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North Korea Introduces 'Secure' E-mail
An anonymous reader sent in a strange little story running over at ZD that discusses North Korea's new secure email system. There's a lot of strange bits in there about trained North Korean hackers, and the fact that North Korea's news agency is hosted in Japan.
http://www.kcna.co.jp
Pretty funny. A lot of stories like, "Ugandan ambassador hails Korean workers". Even some news in Spanish (I wonder if that's for Cuban benefit.)
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It remains illegal for any South Koreans to email their northern neighbours without government permission.
I wonder how strict they are about this? How could you possibly enforce a rule like this, considering the amount of wired households in S.K.
What if someone in N.K sends an email to an email on your mail server which doesn't exist, and your server happily sends out something along the lines of 'this address does not exist'. Are you liable then?
Because they can't risk having such a honeypot inside the DMZ (heh, check out how the computer argot just got completely flipped back upon itself). You don't want those loyal Party North Koreans (who would run such a service) allowing even the chance of Southern/US propaganda entering the North.
Better to isolate it outside and communicate with it securely. Would any self-respecting BOFH run his tyrannical regime er network any other way (bad haircut optioal)?
Also note that a segement of Korean-Japanese (who are descendent from the bad ol' days when the Penninsula was a colony) still see the North Korean regime as the One True way (so getting help to run Il-Jong's isn't too hard). Interesting article on the subject can be found in this JE. It's about an American's vacation into the North. Fascinating.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Hear in North Korea we have bit of Internet but it all controled by ruling party. We had to use anonymus proxy to use internet without ruling party seeing what we look at and say. Kim Jung-Il is terrible man and has no respect for tradition or North Korea people. He is sick but protected by army he made. sorry for my bad english.
You should try the "Friendship" link (after clicking on "welcome" and getting to the main page). I thought it would be something about how the N Koreans are nice and doing friendly things, but nooo it has a picture of a large painting of a guy toting a military rifle and a link to the "national defence" song. Boy, that really generated a warm, fuzzy feeling--NOT!
PGP.Com products are notoriously overpriced, but I bet North Korea could negotiate a nice discount on a 22,000,000 seat license with A.T.M. Networks Inc, the South Korean sales agent...
One hitch -- I tried completing the "free download" form with "N.Korea" as the country code, and got this popup:
Ah well, GPG doesn't have these petty restrictions!
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Hopefully they've improved things since then.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Again, they're just proving that the best security method is just to not let anyone on the system at all.
Very true! How can you 0wn a box that...isn't there! I saw this interesting report on 60 minutes (an abbreviated version of it can be found here, and the full story I beleive can be found here, but for a fee to Big Bill) a number of months ago showing this interesting photo of the Korean peninsula. It kind of reminds you of the hoax photo of the 2003 blackout, except that I suspect the Korean photo to be legit. Assuming it it is, maybe NK should start thinking about how to get power to most of their city (I could be mistaken, but I think Pyonyang is their only city and even THAT was just built "for show") and towns before they start getting their boxes online to trade e-mail!
But setting up a "secure e-mail" system for boxes that don't exist is the same sort of logic you would expect from a country that has traffic cops in the heart of their city directing traffic...that ISN'T THERE! It's an absouletly amazing society. Crazy. Loopy. But fascinating at the same time.
I saw that bit about the "traffic cop" in the same 60 minutes report and in it there was also someone from the state department claiming that at the time there was probably 5 machines on the Internet in the entire county!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
perhaps they are scared? i'm not saying North Korea is at all good, but you've got to see the broader context. The US screwed them with sanctions and overt/covert war. the USSR vanished along with all their oil imports, food imports, aid etc. the US has been threatening to nuke them, reneging on agreements to provide clean power etc. what else the hell would you expect them to do? don't believe most of what you read in the popular press.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
The US isn't simultaneously whining about getting handouts for electricity and food. North Korea is free to do whatever they want if they wish to remain completely isolated, but this thread was about them having no electricity. Because their Great Leader is so fucked up, and their economy is so fucked up, their only real chance for either enough food or enough electricity is outside help. And outside help will not be forthcoming until they abandon their nuclear weapons program and stop shooting missiles through the airspace of neighboring countries during tests.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!