Observations on societal and technological changes in the DPRK
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 254 | |
| Author | ||
| License | CC Attribution 4.0 International: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/53018 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
| |
| Keywords |
36C3: Resource Exhaustion220 / 254
1
7
8
9
10
11
24
26
27
28
35
39
40
41
43
44
47
49
50
55
56
60
62
63
64
68
71
72
74
75
77
78
79
82
88
93
99
100
102
106
109
111
112
113
118
119
122
124
125
127
132
133
135
136
137
138
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
150
151
156
157
158
161
162
164
165
166
167
170
173
175
177
179
180
182
183
187
201
202
208
213
219
224
226
233
234
235
237
239
240
241
244
246
247
249
251
253
00:00
Video gameWordState observerLevel (video gaming)MathematicsTerm (mathematics)Graph coloringDigital photographyComputer animationLecture/Conference
01:12
ComputerContent (media)Level (video gaming)Computer scienceEvent horizonData managementReal numberState observerComputer animation
02:13
Level (video gaming)Type theoryMultiplication signBitSpeech synthesisDecimalGoodness of fitEmailYouTubeVideoconferencingComputer scienceComputer animation
03:16
Computer scienceHypothesisData managementMultiplication signCASE <Informatik>Address spaceTerm (mathematics)Universe (mathematics)WebsiteEmailWeightComputer animation
04:22
Video gameKeyboard shortcutRule of inferenceLocal ringStudent's t-testIntegrated development environmentWordVideo gameData managementData conversionUniverse (mathematics)ComputerCrash (computing)Special unitary groupMilitary baseAlphabet (computer science)1 (number)VideoconferencingObservational studyGoodness of fitLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
06:58
Content (media)UsabilityStudent's t-testTelecommunicationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)
07:41
Similarity (geometry)Content (media)Boss CorporationArmUniverse (mathematics)BitMilitary basePhysical lawMathematicsComputer animationLecture/Conference
08:32
Event horizonOnline helpArithmetic meanStudent's t-testType theoryGroup actionPhysical systemStrategy gameArmMultiplication signComputer animationLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
10:29
Type theoryMetropolitan area networkReal numberForcing (mathematics)VideoconferencingLecture/ConferenceComputer animationMeeting/Interview
11:12
Endliche ModelltheorieMeeting/Interview
11:59
Physical systemReal numberGoodness of fitMeeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
12:44
Link (knot theory)VideoconferencingEndliche ModelltheorieBitSensitivity analysisBuildingElement (mathematics)MoistureTable (information)Software testingMeeting/InterviewLecture/Conference
13:52
Executive information systemTerm (mathematics)Multiplication signEndliche ModelltheoriePoint (geometry)Hybrid computerMathematicsState of matterGroup actionFigurate numberMeeting/Interview
15:17
MereologyLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
16:39
PlanningExplosionSpring (hydrology)BitAreaArmMassTime zoneMathematicsUniverse (mathematics)Type theoryObservational studyData miningElectric generatorImpulse responseSystem callResultantComputer animation
18:15
BitBitElectric generatorState of matterQuicksortArc (geometry)Source codeComputer animation
19:10
Thermal expansionQuicksortOcean currentLine (geometry)State of matterBitNeuroinformatikSet (mathematics)ComputerMultiplication signPlanningVideo gameLevel (video gaming)Lecture/ConferenceComputer animation
20:46
Video gameThermal expansionView (database)Denial-of-service attackQuicksortGroup actionLecture/Conference
21:39
SoftwareNeuroinformatikComputer programmingQuicksortBitUniverse (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>SpacetimeFamilyLevel (video gaming)Data managementComputer animation
22:57
Server (computing)Type theoryPhysical systemTime zonePhysical lawArithmetic meanQuicksortFrequencyGame theoryOffice suiteDesign by contractCASE <Informatik>Point (geometry)Right angleSet (mathematics)Level (video gaming)Multiplication signDomain nameSoftwareData managementOcean currentView (database)Greatest elementXMLMeeting/Interview
24:48
View (database)QuicksortLocal ringSoftware developerObservational studyCASE <Informatik>Structural loadOnline helpComputer animation
25:55
Form (programming)Design by contractQuicksortGroup actionGoodness of fitLevel (video gaming)Physical systemSet (mathematics)Lecture/Conference
26:47
PlastikkarteGroup actionSet (mathematics)QuicksortData storage deviceSoftware developerState of matterSubsetFamilyPlastikkarteTablet computerComputer animation
27:30
SoftwareNeuroinformatikComputer hardwareDigital libraryMathematicsQuicksortBuildingMassRight angleChainVotingSoftware developerComputer animation
28:31
Connectivity (graph theory)Game controllerMathematicsConnected spaceAreaBit rateComputer hardwareDigital electronicsQuicksortFrequencyLecture/ConferenceComputer animation
29:27
Multiplication signNumbering schemeSimulationLocal ringPlastikkarteInternetworkingTerm (mathematics)SoftwareInternet service providerOperator (mathematics)Quicksort
30:38
Distributed computingSubsetPhysical systemState of matterNeuroinformatikEstimatorPay televisionLocal ringExecution unitBitVotingRight angleLecture/Conference
