North Korea's internet laid bare—and it only has 28 sites
One of North Korea's many secrets is the structure of its internet, which is not only tightly controlled by the government, but also inaccessible to foreigners.
That last part changed Monday, when someone in North Korea made an apparent error, allowing anyone to access the country's top level DNS data. This revealed the list of web domain names residing on the country's top level domain, .kp.
The folks working on a Github project accessed the data and discovered that there are just 28 sites there.
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These web domains are mostly accessible from other parts of the world (albeit likely unbearably slow to open) -- but this appears to be the first time that someone outside the secretive state has published a full list of them.
The list, which has been thoroughly analyzed by folks on Reddit, includes some known web domains, such as rodong.rep.kp, which hosts the country's official news website, Rodong.
Some were easy to guess; airkoryo.com.kp, for example, is the website of the country's airline, Air Koryo, and knic.com.kp hosts the Korean People Total Insurance Company.
Some, like friend.com.kp, remain a relative mystery -- could it be some sort of North Korean Facebook clone? -- and some are inaccessible at the time of this writing.
The full list of .kp domains is as follows:
airkoryo.com.kp cooks.org.kp friend.com.kp gnu.rep.kp kass.org.kp kcna.kp kiyctc.com.kp knic.com.kp koredufund.org.kp korelcfund.org.kp korfilm.com.kp ma.gov.kp masikryong.com.kp naenara.com.kp nta.gov.kp portal.net.kp rcc.net.kp rep.kp rodong.rep.kp ryongnamsan.edu.kp sdprk.org.kp silibank.net.kp star-co.net.kp star-di.net.kp star.co.kp star.edu.kp star.net.kp vok.rep.kp
North Korean internet made the news in Dec. 2014, when it went offline for nine and a half hours for no apparent reason. It was then speculated that the country's entire internet, which is connected to the world through China, could be taken down by a simple DDoS attack.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
