On Monday night, someone in North Korea fucked up and switched some computer thing that shouldn’t be switched (“One of North Korea’s top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers,” as a computer researcher put it), revealing to the world that the hermit kingdom only has 28 websites. That sounds…kind of nice?
According to CNBC, computer researcher Matthew Bryant noticed the mistake and was able to gain access to the domain names and some data, which he uploaded to GitHub. A reddit thread detailed the accessible sites, which include websites for travel, insurance, cooking, news, charity, film, and Facebook-like social media site called Friends. Screenshots of the websites are below:
Would we all be better off with fewer websites? There’s not a doubt in my mind (unless, say, your livelihood depends on a content bubble). Of course, good new sites pop every now and again, so a hard limit would be difficult to support. And there’s, uh, all the other bad stuff that North Korea does, like illegally testing nuclear weapons, violating basic human rights, and–worst of all–banning sarcasm. Hmm. Anyway, what an interesting glimpse into an extremely secretive country!
