 |
The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea only has 28 websites.
|
It's sometimes said that too much choice can be a bad thing, but
that's evidently not something North Korea's internet users have to deal
with.
Thanks to (presumably) a higher-up in the country making a horrible mistake, the e-sleuths at GitHub were able to access information on all the websites hosted on the reclusive country's servers.
All in all, it seems residents of North Korea lucky enough to have internet access have only 28 websites to choose from. Earlier this week, GitHub explained, "one of North Korea's top level name servers was accidentally configured to allow global [Domain Name System] transfers.
This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer request] to the country's ns2.kptc.kp name server to get a copy of the nation's top level DNS data."
Some of the websites discovered are self-explanatory. Cooks.org.kp, for instance, is a recipe site, while kcna.kp is the site for the country's news agency. Other addresses, like friend.com.kp, have more nebulous purposes (though people suspect this one is a form of social network). There are many sites which no one has been able to access.
You can see a full list on Reddit here. As someone on Reddit points out, Grand Theft Auto V players can access more websites in the game (83) than North Koreans can on their entire internet.
Despite the limited content, North Korea's servers aren't the most stable. The country's entire internet went offline in late 2014 following what was speculated to be a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Unfortunately, many of North Korea's 24 million citizens have worse things to worry about than a bad connection. Malnutrition, government corruption and human rights violations plague the secretive nation.