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Cool, thanks, everyone.
So my name is Wil,
I am a computer science graduate
student at the University of Washington
and I have spent the last
couple of false teaching computer science
in Pyongyang.
I haven't so I didn't read it in a last
year when I got back, but I
haven't really talked that much because
the whole like issue around this country
is extremely politicized.
It's very easy to sort of
end up in this sort of large narrative
that that I don't really have much to
contribute to. So the
disclaimer is there's there's going to be
nothing about this or about this.
And this will be entirely be sort of
like, what did I see when I was there?
What were the students like that I was
teaching and what was sort of like
consumer technology in terms
of desktops, mobile phones
and sort of what what what does
technology look like there?
So this is the campus I was at.
It's the Pyongyang University of Science
and Technology, sort of in the southern
suburbs still within Pyongyang.
The taller building is the
academic building,
the two wings, our classrooms, the little
middle connecting part is where the
professors offices work and then
the smaller building next to it, which is
still quite large, had the
cafeteria, had the library
and had an assembly hall.
And if off off picture is
dorms, we both both
the students and the professors lived
on campus while we were there.
So at this point I'm probably like,
if I was having a conversation, there'd
be this question of, OK, so how how do
you get there? What what are Americans
doing there?
So I found a video online
about this university being created and
I called emailed saying.
I'm interested in teaching and somehow
that worked. I'm still I'm still not
entirely sure myself.
And so I ended up teaching
classes in operating systems, focusing on
Linux and Android, which was what they
were interested in, and then also an
introductory database's course, sort of
the mechanics of school.
Which were fun.
So this is the lab that I was teaching
in. We had a classroom as well.
And these are were my senior
undergrads who were taking the operating
systems class. You'll notice that they
have computers and that they know how to
use them. So we're off to a good start.
I guess the other interesting part,
though, is that there were these serve
two banks of 16 computers
there on a land connected to each other,
but they're not connected to anything
else. So these students did not have
access to the Internet.
A lot of what they had learned were
through books.
And so this was an interesting challenge.
So so I guess there's sort of three
segments to the rest of the talk.
The first is going to be the network and
access. What does Internet, Internet,
all of these things look like then?
What do what's the desktop?
What's the deal with this Red Star OS
that they have? And then finally mobile.
What's the deal with cell phones?
So surprisingly, I had Internet access.
That was nice.
There's sort of two players in the
Internet industry
in Pyongyang.
They're both joint ventures with foreign
companies. So the building
is I believe
that's that's the older iteration
of it. But currently that's called Star
or Joint Venture Corporation, which is a
joint venture between the DPRK government
and Thailand, a company based in
Thailand.
And they provide the fiber cables
into the country.
So they manage the physical connection.
They peer with China Unicom.
And so there was a fiber line going from
a downtown office to the campus
where we got access.
And I guess there's a couple of
things that are interesting. One is that
I had access it was not filtered
either by China or by
DPRK.
However, there was a proxy that
I had to go through that was at the
campus level.
So all requests were
authenticated.
There was a squid authenticate proxy.
You had to have a proxy authentication
header.
So they knew every request was associated
with my username and password.
Um, the
the DPRK citizens.
So the the undergrads did not have access
to the graduate students and the DPRK
professors who were there did have
Internet access.
They had a filter, although I don't know
the exact details, but I know that it was
somewhat restrictive.
So in addition to that and
they had to go to a special room
in the
library area where there was
a lab proctor who sort of would watch
while you were doing research.
The other company of note is CareerLink,
which is a joint venture with
Orascom, which is an Egyptian company.
I think they've actually changed their
name.
They provide the mobile service.
You can buy a SIM card
with either voice or 3G data.
I did not because it is quite expensive.
It was 80 euros set up for
voice and then another hundred and twenty
eight euros to enable data, which gets
you 50 megabytes of data a month.
So not not quite what
we want, but but there were cases where,
uh, I guess I would say Internet
quite reliable power less reliable.
So for that maybe day a week
when you didn't have, like, intermittent
power, it was nice to still have some
connectivity and you
got that if you had wireless.
Yeah, so I had access.
So there's this Internet thing,
there was not Internet at our campus, I
was told that that was very difficult.
They did not like to have physical
locations that had both.
So there is sort of this sense of these
should be our gapped and foreigners
should not have access to the internal
one.
We visited Kim Il Sung University, which
is sort of the top university.
