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North Koreans are jailbreaking phones to access forbidden media
- ricardobeat 5y agoSurely reporting this, including specific phone models, will only make it even more difficult for them?
- not2b 5y agoNo, because they already know this is going on, and they know the small number of phone models available in NK.
- creakingstairs 5y agoJapanese porn booklets used to be smuggled in back in the days [1], so I'm not surprised they are jail breaking devices to access forbidden media now :p [1] https://imgur.com/a/FUq2shz https://imgur.com/a/FUq2shz (SFW)
- rektide 5y agoThe United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. This is still couched as consuming media. The stakes are higher, but I'd have us go further: try to allow person to person, group, & broadcast communication in places where the internet is being subverted & blocked. "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore. Alas the current regimes, bith conservative & liberal, are more focused around demanding things of the internet & making up new regulation, bith as a direct threat to letting people operate & maintain presence they would online. It's extremely hard days seeing one of the greatest emerged possibilities in the world- a universal right to speech & connect- clambored over & shouted down like this. Stories like this & others, of helping people see beyond their oppressive regimes, need much bigger celebration & support.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- traceroute66 5y ago> The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this. Says someone who's clearly never lived in an authoritarian regime. Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea ? What do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with this US-backed anti-authoritarian software ?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoWell, how does such software currently spread in North Korea? And, what do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with the current non-US-backed anti-authoritarian software? But then when we look deeper, it gets more complicated. Could we make software that is easier to use and harder to detect? Probably. If someone gets caught with it, will they be in more trouble than they would with non-US-backed software that had similar functionality? Very likely. If the time comes when NK figures out how to track it, and more people have it on their phones because we encouraged them, and the hammer comes down on them, but more information got into NK because of this, is that a good trade-off or a bad one? (I'm not even going to propose an answer to that question...) Love your username, by the way.
- rektide 5y agoIf i had all the answers i'd be doing it. Wifi-p2p, bluetooth-le broadcasts... who knows. We need more trying stuff. This salty snippy rejectionist behavior doesnt help. Being so certain of failure, convincing everyone not to try to improve things, swearing all attempts are futile... dont you see what vaccuous sucking nihilism this is? It's badgering & bullying to have a stance that is so uncompromising, so mightily assured of failure, that phrases "concerns" so demeaningly. There's no room for any possibility that maybe, just maybe, we could make things better, and that: I hard reject as cruel & unsavory. I dont know what happens. Maybe we find some fantastic covert plausible deniability systems- launch the tech as a small payload in every top 10 site on the planet. Maybe NK doesnt end up being a good spot for freedomware. Maybe it helps Russia, or Myanmar. Doing nothing will help no oppressed people ever: that I promise. Lets not be cowards, let's find some principled things to explore & advance, lets try.
- lgvln 5y agoI’m not optimistic, considering the state of democracy in US. It looks like liberalism and democracy is insufficient to counteract the ill effects of capitalism - the transformation of society from a market economy to a market society.
- commandlinefan 5y ago> It looks like liberalism I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism" in this context, but over here, it's liberalism that has us relying on billionaires to buy media platforms so that we get access to forbidden media.
- l33t2328 5y agoThat’s just not true. You can host a web server and share whatever legal media you’d like.
- bitwize 5y ago> "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore. This is one of those old bromides like Postel's law that just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation in the modern world. Today's modern equivalent would be "The net interprets heterodoxy as noise and filters it out." The most recent example being, a guy asked about what it would take to get Twitter's AS depeered for "disruptive activity" after the Musk acquisition: https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-April/002299.html https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-Ap... It's probably difficult and unpopular among the large telecom firms to do this now, but with the right incentives we may see sites depeered for political reasons in the future.
- rektide 5y agoCiting one de-peering request does not scare me. The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. I believe in site's rights to maintain themselves as they will, and this is not a contradiction. That's a high-level concern, one the internet infrastructure doesn't notice or care about. You are absolutely correct that things could get shitty. But I see no indicators on my radar right now that the various anti-internet forces that be in the world are at all embraced or accepted: I think we all still see them as enemy of the common good, quite clearly, and foes to fundamental human rights.
- bitwize 5y ago> The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. The internet is a series of contractual agreements between large corporate entities that, till now, have provided an interface that is like a series of dumb tubes. Up till now, they have operated on the principle that everybody has the same color money and should therefore receive the same service. However. These days, large corporate entities need to be aligned with the ESG rules established by the major investment banks who provide them with finances and sit on their boards. That includes an obligation to fight back against forces deemed insufficiently progressive, to avoid the rise of another Trump. Nobody wants to be remembered for complicity in the rise of fascism in the USA, like IBM's complicity in the holocaust. If a site on the internet is seen to be a locus for fascist voices, it will soon be acceptable for that site to no longer be on the internet. Better to enter the kingdom with one eye than to be cast with both eyes into Gehenna.
