In North Korea, there are only 28 websites?

A few days ago, the GitHub file storage showed all the registered domains assigned to .kp. This is the top-level code for a country such as North Korea. In fact, it turned out that there are only 28 websites in it.

What websites are available to North Koreans?

Although many of these sites are unavailable, they provide a rare opportunity to understand how things are in North Korea and how useless, in fact, the Internet in this country.

Among the websites available to North Koreans, there is a portal for buying air tickets, a culinary site, a movie site, several educational, tourist tips, several news agencies and a social science site. It also turned out that in North Korea there is a kind of social network called "Friend". Can it be compared with popular services around the world, it's very difficult to say. But it's obvious that users in other countries have much more opportunities when they decide to create their account on social networks.

You can even access many of the sites listed above, although their downloading may take some time - after all, they probably are not too used to heavy international traffic, since it's unlikely that anyone other than North Koreans might be interested in them .

How did you get this data?

The accompanying post in GitHub explains how cyber security experts managed to get this data into their own hands. On September 19, 2016, at approximately 10 pm, one of the top-level servers for North Korea was accidentally configured to expand the global DNS translation zone. This allows anyone who executes the AXFR request to ns2.kptc.kp to obtain a copy of the top-level DNS data.

So what kind of information is posted on North Korean websites?

A large part of the news articles is focused on the country's leader Kim Jong-un, on his father and former leader Kim Chong-il, as well as on recent nuclear weapons tests conducted in the country.

Here are some examples of headlines on the news sites that the state controls: "North Korean nuclear test of will for sovereignty and peace", "Drug-related crimes among the youth of Sernaya Korea".

One of the articles is about the "Unanimous desire and legitimate right of the Korean people to drive American troops out of North Korea and achieve peace on the Korean peninsula ... The Korean people will never give up their rightful cause to destroy American military threats and economic pressure."