Report: North Korea accidentally allows world to access its entire internet
Too much choice may be a bad thing at times, but evidently that’s not a problem for North Korea’s internet users.
Thanks to (presumably) a higher-up in the country making a horrible mistake, the e-sleuths at GitHub were able to access information on all the websites hosted on the reclusive dictatorship’s servers. All in all, it seems residents of North Korea lucky enough to gain internet access have only 28 websites to choose from.
GitHub, a source-code hosting site, explained this week: “One of North Korea’s top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global [Domain Name System] transfers. This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer request] to the country’s ns2.kptc.kp name server to get a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data.”
Some of the websites discovered are self-explanatory. Cooks.org.kp, for instance, is a recipe site, while Kcna.kp is the site for the government-controlled Korean Central News Agency. Other addresses, like Friend.com.kp, are harder to figure out, though some suspect this may be a social network. There are many sites that no one has been able to access.
You can see a full list of the sites on Reddit here. As one Redditor points out, Grand Theft Auto V players can access more websites within the game (83) than North Koreans can on their entire internet.
Despite the limited content, North Korea’s servers aren’t completely stable. The country’s entire internet went offline in late 2014 following what was speculated to be a denial-of-service attack.
Unfortunately, many of North Korea’s 24 million citizens have worse things to worry about than a bad connection. Malnutrition, government corruption and human rights violations plague the secretive nation.
This article originally appeared on CNET.