Topics: News, World News, North Korea, Technology
A man logged into the internet in North Korea, and was left surprised by what he found there.
The secretive country is known for its extremely close controlling of what information its civilians have access to.
Having untrammelled access to the internet would obviously be quite a big problem in controlling the flow of information.
So, as you might imagine, North Korea maintains very strict control over what people are allowed to access on the internet.
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It's not just a case of controlling what people see either, as the reclusive country will likely also be considering the danger of cyber attacks.
Allowing civilians access to western websites could make the country more vulnerable to this, so it has plenty of reasons - both strategic and political - to control the internet very closely.
But when YouTuber Eric Parker logged into the browser used in North Korea, he was surprised by what he found.
This required him to install a North Korean operating system on his laptop in order to access the internet.
Obviously, western browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or Safari are not capable of accessing this part of the internet.
Speaking in his video, Parker said: “Connecting the North Korean OS, Red Star to the internet to surf the net, Kim Jong Un style.”
When he finally logged in he found he could choose four locations.
These were North Korea, Russia, and Tokyo and Osaka in Japan, though surprisingly not China.
One thing he did notice was that the design of the browser actually looked not dissimilar to one that Mac users will be familiar with, albeit Mac users from a few years back.
“I actually think they've done a really good job of the theming here," Parker remarked.
One person commented on the resemblance, writing: “I find it interesting that they themed it after MacOS. There’s no real reason that would be necessary, but they still spent the time to do it. They must really like the look haha.”
But of course there were plenty of regulations as well.
When Parker tried to access websites like Google and YouTube, including his own channel, he found himself unable to do so.
This was explained with ambiguous error messages which popped up when he tried to access them.
Others shared their thoughts on the video, with one writing: “Imagine if they find out that someone is using their OS on the other side of the planet.”
Meanwhile, another joked: “Imagine if when you opened Google, the browser said ‘Kim Jong Un wants to know your location’.”