31:30
ComputerMultiplication signRevision controlTouchscreenMathematicsLink (knot theory)Office suiteWebsitePlastikkarteComa BerenicesComputer animation
32:12
SoftwareSoftwareConnected spaceVideo gameData storage deviceMobile appComputer animation
32:52
SoftwareSmartphoneDigital photographyVideo gameStructural loadMobile appGame theoryVotingStudent's t-testSoftwareWordRevision controlSystem callComputer animation
33:37
SmartphoneInformation technology consultingAndroid (robot)Physical systemTablet computerComputer hardwarePoint (geometry)CollaborationismFile formatOperator (mathematics)Local ringBroadcasting (networking)WebsiteCuboidElectronic mailing list1 (number)Product (business)Group actionData structureMobile appTerm (mathematics)WaveQuicksortFrequencyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Type theoryView (database)State of matterHypermediaDirection (geometry)Data storage device19 (number)Cycle (graph theory)Video GenieValidity (statistics)Multiplication signForcing (mathematics)XMLUML
37:59
Associative propertyLevel (video gaming)QuicksortDecision theoryElectronic mailing listDesign by contractUniverse (mathematics)Intelligent NetworkWave packetChainLecture/Conference
39:18
Universe (mathematics)Wave packetComputer programmingMultiplication signLine (geometry)Term (mathematics)Channel capacityPhysical systemStudent's t-testStandard deviationNeuroinformatikService (economics)Process (computing)XMLUMLComputer animation
40:20
Channel capacitySoftwareInternetworkingPhysical systemStudent's t-testComputer programmingQuicksortComputer scienceProcess (computing)RewritingCodeSampling (statistics)Product (business)Metropolitan area networkWritingComputer fileLocal area networkUniverse (mathematics)
41:19
TouchscreenBitSign (mathematics)Integrated development environmentType theoryProcess (computing)Student's t-test1 (number)Local ringPhysical systemArmData managementMoment (mathematics)TheoryInformationComputer animationLecture/Conference
42:18
Data managementTheoryMoment (mathematics)InformationStudent's t-testMobile appComputer animationLecture/Conference
43:08
BitWordTablet computerRight angleDefault (computer science)InformationType theoryPlanningLocal ringProduct (business)SmartphoneHypermediaTerm (mathematics)QuicksortCore dumpYouTubeBroadcasting (networking)Category of beingCASE <Informatik>Compass (drafting)ArmRule of inferenceNumberObservational studyWeightLecture/Conference
46:27
Sound effectTerm (mathematics)State of matterQuicksortCondition numberGoodness of fitDependent and independent variablesMereologySoftwareBitWordCASE <Informatik>Prisoner's dilemmaArithmetic meanPhysical lawType theoryIncidence algebraDegree (graph theory)Roundness (object)Decision theoryTelecommunicationRegulator geneCollaborationismService (economics)Point (geometry)Level (video gaming)Power (physics)Chromosomal crossoverLatent heatLimit (category theory)Traffic reportingGroup actionStudent's t-testInteractive televisionSet (mathematics)Intelligent NetworkArmObservational studyTouchscreenUniform resource locator2 (number)AreaLecture/Conference
52:26
Student's t-testFormal languageProgramming languageComputer programmingLecture/Conference
53:09
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Now, I'm very, very happy to introduce Jukka Pekka Haikila and Will Scott, as you see here, who will be speaking about modern life in North Korea and how it is for youth, for example, to live in Pyongyang.
00:22
And they will introduce themselves, so I will just hand over the stage to you and wish you a good talk. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Warmly, warmly, welcome. Also, on my behalf, to the talk about observations on the societal and technological changes
00:46
in the DPRK. My name is Jukka Pekka Haikila. I used to work in North Korea, now I'm an Academy of Finland fellow and visiting scholar in Stanford, and this is a co-hosted talk, and with...
01:02
I'm Will. Yeah. A few words before we get going on what's going on in North Korea in both terms in society and tech. So what is the experience that we are speaking from?
01:23
I used to go to Pyongyang between 2000 and 2017, as much as six months per year. I've been teaching management, international business, international management, the first courses in the country, done a couple of startup events and lectured also outside
01:43
the university. And, Will? Excuse me. I was teaching computer science 2013, 14, 15, talked about that here at CCC, so thinking more about the technical side of things. Yeah. So there were a couple of talks actually on the previous.
02:04
And this content is brand new, obviously, and the way we are going to do this is that first, setting the stage a bit, living in Pyongyang, how it is, what's different, what's similar, then going towards observations, how North Koreans in the country perceive
02:27
besting concepts of entrepreneurship and also the economy itself. And then it's up to Will, we switch the decks and see about a bit of tech.
02:44
And then we have time, surely, for any type of Q&A. Sounds good? Okay, let's get going. This is the most common question. You usually get, when you talk about North Korea, how did you end up there?
