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While North Korea does mass military marches through Pyongyang better than anyone else could expect, they’re not a country that we associate with a robust tech industry. Especially now.
That’s because, thanks to a recent glitch in their system, we found out their “internet” looks a lot like that old BBS you used to log onto with your Atari ST computer in 1988. Only worse.
According to the U.K. Express, North Korea’s internet domain, .kp, is usually closed to foreign access, even though it’s nominally connected to the world through a link to China. However, just recently, a bug in the system caused it to open up to the rest of the world for just half an hour. Someone noticed this and quickly took screenshots of all of their webpages and uploaded them to Reddit.
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Yes, that’s right: all. All 28 of them.
But let’s not despair for the revolutionary peasants under the yoke of that guy with the weird haircut! (Although they can’t actually access the internet, as it’s reserved for the hermit socialist state’s social elite. The rest of the country, inexplicably, has still received AOL free trial disks.)
They still have some pretty awesome web pages, right?
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Here’s the website of the Korea Central News Agency, which is helpfully translated (like most of the screenshots) with Google Translate. This is the best of the home pages that I found, and that says an awful lot. And I do mean awful.
There’s a sidebar story headlined, “Great Achievements of the Revolutionary Tax.” Little known fact: That title came in second to “I’m With Her” in the internal polling for Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan. Also, are North Korea’s web designers using a style manual from 2003? Keep in mind, too, this is the best website I found.
It’s hard to imagine there’s much demand for a recipe website in a country where there’s virtually no food, but for what it’s worth, there is one. This masterpiece of coding apparently uses the world’s worst free WordPress theme with pictures from one of those Hello Kitty digital cameras you always see by the register in CVS. Tomorrow’s featured recipe: how to make kimchi with used dental floss and sewage water!
There’s also a sports website, just in case you really want to see what steroid users look like when they’re terminally underfed. There seem to be a few broken links on this one. Maybe they should have put up one of those old “Under Construction” signs instead.
Oh well, who cares when you have this much patriotic fervor just bursting off the page? For Glorious Leader Kim Jong Un the 42nd Hungnam central agency employees athletic tournament the proletariat wondrous honor make!
Here’s the website for Air Koryo, North Korea’s state airline. It’s also the lowest-ranked air carrier on the face of this planet.
ValuJet a little too safe for your tastes? Tired of cheating death by frequent-flying on Somalia’s eighth-largest airline? Why not book a ticket on Air Koryo? Its fleet includes the Soviet-made Ilyushin Il-18 and Il-62, airliners that date from 1957 and 1963, respectively. Consider that when you get all huffy about being stuck on a flight without USB chargers.
If you fancy a slightly roundabout way to commit suicide, you can book a ticket online. You’ll notice, however, that the fares are not listed in North Korea’s virtually worthless currency, so you’ll have to buy in USD or Chinese yuan instead.
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We also managed to find some exclusive footage of their primary server cluster, too:
I was really hoping to log onto eHay.kp, an online auction site in which the country’s main food staple is bought and sold by the lucky subjects of the Juche regime. However, the gap has been closed and North Korea’s internet is sealed off for good.
As the whole thing looks to have been put together with string, tin cans and surplus Commodore 64s, I’m not too heartbroken.
If you want to peruse screenshots of North Korea’s other 24 Geocities-tastic websites, you can find them in the Reddit thread. Don’t just do it for us, though. Do it for the guy in the weird haircut.
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