 Cool, thanks everyone. So my name is Will, I am a computer science graduate student at the University of Washington and I have spent the last couple of falls teaching computer science in Pyongyang. I haven't, so I did a Reddit A&A last year when I got back, but I haven't really like talked that much because the whole like issue around this country is extremely politicized and it's very easy to sort of end up in this sort of large narrative that I don't really have much to contribute to. So the disclaimer is there's going to be nothing about this or about this and this will be entirely be sort of like what did I see when I was there, what were the students like that I was teaching and what was sort of like consumer technology in terms of desktops, mobile phones and sort of what does technology look like there. So this is the campus I was at. It's the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology sort of in the southern suburbs still within Pyongyang. The taller building is the academic building. The two wings are classrooms. The little middle connecting part is where the professor's offices were and then the smaller building next to it, which is still quite large, had the cafeteria, had the library and had an assembly hall. And if off picture is dorms, we both both the students and the the professors lived on campus while we were there. So at this point, I'm probably like, if I was having a conversation, there'd be this question of, OK, so how do you get there? What are Americans doing there? So I found a video online about this university being created and I called emailed saying I'm interested in teaching and somehow that worked. I'm still I'm still not entirely sure myself. And so I ended up teaching classes in operating systems focusing on Linux and Android, which was what they were interested in. And then also an introductory databases course, sort of the mechanics of SQL, which were fun. So this is the lab that I was teaching in. We had a classroom as well. And these these are where my senior undergrads who were taking the operating systems class, you'll notice that they have computers and that they know how to use them. So we're off to a good start. I guess the other interesting part, though, is that there were these sort of two banks of 16 computers. They're on a land connected to each other, but they're not connected to anything else. So these students did not have access to the Internet. A lot of what they had learned were through books. And so this was an interesting challenge. So so I guess there's sort of three segments to the rest of the talk. The first is going to be the network and access what does Internet, Internet, all of these things look like. Then what do what's the desktop? What's the deal with this red star OS that they have? And then finally, mobile, what's the deal with cell phones? So surprisingly, I had Internet access. That was nice. There's sort of two players in the Internet industry in Pyongyang. They're both joint ventures with foreign companies. So the building is, I believe, that's the older iteration of it. But currently that's called Star Joint Venture Corporation, which is a joint venture between the DPRG government and a company based in Thailand. And they provide the fiber cables into the country. So they manage the physical connection. They appear with China Unicom. And so there was a fiber line going from a downtown office to the campus, where we got access. And I guess there's a couple of things that are interesting. One is that I had access. It was not filtered, either by China or by DPRK. However, there was a proxy that I had to go through that was at the campus level. So all requests were authenticated. It was in a squid HTTP authenticated proxy. You had to have a proxy authentication header. So they knew every request was associated with my username and password. The DPRK citizens, so the undergrads did not have access. The graduate students and the DPRK professors who were there did have internet access. They had a filter, although I don't know the exact details, but I know that it was somewhat restrictive. So in addition to that, and they had to go to a special room in the library area, where there was a lab proctor who sort of would watch while you were doing research. The other company of note is Coriolink, which is a joint venture with Oraskom, which is an Egyptian company. I think they've actually changed their name. They provide the mobile service. You can buy a SIM card with either voice or 3G data. I did not because it is quite expensive. It was 80 euros set up for voice and then another 120 euros to enable data, which gets you 50 megabytes of data a month. So not quite what we want, but there were cases where, I guess I would say, internet quite reliable, power less reliable. So for that maybe day a week when you didn't have like intermittent power, it was nice to still have some connectivity and you got that if you had wireless. Yeah, so I had access. So there's this intranet thing. There was not internet at our campus. I was told that that was very difficult. They did not like to have physical locations that had both. So there is sort of this sense of these should be air gapped and foreigners should not have access to the internal one. We visited Kim Il Sung University, which is sort of the top university. This is also where a lot of the tour groups go. They've got this sort of flagship e-library that you may have seen pictures of. It's where the tour groups go and say, we saw people sitting in front of computers not seeming to know how to use them. Those computers are