03:05
How did you, Will, end up there? I cold emailed the school. I did the same. How did you cold email? Like, how did it? I sent an email to HR at Pus.KP after seeing a YouTube video of someone who was
03:21
looking for computer science professors at the school, and they managed to get back to me. One of the other professors was based in Portland, Oregon, and so I drove down and got coffee with him and convinced myself that it wasn't completely crazy and went from there. In my case, I was doing, on the side of my PhD in China, I was doing an MA on political
03:44
science with a master thesis on North Korea, and I found this, also the address, gmail address, and emailed, and got a reply that your PhD expertise on international management is interesting, and that we just want to make sure that it's voluntary
04:03
work, but you're welcome to come. Six months went by, the school was just established, and then off I went, first time in 2012, and the way it's done, you arrive to Pyongyang, your passport is requested
04:23
to give to the authorities, and then next day you teach, and that's how it started. So basically our home was the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology campus, and you
04:41
live there, and if you wish to go outside the campus, you always request permission to do something. What were the things we did? Go to restaurants, see museums, go hiking. And go to play pool. So basically, but you always inform with that balance, you respect the local environment
05:05
and play according to those rules. The school itself has 600 students, used to be all male, not anymore, and there are three departments, which is international finance, interest management and finance,
05:22
then agriculture and life sciences, then electronic computer engineering, and the management department is the only western based department in the country. And what else on the school? No, sorry, yeah, that's a good question.
05:41
So all teaching is done in English. So students are graduates, often from the most prestigious universities, or sometimes from the countryside, and then they apply to the university, first they study English, then they specialize, and end of their studies, they attended courses like international management.
06:06
So to answer your question, no, I took one semester crash course in Korean before I went in the summer, and from that I'm able to pronounce the phonetic alphabet, words that are loan words from Chinese I can understand, I can say simple phrases like
06:23
I want to go to a restaurant, but I'm not going to have a real conversation. And basically, the daily life went on that you were teaching either on the mornings and afternoons, and then what's very unique in the university setting is that it's a very rare place, or maybe the only ones, where you can really interact with the locals,
06:46
especially the lunch and dinners, there are always some very interesting venues for discussions. And there were a couple of short videos, this is before the lunch,
07:02
exercises which some attend, some don't, and is there a sound? Yeah, so as you could see, what's different, what's similar?
07:37
Different is that it is, imagine students in Germany marching in the campus, no,
07:46
it's that's very different, that it's very disciplined. What's similar is, for example, the content that I teach and communicated, and it was exactly similar than I would teach in Aalto University in Finland where I'm based.
08:02
And of course, the pace would be much slower, especially on ideation, but then again, and the content would be a bit adjusted, but nothing was ever censored. So that was what was allowed to teach, and bearing in mind that entrepreneurship itself is illegal by law, and so yet the first course happened in 2014.
08:25
And this tells a lot about the atmosphere, so now when we are getting into the mindset and about the perceptions on the economy and the social change, the atmosphere in the classroom was very warm, and of course in the beginning it was very strict, but then we started to talk about dreams and ideation for solving the
08:45
problems in the countryside, and it went towards a very open and addressing the problems in the country, which was one was recycling company who won, so we had a pitching competition after every course where the winner would get a chocolate or a football or something like that.
09:02
So in a way, it always was about ideation, and then 2015, it was a healthy fast food. What I mean by healthy was that students got often sick on the street food, so they wanted to industrialize the street food, and so basically again addressing what's going on in the economy
09:26
in the society and how to improve that, and it solved that people are more and more busy, so same issues apply in Pyongyang than here, like people have same worries, love, time, money,
09:43
and very common problems, and what happened in this was, there was very interesting marketing strategy, so we often engage in discussions that how do you do marketing in an officially socialist setting, well you need to work your ways out through what is allowed, what is not,
10:08
it was that the group wanted to develop a rumor-based system where they would acknowledge that the chips in their venture would have blood type B, why they would face anything
10:24
like that, that we have blood type B chips, because the common folklore goes that blood type B women are good chefs, however everyone knows that it's a false, but yet you could spread that kind of rumor, so they really played what is real, what is assumption, and so it was always
10:45
kind of localized addressing the local environment, and then 2016 there was a Pyongyang startup week, you can see this is rather symbolic picture, and there we had a prizes again by footballs,
11:03
and I had a team of six professors with me, and now we are going to see a short video what happened, let's start from,
11:50
participants are being mentored on how to write a business pitch and put together a PowerPoint presentation, instead of real products, they are using modeling clay to make props, and innovative
12:01
business remains a long way off, in countries Stalin's economic system means real startups with real investors will have to wait, but the excitement of possibility pervades the auditorium as the make-believe businesses make real investor pitches, one startup size chemical and really aren't good protection gear made out of crab and shrimp shells, there's a plausible
12:29
sounding recycling venture, startup week is a dry run for the real thing, but no one knows when or if that will ever happen, Charles Clover, Financial Times, so going back to this what was
12:49
also mentioned in the video, modeling clay, first of all taking modeling clay through the customs of China and customs of DPRK, when they resemble explosive, I'm very happy that
13:00
they made it to the country, and then what was really surprising was when you bring out a playful element, when it's a sensitive topic, humor and play quite often ways out into a safety, and for example this particular is a building that is used to
