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Teaching open-source software in North Korea
- Clewza313 5y agoNice story, but GitHub is prohibited by the US OFAC sanctions regime from offering service to North Korea: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-and-trade-controls https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-and-tra... Intentional violations of these sanctions can be punished with prison time.
- k__ 5y agoHow would they put people from NK into prison?
- detaro 5y agoSanction violations are a crime for the people from the US involved.
- k__ 5y agoIs telling NK people to use GitHub already a crime?
- nichch 5y agoWouldn’t it be the duty of the platform in this situation?
- k__ 5y agoIn that scenario, at least there would be some US citizens to put into prison.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI want everybody to stop, shake themselves, and realize how “absolutely insane” this situation is. True or not, we’re talking about prison time for helping people write open source code. This isn’t normal, but everyone’s talking about it like it’s normal. Anyway! Carry on. :)
- mhh__ 5y agoThat may well be true but consider going to the German's and teaching them about Radar in the lead up to the war - that's the logic at least.
- passerby1 5y agoWhen did the opensource begin to be considered a war tech?
- hulitu 5y agoThis is the job of state propaganda: to look abnormal things look normal.
- yur3i__ 5y ago>GitHub is prohibited by the US OFAC sanctions regime from offering service to North Korea Surely Github would have blocked the range of north korean IP addresses if it was illegal?
- tasogare 5y agoThis is one of the reasons I wish there was more bigger European companies. Then we wouldn't need to deal with the bullshit US sanctions and cancel culture.
- yur3i__ 5y agoI'm not sure I've heard sanctions on enemy states described as "cancel culture" before, nor am I sure it applies
- Datagenerator 5y agoThese 'enemies' are fellow humans too right?
- yur3i__ 5y agoI didn't say I agreed with them, just "cancel culture" is a bit of a trivialization
- tasogare 5y agoThose are not the same. I'm referring to two problematic things with US companies: in one hand sanctions, in the other political censorship based on "woke" biais. Some French politicians got/are being canceled by Twitter and Facebook for their political opinions. This is a big problem for democracy.
- cycrutchfield 5y agoIf your “political opinions” violate a platform’s terms of service, what do you expect should happen?
- estaseuropano 5y agoS/he is expexting exactly that to happen and thus is hoping for more European players so its not all US-values that are being pushed, i.e. glorification of violence and prudish shaming/banning of such normal things as breastfeeding.
- andi999 5y agoI would almost be more worried as a scientist to give a lecture in NK, I mean do you not need export control approval for that (although maybe he got the approval)
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoYou do. Virgil Griffith is facing criminal charges for doing just that.
- ev1 5y agoAren't there additional issues with that like if you pay for a flight or hotel or restaurant, you're effectively "supporting the regime" with your dollars, and therefore it's illegal under sanctions too?
- caymanjim 5y agoThis was the case in Cuba. You could visit if you sailed yourself there and didn't spend any money, but as soon as you engaged in any commerce, you were violating sanctions. I believe the rules have been relaxed.
- pattusk 5y agoI think these provisions came after the patch was pushed to Github back in 2016. I remember that when the Github rules related to US sanctions were first posted there was a lot of backlash here on HN from Iranian developers and it must have been 2017~2018. Doesn't mean it wasn't illegal before but at least Github didn't seem to be enforcing it. Also the class was likely at PUST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_University_of_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongyang_University_of_Scienc...) which is operated with US funds and likely had clearance to teach that sort of material.
- richardwhiuk 5y agoIndeed - for any open-source project to accept contributions from North Korea risks opening up a minefield of problems.
- sneak 5y agoWhy's that?
- beebeepka 5y agoWell, because who wants to do business with a "regime". Think of the implications! Good countries have governments and that is totally different. Sorry, couldn't resist
- imhoguy 5y agoSo we should block nearly half of the World population for not being in democracy [0]? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime
- beebeepka 5y agoI guess exclamation marks are no longer considered a good indicator of sarcasm
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- emodendroket 5y agoDepends on how friendly their relations are with the United States, is our operating principle at the moment
- richardwhiuk 5y agoBecause of trade restrictions and embargos.