- pessimizer 5y agoThe United States doesn't help people in the United States jailbreak their phones.
- Ancapistani 5y agoThe US also isn’t buying its own citizens guns, but Afghanistan is awash in automatic rifles purchased by the US taxpayer. What’s your point?
- rektide 5y agoAlas.
- pessimizer 5y agoYes, it's terrible how North Korea has made it so difficult to have root on your own phone.
- readingnews 5y agoI see what you did there. And I looked down at my phone. And I made myself sad.
- lazyier 5y agoNot attacking you personally, but it's important to keep this stuff in mind when we make choices as customers. Consumers are cattle. Don't be like cattle. Use your money for good. ---------------- The difference between you and North Korea is that nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you can't root. Which means that it is very likely that you volunteered for it. Unless somebody else paid for it, like work. Then that is their problem. I still recommend buying your own phone. Why did you do that? Is it because the phone is a particular brand that is fashionable and you want that to reflect on you when you use the phone around other people? Is it because it is cheaper to buy because the phone company subsidizes the phone in order to sell you spyware you can't get rid of and to lock in reliable monthly payments from you? There are lots of reasons people do this. Maybe it's just ignorance. Maybe they tell themselves they don't have anything to hide. Maybe having control over the things in they own seems like too much work or too intimidating. Because it is extremely likely you actually had a choice and your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny baubles. You didn't have to do that. And you don't have to continue to do that. You have a choice. You have the power. You really do. This is important because you have the chance to financially reward people that want to preserve your freedom or you can financially reward people that take it away. This is the power you have. It is more democratic than voting. It also matters much more.
- l33t2328 5y agoMaybe they, like many others, don’t care one iota about having root on their phone. > sell your freedom That’s hyperbolic to the point of killing the discussion.
- MaxLeiter 5y agoIf you found this article interesting and are curious for examples of North Korea’s extensive digital surveillance, I recommend watching “Florian Grunow, Niklaus Schiess: Lifting the Fog on Red Star OS”: https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is from 6 years ago, so they’ve probably only improved their surveillance)
- core-utility 5y agoOn the same subject, Darknet Diaries podcast did an episode on PRK and the smuggling of "illegal" media in. It's a good listen. Episode 71: Information Monopoly https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/71/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/71/
- Kaibeezy 5y agoUSBs are a significant form of sharing information in North Korea. Many citizens have devices with USB ports and SD card slots. So for many years, North Korean defectors have organized efforts to smuggle outside info into North Korea on USB drives to counter Kim Jong-un’s constant propaganda. But these groups were buying memory devices at cost with limited resources. Flash Drives For Freedom is a campaign that travels the world inspiring people to donate their own memory drives. An initiative launched and managed by the Human Rights Foundation, Flash Drives for Freedom is significantly increasing the capacities of these North Korean defector groups. https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/ https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- giantrobot 5y agoApparently the use of flash drives is due to the police shutting down power to a neighborhood and then doing raids. With a DVD player a disc would be stuck when the power is cut. So the police roll in and see you've been watching contraband and off to the dirt mines. With a flash drive you can remove it from the port and hide it even with the power out.
- nes350 5y agohttps://archive.ph/hTbRU https://archive.ph/hTbRU
- decremental 5y agoI just imagine some North Korean jailbreaking his phone and accessing content from the west and thinking "nope!"
- rmatt2000 5y agoThis is extraordinarily brave, given what usually happens to people who possess illegal content in NK. I think I'll stick to criticizing politically unpopular people on Twitter.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- noasaservice 5y ago
- bdcravens 5y agoI'm guessing most people in NK aren't carrying $1000 phones. They are carrying "...government-approved, Android-based smartphones...". Your statement about companies controlling the devices is certainly worth arguing for, but it's a different, far more draconian situation in North Korea.
- asdff 5y agoIt's the same situation, just taken to the extreme conclusion. We see varying shades of control of electronics from different governments and corporations, but at the end of the day putting a stop to any of these varying amounts of control requires the same solution: being allowed to use a computer for general purpose computing.
- kube-system 5y agoIn the case of North Korea, the state of computing norms in the rest of the world have no bearing on the situation there. Even Linux spies on users in North Korea. If every smartphone on the planet had full root access, NK would simply not allow smartphones.
- kube-system 5y agoThese are phones locked down by the power of the North Korean government, not by the choice of any company.
- noasaservice 5y agoThe same techniques used to lock down US phones from owners is the same one NK is using. Or do you think those "features" were added in just for the totalitarian markets?