13:23
cure mental issues, mental illnesses, by acknowledging that people might have those is already a great achievement, and then adding a bit of playful element into it, and it was good fun, and there is more like if you want to read, we just published earlier this
13:43
year an article about it, and it's not behind the table, and then there is an after article, going towards the ending of my slot is so how is the economic reality based on 2012, I've been there end of 2017 last time,
14:09
and there are people who have been there in the audience who have been there more recently who can then engage with the discussion is that, so there are marketplaces that are not
14:22
official, but are becoming semi-official and being taxed, and which is kind of hybrid model of socialism and capitalism, of course it's not talked about as the term of capitalism, and it is a hybrid, there was change of policies on how to, what's the alignment between being
14:45
an entrepreneur and state-owned enterprise, so it's things are slowly changing there, even although we hear very little about what's going on, and then as I said earlier, it's of course keep in mind that yes the things we hear about the country, yeah true, surely and at the same time
15:07
it is a place where there is a lot of fear, yet you can see quite a lot of hope, you can see that people dream about the future, and they dream about love, love
15:20
was always a beautiful topic to discuss, it's also, it brings the hope and then discussions often were about the money and the mindset of quite often a common question was hey Jukka, why does the rest of the world hate us, why do the rest of the world make jokes on us,
15:42
then I said well I'm not a politician, I shouldn't be talking with politicians, politics, but your country might be doing something that the other countries perceived as wrong, and fair enough, but the mindset in the country is that it's victimised, that the country has failed, that's commonly acknowledged, there is no the utopian nation
16:05
anymore that it's the greatest country on the planet, but it's the fault of imperialists, particularly the US, and it's the northern European, like why certain things were clearly opened, allowed to teach and allowed to observe was that the northern European countries seem to
16:21
not be part of the imperialist clique, and the mindset is also on very eager towards learning, towards new knowledge, and then what's going on in the economy is 2012-13 there weren't that many taxis on the street, now there are how many,
16:45
eight companies, six taxi companies, and so like you see these hand traffic jams, you see these developing little by little, and that it's now this is from spring,
17:01
Chinese company planning to cross Xinhua's first foreign-owned special economic zone, which basically means a massive step towards privatisation, and also already the border areas you can see a lot of change in there, and of course western countries can impose as much
17:23
sanctions as they wish, but the studies, the research in Stanford, the research in Princeton, best universities have concluded that the sanctions don't work, instead they make the misery of the people at the countryside much worse, and it's when
17:41
you look at this, this is import and export from China, and import and export from other countries, so you see like how it's going on, and these are not reliable statistics, might be much much more, so keep that in mind when these type of policies are discussed,
18:04
so what I wanted to bring forward before Will and the discussion is that the country is developing its own isolated infrastructure, whether we want it or not, it's happening, but with educational engagement perhaps, not for the persons we were teaching before,
18:24
but for the future generation we could bring a bit of a brighter future, and now we are going to explore what's the role of tech in this all, and this work finished 2017, if you're interested what happened next, actually with you, there will be a talk, funnily enough,
18:45
next day I'm starting at six o'clock about Beirut, and now it's off to Will. Cool, all right, so I'm gonna sort of be giving a somewhat different talk on the tech side of
19:04
things for the other half hour that we've got or so, and looking specifically at how technology has sort of this arc of what technology as a landscape looks like in North Korea, so I'm going to start by talking a little bit about the history of like the last
19:22
20-30 years in particular of what these companies and corporate entities look like, corporate is maybe a little of a strong statement, and then what we know about the current state of internal technology, and sort of the the line of what international engagement between North Korea and the rest of the world technically looks like,
19:44
so there were a set of government labs or efforts to begin this current line of computer technology that emerged around 1990, both the PIC Pyongyang Informatics Center and KCC,
20:01
the Korea Computing Center, got established under a three-year plan that happened between 88 and 91, the Pyongyang Informatics Center was sort of the first of these labs, there's a few others that have emerged subsequently, you saw that then coincide in the late 90s, there's a big famine
20:23
and sort of this time that we maybe see as really hard for the country, and that meant that there was a really strong drive for entrepreneurial engagement where these corporate entities that had been formed five years earlier are now going out really aggressively to find ways to get foreign money, and sort of trying to get hard cash to support
20:45
themselves because they don't have the same level of state support that they would maybe have had in the past, the planned economy is falling apart internally, you know for individuals lives if they can end up working in China or outside of the country they live a much higher
21:00
quality of life and so there's this very sort of scrappy externally facing view there and then that international expansion continues through a lot of the 2000s as they realize they can actually make money on this in an ongoing way until sanctions hit in you know 2012, somewhere around there as nukes sort of wind up and you get a disengagement policy forced on them
21:24
and they start retreating internally and we start to see a lot less of, especially these like big brands that are sort of known externally because they are all targets of sanctions now. So three of the entities that sort of still exist and have been the same entities through
21:41
that whole transition, Kim Il Sung University has a technology program that was sort of where the academics are but that ends up blurring quite a bit into KCC, the Korea Computer Center, and then there's the Pyongyang Informatics Center that's sort of the counterpart that's the other one that has its own set of software.
