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North Korean Internet Is Down
First time accepted submitter opentunings writes "Engadget and many others are reporting that North Korea's external Internet access is down. No information yet regrading whether anyone's taking responsibility. From the NYT: "Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline. 'Their networks are under duress,' Mr. Madory said. 'This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,' he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load."
No, they're not. Sony's annual revenue is $64.7 billion USD. North Korea's GDP is $12.4 billion USD. Sony's market capitalization is also larger than North Korea's entire economy. The drop in Sony's stock value after the hack was roughly a quarter of North Korea's GDP, although the stock has since recovered somewhat.
Sony is far larger than North Korea, economically.
Sorry, figure corrections (I got my info from http://www.marketwatch.com/inv..., which lists figures in yen):
$4,799B - North Korean GDP 2014
$7,770B - Sony Gross Sales/Revenue 2014
$2,280B - Sony Gross Income 2014
Sony is only really worth 1.6 North Koreas.
Dictatorships that control their subjects' access to information like to have all Internet connections in their country pass through a single choke point so that they can maintain control. I once visited Saudi Arabia and met the guy responsible for all Internet traffic in and out of the country -- through a single link with a single backup.
This is good if you want to give your people only the access you want them to have, and to block everything else. At the same time, it means your whole country can be knocked offline by a single attack, which seems to be the problem N. Korea is experiencing. Imagine trying to knock the entire U.S. offline! It couldn't be done.
Cuba, OTOH.... well, that one may change soon. But N. Korea? Probably not, although I wish it would. A far more miserable place than Cuba has ever been.
The US force is a tripwire to draw the US into the conflict. That's why we are there. The US force is tiny and not sufficient to do anything useful except get overwhelmed. But when US bodies start showing up on newscasts, the DPRK is toast
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"Care to point to the source"
Haha is this wikipedia? I'm telling you things you can google, not applying for a job as your bitch.
You know that statement about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof?
Well, ordinary claims just need you to use a search engine, or even just start on wikipedia. You don't get to play skeptic with life, assuming that before you change your precious worldview something has to be tied up and cited. You have the power to google it your goddamned self.
But, fuck it. I'm on vacation.
You can find a TON of first hand accounts of crazy fucking bullshit in North Korea. Here's some who talk on social media after having been there as a tourist:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
Here's one on social media who mentions having taught there, and brings up the "repelled incursions" I referred to, in addition to crazier shit involving netting on cars:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
Also you can find firsthand accounts all over, not only from social media: ..but from other media as well
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dailylife.com.au/li...
Essentially ALL of these mention that the internet is pretty well shut down and only the North Korean fake version is available- in Pyongyang. You know, their BIG CITY.
Here's a wikipedia link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Some quotes:
"As of late 2014 there are 1,024 IP addresses in the country."
"Despite the incident, many citizens of North Korea may be oblivious to the existence of the internet."
http://qz.com/315969/in-north-...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/2...
"Nearly all of the country's Internet traffic is routed through China. Firms that monitor that traffic say it is comparable to only about 1,000 high-speed homes in the United States."
I'd like to repeat my earlier point, however:
You don't need to source a claim to be correct. The world isn't wikipedia.