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North Korea Has Just 28 Websites (vice.com) 138

Posted by BeauHD from the very-small dept.
In September of 2014, NetCraft confirmed there to be over 1 billion websites on the world wide web. There are over 140 million .com and .net domains alone, as well as millions of websites for each country code top-level domain (ccTLD), such as .de for Germany and .cn for China. But in North Korea, the number of websites the country has registered for its top-level domain is in the double digits. Motherboard reports: On Tuesday, apparently by mistake, North Korea misconfigured its nameserver, essentially a list that holds information on all of the domains that exist for .kp, allowing anyone to query it and get the list. In other words, a snafu by North Korea's system administrators allowed anyone to ask the country's nameserver: "can I have all of your information on this domain?" and get an answer, giving everyone a peek into the strange world of North Korea's web. North Korea has only 28 registered domains, according to the leaked data. "We didn't think there was much in the way of internet resources in North Korea, and according to these leaked zone files, we were right," Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn, a company that monitors internet use and access around the world, told Motherboard. Some of the sites aren't reachable, perhaps because after Bryant discovered them, they are being deluged with traffic.
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North Korea Has Just 28 Websites More

North Korea Has Just 28 Websites

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  • Help Wanted (Score:5, Funny)

    by LifesABeach ( 234436 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:22PM (#52926969) Homepage
    System Administrator, North Korea. Prior SA left to spend more time with Ancestors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      To be honest, and when you look at the poor state of the country, I think 14 is a pretty decent number. I mean, that's just north of the number of domain names I own, so they're more prolific than me.

      That should count for something, no?

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:26PM (#52926989)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • North Korea is a hellhole. I don't care how many web sites they have. I do care about millions essentially enslaved and starved by that atrocious, autocratic government of the Kims.

          I don't think many people would disagree with you that it's a hellhole but things like this make it easier for people to understand. It's not easy to comprehend what it's like to live in a true, card carrying hell hole.

          • Re:Help Wanted (Score:5, Funny)

            by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:48PM (#52927145)

            Well, there is this:

            Pyongyang traffic girls http://www.pyongyangtrafficgir... [pyongyangt...cgirls.com]

          • Re:Help Wanted (Score:4, Informative)

            by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @11:29PM (#52928983)

            I don't think many people would disagree with you that it's a hellhole but things like this make it easier for people to understand. It's not easy to comprehend what it's like to live in a true, card carrying hell hole.

            There are a few hints available.

            Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag [theguardian.com]

            In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held. Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them. . . .

            Witnesses have described watching entire families being put in glass chambers and gassed. They are left to an agonising death while scientists take notes. The allegations offer the most shocking glimpse so far of Kim Jong-il's North Korean regime.

            Kwon Hyuk, who has changed his name, was the former military attaché at the North Korean Embassy in Beijing. He was also the chief of management at Camp 22. In the BBC's This World documentary, to be broadcast tonight, Hyuk claims he now wants the world to know what is happening.

            'I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber,' he said. 'The parents, son and and a daughter. The parents were vomiting and dying, but till the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.'

            Hyuk has drawn detailed diagrams of the gas chamber he saw. He said: 'The glass chamber is sealed airtight. It is 3.5 metres wide, 3m long and 2.2m high_ [There] is the injection tube going through the unit. Normally, a family sticks together and individual prisoners stand separately around the corners. Scientists observe the entire process from above, through the glass.'

            He explains how he had believed this treatment was justified. 'At the time I felt that they thoroughly deserved such a death. Because all of us were led to believe that all the bad things that were happening to North Korea were their fault; that we were poor, divided and not making progress as a country.

            'It would be a total lie for me to say I feel sympathetic about the children dying such a painful death. Under the society and the regime I was in at the time, I only felt that they were the enemies. So I felt no sympathy or pity for them at all.'

            His testimony is backed up by Soon Ok-lee, who was imprisoned for seven years. 'An officer ordered me to select 50 healthy female prisoners,' she said. 'One of the guards handed me a basket full of soaked cabbage, told me not to eat it but to give it to the 50 women. I gave them out and heard a scream from those who had eaten them. They were all screaming and vomiting blood. All who ate the cabbage leaves started violently vomiting blood and screaming with pain. It was hell. In less than 20 minutes they were quite dead.'

            Kim curses defectors’ families for three generations [thesundaytimes.co.uk]

            North Korea has ordered the “unconditional punishment” of three generations of the family of anyone escaping from the country and given border guards orders to shoot suspected fugitives on sight.

            Inside a North Korean prison camp: satellite analysis reveals prison life and death [telegraph.co.uk]

            Not much is known about Camp 25, but one thing is sure – the innocuous name given to this North Korean political prison camp does no justice to the human suffering that goes on within.

            • Yes, but this is so horrific it defies comprehension. I doubt many people have the appropriate sheer horror reaction to this as the mind protests us from reality to a certain degree. It's important to know it's happening and maybe it'll sink in. Meanwhile, if tou ad this to the story of the handful of probably mind numbingly useless website they have in their top level domain, available to the people, you start to see a picture and maybe feel it some of what it deserves.