22:04
Both KCC and PIC you can think of as conglomerate entities, they look a little like Hyundai or one of these big Korean conglomerates in the south or like a family thing that just does a bunch of things in this space. KCC in particular up until 2005
22:22
was chaired, so the sort of patron who's managing this whole thing is Kim Jong-Tek, the guy that got assassinated in Malaysia that was like the half brother of Kim Jong-un. So you know these things are fairly tightly tied in at a sort of top political level
22:44
of top-down management. So Korea Computer Center, we see in the 90s there's a KCC Europe that comes out, it's one guy in Berlin who thought he could make money outsourcing to Korea.
23:03
They managed to get something like a million dollars out of him and with the restriction that he could only run the servers in the DPRK compound in Berlin. So why is this type of activity happening? The DPRK embassy system is that all the
23:29
embassies need to be self-sufficient, which means that they need to create their own revenue. So this was an example case on that. So a partnership between KCC and
23:41
whoever was entrepreneurially minded in the DPRK's German embassy at the time realized they could make money on this and they sold this KCC Europe entity the rights to the dot kp top level domain and it managed them from servers in the DPRK embassy compound
24:00
until that sort of technically got mismanaged near the end of 1999 or something and then there's a period where kp was offline and then DPRK eventually just sort of reclaimed it and has a different entity running it now. Another entity that's KCC affiliated they sold a game of Go in South Korea. They also have entities in China, Singapore, Vietnam and
24:22
sort of a bunch of offices that were doing contract programming that were trying to sell software. Some of those still exist. I think one of the points there is that this is pretty deeply rooted in a top-down management of and then combined with a bottom-up set of sort of people just sort
24:42
of going off and trying to make money. We see that continuing now but with an inward facing view under the current sanctions regime. So people are now facing on how do they make money against the internal population because that's what they have access to.
25:01
I guess that's the at least legitimate view which is we see a bunch of a bunch of KCC things of like importing phones for the local thing because they can get hard money for taking a Chinese OEM buying a load of phones for them and selling them on the
25:21
internal market. Also what's clearly visible is the development of these internal markets on Pyongyang trade fair. Being one example is where there are thousands thousands of people and 2013, 2014, 2015 still there were some foreign companies but as the sanctions tightened
25:45
it went through a domestic and especially on the healthcare. Healthcare and health tech, a very peculiar phenomenon, North Korea health tech, is that there was one floor full of the healthcare system has collapsed, country sanctions, obviously something gets developed
26:03
and it is one big consumer party the Pyongyang trade fair like it's a lot of dollars going around and that's an example of that. I guess the flip is that the people who've been externally facing because of sanctions and the difficulty of doing a legitimate
26:21
international business, you're seeing those groups that were maybe perhaps previously a KCC lab doing contract programming now turning to malware or you know hacking bitcoin or trying to do these sort of crime-like things as ways to get money that you know they just sort of ignore the sanctions because they don't need some foreign partner to actually legitimately
26:42
buy things. These fall within little fiefdoms so a lot of the ministries or top-level political things will sponsor internal groups to provide technical things so this is an example of one set of businesses that I think this one's owned by Ministry of Light Industry
27:04
that has an associated bank. The stores would like you to use only the card from that bank to buy things from them so they just sort of have this whole little top-down world and as you go to different stores that are owned by different ministries you have a different world. Each of those ministries would have some software development thing that's like they've got their
27:22
brand of cell phone as well and their tablet that they're importing as their way to make money it's sort of within their little subset of the family or the country. Okay so current state of technology. There is hardware that is reasonably easy to acquire. Computers are coming in from
27:41
China. Phones mostly what you can buy at least legitimately are OAM'd from Chinese companies and then software specifically for North Korea as mandated by the government and then sold. There's been a country-wide emphasis on science and technology for at least since Kim Jong-un sort of before. So they get a fair amount of leeway and resources
28:07
and hype right. They built a bunch of sort of showcase buildings. They're very proud of their electronic libraries and some of these evidences of science and technology. Yeah and what's behind this and also what I discussed is that there is a massive policy change.
28:26
So it used to be military first and all the resources and partially that's why famine happened was that the military first police policy. Now there is a big big change towards developing sustainable economy within the country and that's what has happened for
28:48
the last couple of years like a really big push on resources for that. Yeah the main area that the government is concerned about and that there's right restrictions is around connectivity. So the ability to communicate with other people and so here's some examples of modern
29:06
last couple years cell phones and some of the brands. You had a period where wi-fi was just completely disabled. They spent a while where they would try and get the OAM's to not put wi-fi chips to like not populate that chip and that turned out to be a thing
29:21
that the OEMs got confused by because they're integrated circuits that have both bluetooth and wi-fi so they would just disable it in hardware. Now they're sort of feeling comfortable enough they're reintroducing wi-fi. They've shown a couple things in the last couple years that are sort of weird where they're like we have this street is now wi-fi enabled but you need to get a sim card to use the wi-fi which sounds like they're doing something pretty funky and they haven't.