- jeroenhd 5y agoWeird to see "jailbreak" used in the context of Android phones, but I guess a it's fitting for an operating system where people can only ever install what the maker of their operating system allows. For a totalitarian regime, it's a little surprising to see the devices still getting cracked, especially with the relatively small portion of the populace that can afford to get a computer science education.
- tragictrash 5y agoI don't think computer science education applies here. These people are looking for a solution and smart enough to follow the bread crumbs. That's what we do best - adapt.
- DaltonCoffee 5y agoIsn't most jailbreaking and protections tampering done by people w/o high school, let alone cs degrees.
- eugeniub 5y agoNo, you need to know Dijkstra's algorithm in order to tinker with an OS. /s
- emteycz 5y agoYeah, we learned it as kids at my primary school. Forums and people there will help a lot if you ask nicely. I guess North Koreans have to learn it from other people directly, though... that's probably much harder. Cubans have huge data libraries shared on USB flashdrives, I wonder if North Koreans have it too.
- aspenmayer 5y ago> Cubans have huge data libraries shared on USB flashdrives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
- jeroenhd 5y ago
- pueblito 5y ago> The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is from 6 years ago, so they’ve probably only improved their surveillance) If you think that’s wild, get a load of what the NSA and GCHQ do
- erdos4d 5y agoYeah, I've yet to hear of NK sending submarines to tap undersea cables or storing essentially all internet traffic for future decryption efforts. Their little spy OS seems pretty quaint in comparison.
- MaxLeiter 5y agoI expect the Five Eyes to have that level of sophistication
- jacquesm 5y agoNo need to tap any cables if you're the OEM for the gear at the endpoints.
- ZoomerCretin 5y agoThis is probably the real reason why Chinese networking equipment was banned in the US and other Five Eyes countries.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y agoThis was the stated reason too, at least here in Europe. National security, which is a polite way of saying the Chinese would tap them. Which they definitely would, since we would too in their position.
- ZoomerCretin 5y agoNo, I meant that using Chinese networking equipment was banned because it wouldn't have a Five Eyes backdoor.
- muybasado 5y ago
- dragonelite 5y agoWell the world is already fracturing in multiple spheres of entertainment, cyber and politics. Just waiting for the west to power up their great firewall with the US clean network initiative.
- coliveira 5y agoSoon we'll have to do the same. A lot of media that has been considered "bad" for some definition of "bad" has been banned in western countries.
- azinman2 5y agoThere is absolutely no comparison with North Korea. Sorry that’s just preposterous.
- freedomben 5y agowhy? I would totally agree that NK and the US are on different ends of the spectrum, but why is a comparison not allowed? Isn't it useful to compare two items that may be opposites to observe their differences?
- azinman2 5y agoFirst, if you read the GP, there’s an equivalency implied. You’re commenting on my message out of context. Second, what’s the point? The differences would be immeasurable and nonsensical. It’s like saying shouldn’t we compare snoop dog to a blue whale? They’re mammals on the opposite spectrum!
- scaramanga 5y agoYou have just described hypocrisy to a tee. The morals that I apply to others are so different from the morals that I apply to myself, that they cannot even be considered to exist in the same dimension.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- freedomben 5y ago> First, if you read the GP, there’s an equivalency implied. I disagree. Tho, certainly some similarity is implied so I concede that. > You’re commenting on my message out of context. Fair point, sorry about that, I could have given more "good faith" to your comment.
- aaron695 5y ago
- timcavel 5y ago
- Vladimof 5y agoThat's why Google doesn't want you to unlock boot-loaders even if they allow you to ... I get that warning about my unlocked boot loader every time I boot...
- lern_too_spel 5y agoThe reason you get that warning is so nobody else can modify your OS without you knowing.
- Vladimof 5y agoSo, I can unlock it using software and no-one else can? I just don't see how this is a secure lock...
- lern_too_spel 5y agoIf you see the message, and you didn't unlock the bootloader, somebody else unlocked the bootloader, and you should apply the appropriate level of distrust to the device. I agree that the message could be made more secure by displaying some hash of the system partition, so if you unlock the bootloader deliberately, you will know if somebody else replaced your modifications. Not displaying the message at all, as you've suggested, is a huge security risk.
- chernevik 5y agoUmm, is this newsworthy? I am surely glad it is happening, and hope that it happens more. But perhaps the article draws regime attention to vulnerabilities, and helps the regime defeat them? Not everything interesting should be published.
- dylan604 5y agoIf you think that the North Koreans would be unwares that people are trying to circumvent anything unless they read it on HN, then you are just not very imaginative.
- endofreach 5y agoI don‘t quite understand why most of that wasn‘t blocked on their (i guess) government ISP?
