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posted by
LaminatorX
on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:00PM
from the totally-not-full-of-backdoors dept.
from the totally-not-full-of-backdoors dept.
nobbis writes:
" Desktop Images from Red Star 3.0, the North Korean Operating System, have been made available by Will Scott a US computer scientist who lectured in Pyongyang in 2013.
Red Star 3.0 is a Linux based OS, whose desktop now closely resembles OSX, possibly influenced by Kim Jong-un who has been pictured with an iMac; although how he obtained an iMac is unclear. Screenshots of Red Star 2.0 and a walk through of the installation of Red Star 3.0 are given in an article in North Korean Tech blog. The 8 desktop images include artillery under snow with magpies, a farming scene with 1960s era tractors, and an unconvincing city view. Will Scott has answered questions about his experiences in Pyongyang on a Reddit ask me anything."
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North Korean OS Desktop Images Available
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bornagainpenguin on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:06AM
While everyone in the discussion thus far seems to be focusing on inanity of a dictator of a communist country with a high end luxury computer like the iMac, presumably the original comment was a throw-away in reference to export restrictions on potentially military capable computing. Recall North Korea was mentioned as part of GW's axis of evil as was Saddam's Iraq--and there were all sorts of articles that came out about the ways in which those countries would attempt to leverage common electronics to boost around export restrictions. For instance:
http://beta.slashdot.org/story/15431 [slashdot.org]Iraq Stockpiling PS2 Consoles!
In context it's interesting to see how things have changed and yet remain the same...
(Score: 1) by AnythingGoes on Friday March 07 2014, @06:54AM
As long as anyone with money can buy anything at retail - export restrictions don't matter. How hard is it to pay a teenager to buy a Macbook Pro for you?
Just remember that the computing power that each of us has on our desk is far far more than what was available to the best military/three letter agencies up till 20 years ago and they were using that to do all sorts of top secret stuff etc. And how hard is it to hook up a bunch of PS3/Xbox 360s to be a compute cluster?
Just like in the postscript to "Sum of all fears" where Tom Clancy talked about how easy it was to purchase a 5 axis CNC machine - seriously easier nowadays to buy even better manufacturing equipment from China.
The question is how many people in NK can even afford to have a computer and if it would be a catalyst for change, or become just another tool for control...