on the Kuang Miang national intranet. It's sort of guessed that there's something like 3,000, 5,000 sites. The students were saying that like most companies that needed to do sort of communication would likely have some sort of site and email like access and be connected to this thing. I guess of note, one thing that you can see on sort of this nice Windows XP terminal in the library is that it's got its own DNS thing. The, the, it's sort of small, but it's like last.lab.something.edu.kp. And it's not a DNS record that exists on the public intranet. And so they've got their own DNS system. They have posters up showing that. And so again, sort of you've got all of these sort of new top level domains that we don't have. So maybe we can ask the IETF to include these. Our, our, you know, .web or .recreational or something. So I didn't get that much access to it. The students all knew it. The, the college students at other universities would have access to the intranet and would have more access than they did at our school where they didn't get anything. And so they were sort of somewhat unhappy about that. I guess they would prefer to be someplace where they had some connectivity. I guess the other question that sort of comes to mind is, okay, so, so then how do you, if you, if you don't have access to the internet, get new stuff? It sounds like there is some government agency or of some form that acts sort of like a librarian service where university students who wanted to get access to papers that were not available would request it. And someone at this agency would go to the internet, find it and, and send it back to them. So this is how you sort of get information in. It's sort of on request. Cool. Um, so the students had computers, uh, the laptops, uh, some of the, some of my students had personal laptops that they would bring to class. Uh, they were running Windows XP. Uh, we went to, uh, a mall that had an electronic market in it every couple of weeks for shopping. Um, and they had a bunch of computers generally running windows. Generally it seemed imported from China. Uh, a lot of Chinese brands were there. Uh, that seemed to be sort of what was there. It was cheap. It was available. I didn't really see anyone seriously using Red Star anywhere. This is the sort of mythical thing. Red Star is made by KCC. Uh, the Korean computing center is one of the two sort of large labs. The other one is PIC, the Pyongyang Information Center. Uh, it seemed my, my, my gut feeling here, and I don't have much to support that is that it gets used more for sort of industrial automation contracting things where some other company will go to KCC and say we want, you know, to automate our factory and they'll get a controller and that controller with custom software may well be running, uh, Red Star because you get vendor lock-in, which is great. Uh, and also just like that's maybe where they're programming, but for, for end user computers, it was basically all Windows XP, a little bit of Windows seven, but not much. Uh, but they do have this thing. Uh, the latest version looks very Mac like, um, very Mac like, uh, one, one, one thing of, I guess there's two things that are interesting here. One is that like it's, it's localized. So you can use this without speaking English. That's good. Uh, and it has a very prominent sort of like input method thing in the top that you can't really get rid of. You also don't get root on it. Uh, so it has a terminal, but, uh, by default on the install, you can't pseudo or sue or do that. Um, so I've got a demo, I guess I can log in. Um, it's a little bit slow. So let's see, we'll start the terminal. The, the, the other thing that's maybe interesting here. Oh, I guess there's a couple of things. So, so we've got a set of applications. Some of these are pretty clearly skinned, uh, and our Linux applications that you know and love. Uh, others seem to be much more made by hand. Um, we can look at the root and it looks sort of Linux C. It's got an applications folder though, uh, which maybe is not as commonly found. Um, and, and in there we see a bunch of dot app folders and in there, you know, in, in quick time, for instance, it's got a contents and, and then it has a red star folder for the binary. Uh, so someone, someone really like got Mac OS 10 and got told, make something that works like this and looks like this. Uh, which is pretty cool. Um, so, so one, like, yeah, uh, we can, we can look through and one application that's sort of interesting is there's a utility that I hadn't seen before called Bocum, uh, and it says you can't run this unless you're root, which is interesting since you can't be root. Uh, but luckily since I'm in a VM, I can change the disc and make myself root. Uh, so I've enabled pseudo on this one and it turns out that, uh, Bocum, uh, actually it should come out in a second. Uh, it, it, it allows me to make encrypted discs, which is pretty cool. So that, that got in, included, but sort of not easily allowed. Um, so I can make my, my new, my new disc that's thinking. Well, that wasn't what I wanted to show. Um, what I was going to show is that it was using AES, which was sort of nice. Here we go. Something's happening. Okay. So I'm going to, like show another one. So it's got, it's got Nenoraw web browser, which, uh, looks quite similar to, okay, it's, it's opening that again. Uh, Nenoraw is basically Firefox, but with a different name. Uh, but again, it, it does have, uh, special bookmarks. There we go. So that's Firefox. I don't want it to be my default browser. Uh, again, it, it, it's using, uh, a