This is also where a lot of the
tour groups go. They've got this sort of
flagship library that you may have seen
pictures of. It's where the tour groups
go and say, we saw people sitting in
front computers not seeming to know how
to use them.
Those computers are on the quagmired
national intranet.
It's sort of guessed that there is
something like three thousand, five
thousand sites.
The students were saying that like most
companies that needed to do sort of
communication would likely have some sort
of site, an email like access
and be connected to this thing.
I guess of note, one thing that you can
see on sort of this nice Windows XP
terminal in the library is that it's got
its own DNS thing, the
the sort of small, but it's like
last dot lab dot
something that you dot capi.
And it's not a DNS record that
exists on the public Internet.
And so they've got their own DNS system.
They have posters up showing that.
And so, again, sort of you've got
all of these sort of new top-level
domains that we don't have.
So maybe we can ask the ATF to include
these
are, you know, dot web
or dot recreational or something.
So I didn't get that much access to it.
The students all knew it.
The college students at other
universities would have access to the
Internet and would have
more access than they did at our school
where they didn't get anything.
And so they were sort of somewhat
unhappy about that. I guess they would
prefer to be someplace where they had
some connectivity.
I guess the other question that comes to
mind is, OK, so so then how do
you if you if you
don't have access to the Internet, get
new stuff?
It sounds like there is some government
agency or of some form that
sort of like a librarian service where
university students who wanted to get
access to papers that were not available
would request it.
And someone at this agency would go to
the Internet, find it and send it
back to them.
So this is how you sort of get
information in it, sort of on request.
Cool.
So the students had computers,
the laptops, some
of the some of my students had personal
laptops that they would bring to class.
They were running Windows XP.
We went to
a mall that had an electronic market in
it every couple of weeks for shopping,
and they had a bunch of computers
generally running windows.
Generally, it seemed imported from China.
A lot of Chinese brands were there.
That seemed to be sort of what was there.
It was cheap. It was available.
I didn't really see anyone seriously
using Red Star anywhere.
This is the sort of mythical thing
Red Star is made by KCC.
The Korean Computing Center is one of the
two sort of large labs.
The other one is the Pyongyang
Information Center.
Uh.
It seems my my my gut feeling here and
I don't have much to support that, is
that it gets used more for sort of
industrial automation contracting things
where some other company will
go to KCC and say, we want to automate
our factory and they'll get a controller.
And that controller with custom software
may well be running red staff
because you get vendor lock in, which is
great.
And also just like that's maybe where
they're programing. But for for end user
computers, it was basically all Windows
XP, a little bit of Windows seven, but
not much.
But they do have this thing.
The latest version looks very Mac like.
Very Mac like.
One, one, one thing, I guess there's two
things that are interesting here.
One is that like it's
localized so you can use this without
speaking English. That's good.
And it has a very prominent sort of like
input method thing in the top that you
can't really get rid of.
You also don't get root on it.
So it has a terminal, but by
default on the install, you can't
sue or sue or do that.
So I've got a demo.
I guess I can
log in.
Uh, it's a little bit
slow.
So let's see, we'll start the terminal,
the the other thing that's maybe
interesting here, I guess there's a
couple of things. So so we've got a set
of applications.
Some of these are pretty
clearly skinned and are Linux
applications that you know and love.
Others seem to be much more made by hand.
We can look at the route and it
looks sort of Linux.
See, it's got an applications folder,
though, which maybe is not as commonly
found.
So.
And in there, we see a bunch
of scrap folders
and in there, you know, in quick time,
for instance, it's got contents
and then it has a red star folder for the
binary.
So someone someone really like
got OS
10 and got told, make something that
works like this and looks like this,
which is pretty cool.
So it's a one like, yeah,
we can we can look through.
And one application that's sort of
interesting is there's a utility
that I hadn't seen before called Baucom.
And says you can't run this unless your
route, which is interesting since you
can't be route, but luckily
since I'm in a VM, I can change
the desk and make myself route.
So I've been able to go on this one.
And it turns out that
Baucom actually should come
out in a second.
It allows me to make encrypted disks,
which is pretty cool, so that that
got included, but sort of not
easily allowed.
So I can make my menu when you disk.
That's thinking.
Well, that wasn't what I wanted to show.
What I was going to show is that was
using A-s, which was sort of nice.
Here we go.
Something's happening.
All right, so I'm
going to, uh.
Like show another one, so it's got it's
got Natera Web browser, which
looks quite similar to it,
cited something that, again, Nikolaos
basically Firefox, but with a different
name.
