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A look inside North Korea.


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Guest pod

Not at all. If you read the little blurb about the assignment, he took great pains to try and capture the "real" North Korea, since even tourist photography is heavily restricted.

They're not smiling, and they all look very unhealthy.

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Guest jbit

The only good thing (if you want to call it that) is that most of the country was born into that closed society, they've never seen a tv show or newspaper that wasn't gov regulated, so they have no idea how bad they have it.

I was watching a special on NK, and the reporter noticed that there were no birds any where he went. He asked about it and was told that the famine was so bad that most of the wild birds have been killed for food.

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Guest endymion

Existing smuggling routes could be used to extend email access to those people. I was surprised a few months ago when my research turned up evidence that there already are mobile phones covertly moving into North Korea. Lack of email software is the only thing keeping us from talking to those people.

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Guest pod

What was interesting was that the photographer stated that he was secretly offloading his photos to his MP3 player at night. So there is a way somehow of getting innocuous devices into the country.

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Guest endymion

What was interesting was that the photographer stated that he was secretly offloading his photos to his MP3 player at night. So there is a way somehow of getting innocuous devices into the country.

Yeah there's a reference on that link in my post above, to existing mobile phone smuggling routes.

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Guest Slide On The Ice

Dude, not one person smiling....

Ironically, they are smiling big in this photo. Look at the caption. Could they have been any more brainwashed growing up, into believing that Kim was their savior and that they had it much worse under the Japanese? I don't mean because they're smiling since there is a camera pointed at them, but for celebrating the day as a holiday.

http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0704/kontos44.html

North Koreans celebrate the 61st anniversary of Liberation Day - freedom from Japanese colonialism - in a park in Pyongyang.
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Guest 029

i think you guyz are looking into this too deep. looks like regular people going about their regular business the way regular people do. how many smiles do you get around s. florida (unless the people know each other or are on the cell phone)??

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Guest pod

Er what? Nah, they look totally depressed. I mean, I'm not all sunshine and lollipops but these people are depressed. Think about it, it's North Korea.

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Guest swirlundergrounder

Even at a root level, they know life can be better.

No they don't know how bad they have it. They have been brainwashed for more than half a century already. Several generations of people have been borned loyal to serve Kim Jong Il and the North Korean State.

That is all they know.

There is only 1 plane that go's into North Korea once every 4 to 6 days at the most from China.

That's it.

Their reality is all most of the population knows and understands.

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Guest endymion

Yeah exactly, Pod. How much difference could a few thousand email users make? How much harder would they be for a dictator to control if they could form their own opinions about the world around them?

IWB is also developing a simple protocol for smuggling blog posts and comments in and out of places like North Korea. The sneakernet can easily carry video/audio messages from illiterate users. Wouldn't you be curious to read a North Korean's video/photo blog? I would.

Cutting off your own people's information access to the outside world is a new type of tyranny that doesn't get enough attention yet. If a handful of programmers would put some hours into some very simple and straightforward development then we could impact the lives of millions of people. I'm currently doing it myself whether I get help or not but I'm still the only actual programmer on the project. If even just a few people start to help me with the coding then we could be reading emails from North Korea in 2007 instead of 2010.

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Guest endymion

Personally entering North Korea, taking covert photos, and smuggling them out like Lisa Ling is a high-cost-low-benefit venture. The risk is high and the benefit is low since you as an outsider don't have access to places like the prisons where huge percentages of the North Korean population live. You wouldn't know where to point the camera like a North Korean dissident would.

North Korea's control model is very vunerable to disruptive technology. There are already a lot of mobile camera phones in North Korea. Transporting information across the border is what makes photos like this rare. The IWB sneakernet will make it very easy to move emails and photos and video clips over the border. The sneakernet blogging protocol will turn each of those mobile camera phones already in North Korea into a photo/video blog on the Internet.

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Guest pod

I'm surprised that Kontos was able to do what he did. Even covertly.

What I'm getting at is that North Korea is very very homogeneous. 99.9 percent of the people are Korean or at least Asian, i.e., a tall European stands out just on that virtue. You could see it in some photos, people looked at him like he was an alien.

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Guest endymion

Yeah people were gawking at Lisa Ling's crew too. They won't gawk when it's a North Korean who knows the system well enough to keep a mobile phone concealed.

Handhelds will also be smuggled into the hard labor camps that Lisa Ling could never access. North Korea will never let any foreigner inside their prisons except as a prisoner. The Abu Ghraib photo leaks were a preview of the photos that will find their way to the Internet in the next few decades from North Korea and Cuba and China and prisons all over the world.

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Guest 029

what should i be looking for? idk seems like a lot of people just assume a lot of stuff about a place they know so little about, based on (the words "North Korea" alone and) the propaganda that passes for news here in the states.

i can relate to this better than most b/c i lived under a totalitarian quasi-communist system in eastern europe. after i came to the states, i quickly learned how misinformed most people are in this country regarding the preconceptions about my own country (which continue to this day btw ..)

so what i'm seeing is like i said b4 - people doing their daily things the way they are done in their homeland.

i don't necessarily agree with the system in north korea, nor the overbearing government control, nor the censorship nor any of that. but i think it silly to judge people like this when in the end life is very much the same no matter where you live. people are born, people go to school, they work & have families that have picnics together, they play sports, etc ..

look at this from the perspective of the rest of the world looking at how people live in the united states .. possibly the highest incarceration rate in the world, no healthcare for millions, etc .. maybe they're making posts too about how much better off they are there than we are here .. see my point??

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Guest swirlundergrounder

What I mean is that they're starving, and they know that somewhere, life is better, but not how much better.

But these people are brainwashed into thinking that they have it better than the rest of the world does.

If you had no way to communicate with people outside of the United States., had no Internet, Had only state ran television, an education system that teaches their young what the government wants them to hear, had no mail going outside of the United States or coming into it, had no people leaving or entering the United States etc... then how would we know how other people in the world lived like?

Sure people are dying in the streets of North Korea from staravtion and lack of medical attention. But they are not complaining either. They do not revlot against the regime of Kim Jong Il because to 99% of the population of North Korea, Kin Jong Il is an iconic demigod and every person who is born in that country is taught from birth to do his bidding.

Something like 2/3rd of North Koreas population works for the military and government because thats the only industry they have their with exception to the opium trade..

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Guest endymion

look at this from the perspective of the rest of the world looking at how people live in the united states .. possibly the highest incarceration rate in the world, no healthcare for millions, etc .. maybe they're making posts too about how much better off they are there than we are here .. see my point??

I do see your point. You grew up in Czechoslovakia before the Czech Republic? Very interesting.

I don't judge North Koreans as having worse lives than us just from those photos alone. But it's inescapable to draw some conclusions. There is plenty of evidence that the people there experience significant hardship.

My goal is to encourage more free flow of more information directly to and from the individual people there so that they can share their own perspectives with us, the same way that you can now. We're not going to see a North Korean pop up in the CoolJunkie forums to share his opinion because he just can't. He's not free to converse with us.

I don't feel bad for passing judgement on that as being morally Wrong. It is morally Wrong to prevent ordinary citizens from communicating with other people in order to maintain political power. I'm talking about Cuba, I'm talking about North Korea, I'm talking about Syria, I'm talking about Thailand, I'm talking about Singapore, I'm talking about China, and possibly soon Venezuela and Bolivia as well. Unfortunately I'll be talking about this issue until the day that I die.

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Guest jbit

^^^What he said^^^

My comments about North Korea were not based on those pictures. Those pictures don't do it justice. The propaganda and brainwashing going on there are insane.

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