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Unlocking North Korean songs on a karaoke machine
- 082349872349872 4y agoTIL about the CNC song: https://archive.org/details/tianchi-v700-ktv-940280 https://archive.org/details/tianchi-v700-ktv-940280
- doublerabbit 3y agoBeautiful. NK can keep those three minutes and nine seconds of my life I lost watching that.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI was going to ask about translations but I’ve realized that I don’t want them. I want to enjoy the mystery and wonder.
- betamaxthetape 3y agoIf you are interested in the translations, another copy of the video [0] on YouTube has baked-in English translations. Disclaimer: I don't speak Korean, so cannot vouch for their accuracy! [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPPlTX2a974 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPPlTX2a974
- a257 3y agoThis one has subtitles and a parade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpupc4zxlTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpupc4zxlTo
- stickfigure 3y agoIt turns out that translations only enhance the mystery and wonder.
- iudqnolq 3y agoSide note: I've never seen an account quite like that one before. From their recent uploads > Armed police forces preparing to take on the violent anarchists and trotskyists on the streets of Hong Kong. Drill took place 29 August in Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- computerfriend 3y ago> About: Anti-imperialist.
- iudqnolq 3y agoI'm quite familiar with anti-imperialists of various sorts. They generally don't start ranting about Trotskyists. That makes this person sound decades out of date.
- 13of40 3y agoI can read a little Hangul, so let me give it a shot: "All other countries have inferior potassium..."
- rob74 3y agoAt least you can sing along every time "CNC" is shown on the screen...
- traceroute66 3y ago>TIL about the CNC song If you want to see it performed on-stage in all its glory, including live orchestra.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if60FlQ2FEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if60FlQ2FEo
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoGotta love NK bands subjecting themselves to cultural imperialism by playing western instruments.
- sneak 3y agoRoland is a Japanese company.
- autoexec 3y agoI never would have guessed that! Props to them for going with a name many Japanese people would struggle to pronounce.
- sneak 3y agoFrom Wikipedia: > The "Roland" name was selected for export purposes, as Kakehashi was interested in a name that was easy to pronounce for his worldwide target markets. The name was found in a telephone directory, and Kakehashi was satisfied with the simple two-syllable word and its soft consonants. The letter "R" was chosen because it was not used by many other music equipment companies, so would stand out in trade-show directories and industry listings. Kakehashi did not learn of the French epic poem The Song of Roland until later.
- SeanLuke 3y ago"Sony" has an interesting history as well. The official line is that it was a mixture of "sonus" and "sonny" boys (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony). But I have it on good authority from people in the know in the company that the real reason for the name Sony was that it sounded like an American company name to Japanese ears. America was cool. That is, namewise Sony was the Japanese equivalent of Haagen-Dazs. It's even written in Katakana, the script for foreign words.
- Symbiote 3y agoI'm surprised they call it CNC, in English. Isn't that admitting they didn't invent it?
- sudosysgen 3y agoYes, I don't think they pretend to have invented it, given the lyrics of the song. One of the lines is about how they are advancing towards the cutting edge of the world, which does admit they're not a leader.
- aaron695 3y ago> TIL about the CNC song Your memory is slipping 082349872349872, watch those cosmic bit flips https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24596922
- 082349872349872 3y agoaargh. What's-his-name's disease striking already?
- ipsum2 3y agoWow, how did you find this?
- duxup 3y agoSeems normal to me. https://youtu.be/Rpszgytqkck https://youtu.be/Rpszgytqkck
- komali2 3y agoTheory I've heard is CNC mills and the like aren't banned for import into DPRK by UN or others and so it's like the most advanced industrial component they can import there, so it gets a song!
- thriftwy 3y agoIt is funny how despite all isolation they do not have a Korean term for CNC and just use a Latin TLA verbatim. USSR sucked at that kind of stuff but it did have its own term for these devices (ЧПУ)
- 082349872349872 3y agocf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32481916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32481916
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoSomeone needs to start a campaign going to make that the next Christmas Number 1 somewhere.
