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How Technology Gets the News Out of North Korea
itwbennett writes "Kim Dong-cheol is a North Korean with 'a double life,' writes the IDG News Service's Martyn Williams in a story on ITworld. 'In addition to his job as a driver for a company, Kim also works as a clandestine reporter for AsiaPress, a Japanese news agency that's taken advantage of the digital electronics revolution to get reports from inside North Korea,' says Williams. 'When we started training journalists in 2003 or 2004, getting cameras into North Korea was a real problem,' said Jiro Ishimaru, chief editor of the news agency, at a Tokyo news conference on Monday. 'Nowadays, within North Korea you are able to have your pick of Sony, Panasonic or Samsung cameras.' The images they're capturing are 'often startling,' and it 'documents a side of the country the government doesn't want the world to see,' says Williams."
TFA says that this is a pseudonym.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
How about because they have had joint economic development for years at a special economic zone, perhaps?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaesong_Industrial_Region
If cell phone coverage goes down, they could still use carrier pigeons to send Flash drives to China or South Korea...
Well sir we are talking about a impoverished nation here. Are you sure the pigeons would survived without being hunt down and eaten before it crossed the border?
Before the Iraq war, I was in South Korea. As a soldier, I obviously couldn't actually enter NK, but I have been on the DMZ. The first thing I noticed about NK is that there are no trees. South Korea has forests, but NK appears to be clear cut as far as the eye can see. The NK Guards have soviet-style costumes. If NK weren't so dangerous, the DMZ could pass for a set in a Steven Spielberg film. But the three things NK seems to have in abundance (at least as seen from the DMZ) are oversized flags, martialistic music and Guard Towers. From the DMZ, North Korea looks like the biggest prison in the world. I am glad someone is sneaking cameras into the country and recruiting journalists, because the world seems to be willfully ignorant about how bad the situation is in NK. Hopefully NK will eventually peacefully implode, like East Germany, but the Kim family and his Cronies are enriching themselves at the expense of the Korean People, so they probably won't go without a fight. Maybe we'll get lucky and the North Koreans will deal with the Kim family the same way the Romanians took care of the Ceauescu family.
You know you're either trolling or an incredibly dense American urban hipster with no grasp of self-awareness when you decide that "advertisements", "light pollution" and "cars" are infinitely worse than "starvation", "corruption", "bad trading", and "living under the iron-clad rule of a megalomaniac".
You know what's worse than advertisements? Not being able to buy anything because there's nothing to buy. No food, no clothes, no nothing. You know what's worse than light pollution? Not being able to turn the lights on at night. You know what's worse than cars and traffic? An ox cart pulled by a malnourished ox that you're seriously considering turning into food this winter, even though the meat's tougher than nails and it means you'll have to pull your plow by hand next spring. But, hey, it's that or starve.
But, hey, that fixie you were riding on before you posted your nonsense on this thread will totally come in handy in the Middle Ages-meets-zombie apocalypse world you have mapped out in your sociopathic head as an "ideal utopia" for your urban hipster douchebaggery. Good luck with that.