Kwangmyong

   Kwangmyong (meaning bright light) constitutes a mysterious [1]intranet
   that [2]North Koreans basically have instead of the [3]Internet. For its
   high political isolation North Korea doesn't allow its citizens open
   access to the Internet, they rather create their own internal network the
   government can fully control and [4]censor to their liking -- this is
   unsurprising, allegedly it is e.g. illegal to own a fax and North Korea
   also have their own operating system called [5]Red Star OS for similar
   reasons -- to not get infiltrated by foreign technology. Not so much is
   known about Kwangmyong for a number of reasons: it is only accessible from
   within North Korea, foreigners are typically not allowed to access it,
   and, of course, it isn't in [6]English but in Korean, so a typical tourist
   won't understand a word even if he gets a glimpse of it. Of course the
   content on the network is highly filtered and/or engineered by the state
   propaganda. Foreigners sometimes get a chance to spot or even secretly
   photograph things that allow us to make out a bit of information about the
   network.

   North Koreans themselves almost never have their own computers, they
   typically browse the network in libraries.

   There seem to be a few thousand accessible sites. Raw [7]IP addresses (in
   the private 10.0.0.0/8 range) are sometimes used to access sites (posters
   in libraries list IPs of some sites) but [8]DNS is also up -- here sites
   use .kp [9]top level domain. Some sites, e.g. of universities, are also
   accessible on the Internet (e.g. http://www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp/), others
   like http://www.ipo.aca.kp (patent/invention site) or
   http://www.ssl.edu.kp (sports site) are not. There seems to be a remote
   webcam education system in place -- it appeared on North Korean news.
   There exists something akin a [10]search engine (Naenara), [11]email,
   [12]usenet, even something like [13]facebook. Apparently there are some
   [14]video games as well.

See Also

     * [15]Red Star OS (North Korea operating system)
     * [16]sneakernet

Links:
1. intranet.md
2. north_korea.md
3. internet.md
4. censorship.md
5. red_star.md
6. english.md
7. ip_address.md
8. dns.md
9. tld.md
10. search_engine.md
11. email.md
12. usenet.md
13. facebook.md
14. game.md
15. red_star.md
16. sneakernet.md