There Is No Spoon
Wednesday 24 December 2014 • 12:36 AM
Max Fisher, writing for Vox:
Kwangmyong, which is Korean for “bright star,” is North Korea’s officially sanctioned intranet. It looks sort of like the internet circa 1994; many users even access it with old-school dial-up or computer labs. It is a closed network that runs on pirated Japanese versions of Microsoft software and looks sort of like the real internet but isn’t. Rather, it runs rudimentary email and browser tools that are restricted to a hand-picked collection of “sites” that have been copied over and censored from the real internet.
To a certain extent, I knew this already. But in this respect, North Korea is like a real-life Matrix. Except instead of blissful ignorance, it’s oppressively enforced cluelessness.