- juujian 3y agoOf course the Chinese song is Little Apple, I should have known. The most ubiquitous Chinese song ever, soon 10 years running. So ubiquitous, it has an English wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Apple_(song) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Apple_(song) Knowing that's the song, I am no longer surprised it made it to North Korea.
- ranger_danger 3y agothe history of Chinese songs only goes back 10 years?
- Georgelemental 3y agoThe peak of Chinese population was last year, more or less
- rwmj 3y agoIs there a torrent of the whole collection? I don't see a way to do that from the IA page, only for single videos.
- porphyra 3y agoI wish there was some way to get Chinese karaoke songs in the US apart from spending hundreds on importing a physical karaoke machine. All the apps such as 全民K歌 are region-locked, and the songs on YouTube vary in quality --- they often do not have properly timed lyrics and are rarely the instrumental version without the vocals, and newer or less popular songs are nowhere to be found at all.
- cypherpunks01 3y agoIt's not a torrent, but I think the best way to retrieve the entire collection is using the internetarchive "ia" command line tool. Here's a couple pointers: https://blog.archive.org/2020/10/21/want-some-terabytes-from-the-internet-archive-to-play-with/ https://blog.archive.org/2020/10/21/want-some-terabytes-from... https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html https://archive.org/developers/internetarchive/cli.html
- Sytten 3y agoThe last paragraph is both funny and so so in phase with a lot of security by obscurity found everywhere: "The V700 consults both “/proc/cpuinfo” to learn the CPU serial number of the device it is on, and a binary file associated with the device file system structure as part of its method for determining its AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) key. It then ignores all of these device-specific items, and reverts back to a static key “87654321” stored in the binary."
- LegitShady 3y agoNot the first time something like this has happened. I believe it was the PS3 that was hacked to get Sony's private key because the ECDSA algorithms random factor 'k' always picked 4.
- ljouhet 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/221/ https://xkcd.com/221/
- csense 3y agoThat's the stupidest encryption key I ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-NhD15ocwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-NhD15ocwA
- mangamadaiyan 3y agoSomewhere, hypothetically deep inside NK, someone is probably thinking "That's amazing, I've got the same combination on my luggage!"
- netsharc 3y agoDo NKers have suitcases? It's not like (at least in my head) many of them travel for leisure. What percentage can even leave the country? For the rest, it seems like the country is such a police state that no one would try to open your bags, making a combination lock unnecessary. A quick google just now does tell me there are NKers who travel overseas for work or studies..
- gloyoyo 3y agoAll the hard work you do, don't bring me down...
- rippercushions 3y agoIf you have never witnessed the glory of the mentioned "CNC Song", congratulations, you are one of today's lucky 10,000. Mass Games version: https://youtu.be/xpupc4zxlTo https://youtu.be/xpupc4zxlTo Music video version: https://youtu.be/K6O33icSM3o https://youtu.be/K6O33icSM3o
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hackernewds 3y agoNorth Korea Tech Dot Org??
- netsharc 3y agoSo, why the encryption? Is someone in NK really afraid that their stuff will be stolen? Hmm I guess the answer is in that word "steal", some Chinese supplier probably has monopoly of the NK market and is using the encryption to prevent cheap Chinese karaoke machine makers to just copy their data. (Insert the word "other" in the previous sentence.)
- kaetemi 3y agoYeah. A lot of the karaoke systems (even cheap ones) have their own weird "encryption". It is really just to stop other manufacturers from copying their song collection.
- adasound 3y agoVery busy with deadlines. Did not read. Liked for title alone.
- gambiting 3y agoIf you're so busy with deadlines, why waste any time writing this comment?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thih9 3y agoI’d to have more context about the state of the entertainment industry in North Korea.
- thriftwy 3y agoI wonder what are "Hana and a competing Mokran". Are these North Korean record labels or TV channels?
- willscott 3y agoThis was a fun project. It's good to know that a lot of the north korean consumer technology does propagate at least to the border areas with China, and so has a chance to be archived and kept available into the future.