Call Me, Comrade: The Surprise Rise of North Korean Smartphones (nknews.org) 58
Tia Han, reporting for NK News: 2018 marks the tenth year that cellphones have been legally available in North Korea. The number of users has been growing significantly since then, but overall use remains low: according to the country's state-run Sogwang outlet in January, more than 3.5 million -- out of a population of 25 million -- have mobile subscriptions. "We started providing the 3G service in December 2008, so this year marks the 10th year of the service," Han Jong Nye, from the Arirang Information and Technology Center in Future Scientist Street in Pyongyang, was quoted as having said in Sogwang in January. "The demand for mobile phones is growing larger and larger."
[...] North Korean mobile users cannot access the worldwide internet, of course: use is limited to the country's state-run intranet. Reports suggest various kinds of applications are now accessible for mobile users -- from games to shopping -- several state-run North Korean outlets have reported on their recent technological development, often with a great deal of emphasis on their local origins. State media suggests that North Koreans are playing games, reading books, listening to music, doing karaoke, learning to cook, and even increasing crop output on their smartphones.
[...] Since the majority of smartphone users do not have an access to the internet, according to one expert, users have to go to a technology service center where technicians install apps to their cell phone. "Most mobile users do not have data service even if they buy a smartphone, so they have to be happy with pre-loaded apps such as games and dictionaries," Yonho Kim, a non-resident fellow at Korea Economic Institute, told NK News.
[...] North Korean mobile users cannot access the worldwide internet, of course: use is limited to the country's state-run intranet. Reports suggest various kinds of applications are now accessible for mobile users -- from games to shopping -- several state-run North Korean outlets have reported on their recent technological development, often with a great deal of emphasis on their local origins. State media suggests that North Koreans are playing games, reading books, listening to music, doing karaoke, learning to cook, and even increasing crop output on their smartphones.
[...] Since the majority of smartphone users do not have an access to the internet, according to one expert, users have to go to a technology service center where technicians install apps to their cell phone. "Most mobile users do not have data service even if they buy a smartphone, so they have to be happy with pre-loaded apps such as games and dictionaries," Yonho Kim, a non-resident fellow at Korea Economic Institute, told NK News.
Spread the word (Score:3)
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Amusing thinking about what kind of games the Nokos might approve for distribution. Pacman with ghosts that look like Great Leader? (But if you eat one you lose and go to jail for real.)
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What better way to spread the word of the Great Leader than you have everyone in the country have a cell phone? As long a the government controls the content that can be accessed on it.
Blocking off your network from the rest of the world means something different than it did 5 years ago. Russia has successfully led very successful disinformation campaigns in Ukraine, the UK, the US, and other european countries. It would be naive to think that China and the US aren't pulling similar operations. Ukraine has blocked Russian social media and news websites. They aren't deliberately trying to be oppressive- there is a very real threat to them.
There may be a time when keeping open and f
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"It would certainly be an amazing experiment to split a country in two, make one half capitalist and the other half socialist"
Except nothing at all happened like that with north Corea.
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Yeah, NK was straight communist, similar to the East/West Germany experiment.
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"Yeah, NK was straight communist, similar to the East/West Germany experiment."
Yes, especially around 1945, and more so since then under the continual pressure put on them by the US :
"After enjoying a period of peace for nearly two centuries, the Joseon dynasty faced foreign invasions and internal fractional strifes, beginning in 1592 until 1637. Henceforth, Joseon gradually became more and more isolationist and stagnant. By the mid 19th century, with the country unwilling to modernize, and encroachment of
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There is a famous NASA composite image of the Earth, assembled from every region's cloudless nights. You wonder, 'What's that brilliantly lit island between Japan and China?' Then you realize that it's actually not an island.
I want to see the burning cow dung charger those NK phones use.
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North Korea is a Confucian dictatorship with Communist window dressing.
South Korea is a more traditional Confucian meritocratic republic.
The difference is, in one the government tells you what has Merit, because they're in power so they obviously had more merit, and in the other they're competing to be seen as meritorious through the traditional methods of economic success, institutions, and elections.
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How is a government worker supposed to keep track of where a meritorious worker shops without a helpful shopping app that connects to a Walled Garden of Great Merit?
This is the Age of the Zombie, isn't this the most likely outcome? So far, I'm just glad it is turning out better than Snow Crash.
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Yes, the movie Brazil.
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Yes. It reminds me of cellphones from two decades ago.
NSA and GCHQ (Score:2)
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will listen in. CIA will phone NK nuclear scientists with offers of cash.
Offers of cash? How's that going to work in NK where there is nothing to buy?
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will listen in. CIA will phone NK nuclear scientists with offers of cash.
Offers of cash? How's that going to work in NK where there is nothing to buy?
I have been there. There are plenty of markets and shops where you can buy almost anything you want, from designer handbags to Power Wheels type toy cars. Chinese brands are more common, but goods from Japan and other Asian countries were also available.
But anyway being a nuclear scientist in North Korea is a pretty sweet gig. They have a high status, are treated like national heroes, and provided with the best the country has to offer. Leaving for another country where they will be treated like an
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IF you have actually been there, you have to realize that foreign visitors are only shown what the regime wants them to see. Stores full of western merchandise is an illusion, a facade put on for the benefit of the tourists.
