I’m watching CNN, and the entire country is without internet access?
Is “the US responding appropriately” as Obama promised?
Hmmm…
Business as usual. How many Internet users do you think they have?
‘If you can’t play nice on the Internet, you shan’t be allowed to have it!’
Since Internet access is supposedly forbidden for ordinary North Koreans, all an outage means is that Dear Tubby Leader can’t visit his favorite porn sites.
Oh, someone should definitely do a video with a look-alike actor ‘flogging the capitalist dog’ while he looks at barnyard porn.
The (real) internet is ALWAYS out for those poor guys.
It seems a little tit-for-tat for the US to play hacker and take down their internet, doesn’t it? Especially when so few of their citizens actually have access to it.
Isn’t that the idea? It will hurt only the elites.
Their internet access goes entirely through China. So China may be throwing the US a bone here.
How big a player is Sony in the Chinese market? China may be doing this entirely out of their own economic self-interest.
[Dr. Evil]
China is trowing us a freaking bone here!
[/Dr. Evil]
We’ve done it.
I read an article today discussing how this really affects North Korea. Now I can’t find the article again, so no cite. But here are some salient points as best I recall:
Few people in NK have internet access. The “common people” are only allowed to own a computer with permission from the gov’t, and all computers must be registered with the police. Probably not many could afford one anyway.
The only “internet” that most North Koreans know about (and some may think it’s the whole internet) is actually a government-run intranet with just a few web sites, all of them government-run or -sponsored or -approved and mostly propaganda stuff. There are a few “internet” cafes in Pyongyang where people can surf that stuff. But people aren’t even allowed to travel without gov’t permissions, so people outside Pyongyang can’t even go there.
There are just a few classes of people who are allowed true access to the outside internet:
(1) The people who work the propaganda sites.
(2) The government-sponsored international cyberhacker division, thought to be some 3000 of the country’s best and brightest.
(3) The insider elites, who get all kinds of luxuries that are unknown to the hoi polloi.
So knocking their external net connections off-line really only affects these elite effete few.
I saw that article. Here ya go:
Yes, North Korea has the internet. Here’s what it looks like.
North Korea’s Internet access was only out for nine hours.
About typical for a Comcast user.
Thanks! Yes, that’s the very article I saw and referred to above.
I’ll bet the customer service is better in NK.
Well maybe our response should be to give them MORE internet.
They were gone temporarily but not forever.
No. We cannot give the North Korean people anything. The closest you could do is give things to the assholes who have kept them enslaved for decades and hope they stuff themselves to the point where even they would deign to give their leftovers to the North Korean people.
In case you haven’t figured it out, that’s a terrible plan.
Ah, someone probably just unplugged the modem.