set of internal IPs for it's like default homepage and things that certainly won't load. So, uh, some of these are, are sort of customized. Other ones, uh, they've done, uh, a better job on. I'm not sure why the, the hard drive is being so slow. There we go. Except I won't let me make it. So, so I can look and I can put a password and I can choose my algorithm and I can make my, my, my special encrypted disc image that, that gets mounted. So it has this like security. If, if you want, if you want an encrypted disc. If you want an encrypted disc that you know the NSA hasn't done anything too. So the last part is, is mobile stuff. Um, so, uh, they've got a lot of Android. Uh, that seems to be it. The, there's a lot of older generation feature phones running some sort of Java feature thing. And, and the new ones that they're working on are, are Android based. So this is the Arirang phone, which came out last year. They wanted something like $600 for it initially, which seems like a lot. I'm not sure who was buying it. But, but it is starting to get out. It's running Android. Um, I bought a tablet. Uh, it's a tablet. Uh, it's party pieces that it has analog TV, which is pretty cool. What it, what it doesn't have is Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or anything else. So, you know, you, you can make things for your own market. I guess that's good. Um, I was told that the nine inch version did have Wi-Fi though. So, um, so in order to, to sort of make this a little bit easier, uh, I'm going to show videos of this rather than do it on the actual device, um, but just walk through a sort of basic interaction with this thing. Uh, and this is slightly ugly, but it should work. I think it gets less miserable. So it's got a cool background of like missiles in cyber warfare. Uh, it has, it has the same sort of browser thing, uh, which again has sort of like screenshots of a bunch of the, the internal websites. So at least when they were developing this image, they were on Kwameon, um, it's, it's sort of, I think ice cream sandwich level. So some apps they spent a lot of time on. So this is one that is sort of the collected writings of the various leaders. Uh, and so they've got their bookshelf and this is, uh, Kim Jong-il. You can see the, the different, so it gets better than that, right? So that was, that was just the different volumes. And each of these volumes is many different speeches and you go into the speech and you get the, the multi-page speech. Um, so, so there's quite a lot of material and, and for each of these like things, you can go in and get translations and get definitions of all the words, which is pretty good. Uh, and, and you can also, it has a voice feedback. Uh, I don't think that the HDMI thing is working on this one, but, uh, it will actually narrate this to you. Uh, so you've got that, which is cool. Um, in addition to like this, which has its, its place, I guess. Um, they had a bunch of apps that seemed to be much more just sort of, uh, customized, uh, from, from existing apps. Uh, so there, there are various games. Uh, there's Angry Birds. Uh, so Angry Birds does its thing. This I think is Rio. Uh, and it's got sort of a not quite the same color logo at the top in Korean. So someone went in and needed to change the sprites and that's okay. Um, see what else? I think, I think I had a couple more that were interesting. So in settings, uh, you plug USB into this and it doesn't do anything. You, there's no debug mode. Uh, you sort of have limited settings, but you've got some. Um, and so what more do you do with this? Uh, it turns out that like to get apps, if you're, if you're trying to get apps on the thing, you, you go to a store and they will put the new app. Here's the analog TV. You get three stations, uh, and then when you're not there, they're sort of fuzzy. Um, so luckily it does have a debug mode. Um, and so if you start up and hold all the buttons down, uh, it goes into Android recovery mode and it's only slightly broken. Uh, it doesn't have a shell or anything to like actually use ADB with, but you can still use push and pull to get files on and off of it. So there's its little debug menu that pops up. Um, it has like, it's got a little mini SD card that has eight gigs on it and like six or seven different partitions because that's the way you do things. Um, and, and they're mounted at slash data, which might sound right. And also slash data too. And the APKs reference file statically at slash data too. So they won't really just transfer over, which is unfortunate. Um, so, so I looked at this a little bit. I was able to get some of the APKs and it's like, yeah, angry birds is still angry birds just with different sprites in it. Um, the, the speeches, which was the one I was sort of interested in, uh, isn't nearly as easy. I couldn't find the actual speech content anywhere on the thing and looked at the decks, uh, decompilation and, uh, it turns out that like it's loading in another encrypted partition to like get to that speech data. So they're really like actually trying to make it hard to, to take that APK and, and put it somewhere more accessible. Like that, that is, that is part of this device and not meant to go anywhere. Um, and that was about as far as I got on that. But, uh, if anyone wants to take a stab, I would welcome, uh, additional help. So I think that's, that's sort of the main things that I took away from it. Um, they're really customizing stuff to work in their market. As you would expect, they've got phones. I think Coriolink has over a million subscribers, something of that nature, which isn't that surprising because you see phones around Pyongyang quite a bit and Pyongyang, something like four million people. Um, so thank you. Thank you very much. That was a really, really interesting talk. Uh, you were very fast. So we have a lot of time for question and answers. And please curl up to the microphones. If you have any questions and to the other ones, please stay seated during the Q and A as it gets to know that if you absolutely have a pressing need to leave, then please do it quietly and do not, uh, disturb the others here. So, uh, the first one on the microphone one, please. Yeah. I have, uh, a couple of questions. Firstly, there are only men on this. What, what? Newer to the microphone, please. So it can also be, it can be good. Newer to with the microphone. Take the mouse and get to the microphone. