americans wounded in the Korean War: 105,000
Number of South Koreans killed in the Korean War: 415,000
Number of South Koreans wounded in the Korean War: 429,000
Estimated number of Chinese and North Koreans killed in the Korean War: 1,500,00013
I would like to hear more from historians as to what would have happened had the war never occurred. My guess is a united Korea would be in line as a periphery of China with their level of technology... with Kim Il Sung and his family long gone and irrelevant.
I would also like to add that Americans know nothing of modern war never actually having had to live through it or having to deal with its consequences on their livelihoods, economy, or psychology. War for Americans is stuff that happens to other people... where they send oblivious young men to fight who are usually forgotten as soon as they are sent off to protect "freedom".
However the JCS denied all such requests and remarkably there were only two or three violations during the entire war, such as the August 1950 strafing-attack on Antung airfield. The USA offered compensation afterwards despite that being the home of over 100 MiG-15s engaged in the war.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre
* Logs every app and web page that you open.
* Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files.
* Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on the device that took them, while government-approved files can be shared freely.)
Among other things. Yikes.
I would think opening the camera and taking a picture of another tablet would draw suspicion.
Now, all of that being said that's not to say that the current state of affairs is good (and there's still plenty of other problems) but it's disingenuous to ignore that you have a choice with Android and you don't in North Korea.
I'm not saying it's anywhere near as bad as living in NK, but the "open" option is not at all known or available to what I'd estimate at 95+% of the population, and many fewer will actually use it.
It tracks the websites you've visited, the video's you've watched, music I've played, things I've searched, App's I've used (Camera for example), directions I've searched (google maps), ads I've seen, cards in my feed (google now), my location history (actually very cool and very scary)... There are probably a LOT more metadata they have on me that I don't know
I mean, they have a LOT of my data, they know probably more about me that I know about myself.
Of course we aren't blocked for using any apps or viewing files, but they know that we are using and viewing the apps/files. I think it's in their best interests not to block anything, as this way they get a lot of information they otherwise would not get.
You can compare the "my activity" with "Trace Viewer". It's just a matter of perspective. Don't get me wrong, I don't approve the NK way of blocking everything, but the tracking of the data happens in the West already too and we just "accept" it.
[1] https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity
The penalty for attempting that with the North Korean tablet is going to be rather more severe than "can't say OK Google to do a web search".
A much crazier permission is phone access on Android. I recently noticed Facebook's Messenger had been uploading my call logs without ever mentioning it to me. Only realized when it recommended I call a contact back despite me not using messenger to call them - it saw the call in the phone's history and matched it against its database.
Also note that unlike North Korean tablets, your own link has the "Delete Activity By" and "Activity Controls" tabs that allow you to remove collected data or disable its ongoing collection.
Google gives you at least some measure of control, North Korea does not. As such I don't think these are really comparable.
To use a German example: I don't think anyone would argue that the firebombing of Dresden was moral. It was effective... but that's not the same thing.
Of course... this is war we are talking about. So, morality is already about shades of grey.
"According to the Declaration of Independence, the government gets its power to govern from the people that it governs. As the Declaration says, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
First, this is a bannable offense on Hacker News. Please don't do it again.
Second, please stop posting unsubstantive comments on inflammatory subjects. We don't want those here.
This is a widely accepted truth, throughout history and international law - so while I do agree that the poster you're warning is a bit rude, I don't agree that their position is unsubstantive, one bit. I can understand their exasperation at the many claims that "governments can just get away with whatever they want to do because the people are powerless anyway."
There are many in the HN crowd who would like to see civilisation improve itself for the better - failing to take responsibility for ones government and its crimes against humanity is not going to produce that result. I would urge you to reduce your comment to pointing out the posters' rudeness - and remove your tacit censorship of their, very valid, point.
It's quite a reliable effect, which is why we're so clear about asking people not to do it.
However, it has to be stated that the entire basis of American society started with the Declaration of Independence, which frames the argument in entirely substantive terms leading to the conclusion that there is no government without its people - thus the people are responsible for their government whether they like it or not.
I feel that this point is valid in this conversation, because there is most definitely groupthink involved in not taking any responsibility, whatsoever, for ones governments' actions. Especially in the HN crowd, this is a vital issue and one that is no doubt bound to create diversion. But, doesn't that mean we need to continue the discussion, not censor it?
> Civilians are responsible for their governments.
So the attack on the WTC was justified in your opinion?
BlueCoat. They're called BlueCoat. As an aside, a subdivision of Intel actually runs the internet filters for some middle eastern country (due to some chain of acquisitions). Isn't that great.
The reality is way worst: some company from our countries accepted a contract with NK and built that for them.
I know that my country, France, is actually pretty famous for their surveillance technology. We have companies such as Amesys that have been caught blatantly selling huge systems for spying on entire countries. Nobody bats an eye because they make banks.
So the UK, Israel, the US or France probably made the tablet. Knowingly.
I'd be worried about getting free rootkit updates from the CIA and UK spooks.
But then again, commerce can make strange bedfellows.
My point is that it doesn't take that much manpower to build a working system, so it should be well within North Koreas reach. That their system is less polished matters little, as would-be competitors don't have access. And building their own system from scratch has a killer feature: None of the data will be slurped up by the US or its megacorps.
Why do you complain about the company dumping waste in your backyard - just move to a nicer neighbourhood.
Maybe they even hang out in Stack Overflow...
After all there is a lot of commercial surveillance software that sold to authoritarian regimes. Of course that doesn't mean someone work directly with NK.
edit: Even simple surveillance features like file tagging are already deployed within the US, and is how the FBI claims to track stolen documents to Chinese hackers. Although, the system the FBI uses to track document content traversing the internet is likely quite a bit more sophisticated. The prototype system can even be a rootkit spying system used by corporations to spy on their employees and/or their consumers and customers.
The chain of sales is almost certainly from Silicon Valley, to a Chinese front, to North Korea or [ SV and China ] to North Korea. SV, US, and China work closely together in regards to surveillance, the only real difference is their rhetoric and how they sell it to their citizens.
It's not the problem of whether North Korea is implementing these features, as North Korea did not create anything original but rather see's these features already being provided. The problem that Silicon Valley and the US has is that companies (err... countries) like North Korea are implementing (or have implemented) it before their own companies have and that diminishes their capacity to claim IP to related implementations.
* targeted: meaning they can target individuals, and various sizes of groups based on sophisticated and targeted profiling. Trump's campaign used this to divide and conquer the 2016 election.
They should just come with this system to open market, make a company that is worth billions from the start, because every BigCo would love to buy.
They have all kinds of embedded Windows and Linux there, but they have more holes than Swiss cheese.
For white-collar workers you can integrate this with e-mail and workflow solutions, needs additional work but will make that company worth $10B.
Smartphones are so bad.
Tricks or truth, reality or fiction. What make your phone?