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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.
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.
Damn right. My grandpa died in a concentration camp.
He was drunk and fell off a watchtower, but still.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They can't even get an access point to work, yet we should believe our fuhrer when he blames them for quite sophisticated hacking.
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.
Gallows humor, no offense intended. For what it's worth, I never met my grandfather. He died in front of a German firing squad in 1942 while my grandmother was pregnant with my mother. His sister just spent the next three years in a concentration camp, being subject to medical experiments. She survived. Barely.
Concentration camps are used in N Korea and other countries still have them as well. It's not really racially insensitive when they aren't used exclusively against a race. Even the Nazis put political opponents in concentrations camps.
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.
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.
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;
If you read his posts you'd know sever things about him:
1) he *assumes* everything is on the record and monitored at all levels while in country.
2) he has completely different kit for in and out of DPRK.
Given that context having his phone or any other device hacked doesn't actually impact him as he's operating on the assumption that such compromise has already happened.
I assume (no overt post saying so, but given his other posts it seems likely) that once back in Japan he dumps everything DPRK related into a box. and doesn't touch it again until the next trip back.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Killing Benigno Aquino is what toppled Marcos' regime. I actually met Aquino when he was an MIT fellow. My first reaction when I heard he was going back was "Marcos will have him killed." Doing it before Aquino even got off the tarmac was a mistake; he should have met with an "accident". But then that was only the culmination of a whole train of mistakes, which started by allowing a young, charismatic politician to become the focus of opposition hopes.
So your analogy doesn't really work. The lesson for a tyrant is don't let your opponents become publicly notable. Keep people you can't trust inside the country where you can watch them and restrict them effectively. If they do manage leave the country, don't let them back in, or even adopt the pretense that they're free to return. Kill them while they are *languishing* in exile with no prospect of return. These are all lessons the DPRK has followed assiduously.
Practice makes perfect applies to tyranny as much as anything else, you just can't be half-hearted or half-assed about it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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
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.