But again, it does have
special bookmarks.
Here we go.
That's Firefox.
I don't want it to be my default browser
again. It.
It's using a set of internal apps
for it's like default homepage and things
that certainly won't load.
So some of these
are sort of customized other ones.
They've done a better job.
One.
I'm not sure why the hard drive is being
so there we go.
Let me make it.
Oh, yeah, so so I can look and I can
put a password and I can choose my
algorithm and I can make my my
my special encrypted disk image that
gets mounted. So it has this like
security,
if you want if you want an encrypted
disk.
If you want an encrypted disk that, you
know, the NSA hasn't done anything to
you.
So is that last part is is mobile stuff,
so.
They've got a lot of android that seems
to be the there's a lot of older
generation feature phones running some
sort of Java feature thing, and the new
ones that they're working on are Android
based. So this is the Arirang phone,
which came out last year.
They wanted something like six hundred
dollars for it initially, which seems
like a lot.
I'm not sure who was buying it, but but
it is starting to get out.
It's running Android.
I bought a tablet.
It's a tablet, it's
party pieces that it has analog TV, which
is pretty cool.
What it doesn't have is Wi-Fi or
Bluetooth or anything else.
So, you know, you can make things for
your own market. I guess that's good.
I was told that the nine inch version did
have Wi-Fi, though.
So in order to to
sort of make this a little bit easier.
I'm going to show
videos of.
This rather than do it on the actual
device, but just walk through sort of
basic interaction with this thing
and this is slightly ugly, but it
should work. I think it gets
less miserable.
So it's got a cool background of like
missiles and cyber warfare,
it has it has the same sort of browser
thing, which, again,
has sort of like screenshots of a bunch
of the internal websites.
So at least when they were developing
this image, they were on Quami on.
It's sort of, I think, ice
cream sandwich level, so some apps
they've spent a lot of time on, so this
is one that is sort of the collected
writings of the various leaders.
And so they've got their bookshelf.
And this is
Kim Jong Il. You can see the different.
So it gets better than that, right?
So that was that was just the different
volumes. And each of these volumes is
many different speeches.
And you go into the speech and you get
the the multipage speech.
So so there's quite a lot of material.
And for each of these things, you
can go in and get translations and get
definitions of all the words,
which is pretty good.
And you can also it has
voice feedback.
I don't think that I think is working
on this one, but it will actually narrate
this to you.
So you've got
that, which is cool.
Um, in addition to like.
This, which has its
its place, I guess they had a bunch
of apps that seem to be much more
just sort of customized
from from existing apps.
So there there are various games.
There's Angry Birds.
So some Angry Birds does its thing.
This, I think, is real.
And it's got sort of a not quite the same
color logo at the top in Korean.
So someone went in and needed to change
the sprites. And that's OK.
See what else I think?
I think I had a couple more that were
interesting and so in settings,
you plug USB into this and it doesn't do
anything.
There's no debug mode.
You sort of have limited settings, but
you've got some.
And so what more do you do with this?
It turns out that like to get apps,
if you're if you're trying to get apps on
the thing, you go to a store
and they will put the new app.
Here's the analog TV.
You get three stations.
And then when you're not there, they're
sort of fuzzy.
So it luckily it does have a debug
mode.
And so if you start up and hold all the
buttons down, it
goes into Android recovery mode and it's
only slightly broken, it doesn't have a
shelf or anything to, like,
actually use EDB with, but you can still
use push and pull to get files on and off
of it. So there's a little debug menu
that pops up.
It has like it's got a little
mini SD card that has eight
gigs on it and like six
or seven different partitions because
that's the way you do things.
And they're mounted at data which
might sound right. And also slash data
too. And the apex
reference file statically at slash data
too. So they won't really just transfer
over, which is unfortunate.
So so I looked at this a little bit.
I was able to get some of the because in
this like app, Angry Birds is still Angry
Birds just with different sprites in it.
The the speeches, which
was the one I was sort of interested in,
isn't nearly as easy.
I couldn't find the actual speech content
anywhere on the thing and looked at the
decks de compilation
and
it turns out that like
it's loading and another encrypted
partition to get to that speech data.
So they're really like actually trying to
make it hard to to take that API and
and put it somewhere more accessible like
that. That is that is part of this device
and not meant to go anywhere.
And that was about as far as I got on
that. But
if anyone wants to take a stab, I would
welcome additional help.
So I think that's
that's sort of the main things that I
took away from it.
