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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.