2.3 KiB
Kwangmyong
Kwangmyong (meaning bright light) constitutes a mysterious intranet that North Koreans basically have instead of the Internet. 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 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 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 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 (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 is also up -- here sites use .kp top level domain. 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 (Naenara), email, usenet, even something like facebook. Apparently there are some videogames as well.
See Also
- Red Star OS (North Korea operating system)
- sneakernet