I find it interesting that, according to the article and in 2016 at least, North Korean graduate students had unfiltered internet access! Probably monitored, and it mentions they were forbidden from creating accounts in social media platforms, but still... unfiltered access!
This tells me there's a lot we don't know about NK. Lots of people seem to assume maximum oppression/censorship by default, when the reality might be more nuanced.
People have monitored activity from North Korean IP ranges. There's more than you think!
Of course, this sort of unfiltered access is still extremely restricted: these are the children of the elite, the literally hereditary elite caste (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbun), who are investments for the state for being sent abroad for the hacking campaigns (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-07/inside-ki...) or for the domestic surveillance apparatus. (Someone is developing all of the clever ways they have to restrict and monitor smartphones: https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2017-kretchun.pdf And it'll keep going. 'Reducing traffic jams' my arse. But at least we have more 'transparency' now...)
They are granted access for that purpose, and they know their families' welfare and positions are hostage, and are in no hurry to jeopardize their charmed lives in Pyongyang. You don't live in Pyongyang, be taught English, go through university there through to a master's, without absolutely impeccable credentials and a lot to lose. It is unsurprising that they rarely 'abuse' that privilege. (Think of the closed cities in the USSR, or shopping at the foreign-currency stores, or travel abroad.)
I wonder how true the western claim is that North Koreans always feel like they’re being held hostage and fearing for their lives, so they make sure to stay in line. Or whether it’s closer to its neighbor, China, where most people simply do not care about those “forbidden” things and thus don’t seek them out.
Think of people living in rural Appalachia (a place I’m from). Most don’t think about how “good” life could be outside of that area where job opportunities are more plentiful and standard of living is higher. There’s a very strong party allegiance that’s almost religious. Caring about other countries extends to knowing just the names of some major economies and not much more. Unlike NK, they’re completely free people, but they’re happy enough being there with many never going more than a few miles from their home town or researching what the outside world is like. Most people there just don’t care. And I’m not implying it’s bad, just not an uncommon mindset.
I recently watched this interview with a North Korean defector who was part of the social “elite” and he sort of touches on this topic in a few different ways. It’s a bit long, but definitely worth the watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rLqYXTaFI
There are some people who "defected" accidentally. By happenstance they visited family in China expecting to return but got tricked by human traffickers and ended up in South Korea as defectors. There are a few of these people who say they want to go home.
I mean....obviously it's not quite the same, but there are plenty of people who think that in the former Soviet Union and its republics people had no idea about what the West was up to. That again couldn't be further from the truth - there was loads of smuggled in media, magazines, books, movies with home made dubs, people listened to forbidden radio stations.....yeah all of it was highly illegal and you could get in serious trouble for it, but people absolutely still did it. I have no doubt that similar things are happening in North Korea right now.
Did the people in the Soviet Union think that the smuggled media was propaganda? I remember the story about Boris Yelchin visiting a US supermarket, being amazed at the all the products available, and thinking that it was a fake store set up to impress him at first.
>"Did the people in the Soviet Union think that the smuggled media was propaganda"
I was born in the USSR. No we did not think that the media was propaganda. At least most of the people I knew. And USSR's own propaganda was so cheesy that it was not believable to normal people. My parents were scientists and I also studied in university and had become scientist myself. So my experience might be somewhat not all encompassing because of the environment.
What I do find now is that the amount of corporate, media and government propaganda in the west is insane and is as cheesy as the one of former USSR.
Also the amount of venom and paranoia in this thread is depressing.
quote:"What I do find now is that the amount of corporate, media and government propaganda in the west is insane and is as cheesy as the one of former USSR."
Indeed. And it's gone on long enough (on TV) that now it's hit the re-runs. "24" in particular did not age well ...
I'm sorry, I don't perceive the venom/paranoia that you clearly see. Would you be willing to call out the specific passages that strike you that way and why?
Alek Sigley eventually got in trouble for it and had to leave, but before that he wrote a lot of articles on daily life for (admittedly privileged, given that he was in Pyongyang and at a university) people in North Korea.
I grew up in the USSR. There were multiple layers of the system. I was somewhere in the middle with my father being a well known poetry translator and grandfather writing propaganda. We listened to the BBC and Voice of America without reprimand, because of our status. Neighbors would face serious consequences for this. At 12 I was sent to the US to understand how capitalism is harmful. I think North Korea is making the same bet of creating a system in which some know all the truth and still work for the regime.
