North Korea accidentally opened up access to its internal internet system on Wednesday, showing that there are only 28 sites available for North Koreans to access. Normally, websites on the country's server are only available for people in North Korea.
A full list of the websites, which include one for booking flights, one for recipes, and one that is potentially a social network, is available here.
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.
One Reddit user noted that there are more websites available in the latest Grand Theft Auto video game than there are for actual real-life North Koreans.
A sad look at the brutality of a totalitarian state.
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