29:46
Comment on that funkiness is in terms of networks which was the network was provided first first one by ORASCOM which is a gypsum provider and so there are currently there are
30:01
other operators as well which are local but there are two different networks which is the foreigner one and then the local one and you could buy a sim card to this and the last time I bought it was 250 dollars which got you 50 megabytes of data so you do not
30:22
use it too extensively. It's worth noting that the price scheme for locals is totally different so they're not paying 250 megs but they also generally do not have external internet on data. I think pretty much any time so I guess the other side of that is
30:40
these phones for a while they would sell them to you for money and typically they would ask for 100 to 200 US dollars for a phone. I never saw a local actually paying that the locals all would have vouchers and it was going through the state distribution system for how a work unit would be allocated new cell phones so that price was for some very small rich subset of the population
31:04
that had access to hard currency they could go around and not use the state distribution system and just like pay money or foreigners they could try and milk some money out of but that was not where most of these cell phones were getting distributed that was happening through this opaque rationing system. What is the estimate it used to be 3 million out of population of
31:22
23 million have a subscription is it they're up to seven or eight million up to seven okay yeah so it's quite a big they have computers we talked about red star a bit red star 4 exists now I guess this is I don't have a shot of it red star 4 exists it hasn't come out of
31:41
the company they sort of teased it on tv a couple times and and showed logos of like we've got this but never took screenshots or like showed what the ui changed or what's new in it and it's unclear if anyone has actually used it besides that they had an exhibition booth where they claimed that they had a version 4 now. This is a choreo link office so this is where you go to
32:05
register your cell phone get it licensed get some cards get by phones choreo link is the ORASCOM subsidiary it's actually divested from ORASCOM now so ORASCOM the original Egyptian owner has sold it off and I believe it's now there's like a Hong Kong based
32:26
subsidiary that still has an interest in it yeah no that's sorry I'm getting these mixed up so the other side of this is the wired network which is Starco and that was a joint venture initially with Loxley Pacific which is a Thai company and that now Loxley Pacific has divested
32:42
and it's a Hong Kong guy that's the partner for managing their wired connectivity out to China. Software still gets installed physically in general so they have app stores which have lots of pictures of all the various video games or at like I'm sorry that photo is blurry
33:01
but that's one of the exhibition halls and you could go and people had a little stall and would go take your phone and load apps onto it but that's how you get apps. One word about the software or games when having discussion for example when I showed that
33:22
when Angry Birds was really popular I showed a version of Angry Birds in my home in my phone and the students were yeah of course we know the game it's developed by our country and it's called the slingshot birds so that's how games also found their way. They'll opt in
33:43
yeah yeah they'll often repackage them just take the apk change some of the sprites rebuild an apk and put that on phones instead. We're in a midst of a transition in some ways most people have some watching of tv that may be at their workplace but like there is pretty
34:08
high tv prevalence at this point even in the countryside a lot of that comes with weird dvrs that play weird formats of things and are mostly meant for like local tv broadcasts but there are set talk boxes that are pretty widely distributed some of those are running of
34:23
android or linux like system as well. The companies and startups and technical efforts a lot of what would have been direct ministry investments is turning into going through these corporate banking structures that have been set up and that's more about you know someone else
34:40
is getting the cut or they've got a different setup for how they're going to take that tax on profits. In terms of how the country is interacting internationally there's sort of three ways or three different types of view that you can take one is that they are a consumer of technology primarily from china they also are a producer of technology they will still contract when they
35:03
can and then they are engaging and sort of taking whatever they can get for free in terms of humanitarian and educational support. As consumers some of the chinese brands gne was a big media tech oem chinese cell phone distributor they went bankrupt at the end of
35:21
2018 and then the ceo of that started a new company called chunyi also in shengzhen that i think also is now bankrupt but there was a period like for a while all of the dprk cell phones were basically rebranded gne products and then in 2019 the new ones that came out were
35:40
rebranded chunyi products so there's some relationship maybe between that ceo and dprk some of the tablets have been traced back to be the same hardware that huzu a chinese company is selling so you know there there's pretty reasonable evidence that they're going out to these companies mostly in shengzhen and getting the hardware made there which is what you know
36:00
any other country is doing as well so that's not surprising and there's some collaboration in customizing the operating system based on the requirements of pangyang. As producers um they've got some websites that are still up silver star china got put on the sanction list
36:21
uh a year or two ago as like being a dprk consulting company uh the ceo is north korean it's like not particularly hiding it's just was registered as a chinese company um they still run their website they claim that their app store feature is that they claim to have written a fox news election 2016 app so i think this gets more laughs than the us where we are worried about
36:44
russian interference it's like well the north koreans claim they made like our election apps um i'm not sure why that one hasn't gotten much press um and and then they they have other consulting things as well i think we have people in the audience who are more familiar
37:01
with that than i am um sanctions so the there have been sanctions for a while there's another wave that got put in in in 2017 or end of 2016 this is when u.s citizens stopped being able to go uh u.s passports now uh are not valid for travel claims the u.s state department so it's
37:20