They're really customizing stuff to work
in their market, as you would expect.
They've got phones.
I think Carelink has over a million
subscribers, something of that nature
which isn't that surprising because you
see phones around Pyongyang quite a bit
and Pyongyang, something like four
million people.
So thank you.
Thank you very much.
That was a really, really interesting
topic.
You read very fast.
So we have a lot of time for questions
and answers.
And please come up
to the microphones if you have any
questions.
And to the other ones, please stay
seated during the Q&A as it
gets to know if you absolutely have a
pressing need to leave, then
please do it quietly and do not
disturb the atmosphere.
So the first one on the microphone,
one, please.
Yeah, I have
a couple of questions.
Firstly, there are only men on this.
What what you want
to the microphone, please.
So
you have to put the microphone, take
them away from the microphone.
Yeah, OK, absolutely.
So there are only men on this picture.
Why is that?
Uh, when the school opened it
was determined that the initial student
body would be male.
Uh, the foreign faculty
are pushing to get, uh, females
the, uh, responses that there may be
a nursing program opening that will have
females, which isn't quite the same.
But we're getting there.
There are like the
other DPRK computer science professors,
there are female ones. So it's not a
uniform, uh,
gender difference.
Uh, it sounded like
it was something like the students are
supposed to sort of not really talk
all that much about what they learn
outside when they go home for the summer.
And it was decided that, uh,
guys were less chatty
and.
Yeah.
And what, uh,
what language.
And I was teaching in English, I don't
know, Korean at all. Yeah.
And with
translation and stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
OK, so the
this university,
as students come in they take one year of
English English language as
a foreign language. But most of them, I
think pretty much all of them have had
English in high school before they
get to university level.
So that's already somewhat good.
And then a year of just intense English
gets them up to the level where they they
do quite well in their major classes
being taught in English.
The next question from microphone to
please, and after that, we will have a
question from the Internet.
So one question, is there
some kind of system dump of the
operating system of the Android phone
or Android tablet?
So so I got some of the partitions.
But other ones don't like copy directly
with Adobe, so I don't have the full
thing. And it seemed weird to just have,
like, partial partitions, which is why
I haven't done that.
OK, now the question from our second
vendor, please.
OK, the first question from the
site, the first question from the
Internet is how do you
actually keep up with the C
not control with all the North Korean
tech?
I was there for two falls,
so involved 2013.
I was there for three months teaching
and I went back for a few weeks earlier
this fall for another lecture.
OK, then we will go round for
the number three, please.
Hi. Um, I was wondering if you have any
insight on what they're using,
which are what you're teaching them for.
I mean, what are they programing.
What are they making.
Any idea on that.
Right. So so my basic
sense because they kept asking about
Android was that they realized
that they've got this whole tablet and
phone ecosystem that they need people to,
like, develop and they sort
of would like to have more people who can
do that.
So it seemed like, uh,
many of the students were,
as after they graduated, likely to end up
working on developing more of these apps
and sort of advancing that.
Uh, so the first the first undergraduates
graduated this fall.
And we know that some of them, uh, ended
up going into sort of graduate programs
for more education and other ones
did end up working in this CCSC
labs doing computer
stuff.
OK.
Microphone four, please.
Um, did you witness any non elite
students use technology
outside, maybe the university.
So so, um.
You would see phones around Pyongyang so
so beyond just the students, like the the
the life that I saw was Pyongyang.
We did not leave the city very much,
but although we did leave campus to some
extent.
And so you would see people who were sort
of normal Pyongyang residents, and they
would not be uncommon for them to have
phones as well.
And, you know, these these students, not
all of them were from Pyongyang.
Some of them were sort of upper class,
but were from other provinces and came in
for schooling.
So it's not completely limited
to the city, but I don't
have a sense of exactly how that
distribution of sort of the gradient
of who has access files, any notebooks
in the city somewhere, what any
notebooks witnessed in the city's
notebooks.
Uh.
You'd see them in shops, some like you'd
see the point of sale or that sort of
thing. I didn't see that many like I
don't know if I was in situations where I
would see people using personal laptops.
Like I didn't see in that much, though.
Nothing that stands out to me.
But I don't think I was expecting to
either.
OK, you to have a fair distribution of
questions of you have left,
please, microphone one, then two,
and then the question from the Internet
and then we will see how much time we
have left.
Oh, sorry, sorry.
I know it's
very unfair.
I didn't see you had to see from
up here. OK,
then we keep the order of the microphone
five, microphone six, and
then we're gone.
