Something Happened? All N. Korean Diplomatic Missions Ordered to be on Stand-by

Yomiuri Shimbun ^ | 10/18/08

[TigerLikesRooster]

/begin my translation

Something Happened? All N. Korean Diplomatic Missions Ordered to be on Stand-by

N. Korea's diplomatic missions all over the world were ordered on Oct. 17 to stay at their mission, refraining from going out, and expect important announcement from their government.

Sources explained they expect that official announcement could be made in a few days. They speculate that it is related to inter-Korean relationship or Kim Jong-il's health.

/end my translation

[SevenofNine]

I been around not as much I been on another threads LOL!

[SevenofNine]

I think Tass news wire since they are onlyyyy news organization left in North Korea would tell the world first

[SevenofNine]

HEY TIGER look what I found on UK Sunday Telegraph

He dead Jim LOL!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/3221859/North-Korean-diplomats-prepare-for-Kim-Jong-il-announcement.html

[El Gato]

Is Chia Head finally dead?

Or has he ordered the "Final Push" for reunification in his lifetime, however short that might be?

I sure hope the "Talent Keyhole"; folks are doing their thing, and the KH operators aren't asleep at their consoles.

[El Gato]

The are clearing the house, even their official site is empty http://www.kcna.co.jp/

Not the English Language part

[rdl6989]

Kim Jong is mentally ill among his other ailments. Maybe he died of roneriness.

[El Gato]

Related thread Sankei Shimbun "N. Korea May Announce Entry Ban of Foreigners"

I think I'd be going to a higher state of alert, where I the Commander of the Joint US-S. Korean command. Load the bombs on the aircraft. Man all the Patriot and other SAM batteries.

[AdmSmith]

I checked KCNA at the waybackmachine http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kcna.co.jp/
On Jan 12, 2008 they had a very strange front page http://web.archive.org/web/20080112022319/http://www.kcna.co.jp/

[AmericanInTokyo]

North Korean encoded message through KCNA news website to overseas diplomats and agents, **or**, outside hacking of them by an outside party. They did this again today for a few hours, then the page was wiped again clean except for the logo and the hotlinks to the English and Korean news. Now this makes it very interesting.

Also, the "gobblyedgook" a few hours again, was DIFFERENT than that which appeared yesterday. I tend to think they are transmitted coded diplomatic messages.

[AmericanInTokyo]

Now the have THIS stuff up, seen afternoon on Sunday 19 October and last seen at 5 p.m. local time. Compare with text from yesterday:

㰊捳楲瑰氠湡畧条㵥䨢癡卡牣灩≴ਾℼⴭ瘊牡匠浹敒污湏潌摡਻慶⁲祓剭慥佬啮汮慯㭤ਊ畦据楴湯匠浹湏湕潬摡⤨笊 眠湩潤⹷灯湥㴠匠浹楗佮数㭮 椠⡦祓剭慥佬啮汮慯⁤㴡渠汵⥬ ††祓剭慥佬啮汮慯⡤㬩紊ਊ畦据楴湯匠浹湏潌摡⤨笊 椠⡦祓剭慥佬䱮慯⁤㴡渠汵⥬ ††祓剭慥佬䱮慯⡤㬩 眠湩潤⹷灯湥㴠匠浹敒污楗佮数㭮 匠浹敒污湏湕潬摡㴠眠湩潤⹷湯湵潬摡਻†楷摮睯漮畮汮慯⁤‽祓佭啮汮慯㭤紊ਊ祓剭慥佬䱮慯⁤‽楷摮睯漮汮慯㭤眊湩潤⹷湯潬摡㴠匠浹湏潌摡਻⼊⴯㸭㰊猯牣灩㹴ਊ

[AmericanInTokyo]

same exact text as of yesterday around this time.

[AdmSmith]

Is it not the same?

[AmericanInTokyo]

It is in fact exactly the same, so it is the same message being sent out for people to decode, or it is another hacking attempt by someone to screw with their site. Twice now within the last 24 hours on the North Korean KCNA news website top page.

I did find this, though, and also I did some random character searches and came up with all kinds of weird poats on various blogs, other sites, decode charts, etc. located in Japan and other places in Asia:

SOURCE: Wikipedia ...."Encoding and decoding A codebook is provided for encoding and decoding the Chinese telegraph code. It shows one-to-one correspondence between Chinese characters and four-digit numbers from 0000 to 9999. Chinese characters are arranged and numbered in dictionary order according to their radicals and strokes. Each page of the book shows 100 pairs of a Chinese character and a number in a 10×10 table. The most significant two digits of a code matches the page number, the next digit matches the row number, and the least significant digit matches the column number. For example, the code 0022 for the character 中 (zhōng), meaning “center,” is given in page 00, row 2, column 2 of the codebook, and the code 2429 for the character 文 (wén), meaning “script,” is given in page 24, row 2, column 9. The PRC’s Standard Telegraph Codebook (Ministry of Post and Telecommunications 2002) provides codes for approximately 7,000 Chinese characters. Senders convert their messages written with Chinese characters to a sequence of digits according to the codebook. For instance, the phrase 中文信息 (Zhōngwén xìnxī), meaning “information in Chinese,” is rendered into the code as 0022 2429 0207 1873. It is transmitted using the Morse code. Receivers decode the Morse code to get a sequence of digits, chop it into an array of quadruplets, and then decode them one by one referring to the book."

[AmericanInTokyo]

ping!

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

No ideas confirmed about what is going on, I take it?

[AdmSmith]

If you check the source code for their front page http://www.kcna.co.jp they have in META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”News From KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY of DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea),KCNA,KNS,조선통신,조선통신사,조선중앙통신,조선중앙통신사, 朝鮮中央通信,朝鮮中央通信社,朝鮮通信,朝鮮通信社,ニュース,報道,速報,通信社,メディア,マスコミ” , that is English, Korean and Japanese. and in meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html;charset=x-sjis” i.e. one of the Japanese character sets. However, on their Korean page http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-k.htm they have charset=Shift_JIS i.e. another Japanese character set.

[AdmSmith]

Sorry for that. FR does not represent the char sets properly. Check the source code for the two pages.

[AmericanInTokyo]

will do.

if the exact same text code that is up there now has appeared in previous messages some time ago, it might be a spammer, unless the messages are vague and occasional such as "all mission personnel will cease any travel and will remain physically on post, along with all family members, and will wait for a statement from the foreign ministry"...something like that. I was amazed at the number of obscure Japanese websites for different domains carrying this kind of text in blog posts and various comments by posters apparantly located in japan and elswhere.

[AmericanInTokyo]

2 hours later since I first looked, now at a little after 7 pm in Pyongyang, Tokyo, etc. and they (on KCNA site top page) have once again taken that odd text/fonts down again. It seems to be going up for a few hours, then is taken down. This is what they did yesterday.

[AdmSmith]

I try to post it again: from their index.htm page CONTENT News From KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY of DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea),KCNA,KNS,조선통신,조선통신사,조선중앙통신,조선중앙통신사,朝鮮中央通信,朝鮮中央通信社,朝鮮通信,朝鮮通信社,ニュース,報道,速報,通信社,メディア,マスコミ