the u.s state department that gets me in trouble if i were to go um unless you go and ask for a one-time uh passport that basically has this little stamp in it saying this is valid for one trip to dprk that they sort of have only given journalists um they started enforcements uh this year basically as things went back to being not great
37:41
um right there was a period of sort of bromance between trump and and kim jong-un and that's starting to fall apart um what that what that sort of has meant is earlier this year uh the u.s government started uh it had claimed that uh people foreign nationals who had traveled to north korea wouldn't be valid for esta but hadn't been enforcing that until this
38:03
year so now if you've traveled there like if you've traveled to iran you have to apply for a full visa and you aren't valid for an esta visa waiver and then uh recently uh they arrested uh virgil riffith a u.s citizen for traveling uh to north korea earlier this year
38:21
run a blockchain conference he wasn't running it he wasn't running it the north koreans were running it no the korean friendship association a tour company was running it but it's it's really just a another level of sort of enforcement and causing fear and sort of trying to break down or uh mess with that relationship
38:41
um plenty of bad decisions in that one um a big a big list yeah uh and and so one of the other things is that there is a lot of this contracting going through china that's just going to appear uh either it's a subcontract where the external company doesn't you know actually even see that there is this subcontracting happening um since most of the businesses
39:02
through china like the opacity of that means that you may either be working with a north korean company that's in russia or china and not notice that or it'll be a subcontract that you aren't even told about as a way that the chinese company is saving costs and then finally education um so pust is still going uh they're using third uh country
39:22
nationals so no u.s citizens anymore but they're still running uh a working university um there's other efforts chosen exchange is based in singapore that takes north koreans out to singapore for week-long trainings in entrepreneurship they've been running those and they've also had people go into the country and run workshops there
39:40
it's seemingly a very successful program and then there's i think more engagement on that educational side than you would expect there's a professor at ubc in vancouver canada that's been having north korean academics come out to canada five or six a year every year that's that program's still going uh she's been going in three or four times a year um so there's
40:01
you know there are people who are still able to walk this line of living and working between north korea despite sanctions so that that line is growing thinner but it still is there in terms of technical capacity the educational system i think i've mentioned this is is really
40:23
a traditional asian educational system that places a lot of value on rope memorization much less on creative thinking that doesn't translate super well into programming so a lot of the computer science students that you're going to see who've gone through sort of the standard educational process you know can rewrite code samples very well but can't debug
40:42
very well at one of the things that they do is they will air gap access to the internet and access to the internal network since the post campus has internet access that means the students don't have access to the internal network which is what they would normally have access to and that means that they are normally they're mostly acting in a disconnected way while
41:01
they're there so they'll have access to a LAN but they won't have external connectivity in general which is pretty limiting for them many of them express that they prefer being at Kim Il Sung or Kim check university where they would have intranet access because they can share files much more easily than than they can here uh yeah so i think that's it we
41:21
i have a few more minutes for questions hopefully um but we seem to have 15 minutes so i don't know about that but i think we have an angel who will help us yeah this was one hour ago there was a sign that got popped up that said something like five or ten minutes left okay i think we may be getting close anyway some uh but are there questions any questions
41:48
what types of jobs did the students get oh um um the actually one of the most um talented ones um ended up as phd students and then it seems um in academia in local environment so
42:05
basically professors um and in their system and then um some of the students ended up in the banking sector which um was also in the talk um then uh obviously especially in the business
42:22
in the finance and management is something that um in theory is international trade but of course there is not much trade happening at the moment so um but we get very little information on that unless we see we of course Pyongyang is in the end small place with the market so you might pump up to students uh on ece we uh some of the early graduate students did end up making
42:45
it into kcc um so um yeah hi i have a mic i'm back here someone with the mic i was just wondering can you talk about how uh i would be curious to hear from both of you how
43:02
consumers in in north korea of technology learn about technology because like you should you talked about how they can go to these shops to get apps installed um but like is advertising for things and you know through what medium do people learn what they want to get or what they need to get uh on their phones for example thank you um excellent excellent question
43:22
um there are i'm slicing this these two in terms of advertising and in terms of the new knowledge um currently uh new knowledge is entering the country in a very increasing speed why is that is uh because of the usbs and because of the awareness in general if you have
43:42
directly like have you watched foreign movies um it might be um double topic as uh one-on-one discussions are not possible in in the campus for example but everyone by default has consumed foreign media and even it's it's being monetized um like you like information is is very valuable obviously if you have something it can be a trade-off um then um so it comes
44:08
both it's it's not the information that is being parachuted it's that's probably not the most valuable info but um that is coming through the markets and and those is one and then the notion on advertising was um that we often encounter discussions on
44:26
that yeah we don't need advertising in this type of country where it's the planning plan planned economy um however the discussion then changed when they were the first advertisements of local products in a stadium for example and you could see um on the way to the new
44:42
Pyongyang airport that there were car advertisements um the most default one was a rumor so basically so word of mouth is uh an important thing especially for things like
45:00