        • sorry, we only regime change for money and/or power

        • Not THAT much worse than how the Sauds and their cronies treat their slaves, I mean, subjects, I mean, population. The main difference is probably that there's no oil in NKor.

      • I bet that your family isn't starving though. Nor, do they march to your orders. I could be wrong on that one.

    • Re:Help Wanted (Score:5, Funny)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:44PM (#52927123)

      "No country should need more than 28 websites"
      -- Bill Jong Gates

      • "No country should need more than 28 websites" -- Bill Jong Gates

        *throws chair*

        "I'm going to fucking kill that SysAdmin!"

        -- Steve Ballmer (former Microsoft meme champion, as of 20 minutes ago)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        Sounds like Bill Jong Gates and APK might have a lot in common...

  • Is it too much to ask that you name it correctly? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    That query is called a zone transfer. [wikipedia.org]

  • RIP sysadmin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:36PM (#52927067)

    I hear a position has opened up.

  • It's too depressing to read most of the time. And we never meet the heroic cool characters... Yet.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
      A good dystopian novel lacks heroic characters. Or at least they all get broken by big brother. Re-read 1984 as a reference. Fahrenheit 451 kinda sorta but I've always been a critic of the ending which seemed like a "how the fuck to finish this story" cop out.

    • The story of North Korea does indeed have some heroes to it!

      Lee Soon-ok [wikipedia.org]

      Kang Chol-hwan [wikipedia.org]

      An Hyuk [wikipedia.org]

      And plenty other survivors and escapees. Imagine what it would take to plan an escape from North Korea, and actually carry it out. Soon-ok and Chol-hwan served time in labor camps where they saw executions and human experimentation, and still had the stones to manage an escape knowing what horrible fate failure would get them. If that doesn't merit the label of hero, I don't know what would.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If your best idea of a hero is someone who runs away and leaves his mother and sister behind to pay for his defection, just to sit in comfort somewhere and spin stories for US politicians to exploit... then congrats. You truly are a notable person, no kidding...

        • If your best idea of a hero is someone who runs away and leaves his mother and sister behind to pay for his defection, just to sit in comfort somewhere and spin stories for US politicians to exploit... then congrats. You truly are a notable person, no kidding...

          Choose your propaganda carefully, my friend. You're implying that the N Korean authorities will make family members pay for the crime of escaping from that worker's paradise. That also implies those people were correct to try to escape, and aren't just making up stories, doesn't it? See what happens when you lie in both directions? You end up contradicting yourself in the same post.

  • Quality over Quantity (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But they are the best 28 web sites. Few ads, great approved information and very responsive.

  • Wait, so it is a big secret which publicly facing pages a country has registered? What is the point of making name servers black boxes and not having any way of know which names are registered other than to try them and see if they exist?

    • "the public" in this case is n. koreans. you foreign devils don't get any of their precious DNS

    • Re:Secret? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:59PM (#52927249)

      Because it's North Korea! And everything happening in there is supersecret and hence interesting. It's a bit like the inner workings of, say, the Freemasons. It's secret, it's alien, and hence it's interesting. If you could really see what it's like, you'd probably turn away, bored and uninterested. But because you can't just normally see it, it's interesting.

  • Does some one have the IP list?

  • How long it takes for any other country to launch these many websites. A nanosecond? Faster than the speed of light? xD

  • On second thought, North Korea is such a dystopian nightmare of human misery there is no humor to be had here.

    In North Korea nameserver... nope, not that either.

  • Such as:
    gloriousleader.kp becomes gloriousleader.com
    and the same for
    bountifulharvest.kp
    corruptwesternimperialistpigdogs.kp
    victoryisnear.kp
    weshallconquertheocean.kp
    and so on.

    I wouldn't like to be the owner of kp.com. Imagine the requests for sub-domains....

    • Do they have virtual hosts? Like sexy.gloriousleader.kp? To help him make his entire female population his concubines?

  • We have found them! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @04:56PM (#52927225)

    The only 28 pages on the internet you can visit without adblocker!

  • It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: North Korea is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered North Korea community when IDC confirmed that North Korea nuke share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that North Korea has lost more nuke share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. North Korea is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exempl

  • Hey Dan, ready for that public hanging of political prisoners? I'm just finishing up here with my new kayaking friends.

    Kayaking friends on your computer?

    Dan: Yeah, I just got North Korea online.

    Sounds great. Listen, I can't go to the public executions today.

    WHAT?

    First my kids have to go to the library to read books on how great Our Leader is. Then I have to stand on a street corner and yell revolutionary slogans at complete strangers. And I have to contact my mother; she's making kayaks in a slave

  • America has just 6 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @05:22PM (#52927385)
    Pornhub, Redtube, xhamster, amazon, google, facebook... that's it right?
    • A few years ago I was responsible for the company proxy server. We blocked porn obviously, but over 80% of the traffic was just a few sites - Google, Facebook, the local real estate site, and the local online news etc.

  • 12 are porn sites (Score:3)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @05:22PM (#52927387)
    One is for weather, one for shopping, four movie sites, 10 are news/propaganda and the rest are porn.
  • More worrying is that North Koreans have only access to these 28 sites.

  • Wow, such selection. Are any of them porn sites?

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