December 21, 2024, 9:36 am | Read time: 2 minutes
Due to a technical error, users were able to look around the North Korean Internet – and were amazed. There are fewer websites in the censored online world than in the “GTA V” action game.
North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, has his country’s internet firmly under control. Foreign websites are blocked. The country’s 24 million inhabitants have to make do with North Korean websites if they have an Internet connection at all.
North Korea Has Only Had Its Own Internet Domains Since 2007
North Korea was a late adopter of the Internet trend. In 2004, the country applied for its own country-specific top-level domain (ccTLD). The “.kp” ending has been officially available since the end of 2007.
As little is known about North Korea’s internal Internet infrastructure, it is difficult to estimate its scope. It was only through an error in the configuration of a name server (i.e., a server that converts names into IP addresses) that a group of programmers was able to access North Korea’s domain name system (DNS). Members of the TLD Records project were able to carry out a so-called zone transfer and thus obtain a copy of the DNS data.
The group has published its findings on the developer platform GitHub. The data is the first and only time so far that outsiders have been able to see how large the Internet in North Korea actually is.
There are just 28 domains with the North Korean ending .kp. By comparison, there are more than 17 million German domains (.de). Even the action game Grand Theft Auto V has 86 fictitious websites, which is more than North Korea.
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The programmers have listed all 28 .kp domains on GitHub. Among them is a site for cooking recipes, a movie website, a travel agency, an insurance company, the state airline, a university website, and news portals that make powerful propaganda for Kim Jong-un’s regime.
Some of the 28 domains cannot be accessed at all without a North Korean IP address or are only used for internal purposes. Nevertheless, the sites provide a unique insight into the Internet in North Korea and the omnipresent propaganda of the Kim Jong Un regime, which rules its citizens with an iron fist.
The German original of this article was published in October 2024.