Posted on 12/28/2015 10:30:11 PM PST by Swordmaker
As the most closed-off country on the planet, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the North Korean government developed its own homegrown operating system that can be used to spy on its citizens.
Fueled by an unprecedented level of paranoia and a desire to keep its populace in line and closed off from the outside world, North Koreans outside of the government are completely shut off from the Internet. In its place? A nationwide intranet heavily controlled and monitored by the powers that be. And the mysterious operating system powering most of the computers in the country today? Red Star OS.
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Recently, German researchers Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess managed to download a copy of Red Star OS, providing us with unprecedented details surrounding the country’s mysterious operating system. Based on a version of Linux called Fedora, Red Star OS, not surprisingly, leans heavily towards surveillance.
“We found that the features implemented in Red Star OS are the wet dream of a surveillance state dictator,” Grunow and Schiess explained. “It provides a set of surveillance features like the capabilities to watermark different types of files that can be used to track the distribution of documents and multi-media files.”
While that’s to be expected, what’s a little bit surprising is that Red Star OS looks remarkably like Apple’s OS X. You can check out a full 27 minute run down of how Red Star OS operates and what it looks like below, but for now, we’ve compiled a few photos which showcase the OS’ striking similarity to OS X.
Up first, during the installation process, we see a distinctly Aqua look and feel.
In this photo, you’ll note the presence of the Mac’s spinning beach ball
And here’s the desktop which looks exactly like OS X. As a interesting design detail, note how the Apple icon on the upper left hand corner of the menu bar is replaced with a North Korean Red Star.
Almost comically, when shifting the language to English, we see that the Finder has been renamed KFinder.
A few more photos.
Here’s North Korean Quicktime.
And the System Preferences pane.
Ever wonder what kCal looks like?
And a few more photos.
Part 2 of the Red Star OS walk through can be viewed here.
Hahaha, I saw this today. A very low-rent OSX with massive spyware capabilities. Very Nork.
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Reminds me of an article I read in the early 1980s. The USSR was showcasing their “home-grown” computer, supposedly all designed and created by Russian computer experts from the ground up, at an expo in Moscow. So a savvy Western reporter sat down at the Soviet computer, banged away a few keystrokes which did a dump of the operating system... which displayed copyright notices of Apple Computer Inc. It was a complete copy of the Apple II computer, with very few alterations of the ROM code. The Russian “experts” weren’t savvy enough to erase all the Apple copyright notices embedded everywhere in the code.
Is Apple filing lawsuit?
In Nork Court? Lol, why on earth would they even bother. It’s not like you can buy any Apple in North Korea anyway.
Into what court could Apple haul the North Korean government to sue them for copyright and patent infringements? I know of no court that would have jurisdiction, do you?
The underlying OS isn't UNIXtm but Linux, so I suspect it would be mostly copyrights at issue. As far as I know, North Korea is not signatory to any international Copyright Accords that civilized nations have agreed to abide by.
Damn, the strange bug in FR seems to have reared it’s head when it duplicated your post in the reply editing screen. . . because “Apole” came up instead of “Apple” That’s what I saw, so I put the (sic) on it. I wish John Robinson would get a handle on this dang translation bug! Sorry about that.
Yeah that bug is annoying. It seems to only be an issue when you copy and paste.
Well I guess we now know what manufacturer’s computer Kim Jong Un used when he went to college in the West.
If a communist country is going to copy a computer operating system you know that it is going to be the system with which their dictator with which is comfortable.
When I was a child, it was a running joke how the Soviet press claimed that every major invention in human history had been discovered by Russians in the USSR: among other things, they had invented the television, the helicopter, and the automobile. The Pyongyang apple did not fall far from the Kremlin tree.
Someone needs to finish off the last 10-20 hamsters and their wheel to kill the NORK electrical grid. Enough already.
The biggest threat is not to Apple’s profits, the Norks don’t have the money to buy Apple products anyway. The biggest threat is the malware likely to be embedded.
This is pathetic. If that’s all their genius programmers can manage, then there is probably no one in the country capable of using it for any significant purpose.
KIM jong unhinged berieve his ploglammuhs make arr by themserves!!
Others have said the same, but that is not my experience; if I type straight into the “Reply†using the shift and the key beside the semicolon key, I get the mess I predict you will see above.It seems to only be an issue when you copy and paste.And that makes me suspicious . . .
For years now, I have had the problem that if I type the HTML code to make a hypertext link, the second - not the first, apparently, but only the second - double quotation mark I use to delineate the address of the link is not recognized as such by the HTML parser. It is weird, but after I do a preview, I can then redo the second double quote, and the link malfunction goes away.But note, although I did type in the quotation marks,I will now do an example:
a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=3377562%2C9"> in which I have omitted the leading < of the link to keep it from killing everything after the attempted link. I know that you will be seeing some gibberish that resembles € in places, so I will give a description:
When I typed the first " (which I used " to induce HTML to display for you), I see ".a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/postâ€>But when I typed the second ", the character I see differs. It looks a lot like ”, except that the marks are not curved but straight.
Now when I execute a preview, I do not observe any change in either the first or the second "; the second one still is slanted. Of course when I look at what will get displayed to you, the second quote mark turns to gibberish like â€. But, the first quote mark is a faithful copy of the original ".
Now when I delete and replace the second " as I would normally do to get HTML to create an actual link, I see that the second " actually does look like " and not like ”.
And, sure enough, a Preview of the result tells me that the second " will be what you should actually see when I now post this.
And seeing that that is the case, I will now redo the “link” above, so you will see below what I saw above after the first Preview:
might still apply in the sense that in fact I did copy the URL from the browser. I will try manually typing in the URL:a href=“http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/postsâ€>
Now that is weird: the quotation marks on the left and the right are both slanted. The same way. And Preview reflects the fact that neither one of them is "
Disclaimer: This issue of the hyperlinks has been happening on my OS X Mac for years, but only started less than five years ago and when I encountered it I was unable to associate it with any changes I had made. “It’s not what you do, it’s what you say when you do it.”
I noticed another thing the other day. When looking at the forum there was a post that the preview of the body didn’t show funny characters, but when you opened the post the characters appeared. I’m wondering if there is an issue within the stylesheet (.css file), possibly associating to an old/corrupt/unsupported style.
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