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A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

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Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#41

Post by Houshalter »

IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #33
linkmotif wrote: post #9

The one good, albeit tragic, thing about the existence of North Korea is that it serves as a constant reminder of what society can become if we're not vigilant about educating each generation about the dangers of certain ideologies and modes of social organization.

The government of North Korea is one of the two puppet dictatorships established in the Korean peninsula after World War II. It was the will of the Korean people to establish a socialist democracy, not a Juche dictatorship, but in 1946 the USSR and USA decided that what the Korean people wanted was the least important concern. The point is that it wasn't the ideology of the Korean people that mattered, it was the cla…

Dictators have come to power through many methods through history. Being given power by an outside force is only one possible route to totalitarianism. Many dictators start out popular and sometimes even democratically elected.

The scariest thing about modern dictatorships is they may never go away once established. As surveillance technology improves, perfect ideological control becomes possible. As drones and robots replace human soldiers, uprisings become much less practical. Nuclear weapons eliminate the threat of foreign invasion. Eventually anti-aging will prevent the dictators from even dying.

That was always the scariest part of 1984 for me. Not that the world was a dystopia, but that it was completely stable. The state could continue on for thousands of years. Or at least until they ran out of natural resources.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#43

Post by _nedR »

averagewall wrote: post #37
sleepingeights wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These people are insane. > And if North Korea ever does change, if the Kim family were overthrown or were to voluntarily loosen its chokehold on information, a U.S. apology for the bombing could help dispel 65 years of hate. Consider the response of white americans in the US after the Imperial Japanese bombed a military force in Pearl Harbor, with almost zero civilian casualties. It quickly became common sentiment in…

But what if they hadn't? Japan was invading most of Asia with mass killings along the lines of ISIS and the Nazis. Are you saying ISIS should also be left alone and America not try to stop them? Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent. The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.

>Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.

Wow, Its fascinating, the mental gymnastics people perform to rationalise the atrocities their side perpetrates while in the same breath deploring the atrocities committed by the other side.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#44

Post by bdcravens »

Reading this the engineer in me was impressed at their thoroughness. I believe it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking of the North Korean government as grossly incompetent, and this isn't necessarily true. If these assumptions extend to Western leaders, it could one day have a disastrous result.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#45

Post by abalashov »

bschwindHN wrote: post #11
Graphon1 wrote: post #3

ok , so DPRK is installing spyware on tablets that are sold in DPRK. Reading this article, it occurs to me that it's not very different than the surveillance that the NSA is performing on US Citizens, except the NSA is smarter about it and taps the network access, at the network provider.

Are you joking? We couldn't even have this conversation on North Korean devices. As bad as the NSA might be, this is on a completely different level.

I don't know. While there's no literal comparison, I concede, it's possible the OP had a figurative one in mind.

Reading his argument charitably: the Snowden revelations showed us that the penetration of the tentacles of our surveillance is at least an order of magnitude greater than we imagined, and that many things we thought rendered it technically or economically infeasible are in fact quite feasible if the resources of the NSA are thrown at it. More significantly: our surveillance is fantastically disproportionate to the lyrical encomiums we sing to our free society and democracy and so forth. At least in North Korea it's par for the course.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#46

Post by abalashov »

bdcravens wrote: post #44

Reading this the engineer in me was impressed at their thoroughness. I believe it's easy to fall into a trap of thinking of the North Korean government as grossly incompetent, and this isn't necessarily true. If these assumptions extend to Western leaders, it could one day have a disastrous result.

I do wonder where they source the talent and expertise with these platforms necessary to pull something like this off. I understand that's kind of a naive question—any functional state has sufficient resources to solve such problems for itself—but one does wonder. I can only assume there was extensive Chinese help. They definitely have the critical mass of engineering ecosystem for that sort of endeavour.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#47

Post by fluxem »

leggomylibro wrote: post #35

This is a terrifying manifestation of what technology makes trivially possible. This device: * Logs every app and web page that you open. * Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files. * Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on t…

So, basically Android? Except, you don't get shot in the back. With Android, it automatically syncs Contacts and photos to the "Cloud", unless you disable it. But, you cannot do it 100%, because it's turn on by default when you first sign in. Also, it's not a secret that Google logs your locations history.

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#48

Post by friedman23 »

IslaDeEncanta wrote: post #32
Cieplak wrote: post #28

Random fact that I learned recently, 20% of the North Korean population was killed during the Korean War (1950-1953). Mostly with Napalm. :(

The US dropped more bombs on North Korea than we dropped on all of Europe and Japan during WWII. Proxy wars between superpowers never work out well for the actual people affected, and we should not be so forgetful of that.

It worked out well for the South Koreans

Re: A Closer Look at North Korea’s Ullim Tablet

#50

Post by devoply »

leggomylibro wrote: post #35

This is a terrifying manifestation of what technology makes trivially possible. This device: * Logs every app and web page that you open. * Keeps forensics on shared files based on hashes, to track networks of like-minded dissidents or individuals sharing similar files. * Refuses to open any files which are not signed by either the government, or the device which created the file. (e.g. photos can be viewed only on t…

Yeah and if North Korea can do stuff like this, it means anyone can do stuff like this. It's trivial enough to do at this point.
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