- bouncycastle 5y agoThere's currently one open source software dev / researcher in the US who's facing prison time after talking about open source software at a conference in North Korea. His name is Virgil Griffith. The speech he gave was nothing more than information that was already public. He's also known for the WikiScanner. More details here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2020/01/11/internet-man-of-mystery-virgil-griffith-indicted-for-crypto-trip-to-north-korea/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbrett/2020/01/11/internet-... His personal home page http://virgil.gr/ http://virgil.gr/
- xxpor 5y agoI mean I don't think he should be thrown in jail for that, but you can't just go do that and not expect to get in trouble. Sanction violations are something the feds take extremely seriously. It's one of the few ways to actually get the corporate death penalty if you're a company.
- netr0ute 5y ago> Sanction violations are something the feds take extremely seriously. This is just FUD.
- frisco 5y ago?
- netr0ute 5y agoWhile it's true, the level you would have to be at to have to worry about sanctions puts you into "too big to fail" territory.
- frisco 5y agoThe point of the above posts though is that Virgil Griffith is probably going to prison because he wasn't paying attention to sanctions though? Or, the case of Meng Wanzhou who is a Chinese citizen who avoided connecting flights through the US and was arrested in Canada anyway for violating trade sanctions with Iran?
- ckja 5y agoThis is why open source projects should not be on GitHub and not in the US. The same applies to foundations, though some of them seem to have adopted similar tactics as the North Korean party anyway.
- xxpor 5y agoIf you deal in US dollars, you're subject to US sanctions laws. Hint: if you ever convert between currencies, unless you're EXTREMELY careful, you're actually going X -> USD -> Y. It took the EU multiple years to setup a facility so they could provide euros to Iran without falling afoul of US sanctions during the Trump admin.
- throwaway4good 5y agoChinese Gitee have mirrors of most (all?) of the open source projects on Github.
- known 5y agoSounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
- dng88 5y agoSupporting totalitarian countries from North Korea to china, great.
- dng88 5y agoIt is not just legal aspects. There are reason why it was sanctioned. Supporting totalitarian countries, great. Provide the guys who can … tools and whilst you and their own people cannot stop them. Great! Glory to the supreme leader.
- Bostonian 5y agoNorth Korea does have a nuclear weapons program that much of the rest of the world would like to hinder. What tech restrictions on North Korea make sense? I remember that when Fortran compilers were sold on CD-ROM that the packaging of Digital Visual Fortran said the compiler was not for resale to North Korea and maybe Iran. Now Fortran, C, and C++ compilers that would be used in modeling nuclear bombs are open source, and I don't think people in any country can be stopped from accessing them, as a practical matter.
- btdmaster 5y agoWould https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons#Statistics_and_force_configuration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we... suggest that, if technical restrictions are necessary for NK, they are a life-or-death situation in the case of the US and Russia? Of course, these statistics may not be entirely accurate but we are talking of a difference of 2 orders of magnitude in the number of warheads.
- thriftwy 5y agoRussia is bound by non-proliferation laws and accepts international observers to its nuclear objects, so no. A lot of difference between rogue nuclear state, and a member of the club.
- SiempreViernes 5y agoSince they already have working nukes and they can credibly nuke South Korea and Japan, it's not clear what the point is in trying to restrict access now. The best that can be achieved now is that they can't kill people in DC, which I'm not sure is worth so much to people in Tokyo that you can get them to sign on to your sanctions regime.
- caymanjim 5y agoThe regime actively engages in digital espionage and criminal hacking behavior. It's a source of revenue for the government.
- the_af 5y agoI find it interesting that, according to the article and in 2016 at least, North Korean graduate students had unfiltered internet access! Probably monitored, and it mentions they were forbidden from creating accounts in social media platforms, but still... unfiltered access! This tells me there's a lot we don't know about NK. Lots of people seem to assume maximum oppression/censorship by default, when the reality might be more nuanced.