I doubt a 12 year old would know/care about that though. They would notice that almost everyone had a car, there were no shortages in grocery stores, houses were much bigger, etc.
You start also to notice that there are no differences in the propaganda narative between your home country and the country you visit. And that some people live on the streets. In the end you need to choose your masters.
Well, it's not that difficult to understand why (the US brand of) capitalism is harmful by wandering around the US for a while.
... problem is, it may not help convince you that Stalinism / "Actually existing Socialism" is the answer. (In case you don't recognize this term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism)
There's currently one open source software dev / researcher in the US who's facing prison time after talking about open source software at a conference in North Korea. His name is Virgil Griffith. The speech he gave was nothing more than information that was already public.
I mean I don't think he should be thrown in jail for that, but you can't just go do that and not expect to get in trouble. Sanction violations are something the feds take extremely seriously. It's one of the few ways to actually get the corporate death penalty if you're a company.
The point of the above posts though is that Virgil Griffith is probably going to prison because he wasn't paying attention to sanctions though? Or, the case of Meng Wanzhou who is a Chinese citizen who avoided connecting flights through the US and was arrested in Canada anyway for violating trade sanctions with Iran?
I think these provisions came after the patch was pushed to Github back in 2016.
I remember that when the Github rules related to US sanctions were first posted there was a lot of backlash here on HN from Iranian developers and it must have been 2017~2018.
Doesn't mean it wasn't illegal before but at least Github didn't seem to be enforcing it.
If you deal in US dollars, you're subject to US sanctions laws. Hint: if you ever convert between currencies, unless you're EXTREMELY careful, you're actually going X -> USD -> Y.
It took the EU multiple years to setup a facility so they could provide euros to Iran without falling afoul of US sanctions during the Trump admin.
Why would trade restrictions or sanctions have any effect on people in those countries donating code to an open source project? No trade is taking place.
I would almost be more worried as a scientist to give a lecture in NK, I mean do you not need export control approval for that (although maybe he got the approval)
Aren't there additional issues with that like if you pay for a flight or hotel or restaurant, you're effectively "supporting the regime" with your dollars, and therefore it's illegal under sanctions too?
This was the case in Cuba. You could visit if you sailed yourself there and didn't spend any money, but as soon as you engaged in any commerce, you were violating sanctions. I believe the rules have been relaxed.
I want everybody to stop, shake themselves, and realize how “absolutely insane” this situation is. True or not, we’re talking about prison time for helping people write open source code.
This isn’t normal, but everyone’s talking about it like it’s normal.
This is one of the reasons I wish there was more bigger European companies. Then we wouldn't need to deal with the bullshit US sanctions and cancel culture.
Those are not the same. I'm referring to two problematic things with US companies: in one hand sanctions, in the other political censorship based on "woke" biais. Some French politicians got/are being canceled by Twitter and Facebook for their political opinions. This is a big problem for democracy.
S/he is expexting exactly that to happen and thus is hoping for more European players so its not all US-values that are being pushed, i.e. glorification of violence and prudish shaming/banning of such normal things as breastfeeding.
I hate to say it: the same argument was made by the communist party. It is sad that people never learn from history. It does not matter who does it. It matters because it becomes widespread and it becomes the new normality and good luck fighting normality. In communism ( or nazism) the party was not always the coercive power. Sometimes your boss, your wife or your neighbour take this role.
> This is one of the reasons I wish there was more bigger European companies. Then we wouldn't need to deal with the bullshit US sanctions and cancel culture.
I'm afraid you'd simply get wound up in their own national policy and need to peep through keyholes.
Pretty wild on github to see national policy kinks worm their way through the system. What happens if it's hosted in a neutral country?
> The reason—as it was explained to me—is because the United States controls most internet infrastructure (including websites like Twitter), and through programs like the NSA’s PRISM and the Army’s Cyber Command is spying on and manipulating social media.
After listening to The Lazarus heist[1] I find it hard to have sympathy for Izbicki's position. Children are recruited into computer science from a young age in NK with the express purpose of furthering the state's objectives. Mainly by funding the regime and circumventing sanctions by engaging in hacking. There's a good chance he's helping train the next generation.
I'm conflicted on this type of problem. The bit I particularly struggle with is the alternative - if we don't go there and attempt to break down the barriers with ordinary people, what hope is there for the country? Just sit tight and wait until the next dictator dies and hope they're of a more lenient disposition? They're not going to invite us in for lectures on political education.
