Internet Access in North Korea

As with anything involving the Hermit Kingdom, there is a great deal of craziness attached to this issue. Prepare to be smacked by gob as a consequence of reading the following:

  • As the article’s title indicates, at the most, a grand total of 1,000 people would be affected by a cyber blackout in North Korea. And perhaps the number of people in the country with “unrestricted access” numbers only “a few dozen families — most directly related to Kim Jong-un himself.”
  • North Korea’s mobile Internet service does not cover people who actually live in North Korea.
  • North Korea’s intranet prevents the country’s citizens from getting anything resembling an honest glimpse of the World Wide Web—and of the larger world, to boot. Additionally, if you are a journalist and there is but a small typo in your article, you can be sent to a “revolutionisation” camp. I’m pretty sure the experience is less lovely than it sounds, and the experience doesn’t sound all that lovely to begin with.

Other than the foregoing, of course, we can bet our bottom dollars that everything is fine in North Korea, and everyone living there thanks his/her lucky stars on an hourly basis for the good fortune that placed them on the septentrional side of the 38th parallel. I mean, who would want to live with those pesky South Koreans and their significantly larger number of political liberties, their wealth, their much higher standard of living, and their plentiful food options—options which don’t involve eating grass and/or cannibalism?