4 ms·

Woolim – Lifting the Fog on DPRK’s Latest Tablet PC [video]

53 points by Vespasian 10y ago

johansch 10y ago
(Now - listen: this is after "suffering" through 3-4 CCC speeches in the past week.) Ah. It's that time the the year. CCC. Ze Germans. I'm also not a native speaker of English (I'm Swedish).. but I know my limits. If I would want to communicate something to the rest of the world, I would put it on the web. In text and images. German people tend to be decent-to-quite good good at writing English - and kind of bad at speaking it, to be honest. This guy is one of the better, I have to say. The video format is still annoying though, because of its linear format. Please: CCC speakers with brilliant and interesting topics that you know will interest the global community: Put up an English language blog post!
- dom0 10y ago
  A lot of speakers put their slides up for download. Also not all are Germans. I mean, it's a conference in Germany, so the audience obviously has a large German part, but there are lots of people and speakers from other countries as well. But yes, even as a German myself the Denglish (German-English) accent can be plenty annoying.
  - johansch 10y ago
    The good stuff tends to come from the german speakers though :).
- smcl 10y ago
  I had a similarly irritating experience with one of the CCC videos, but I'm not sure if it's just me being spoiled (these are otherwise excellent quality talks, provided at no cost to me). The first 20 minutes of the Snowden/family talk was a presenter fiddling around with her laptop which had run out of battery, interspersed with a guy whistling into the mic to "entertain" the crowd. I was able to skip past it, but whistling - wtf!?
  - wonko1 10y ago
    I feel a bit sad to read this. The CCC is a super-cheap conference. It costs 100Euro (about 100USD currently?) to attend a 4 day conference. The venue is massive, and roughly 13,000 people attend. There are often 3 or 4 talks going on at the same time. The talks are among the most technically interesting available anywhere. In top of that, they have areas where people can hack on group projects, and the venue is open 24hours during the conference (some people even crash there over night). This is all run on a largely volunteer basis. And in my view to a very professional standard. Someone screwing up and delaying one talk seems pretty insignificant in light of the amazing work they do.
    - smcl 10y ago
      Hey hold on - I did say that the talks were excellent and delivered at no cost, and conceded that I was probably just overreacting. Why are you commenting as I didn't?
  - Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 10y ago
    The audience at CCC whistling the Jeopardy theme song during delays has been a thing for a loong time. They have a popular Hacker Jeopardy event late at night (now only every second year), where random delays can happen e.g. when the game UI crashes.
tedmiston 10y ago
"We don't know if it's really Flash, but it makes sense because most of the DPRK websites are using Flash to serve video… and deliver remote exploits."
cnvogel 10y ago
Slides: https://github.com/takeshixx/woolim-tools https://github.com/takeshixx/woolim-tools Blog-Post: https://insinuator.net/2016/12/woolim-lifting-the-fog-on-dprks-latest-tablet-pc/ https://insinuator.net/2016/12/woolim-lifting-the-fog-on-dpr...
wonko1 10y ago
I'm constantly impressed by the effort the DPRK is putting into securing their devices. I've just skimmed it, but: The talk describes what is really an extreme form of DRM, the tablet can only open media created and signed by the government or media created and self-signed on the tablet. Users can't exchange files, if they try the signature check fails. It's very similar to what they presented last year on RedStar OS, but this seems to be taking it to even greater extremes. In RedStar OS you could transfer files, but they'd get watermarked. In someways that's even scarier, because they can log ever user who touched the file. Really very interesting, it will be fascinating to see how this progresses (as well as terrifying).
- lisper 10y ago
  > Users can't exchange files Yes, they can, but the OS appends a watermark to each file when it is exported, so every file carries with it a record of who exported it and in what order. That allows the government, when it gets a copy of a shared file, to track back exactly who gave it to whom. > terrifying Indeed.
  - wonko1 10y ago
    That appears to be the case on RedStar OS. But on Woolim you can only few government signed or self-signed content, nothing else. That was my understanding from the talk.
    - lisper 10y ago
      Ah, you may be right. I skipped over a few parts of the talk, so I may have been missing some context during the watermarking discussion. My comment was based on the segment starting at 41:30.
      - strgrd 10y ago
        Maybe you should state that you skimmed the article before declaring something so assertively. Did you even read the parent comment, or did you see "transfer files, Redstar OS" and jump at the chance to espouse your little NK factoid? Seriously, you didn't read/listen to the article, and you didn't read the parent comment. This sort of comment etiquette is unacceptable on YC
wyldfire 10y ago
DPRK is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly referred to as "North Korea".
jwtadvice 10y ago
This would be so much fun to jailbreak. The solution to media content distribution looks a lot like what companies in the United States have tried again and again to do, but have failed - with perhaps the recent exception of smart phone and tablet devices. Another trick the DPRK might consider is making much of their software a service and requiring always-on connectivity to use the application in question. This not only restricts what a user can do, but it also allows the 'stewart' body to track usage, collect metadata and a number of other useful bits for state security. Often, the use of the app can be track to a geolocation.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well, Bono managed to point to China's great firewall as an example when talking about DRM enforcement...
laborat 10y ago
I guess these guys hadn't seen the info on https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page when they were trying to get the device to run arbitrary code. All Allwinner SoCs have a USB bootloader baked into the _CPU_, which you can talk to over an open-source protocol (poorly documented, but on my old A10 tablet the magic term to google for is 'LiveSuit' - there is an open-source Linux driver, bootloader, and flasher stub to be found on github somewhere).

