Slashdot Mirror
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."
You act as if the common North Korean citizen has internet access.
I didn't catch any stories like that. Why is China mad at them this time?
You've got it backwards. China has stated that they think the US Government's claim that NK was behind the Sony hack is bogus and lacking in facts. Since NK's internet routes through China, then the implied source (the US Government, probably the NSA) is going through Chinese servers to whack NK's internet, which will piss them off. Personally I doubt it's the US, I bet it's some hacker group like an Anonymous faction, but everyone will think it's the US.
China hates North Korea as much as everyone else. They support them because they're a convenient tool for Chinese diplomacy with the US; every so often the DPRK goes nuts and threatens to blow up South Korea, and the US gets all riled up because we've never officially stopped being at war with them (just a 60 year cease fire). Then China gets to step in and provide the peaceful solution and portrays Washington as a bunch of warmongering fools bullying smaller nations. This is just another iteration of the same tired old game going on the Northeast Pacific.
Um...politics and warmongering is the price we have to pay for not having a global dictatorship. If you have large groups of people who disagree with each other there needs to be a method of getting things done while allowing for the representation, at least to some degree, of these disparate groups. Would you prefer to have the world run by dictator who thinks like you (or perhaps you yourself would like to be the dictator) so you can advance to the world toward what you think is best, irregardless of what others want?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
You act as if the common North Korean citizen has internet access.
Indeed. The typical North Korean subject likely doesn't have enough calories per day to thrive, and lets skip the question of nutrition. Even the North Korean armed forces have been on lean rations the last several years.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
He acts as if the common North Korean citizen is permitted knowledge of the internet, instead of just advanced CS students who have proven themselves indoctrinated sufficiently.
It's so easy to underestimate what such a government can do with such an ancient moral code and modern access to propaganda. The North Korean people aren't like "put yourself in their position". They have been systematically denied knowledge and education that would permit them to ask "Why don't we have the freedom to access the internet". They don't understand "freedom", they don't know that there is an "internet", and in many cases their definition of "we" will be substantially alien as well. Education is huge, and they have plenty over there- just of the wrong kind.
Protip: The North Korean media reports on US troops attacking North Korean soil and being repelled. The overwhelming majority of North Koreans believe that not only is the US at war with North Korea, but that North Korea is winning a defensive war lasting decades. That's the literal truth. That's how successful the Juche zealots have been. Internet access? Goodness, lol.
Most of the guards on the North side looked bored and didn't care particularly what you did. In contrast, the guards on the South side look like they will kill you for looking in the wrong direction.
I think that might more accurately illustrate which side suspects the other might try to invade.
Slightly. At most. North Korea's ability to project power barely extends beyond the DMZ. They could ruin Seoul, maybe...
Note that there's no indication that whatever the NK's have for a "nuclear arsenel" is air-portable, nor is there much indication that they could get a plane to Japan....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
China wouldn't need to DDoS North Korea's internet link
They do, if they want to have plausible deniability.
Is NK still off the net? About a half hour ago I had no trouble reaching the sites www.kcna.kp - 175.45.177.74 / 175.45.176.71 naenara.com.kp - 175.45.176.67 / 175.45.177.77 According to https://www.northkoreatech.org..., both sites are physically hosted inside North Korea. I see that both are in the 175.45.176.0/22 block that whois says is assigned to North Korea, and traceroute shows an extra latency (satellite hop?) for that network past China. Is that their only net block? A /22 is 1024 addresses, which I keep hearing is the total number for the entire country.
Case in point, the troops there call themselves "speed bumps." They know their job in case of a N. Korean attack is to get overrun and die, so the U.S. populace will get all outraged and back a full reprisal in S. Korea's defense.
And to answer OP, the idea is that the outcome of a war between N. Korea and S. Korea has enough uncertainty that some loony of a N. Korean leader may actually try it. But the outcome of a war between N. Korea and the U.S. is so obvious that no N. Korean leader would try it. (Well, no sane N. Korean leader. I'm starting to have my doubts about how much sanity is left after 60 years of indoctrination about how "N. Korea drove the U.S. out" of half the peninsula.) If you talk with S. Koreans, most of them don't exactly like U.S. troops being there, but are willing to tolerate it for this tangible deterrence factor.
But couldn't the UN do something? When the original 1950 "police action" in Korea was authorized by the UN security council, China's vote was controlled by Taiwan, and the Soviet Union happened to be boycotting the UN to try to get that vote transferred to mainland China. Let's just say that if a similar situation should arise, there's considerable uncertainty about getting anything more than a strongly worded statement from the UN.