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North Korea's Own OS, Red Star
klaasb writes "North Korea's self-developed computer operating system, named 'Red Star,' was brought to light for the first time by a Russian satellite broadcaster yesterday. North Korea's top IT experts began developing the Red Star in 2006, but its composition and operation mechanisms were unknown until the internet version of the Russia Today TV program featured the system, citing the blog of a Russian student who goes to the Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang."
I'm guessing said news program didn't consider the potential consequences for the student? (Especially if a) he's still there and b) If they consider this project to be some kind of 'national secret' which they probably do given security / the likelihood of 'cyber warfare')
I can't get to the article, but I'm going to take a swing and guess that their "self-developed" operating system is a re-branded version of Fedora with a bunch of backdoors punched into it.
Interesting is, they are in violation of the GPL. But then again, It's North Korea ...
It's kinda hard to violate nonexistant copyright laws. OTOH, we're free to copy anything coming from North Korea as well. Not quite sure how much is worth copying.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
And they still had to make it look like Windows:
The Red Star is based on Linux, a free and open software operating system, but looks a lot like the Microsoft Windows on display. It also has a similar user interface.
The desktop display of Red Star is almost identical to that of MS Windows.
A Red Star logo is shown on the lower left corner of the screen where MS Windows has a start button. It has most of the basic MS Windows icons such as a Trash Bin and My Computer. Only, the names of the icons are slightly different from the Korean version of MS Windows.
Application programs such as a Web browser and a word processor which also resemble MS products come in separate discs.
http://geology.com/articles/night-satellite/satellite-photo-of-asia-at-night.jpg actually shows this best.
The bright portion of the peninsula just west of Japan is South Korea, the dark spot between it and the main land is North Korea.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
We have a greater percentage of our population in prison than North Korea does.
Damnit! Now all the Windoze Fanboiz are going to say there's evidence that Linux and FOSS are communist.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
The people of N. Korea are so fucked. I feel sorry for them. One day reality will come crashing down on them like Thor's hammer and either cause mass suicide, violence, or both.
Life is not for the lazy.
I doubt they're going to murder him for leaking information about their non-secret software if that's what you mean. Apparently North Korea still gets a fair number of Russian tourists and would probably like to not piss off the Russian government.
I ran across a bunch of pictures from a Russian tourist a while back with translated captions. I found them pretty interesting.
http://www.enlight.ru/camera/dprk/index_e.html
Good point. Do we need to know NeXTSTEP and BSD in order to use OSX? :)
Incidentally I have worked in South Korea and engineers there use a local linux distribution which, like this, looks like red hat with different icons and localization. I wouldn't be surprised if this distro is derived from the southern version.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Don't forget that South Korea is totally screwed up by a Microsoft. They are very proprietary and bound to one OS totally. They even have officially allowed only one module to do internet banking online. And it is written only for MSIE on Active X, working only on Windows. They will have definitely hard time to move away from that.