I remember watching the Vice doco on North Korea on a day I was experiencing a particularly nasty brand of hangover. The unsettling footage of the hermit country certainly didn’t help either.
What I found especially amusing about the painfully orchestrated tour given to the American guests and the university computer lab they were taken to. They were quickly ushered over to the one student who knew anything about computers while the others were likely given instructions to simply appear to know what they were doing. But they didn’t do a very good job of it, and I know this because the camera shows a close-up shot of one of the students moving his mouse around on the Google home screen and nothing more. That, my friends, is textbook internet suppression.
While the country may not have access to the absolute banquet of content that we lucky Australians do, they do have access to their very own delicious platter of websites and let me tell you, they are absolutely dripping with goodness. All 28 pages of them.
Yup, 28 pages of highly moderated communist delight await you thanks to a Reddit post revealing what appears to be an accidental opening of the North Korean server that houses all of the details for countries official domain, .kp. The post reads:
“On Sept 19, 2016 at approximately 10:00PM (PST), one of North Korea’s top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers. This allows anyone who performs an AXFR (zone transfer) request to the country’s ns2.kptc.kp nameserver can get a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data. This was detected by the TL;DR Project – an effort to attempt zone transfers against all top level domain (TLD) nameservers every two hours and keep a running Github repo with the resulting data. This data gives us a better picture of North Korea’s domains and top level DNS.”
Most of the sites are now down, but luckily, the denizens of Reddit got a few screenshots. Here are 2 of our favourites.
friend.com.kp – What appears to be a social media network. We were able to get onto this one and use Chrome‘s translate feature to reveal the madness.
Please note the line, “Here are a powerful source of all victories”. Terrifying.
This is the Kim Il Sung University landing page featuring a “Theses [SIC] on the Socialist education”.
Congratulations, you’ve just viewed 7.14% of the country’s internet. Isn’t it glorious?
Source: Gizmodo.
Photo: friend.com.kp.