- gambiting 5y agoI mean....obviously it's not quite the same, but there are plenty of people who think that in the former Soviet Union and its republics people had no idea about what the West was up to. That again couldn't be further from the truth - there was loads of smuggled in media, magazines, books, movies with home made dubs, people listened to forbidden radio stations.....yeah all of it was highly illegal and you could get in serious trouble for it, but people absolutely still did it. I have no doubt that similar things are happening in North Korea right now.
- _joel 5y agoOne of my favourites I heard about from that era - https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-weird-secret-history-of-soviet-x-ray-music https://www.npr.org/2016/01/09/462289635/bones-and-grooves-w...
- shard 5y agoDid the people in the Soviet Union think that the smuggled media was propaganda? I remember the story about Boris Yelchin visiting a US supermarket, being amazed at the all the products available, and thinking that it was a fake store set up to impress him at first.
- FpUser 5y ago>"Did the people in the Soviet Union think that the smuggled media was propaganda" I was born in the USSR. No we did not think that the media was propaganda. At least most of the people I knew. And USSR's own propaganda was so cheesy that it was not believable to normal people. My parents were scientists and I also studied in university and had become scientist myself. So my experience might be somewhat not all encompassing because of the environment. What I do find now is that the amount of corporate, media and government propaganda in the west is insane and is as cheesy as the one of former USSR. Also the amount of venom and paranoia in this thread is depressing.
- damagednoob 5y agoAfter listening to The Lazarus heist[1] I find it hard to have sympathy for Izbicki's position. Children are recruited into computer science from a young age in NK with the express purpose of furthering the state's objectives. Mainly by funding the regime and circumventing sanctions by engaging in hacking. There's a good chance he's helping train the next generation. 1: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-57520169 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-57520169
- mhoad 5y agoThat is actually very clearly what is happening here. This combined with the "unfiltered internet access" claim all clearly points in an obvious direction. Repressive and notoriously paranoid regimes are not in the business of doing something like that out of the goodness of their hearts. They do however rapidly need to build out and further expand their cyber power because it's one of the few winning strategies they have at the moment and has allowed them to become one of the big players in that space. Those networks may be "unfiltered" but they are monitored. This entire thing is a giant loyalty test to the party. You need a way to filter out the "true believers" from everyone who could pose a threat to the future stability of the regime. But nobody who works in or around this space would see anything other than a giant counterintelligence operation happening under the guise of "unfiltered" internet access.
- JPKab 5y agoEngaging in teaching these kinds of skills in a nation like North Korea is inherently aiding the state and continuing the oppression of its people. You are completely correct about your suspicion about primarily furthering the objectives of the state. I am always saddened by the naive do-gooders who don't get this, and devote energy to making the world a worse place when they implicitly think they are doing the opposite.
- dvdkon 5y agoSo would you say that the best strategy to making North Korea a better place would be to make the lives of North Koreans as miserable as possible, destabilising the country? It might work, but it seems antithetical to the original goal of helping people.
- IngvarLynn 5y agoThe fates of many american useful idiots in USSR are quite gloom - serving tens of years in siberian camps. Mike should've read the black book of communism instead of bible.
- kleton 5y ago> The reason—as it was explained to me—is because the United States controls most internet infrastructure (including websites like Twitter), and through programs like the NSA’s PRISM and the Army’s Cyber Command is spying on and manipulating social media. Not exactly false
- jollybean 5y agoThere is a 100% chance this tech will be used to surveil, subdue and repress people in draconian ways.
- breakfastduck 5y agoSo exactly the same as in the USA and every other major developed nation in the world, then?
- jollybean 5y agoNo, the opposite of what you stated.
- jkbbwr 5y agoYou do realise that the US is literally rolling out wide spread facial recognition software as we speak, NK doesn't hold the monopoly on being an authoratarian hellhole.
- jollybean 5y agoYou do realize that the US has a functioning justice system, and there is a difference between security and suppression?
- breakfastduck 5y agoYou do realize the reality of the US justice system (and most of its systems) is not at all the same as the theory?