consumer technology and and phones that you'll see your friends or whatever someone gets a tablet and everyone wants one um the 2012 was the first consumer smartphone the are you wrong and that allowed taking pictures and and sending them to friends and that was a big deal right that that was both a show of wealth and also this like new capability that people wanted to
45:24
have so there is a latent desire for this sort of stuff you've also got you know a a core elite population that is able to travel to china and seize a lot of this technology just in common use in china and then once that as they come back into north korea as well
45:41
there is a fair amount they're really into like infomercials so you can watch uh the kcna the tv and they upload a lot of it to youtube although youtube keeps trying to take it down but um you can find sort of daily uploads from north korea on youtube of the current broadcast and there's just a lot of infomercials about internal products that they want you to buy
46:03
there's a lot of quack health science like they'll they'll sell everything as a health supplement so there's a lot of that but also sometimes you'll get advertisements for new tech products there's a question over here yeah thanks a lot and my question is on you briefly
46:20
touched upon the ministries and like the role they they play in the whole thing in the infrastructure could you talk a bit more about like are they um like competing with one another basically or yeah how does this look yeah um i can tell um on my experiences like it's there is indeed a lot of competition between the ministries those who
46:43
obviously um interact with foreign entities and and then um a big power place those who are engaged with the special economic zones and if you were in the education like i was um those went to specific um ministry as well and you never knew what the map is like and
47:05
and the decision making is done like that you it's it's very much in the darkness but um definitely a lot of competition on i'm not i don't know about tech yeah i mean so you've got entities like kcc that are direct sort of there there's under a technology council a lot
47:26
of this falls under the ministry of post and telecommunication as like the uh entity that's setting uh regulations and restrictions but then you can have a company uh or or some part of another ministry like the ministry of light industry uh do an actual import of oems and
47:42
work with kcc to do that um so there's there's some uh both collaboration here of uh if you need technical services you go to one of these approved labs because that sort of de-risks you and you want to lower your risk and liability of getting called out for messing up um but but you can still make money by doing the actual work of doing an import and selling
48:03
a round a run of devices are we done i don't see i see two more hands over there okay please say that you have questions before so i can run to you let's uh finish up the two
48:21
questions and yeah thank you um the auto warm beer incident the auto warmer it's up yet um to to what degree did he provoke what happened and did you feel threatened by it yeah and then there's another question what role play korean soaps who trickle in from china
48:43
south korean soaps okay um the discussion around auto warm beer and then on the south korean software what role does it play well i'm on a couple of words on on that particular case um to set the ground is that obviously the host hostages and and
49:09
persons in north korean prisons um it was all always about nationalities of u.s persons and that was like you were in you were in bigger danger than i would be as a fin
49:21
if i would fool around which leads to the issue that um if you are in north korea and you are u.s citizens and you go to a floor in a hotel that is a surveillance department basically and you steal a propaganda banner from there um that is um quite a big offense to
49:42
to provoke in there so that being said what then happened is not justified by any any means but um if you are a visitor in a country and you break the law obviously some type of punishment will come but it's it's um there a bit of provocation but then how it was handled
50:02
of course that's another like it was a horrible accident and nobody knows what in the reality what what happened what's your take on do you have a take on that um so so i guess the thing that we heard is that the there there is sort of a culture of fear and lack of shared
50:25
of responsibility and one of the things that happened was during sort of the negotiations and release with the u.s the diplomats from north korea didn't actually know of auto's condition that the hospital had sort of not told anyone about that and so they thought they
50:41
were releasing auto in good condition like up until the couple days before and and so that sort of prompted a different response from the u.s than might have happened if they had actually realized what was happening and had dealt with things in a cleaner way like part of that was uh as a side effect of the internal culture they messed up pretty badly politically
51:04
and how they handled the situation and then that led to a bunch of reverberations in terms of sanctions and outrage um yeah uh for south korean dramas i mean i never saw any i hear that that is more of a thing in two circumstances one there are people near the chinese border
51:23
that that's a place where there's a more sort of crossover that some people have tv sets that can pick up chinese tv and there's sort of just a a bit of a black market that happens back and forth where that's a thing that people are walking back and forth or otherwise can get stuff physically in north in in pyongyang that is going to be replaced by privileged citizens
51:46
who just sort of fly to beijing and have a usb stick and are above the law and so it's still it's you know uh off limits enough that you're not going to see it especially not as a foreigner um but by all reports it is happening so um for for other movies that were like
52:04
disney or or action movies or software that's not state approved you would that was a minimal enough infraction that you would see students with that stuff and they didn't care too much that you saw them with it so that that sort of is normalized to the point where it's not gonna get you in trouble that that you are watching a disney movie um but uh south korean
52:26
stuff i think was probably more sensitive that that wasn't something that i was gonna catch a student with you've been waiting for a while i'm so sorry but i think we are at the end but if it's quick what kind of languages do the students learn like english of course and what
52:48
of programming languages do they learn or yeah and learn uh so most of them speak chinese as a second language some speak russian um some speak english uh see
53:01
cool i think we're at the end so thank you thank you and thank you our hosts thank you big thank you