It's not the same, I'm not suggesting it is, but I do see parallels with Saudi Arabia (I bring it up because I've lived there). And while the guy at the top is as unsavoury as it gets I do think the presence of Westerners has been a positive influence and the few steps we've seen to let women drive, cinemas open, etc. I'd put down in small part to that presence influencing the general population. And in another perhaps not so small part down to the internet. And that's a country we sell proper weapons to, not just machine learning classes.
I get that there's a fairly direct line that can be drawn to negative consequences in engaging with such states, but these things are inherently messy and there's a long game to play here.
>if we don't go there and attempt to break down the barriers with ordinary people, what hope is there for the country?
Giving teaching to oppressing elite is not breaking barriers with ordinary people. It's making those barriers between elite and ordinary people even stronger. Your only hope is to 'smuggle' good ideas and books about freedom values, democracy and even more valuable the truth about what is going on.
That is actually very clearly what is happening here. This combined with the "unfiltered internet access" claim all clearly points in an obvious direction. Repressive and notoriously paranoid regimes are not in the business of doing something like that out of the goodness of their hearts.
They do however rapidly need to build out and further expand their cyber power because it's one of the few winning strategies they have at the moment and has allowed them to become one of the big players in that space.
Those networks may be "unfiltered" but they are monitored. This entire thing is a giant loyalty test to the party.
You need a way to filter out the "true believers" from everyone who could pose a threat to the future stability of the regime. But nobody who works in or around this space would see anything other than a giant counterintelligence operation happening under the guise of "unfiltered" internet access.
This is extremely shortsighted. Educated people are a lot harder to exploit. One of these students might one day lead the kind of change we’ve seen in numerous examples through history.
There was a cadre of Chinese students who were educated abroad to be diplomats. The program was scrapped when it was found the students wound up pro-democracy. They do something else now, but it is not clear if it works. Party loyalty enforced by the state ignoring your corruption seems likely, as proposed elsewhere.
If you're trying to talk someone into something, sure. But if all you really mean to do is get someone's compliance where you want it and silence otherwise, I would think a realistic threat of thuggery trumps education an overwhelming majority of the time. I also wouldn't be surprised if education was limited to those that were considered "reliable", with vested interests in perpetuating the system.
Revolution by vested interests against other bits of the vested interests is basically the short story of how countries in latin america got independence from spain.
On the other hand what we see in Russia is reincarnation for ussr and now with more powerful tools for oppression.
Also look at China and how oppressive monster become stronger without changing it's values toward respecting freedom.
Giving power without changing values is helping the worst kind of people to be stronger. It can fireback and it does. The worst censorship practices of China are now trying ot make it's way to the West.
This comment clearly shows an absolute blatant ignorance of anything to do with North Korea.
I would recommend that you educate yourself on what North Korea actually is and how deeply oppressive it is.
Anyone in North Korea who has access to a computer is in the highest caste in their system. You are born into this caste, and it's based on the interviews that were done of North Korean people in the 1950s. Families were classified into hostile, wavering, or supporters of the communist revolution. These classifications were made primarily on the basis of occupation and other factors that were indicators of whether they were in a higher economic class or were more of a proletariat.
In short the only people who are going to learn anything about software North Korea are part of the class that is oppressing most of the nation. Another thing that you certainly aren't aware of is the fact that people in the lowest caste are literally prevented from traveling into any of the North Korean cities and are relegated to a portion in the Northeast and aren't even allowed to be anywhere near a border where they could potentially escape into China or SK.
Stating that something is shortsighted should be based on some knowledge of the nation you are talking about.
This kind of thing was an issue in the USSR as well (at least in athletics, chess and the like). I do believe that the countries' policies of some cultural and scientific interchange did reduce tensions and risks.
Engaging in teaching these kinds of skills in a nation like North Korea is inherently aiding the state and continuing the oppression of its people.
You are completely correct about your suspicion about primarily furthering the objectives of the state.
I am always saddened by the naive do-gooders who don't get this, and devote energy to making the world a worse place when they implicitly think they are doing the opposite.
So would you say that the best strategy to making North Korea a better place would be to make the lives of North Koreans as miserable as possible, destabilising the country? It might work, but it seems antithetical to the original goal of helping people.
> the best strategy to making North Korea a better place would be to make the lives of North Koreans as miserable as possible, destabilising the country?
I see here hidden false assumption that helping North Korea is making lives of North Koreans less miserable.
