Posted on 12/16/2013 6:33:28 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
In 1984 moment, N. Korea deletes near entirety of news archives
In striking development, North Korean media deletes near-entirity of its article archives
by Chad O’Carroll , December 16, 2013
North Korean state media outlet the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) has deleted over 35,000 articles from its on-line archives.
The deletion, the biggest ever article removal in KCNA’s history, means that with the exception of a small number of articles about Kim Jong Un, the digital record of state-approved news currently only reaches back to October 2013 on KCNA’s North Korea (.kp) hosted website.
“There were 35,000 articles dated September 2013 or earlier on KCNA in Korean. If they’re leaving the odd one in, it’s still a kill ratio of 98-99%,” said Frank Feinstein, a New Zealand based programmer that tracks North Korea’s online media output for NK News.
In addition to the 35,000 original Korean language articles, translations in English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese were all deleted from the archives, bringing the total to nearly 100,000 missing articles.
Article identifiers previously used to locate KCNA articles showed up “NULL” results when verified on the kcna.kp domain on Monday, while searches only returned results from October 01, 2013 onwards.
null-results
In addition, Feinstein said that approximately 20,000 articles had also been removed from the archives of the Rodong Sinmun, North Korea’s state newspaper.
“This is a a calculated thing they’ve done. Across all sites, it means the order most likely came from above each individual agency.
“This is what makes it so interesting – it’s a true North Korean purge, not just a KCNA one,” Feinstein explained.
(Excerpt) Read more at nknews.org ...
Ping.
I think little Kim is being challenged and he’s trying to consolidate his hold. Hopefully they can overthrow him.
Who would dare challenge him? The military? He did purge a lot of the generals. If North Korea does collapse, its ripe for evangelization from Asia’s missionaries in the south.
Not to worry. It will be back soon, in a revised, sanitized, new-and-improved version ... once Dear Leader decides how things “really” happened.
No problem, the communists have been teaching us to “live in the present.”
Or Cubby’s nuts...
Hopefully,not until after Dennis Rodman holds his next basketball clinic.
Hopefully we all won't have a need to learn Korean.
Here they go again. They are going to rewrite them all?
lol
NK state media is kind of new to the online thing
Yeah something up very Stanlist of Chia Chub
Not sure I agree here. While lack of awareness or interest in the internet or international public opinion was probably accurate for former leaders of the “Hermit Kingdom,” the current North Korean dictator studied in the West and reports indicate he's a regular user of the web.
It's almost impossible to say anything with certainty about North Korea, but we have good reason to assume this “delete button” order came straight from the top, or at least with Kim Jong Un’s advance consent.
Another factor is that while people overseas who are web-savvy can use things like Google archives and the Wayback Machine, most people in North Korea can't do things like that unless they have special access privileges. It wouldn't surprise me if this “delete all” decision was designed to keep what passes for North Korean “intelligentsia” from researching the history of Kim Jong Un’s executed uncle.
I'd appreciate hearing from Tiger Likes Rooster and American in Tokyo on their thoughts about motives.
29 posted on 12/16/2013 10:29:37 AM by C210N: “Hopefully we all won't have a need to learn Korean.”
Trust me. It's not as easy as it looks.
And it doesn't look easy.
But Hangul does have an advantage over English — the spelling reflects current vernacular pronunciation, not the late medieval way our English spelling would say words like “knight” and “night” should be pronounced. English orthography was “fossilized” centuries ago and does not reflect subsequent developments in speech.
American English (thanks to Noah Webster) did modernize some spellings such as “plough” to “plow.” But the spelling of many words did not change and probably won't change for several more generations. Look, for example, at the near-universal resistance a generation ago to changing the spelling of “through” to “thru” when the Chicago Sun-Times and other media tried to “update” spellings to reflect current English pronunciation.
Trust me. It's not as easy as it looks.
Well, thinking positively, don't have to learn a lot of Korean... just some common phrases:
"YOU! Pick the rice in the pattys over there..."
"Where do you want me to hang up the portrait of our Dear Leader?"
Personally, I find “yes, yaobo” (honey) to be the most useful Korean phrase.
But I think that applies to any husbands anywhere regardless of language ;-)
The big shiny gray thing on the left must be a North Korean Dalek.
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