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The North Korean developers who worked on this must be privileged beings with access to the open Internet. I can't imagine developing such a complex system with

• SXX 9y ago
  There is good chance it's actually developed by developers seating somewhere in Bay Area working for some VC-funded company with inconspicuous name. After all there is a lot of commercial surveillance software that sold to authoritarian regimes. Of course that doesn't mean someone work directly with NK.
  • icelancer 9y ago
    Exactly. This was almost certainly made by a Western country under NDA.
    • fit2rule 9y ago
      Could just as easily be a Chinese company under contract.
    • hutzlibu 9y ago
      I doubt it. They would be too scared of implemented backdoors. They might outsource some parts, maybe to china or india, but they will likely assembly it in NK - to have full control over it.
      • sleepingeights 9y ago
        They're likely a test-bed for a prototype surveillance system already being developed and/or deployed by the Silicon Valley of the West for Western regimes and dictatorships. edit: Even simple surveillance features like file tagging are already deployed within the US, and is how the FBI claims to track stolen documents to Chinese hackers. Although, the system the FBI uses to track document content traversing the internet is likely quite a bit more sophisticated. The prototype system can even be a rootkit spying system used by corporations to spy on their employees and/or their consumers and customers. The chain of sales is almost certainly from Silicon Valley, to a Chinese front, to North Korea or [ SV and China ] to North Korea. SV, US, and China work closely together in regards to surveillance, the only real difference is their rhetoric and how they sell it to their citizens.
  • sleepingeights 9y ago
    The company called Facebook has already implemented features within their services to allow censorship, control, targeted* and mass propaganda efforts, monitoring and surveillance, etc... on targeted* and mass user bases, and is already selling these features to regimes for access to their citizens, and to provide regimes in-depth surveillance access to the social networks. Including, the regime apparatus within the US such as FBI, CIA, etc... Facebook is an "intelligence" product sold both to the US and to other nations. Their company has people who were high executive officers in the "intelligence" and surveillance apparatus in the US (CIA, etc...). It's not the problem of whether North Korea is implementing these features, as North Korea did not create anything original but rather see's these features already being provided. The problem that Silicon Valley and the US has is that companies (err... countries) like North Korea are implementing (or have implemented) it before their own companies have and that diminishes their capacity to claim IP to related implementations. * targeted: meaning they can target individuals, and various sizes of groups based on sophisticated and targeted profiling. Trump's campaign used this to divide and conquer the 2016 election.
  • willstrafach 9y ago
    Would current sanctions really not prevent that?
• willstrafach 9y ago
  The university in their capital, which teaches CS, allegedly has access to the open internet via China (although it is worth noting that they are only likely to allow access for "elites" there such as children of Party members).