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. So, uh, there are only men on this picture. Uh, why is that? Uh, when the school opened, it, uh, was determined that the initial student body would be male. Uh, the foreign faculty, uh, are pushing to get, uh, females. The, uh, response is that there may be a nursing program opening that will have females, which isn't quite the same, but we're getting there. Um, there are like the other DPRK computer science professors. There are female ones, so it's not a uniform, uh, at the gender difference. Uh, it sounded like it was something like the students are supposed to sort of not really talk all that much about what they learn outside when they go home for the summer. And it was decided that, uh, guys were less chatty. Uh, and what, uh, what language, uh, I was teaching in English. I don't know Korean at all. Yeah. And, uh, translation and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, okay. So the, this university, uh, as, as students come in, they take one year of English, uh, English language as a foreign language, but most of them, I think pretty much all of them have had English in high school before they get to university level. So that's already somewhat good. And then a year of just intense English, uh, gets them up to the level where they, they do quite well in their major classes being taught in English. Okay. The next question for microphone, two please. And after that, we will have a question from the internet. Uh, so one question is there some kind of system dump of the operating system of the Android phone or Android tablet? Uh, so, so I got some of the partitions, but other ones don't like copy directly with ADV so I don't have the full thing. And it seemed weird to just have like partial partitions, uh, which is why I haven't done that. Okay. Now the question from our signal angel, please. Okay. Um, the first question from the, sorry, the first question from the internet is, um, how do you actually, um, keep up with the, uh, scene or culture with all the North Korean tech? I was there for two falls. Uh, so in fall of 2013, I was there for three months, uh, teaching and I went back for a few weeks, uh, earlier this fall for another lecture. Okay. Then we will go around for the number three, please. Hi. Um, I was wondering if you had any insight on what they're using, what you're, what you're teaching them for. I mean, what are they programming? What are they making? Do you have any idea or not? Right. So, so my basic sense because they kept asking about Android was that they realized that they've got this whole tablet and phone ecosystem that they need people to like develop. Uh, and they sort of would like to have more people who can do that. So it seemed like, uh, many of the students were, uh, as after they graduated likely to end up working on developing more of these apps and sort of advancing that. Uh, so the first, the first undergraduates, uh, graduated this fall, uh, and we know that some of them, uh, ended up going into sort of graduate programs for more education and other ones, uh, did end up working in these KCC MPIC labs, uh, doing computer stuff. Okay. Microphone for, please. Um, did you witness any non-elite students use technology outside maybe the university? So, so, um, you would see phones around Pyongyang. So, so beyond just the students, like the, the, the, the life that I saw was Pyongyang. We did not leave the city very much. Um, but although we did leave campus to some extent. Um, and so you would see people who were sort of normal Pyongyang residents and they would not be uncommon for them to have phones as well. Um, and you know, these, these students, not all of them were from Pyongyang. Some of them were sort of upper class, but we're from other provinces and, and came in for schooling. Uh, so it's not completely limited to the city, but I, I don't have a sense of exactly how that distribution of sort of the gradient of who has access falls. Any notebooks in the city somewhere? What? Any notebooks witnessed in the cities? Notebooks. Uh, you'd see them in shops. Some like you'd see the, the point of sale or that sort of thing. I didn't see that many, like I don't know if I was in situations where I would see people using personal laptops. Uh, like I didn't see in that much or nothing that like stands out to me, but I don't think I was expecting to either. Okay. To have a fair distribution of questions, uh, we have four minutes left. We take please microphone one, then two, and then the question from the internet, and then we will see how much time we have left. Oh, sorry. Sorry. I've, uh, it's very unfair. I didn't see you. You are hard to see from up here. Okay. I, I then we keep the order of the microphone, five