The main cause of all problems for North Koreans is this totalitarian regime and those who support it. They suffer from that! Not from your actions. So destabilising the country is attacking the core of their problem and thus helping North Korea people. Supporting the regime is prolonging their sufferings. This regime should fall inevitably and there is no other way to help people of North Korea people so the only question is when and how.
> The main cause of all problems for North Koreans is this totalitarian regime and those who support it. They suffer from that! Not from your actions. So destabilising the country is attacking the core of their problem and thus helping North Korea people.
Please! No more of this line of reasoning, it has caused suffering and damage time and time again.
Don't recommend that others endure that which you and your loved ones are not willing to endure. Before claiming a country must be blockaded, starved and bombed into submission "for its own good", consider whether you would welcome that blockade, destabilization and bombs if they were falling on your roof and possibly killing your loved ones.
>consider whether you would welcome that blockade, destabilization
and bombs if they were falling on your roof and possibly killing your loved ones.
First of all I didn't speak about bombs falling on the heads of civilians because only heartless crazy individual would recommend that.
>Before claiming a country must be blockaded, starved and bombed into submission "for its own good"
Second I didn't speak about starving either.
But certain blockade and destabilization of oppressive regime is more then welcome because such regime should fall.
I never understood why everybody would be in favor of stopping some killer but if that killer or group of killers put some funny clothes and call themselves 'country' everybody kind of ok with them having millions of hostages.
>Don't recommend that others endure that which you and your loved ones are not willing to endure.
I was in Crimea already occupied by Russia during electricity blockade. Was I happy? I have suffered from it but I was welcoming it with both hands. Unfortunately it was not enough to return freedom and rights to Crimea and people living there so I would welcome something that would.
>Please! No more of this line of reasoning, it has caused suffering and damage time and time again.
Since I lived in the ussr and saw this evil empire with my own eyes you will see nothing but exactly this line of reasoning from me.
I cannot understand why ussr was allowed to exist for so long. Why people of the free world were closing their eyes to the crimes of this regime. Why it was not suffocated sooner.
I cannot understand why today people of the free world are ok with turtures in the middle of the Europe. I am talking about Belarus dictator where real people have spoken loudly what the want. Why real help didn't come to them? Why military help didn't come to Ukraine when Russia have occupied Crimea and later on two regions. Why it didn't come to democratic Georgia when Russia attacked them?
I cannot understand why Ukraine's young democracy is not in NATO or under full protection of NATO. I do not understand why free world doesn't stop Russia attacking their neigbours and taking away rights and freedoms of people.
I cannot understand why regimes like in Russia, North Korea, Iran and so on are allowed to exist at all and why they are allowed to torture people under their control and perhaps I never will. So Please! Don't even ask.
North Korea does have a nuclear weapons program that much of the rest of the world would like to hinder. What tech restrictions on North Korea make sense?
I remember that when Fortran compilers were sold on CD-ROM that the packaging of Digital Visual Fortran said the compiler was not for resale to North Korea and maybe Iran.
Now Fortran, C, and C++ compilers that would be used in modeling nuclear bombs are open source, and I don't think people in any country can be stopped from accessing them, as a practical matter.
Would https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we... suggest that, if technical restrictions are necessary for NK, they are a life-or-death situation in the case of the US and Russia? Of course, these statistics may not be entirely accurate but we are talking of a difference of 2 orders of magnitude in the number of warheads.
Since they already have working nukes and they can credibly nuke South Korea and Japan, it's not clear what the point is in trying to restrict access now.
The best that can be achieved now is that they can't kill people in DC, which I'm not sure is worth so much to people in Tokyo that you can get them to sign on to your sanctions regime.
Sure, but unless you claim their nuclear program is mostly funded directly by the hacking this is not a particularly targeted sanction. If you insist on targeting just their general economy it's probably better to go after coal or chemicals.
In any case, the OP was obviously talking about which technology should be denied for the purpose of it not being directly used to construct a bomb. To reply "we should deny them money" is quite beside the point.
You do realise that the US is literally rolling out wide spread facial recognition software as we speak, NK doesn't hold the monopoly on being an authoratarian hellhole.
The fates of many american useful idiots in USSR are quite gloom - serving tens of years in siberian camps.
Mike should've read the black book of communism instead of bible.
This tells me there's a lot we don't know about NK. Lots of people seem to assume maximum oppression/censorship by default, when the reality might be more nuanced.