53 points by Vespasian 10y ago

(Now - listen: this is after "suffering" through 3-4 CCC speeches in the past week.) Ah. It's that time the the year. CCC. Ze Germans. I'm also not a native speaker of English (I'm Swedish).. but I know my limits. If I would want to communicate something to the rest of the world, I would put it on the web. In text and images. German people tend to be decent-to-quite good good at writing English - and kind of bad at speaking it, to be honest. This guy is one of the better, I have to say. The video format is still annoying though, because of its linear format. Please: CCC speakers with brilliant and interesting topics that you know will interest the global community: Put up an English language blog post!

dom0 10y ago
A lot of speakers put their slides up for download. Also not all are Germans. I mean, it's a conference in Germany, so the audience obviously has a large German part, but there are lots of people and speakers from other countries as well. But yes, even as a German myself the Denglish (German-English) accent can be plenty annoying.
- johansch 10y ago
  The good stuff tends to come from the german speakers though :).
smcl 10y ago
I had a similarly irritating experience with one of the CCC videos, but I'm not sure if it's just me being spoiled (these are otherwise excellent quality talks, provided at no cost to me). The first 20 minutes of the Snowden/family talk was a presenter fiddling around with her laptop which had run out of battery, interspersed with a guy whistling into the mic to "entertain" the crowd. I was able to skip past it, but whistling - wtf!?
- wonko1 10y ago
  I feel a bit sad to read this. The CCC is a super-cheap conference. It costs 100Euro (about 100USD currently?) to attend a 4 day conference. The venue is massive, and roughly 13,000 people attend. There are often 3 or 4 talks going on at the same time. The talks are among the most technically interesting available anywhere. In top of that, they have areas where people can hack on group projects, and the venue is open 24hours during the conference (some people even crash there over night). This is all run on a largely volunteer basis. And in my view to a very professional standard. Someone screwing up and delaying one talk seems pretty insignificant in light of the amazing work they do.
  - smcl 10y ago
    Hey hold on - I did say that the talks were excellent and delivered at no cost, and conceded that I was probably just overreacting. Why are you commenting as I didn't?
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 10y ago
  The audience at CCC whistling the Jeopardy theme song during delays has been a thing for a loong time. They have a popular Hacker Jeopardy event late at night (now only every second year), where random delays can happen e.g. when the game UI crashes.

tedmiston 10y ago

"We don't know if it's really Flash, but it makes sense because most of the DPRK websites are using Flash to serve video… and deliver remote exploits."

cnvogel 10y ago

Slides: https://github.com/takeshixx/woolim-tools https://github.com/takeshixx/woolim-tools Blog-Post: https://insinuator.net/2016/12/woolim-lifting-the-fog-on-dprks-latest-tablet-pc/ https://insinuator.net/2016/12/woolim-lifting-the-fog-on-dpr...

wonko1 10y ago

I'm constantly impressed by the effort the DPRK is putting into securing their devices. I've just skimmed it, but: The talk describes what is really an extreme form of DRM, the tablet can only open media created and signed by the government or media created and self-signed on the tablet. Users can't exchange files, if they try the signature check fails. It's very similar to what they presented last year on RedStar OS, but this seems to be taking it to even greater extremes. In RedStar OS you could transfer files, but they'd get watermarked. In someways that's even scarier, because they can log ever user who touched the file. Really very interesting, it will be fascinating to see how this progresses (as well as terrifying).

lisper 10y ago
> Users can't exchange files Yes, they can, but the OS appends a watermark to each file when it is exported, so every file carries with it a record of who exported it and in what order. That allows the government, when it gets a copy of a shared file, to track back exactly who gave it to whom. > terrifying Indeed.
- wonko1 10y ago
  That appears to be the case on RedStar OS. But on Woolim you can only few government signed or self-signed content, nothing else. That was my understanding from the talk.
  - lisper 10y ago
    Ah, you may be right. I skipped over a few parts of the talk, so I may have been missing some context during the watermarking discussion. My comment was based on the segment starting at 41:30.
    - strgrd 10y ago
      Maybe you should state that you skimmed the article before declaring something so assertively. Did you even read the parent comment, or did you see "transfer files, Redstar OS" and jump at the chance to espouse your little NK factoid? Seriously, you didn't read/listen to the article, and you didn't read the parent comment. This sort of comment etiquette is unacceptable on YC

wyldfire 10y ago

DPRK is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly referred to as "North Korea".

jwtadvice 10y ago

This would be so much fun to jailbreak. The solution to media content distribution looks a lot like what companies in the United States have tried again and again to do, but have failed - with perhaps the recent exception of smart phone and tablet devices. Another trick the DPRK might consider is making much of their software a service and requiring always-on connectivity to use the application in question. This not only restricts what a user can do, but it also allows the 'stewart' body to track usage, collect metadata and a number of other useful bits for state security. Often, the use of the app can be track to a geolocation.

digi_owl 10y ago
Well, Bono managed to point to China's great firewall as an example when talking about DRM enforcement...

laborat 10y ago

I guess these guys hadn't seen the info on https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page when they were trying to get the device to run arbitrary code. All Allwinner SoCs have a USB bootloader baked into the _CPU_, which you can talk to over an open-source protocol (poorly documented, but on my old A10 tablet the magic term to google for is 'LiveSuit' - there is an open-source Linux driver, bootloader, and flasher stub to be found on github somewhere).