microphone, six, and then we go on. Um, did you bring any of your own devices to the country and were they checked in any way? Or could you elaborate on this? Uh, so I brought a Chromebook, uh, because I liked having a TPM. Uh, it was not checked, uh, and it was, you know, seed seemed to stay fine the whole time. Uh, when I came back this time, I brought like, uh, a duffel bag full of a bunch of raspberry pies that we used for programming exercises. And that got sort of a skeptical look when I opened it up at the border. Um, but they didn't seem to have problems with a bunch of bear circuit boards and camera modules. So. Hey, my microphone, what you want? Yeah. Microphone six, please. Uh, thanks for the talk. Uh, could you please upload an image of, you know, Red Star of S to the internet for research purposes? Yeah. So, okay. Uh, so, so I actually went, uh, uh, after asking one of the, the miners. So, so I guess I hadn't explained that we, we could walk around campus freely, but to leave campus, we had to go with, uh, a guide. Uh, and so there was a set of guides for the campus, for the foreigners. Uh, and so at one point I was able to convince them to take me to a computer store because the normal one we went to did not sell Red Star. Uh, so we went to, uh, I believe it was a reseller of KCC and for, uh, 2001 or 25 cents, I was able to get a copy, which is great. Um, however, I'm, I didn't want to like distribute it because it was like, well, I'm the only one who's like said that I've had it. But the good news is I got contacted earlier this fall by someone who claims that they want to put it online. So I would not be surprised if it actually ends up online pretty soon. Okay. We have still two minutes left. So some short question from microphone one, microphone two, and we will get to the internet. Yeah. If a question about, uh, kind of a level of network knowledge, because the map you have seen everywhere, class A, B and C networks, which is not available anymore since 20 years. Um, the first question is this class less into domain routing, uh, known there and is IPv6 available there? I did not see any evidence of IPv6. I don't think they're, they're up on that one yet. Um, the books that they had had BGP, they would ask me questions about BGP every once in a while. Um, I don't think it was a huge problem. They sort of just did things. So the campus network, right? I mentioned that it, uh, had a proxy. Uh, when you connected your device, it didn't have DHCP or any sort of default route. You had to explicitly type in the IP address of this gateway that you wanted to use as your proxy and sort of normal traffic you sent out would just fall on the floor. Um, and they chose that that internal network was going to be like the one 10 slash eight address space because they could, and I think it overlapped with a set of South Korean IP space. So that was cool. Um, so, so they sort of used segments of IPv4 that they want to. So just a short question, please. I know you wanted to take and talk about technology, not so much politics, but could you maybe tell us a little bit about the attitude of your students? Is there a hacker culture and spirit similar to what we have today value digital freedoms, individual empowerment like, like we do? Or what's the motivation of the students? I think the motivation for the students was pretty varied. Um, there were some of these guys really did enjoy computer science and computers and hacking on them. And like in their free time in the evenings, they would go up to the lab and play computer games or, um, work on coding. Uh, and so there was, there was some evidence, a lot of them sort of, uh, seemed either to end up at the school because, uh, it was pretty clear that English as a language is a pretty good skill to have, even if you don't care so much about your major, somewhere in that boat. Um, so I guess one, one anecdote to that is that there was this sort of copy of a DOS level operating system that some previous student that I think I got told Kim Il-sung University had, had written that you could boot up directly to that had a competitive two player Tetris that they really liked to play. Uh, and it was like nice 256 color, like, and they were really good at it. Uh, so, so there's, there are people who like are doing cool things over there. Uh, but I think it's not, uh, nearly at the same level as it is here. Okay, the time is nearly up. I think we take the question from the internet and then very, very short question from microphone six. I know it's unfair to everybody standing in line for the microphones, but we know we have only so much time. Please stand in line. Okay, um, the internet wants to know on which name the dot com top level domain is introduced there. Which top level domain do they use? Yeah, no, um, the dot because they want to know if like dot com was we labeled like, uh, what did they, uh, imperialist forbidden namespace or something? Uh, I mean, so, so there's Kwong Myung, the intranet, and that was just their completely their own, uh, set of DNS. And when you were on the internet, you were using public DNS. So I don't, I don't know of any particular remappings. Okay, so the last question, please. Yes, um, since they're using so old software and don't have access to updates on the internet, how do they handle viruses or hacker and so on? Or is this not happening? They keep reinstalling their operating systems regularly. So thanks to everyone. Sorry that we are not able to have all the questions asked, but I think you can meet Will Scott afterwards. So give a big round of applause to all.