Did you bring any of your own devices to
the country and where they checked in any
way, or could you elaborate on this?
So I brought a Chromebook, uh,
because I liked having a 2pm.
It was not checked.
And it was you know,
it seemed to stay fine the whole time.
Uh, when I came back this time, I brought
like a duffel bag
full of a bunch of raspberry PIs that we
used for programing exercises.
And that got sort of a skeptical look
when I opened it up at the border.
But they didn't seem to have problems
with a bunch of their circuit boards
and camera modules.
So
they might take that for what you want.
Yeah. Microphone six, please.
Thanks for the talk.
Could you please upload the image
of Red Star Office to
the Internet for research purposes?
Yeah. So OK.
So so I actually went
after asking one of the minders, so
so I guess I hadn't explained that we
we could walk around campus freely, but
to leave campus, we had to go with
a guide.
And so there was a set of guides for the
campus, for the foreigners.
And so at one point I was able to
convince them to take me to a computer
store because the normal one we went to
did not sell Red Star.
So we went to I believe that was a
reseller of KCC.
And for two thousand
one or twenty five cents, I was able to
get a copy, which is great.
However, I didn't want to like,
distribute it because it was like, well,
I'm the only one who's like said that
I've had it. But the good news is I got
contacted earlier this fall by someone
who claims that they want to put it
online. So I would not be surprised if it
actually ends up online pretty soon.
OK, we have still two minutes left.
So some short question from microphone
one microphone through and
we will get to the Internet.
Yeah, you have a question about the
kind of level of network
knowledge, because I've seen
a class A, B and C networks, which is not
available anymore since twenty years.
And the first question is, is glassless
into the main routing known there
and is IPV six available there?
I did not see any evidence of IPV six.
I don't think there are there up on that
one yet.
The books that they had had BGP, they
would ask me questions about BGP every
once in a while.
I don't think it was a huge problem.
They sort of just did things.
So the campus network.
Right. I mentioned that it
had a proxy when
you connected your device, it didn't have
the or any sort of default route.
You had to explicitly type in the IP
address of this gateway that you wanted
to use as your proxy and sort of normal
traffic you sent out would just fall on
the floor.
And they chose that that internal network
was going to be like the one 10
slash eight address space
because they could and I think it
overlapped with a set of South Korean IP
space. So
that was cool.
So so they sort of use the segments of IP
before that they want to.
So just a short question, please.
I know you wanted to talk about
technology. Not so much politics, but
could you maybe tell us a little bit
about the attitude of your
students? Is there a hacker culture and
spirit similar to what we have
to devalue digital freedoms, individual
empowerment, like like we do?
What's the motivation of the students?
I think the motivation for the students
was pretty varied.
There were some of these guys
really did enjoy computer science and
computers and hacking on them.
And like in their free time and
the evenings, they would go up to the lab
and play computer games or
work on coding.
And so there was there was some evidence,
a lot of them sort of seemed
either to end up at the school because
it was pretty clear that English as a
language is a pretty good skill to have,
even if you don't care so much about your
major somewhere in that boat.
Um.
So I guess one one anecdote to that is
that there was this sort of copy of
a DOS level operating system that some
previous student, I think I got
told Kim Il-Sung University had had
written that you could boot up directly
to that, had a competitive two
player Tetris that they really like to
play.
And it was like nice 256 color
like and they were really good at it.
So there are people who are doing cool
things over there, but I think it's
not nearly at the same level as it is
here.
OK, detainments nearly up.
I think video takes a question from
the Internet. And then one very short
question from microphone six.
I know it's unfair to everybody standing
in line for the microphones, but,
you know, if you have only so much time,
please, to them, OK?
And the Internet wants to know
which name the dot com top level domain
is introduced there.
Which top-level domain do they use yet?
No, because
they want to know if, like, dot com was
we label like what did they
imperialists forbidden namespace or
something.
Uh, I mean so there's quote on
the Internet and that was just their
completely their own, uh,
set of DNS.
And when you were on the Internet you
were using public DNS.
So I don't I don't know of any particular
mappings.
OK, so the last question, please.
Yes.
Since they're using so old software
and don't have access to updates
on the Internet, how do they handle
viruses or hacker and so on, or
is this not happening?
They keep reinstalling their operating
systems regularly,
so.
Thanks to everyone sorry that we are not
able to have all the questions
asked, but I think you can meet
Scott afterwards, so give a big round
of applause to all.