# Kwangmyong

Kwangmyong (meaning *bright light*) constitutes a mysterious [intranet](intranet.md) that [North Koreans](north_korea.md) basically have instead of the [Internet](internet.md). For its high political isolation North Korea doesn't allow its citizens open access to the Internet, they rather create their own internal network the government can fully control and [censor](censorship.md) to their liking -- this is unsurprising, allegedly it is e.g. illegal to own a fax and North Korea also have their own operating system called [Red Star OS](red_star.md) for similar reasons -- to not get infiltrated by foreign technology. Not so much is known about Kwangmyong for a number of reasons: it is only accessible from within North Korea, foreigners are typically not allowed to access it, and, of course, it isn't in [English](english.md) but in Korean, so a typical tourist won't understand a word even if he gets a glimpse of it. Unsurprisingly the content on the network is treated with the highest forms of censorship, filtering, control and a great deal of it is engineered to serve the state propaganda. Here and there a foreigner gets a rare opportunity to peek into the network or even secretly photograph things that enable us to make out a bit of information about Kwangmyong.

North Koreans themselves almost never have their own computers, they typically browse the network in libraries.

There seem to be a few thousand accessible sites. Raw [IP addresses](ip_address.md) (in the private 10.0.0.0/8 range) are sometimes used to access sites (posters in libraries list IPs of some of them) but [DNS](dns.md) is also up -- here sites use *.kp* [top level domain](tld.md). Various sites, e.g. of universities, are also accessible on the Internet (e.g. http://www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp/), others like http://www.ipo.aca.kp (patent/invention site) or http://www.ssl.edu.kp (sports site) are not. There seems to be a remote webcam education system in place -- it appeared on North Korean news. There exists something akin a [search engine](search_engine.md) (*Naenara*), [email](email.md), [usenet](usenet.md), even something like [facebook](facebook.md). Apparently there are some [videogames](game.md) as well.

## See Also

- [Red Star OS](red_star.md) (North Korea operating system)
- [sneakernet](sneakernet.md)