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posted by
LaminatorX
on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:00PM
from the totally-not-full-of-backdoors dept.
from the totally-not-full-of-backdoors dept.
nobbis writes:
" Desktop Images from Red Star 3.0, the North Korean Operating System, have been made available by Will Scott a US computer scientist who lectured in Pyongyang in 2013.
Red Star 3.0 is a Linux based OS, whose desktop now closely resembles OSX, possibly influenced by Kim Jong-un who has been pictured with an iMac; although how he obtained an iMac is unclear. Screenshots of Red Star 2.0 and a walk through of the installation of Red Star 3.0 are given in an article in North Korean Tech blog. The 8 desktop images include artillery under snow with magpies, a farming scene with 1960s era tractors, and an unconvincing city view. Will Scott has answered questions about his experiences in Pyongyang on a Reddit ask me anything."
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North Korean OS Desktop Images Available
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 3, Informative) by hubie on Tuesday March 04 2014, @10:16PM
Is it a mystery how he got an iMac? Someone from one of their foreign embassies goes out and buys one, puts it in the courier bag? Dennis Rodman bought one at Best Buy and carried it over? I'm not sure why this is worth speculating over.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bornagainpenguin on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:06AM
While everyone in the discussion thus far seems to be focusing on inanity of a dictator of a communist country with a high end luxury computer like the iMac, presumably the original comment was a throw-away in reference to export restrictions on potentially military capable computing. Recall North Korea was mentioned as part of GW's axis of evil as was Saddam's Iraq--and there were all sorts of articles that came out about the ways in which those countries would attempt to leverage common electronics to boost around export restrictions. For instance:
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/15431 [slashdot.org]Iraq Stockpiling PS2 Consoles!
In context it's interesting to see how things have changed and yet remain the same...
(Score: 1) by AnythingGoes on Friday March 07 2014, @10:54AM
As long as anyone with money can buy anything at retail - export restrictions don't matter. How hard is it to pay a teenager to buy a Macbook Pro for you?
Just remember that the computing power that each of us has on our desk is far far more than what was available to the best military/three letter agencies up till 20 years ago and they were using that to do all sorts of top secret stuff etc. And how hard is it to hook up a bunch of PS3/Xbox 360s to be a compute cluster?
Just like in the postscript to "Sum of all fears" where Tom Clancy talked about how easy it was to purchase a 5 axis CNC machine - seriously easier nowadays to buy even better manufacturing equipment from China.
The question is how many people in NK can even afford to have a computer and if it would be a catalyst for change, or become just another tool for control...