I assure you, there is nothing behind the counter that a nuclear scientists would be allowed to buy. Nor would it be anything they 1. want/need or 2. wouldn't be obvious was obtained though resources other than his allotment. Walking around with a fancy purse would be a dead giveaway
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When it comes to building nuclear weapons today a nuclear scientist brings very little to the table. The science behind creating a weaponized nuclear fission reaction has been known far and wide since the 40's when the first experiments were conducted. The hard part of building a deployable nuclear weapon is obtaining the computer scientists, rocket scientists, aeronautical engineers, electrical engineers, and the advanced materials needed to manufacture all the required components. Not to mention having a
For those of you too young to remember (Score:5, Interesting)
That almost happened to us. Back in the 1980s, the "network" you dialed into with your home computer was a corporate fiefdom. Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL, Delphi, GEnie. Each set up their own site with guides, forums, chatrooms, shopping, messaging, etc. and you paid them a monthly subscription to be able to access it. Communication between them was initially impossible, and accessing a different service's site required paying their subscription fee. MSN was Microsoft's attempt to set up a similar subscription service (done in conjunction with NBC, hence MSNBC).
Those of us in schools, the military, and certain tech companies knew there was a bigger, better way to network things. And we began informing regular lay persons about it. Gradually the services started to allow email between the services, and a few even gave access [wikipedia.org] to some select Usenet newsgroups [wikipedia.org]. People slowly began to realize that there was actually another thing out there called the Internet which could connect everything together. Instead of being stuck with only the guides, forums, and sites you were subscribed to, you could access everything that anybody in the world made. And they began to demand being able to access everything. Finally in 1994, Bill Gates threw in the towel and added a TCP/IP stack to Windows 95 (before, you had to download and set it up yourself using something like Trumpet Winsock [wikipedia.org] - a feat beyond the technical capabilities of most users). Which coupled with the HTTP protocol (websites) gave birth to the Internet the way most people use it today.
We fought hard to inform the public that the Internet existed, and for direct access to it. That's why it horrifies us that many people are taking that freedom we fought and bled for, and willingly giving it up to return to the AOL-like walled gardens of Facebook and iOS, where the company controls everything you can see and do. Don't take your freedom of choice for granted, and throw it away so blithely.
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AOL actually provided unfiltered access to the internet. You could just ignore the entire AOL portal if you wanted, which many people did, the only drawback being that AOL email address, which marked you as an AOLer. But at that time, nearly everybody used their ISP's domain for their email address, so not a huge issue. Everything was dial-up at that time so it was impractical to run your own server, though that started to be a thing amongst the cognoscenti just a few years later.
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AOL only did this much later in the 90's. Earlier on, no internet access, no AOL TCP/IP control panel.
I don't remember the exact dates, but I got an AOL account and used it purely for internet access just a year or two after the first mass distribution of AOL disks. You did not need to touch any control panel, you were in with nameservice etc right away on startup. Just ignore the popup window.
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that was a later feature of AOL you had to minimize the portal and use a web browser. When they first started that was not the case. Prodigy and AOL and MSN all used TCP like technology but because commercial traffic was not allowed on the internet they could not talk to each other and you could only send e-mail to others on the same network. When the government lifted the requirement that internet connections could only be used for research / non-profit purposes then it became commercially viable to con
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We fought hard to inform the public that the Internet existed, and for direct access to it. That's why it horrifies us that many people are taking that freedom we fought and bled for, and willingly giving it up to return to the AOL-like walled gardens of Facebook and iOS, where the company controls everything you can see and do. Don't take your freedom of choice for granted, and throw it away so blithely.
What is your alternative? There are too many people and organizations burning down gardens and toilet papering them now. From malware to disinformation campaigns, the internet riff raff keeps getting more dangerous by the day.
Someone has to put up a wall somewhere. You and I can handle our own wall, but most people can not. That leaves the ISPs, the OS/device makers, or the government to do something about it. Which is the least objectionable?
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Re:korean unification is going to blow peoples min (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine not having a cell phone, or access to much of any technology created in the last 30 decades or so...
Then one day, north and south are reunified... and you've got electric cars driving through north korea, 3g cell phones with no data replaced by the latest and greatest iphone... the sudden shift from impossible to common place...
It is easy to imagine... I drove through West Virginia a few months ago.
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I presume that only party members can afford them, and most probably, are required to have them.
Excellent Leashes. (Score:4, Insightful)
Leash, Tracking Device AND a Bug!
If cellphones didn't exist Dictators would have to invent them.
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Leash, Tracking Device AND a Bug!
Just to be clear, you aren't just talking about North Korea, are you.
Li'l Smartphone Man (Score:2)
Our low-energy dictator is making North Korea great again. Brutal regimes are making a big comeback under the peach-faced cuntmuffin we have as president.
What percentage is real? (Score:2)
Also only The Rich (which is a very, very small percentage) will have cellphones, the rest of the citizens are just trying to get enough to eat.
My tour guide in 2010 had a cell phone (Score:1)
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You can get smartphones down to the $30 range here in the US. They're not great but in emerging markets (like some regions of Africa) the price is well below that. And a lot of that is presumably profit because they're mass-produced commodities. Yes, that's expense for NK. There are so few citizens that just creating a nationwide network for government use would be a fixed cost and any usage fees for anyone else would basically be pure profit since it's a sunk cost they would have spent anyway.
"but overall use remains low" (Score:2)
Probably because the majority of the population is poor and is more focused on food and shelter than using the intarwebz. If their Dear Leader gets his shit in order and decides to play nice with developed nations then their county will prosper. Until then...
With thunderous applause (Score:2)
if they buy a smartphone, so they have to be happy with pre-loaded apps such as games and dictionaries,"
"...and government monitoring software."
"That's a lie!" said the government minder. "Warrentless metadata gathering allowing us to track suspected resistance people to flesh out their contact networks is sufficient!"
"I heartily agree. I wish I had this 250 years ago," said old King George III of England.
Call Me Comrade (Score:2)
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Hey I just met you and this ain't stanlgrad
I have new cell phone so Call me Comrade
your hard and you look really bad
Hey I just met you and this ain't stanlgrad
I have new cell phone so Call me Comrade
And all the party try to rad
I have new cell phone so Call me Comrade