- kube-system 5y agoIt might be. I don’t see anything in the article stating that this is via the internet. The sneakernet is popular in places with limited internet access.
- tedk-42 5y agoIn an ideal world, North Korean people would internally overcome their repressive regime. Perhaps the first step forward is a tech elite that educate and unite the people against their leader. Maybe they are by accident, breeding a large group of hackers in the general public that will be employable outside of North Korea today.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIn an ideal world a frail weak person could lift boulders and build mountains. At some point, the situation gets so bad that people can’t help themselves. Unfortunately, the situation would’ve corrected itself decades ago in a vacuum, but China keeps funding the elites to maintain their stranglehold.
- amelius 5y agoThere's probably a prize for calling out traitors, so this doesn't work.
- colinmhayes 5y agoNorth Korea would nuke south korea if they thought their government would fall. Makes no difference why the government is falling, if they're going they'll take the south with them. Also adds additional incentives for the south to stop wide scale dissent.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoNo, they would not. The nukes are a deterrent against invasion. And for what it's worth, if the North wanted to, they could flatten much of Seoul with conventional weaponry, since it's only 70 km from the border.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago"In another Orwellian measure, Pyongyang phones' government-created operating system takes screenshots of the device at random intervals, the two defectors say-a surveillance feature designed to instill a sense that the user is always being monitored. The images from those screenshots are then kept in an inaccessible portion of the phone's storage, where they can't be viewed or deleted." Hypothetical: What if the images were instead kept inside an Apple "Secure Enclave". The Secure Enclave is equipped with a dedicated secure nonvolatile storage device. How could the owner of the device access and delete them.
- dymk 5y agoThat's not what the "Secure Enclave" is or how it functions Is the point of your comment to throw FUD at... what, exactly?
- tonguez 5y agowhy don’t you tell us since you’re the one making the accusation. your comment is basically, “this angers me, tell me why”
- dymk 5y agoEnjoy educating yourself: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec59b0b31ff/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- freedomben 5y agoI don't think you need to be so defensive. GP is not saying that's how it works today. They're speculating about how existing technology can be repurposed to do evil things.
- deleted 5y ago
- scaramanga 5y ago"In another Orwellian measure, Pyongyang phones' government-created operating system takes screenshots of the device at random intervals, the two defectors say-a surveillance feature designed to instill a sense that the user is always being monitored. The images from those screenshots are then kept in an inaccessible portion of the phone's storage, where they can't be viewed or deleted." Oh, hah, a friend of mine worked at a company that developed employee monitoring software that did exactly that, it also took pics of you using the webcam. They used it for their own employees, too.
- donthellbanme 5y agoCould you name the company? We need strong anti-monitoring laws. The only profession I think needs constant monotoring is the average cop, and not so average cop, like the FBI. It's ironic many cops are required to wear cams now, but they can still cover that lens.
- golergka 5y agoYou already have them: freedom not to sign a contract with such an employer. Something that you don't have in a communist country.
- mschuster91 5y ago> You already have them: freedom not to sign a contract with such an employer. When that employer is the only major one around, there is no such thing as a truly free choice. There's a reason why meatpackers, Amazon or Walmart like to set up shop preferably in areas with high unemployment and why unionization attempts have been so fraught with failures - these companies exploit that the US social safety net is pretty much broken, and when your survival depends on that crap job you're not gonna complain too much. A truly free labor market is one where everyone can choose to not work without losing their home as a result... only then, employers are forced to provide actually competitive working conditions (wages, workplace safety, equipment, break times).
- wly_cdgr 5y agoImagine risking your freedom and your very life to watch Patrick Bateman walking through his office listening to Tomato Town
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- instagraham 5y agoInteresting writeup about the Pyongyang 2423, an Android phone common in NK: https://www.dailynk.com/english/a-look-inside-north-koreas-latest-smartphone-the-pyongyang-2423/ https://www.dailynk.com/english/a-look-inside-north-koreas-l... Amazing to think about how much an "open source" initiative like Android can be manipulated by a totalitarian regime.
- grishka 5y ago> When using a separate SD card, the user is asked to select between “use as a memory card” or “use as internal memory.” If the user chooses “use as internal memory,” it then requests initialization of the SD card so that it can only be used on the current phone. When “use as a memory card” is selected, initialization is not required but folder access is blocked. This sounds suspiciously like Android's "adoptable storage", except the folder access part. But meh, they got the thing, but didn't do any kind of technical analysis on it? Didn't dump the ROM for everyone curious to poke at? How so? The article itself, too, is almost annoyingly un-technical.
- throwaway290 5y agoI wonder if publishing a story about how specifically hackers stand up to authoritarian regime undermines their efforts.