In yesterday’s New York Times, Tom Zeller writes about Internet access in North Korea, touching on their almost non-existent web presence. Among the tiny handful of official sites mentioned is the Korea Computer Centre’s Naenara (or “My Country”) — the nation’s official portal. Hosted in Germany and translated into a number of languages, it’s a very entertaining glimpse into the public exterior of the DPRK.
In addition to being a mouthpiece for national propaganda and a free e-mail provider, they also have an unusual and quirky web-based store. Aside from the usual books, CDs, and software (?), they offer an entire section of both cell phone ringtones (“handphone melodies”) and wallpaper (“characters”). (Cell phones are banned in North Korea, so these must be designed for sympathizers outside of the country.)
The wallpapers section is particularly good. For only US$0.50, you could have an animated caricature of George W. Bush as a panting dog with American flag necktie. Or head to page two for delightful animations of burning American flags, giant fists crushing the White House, or what appears to be an American soldier with a missile embedded in his chest, sulking dejectedly to a graveyard. They take Mastercard and Visa, so buy now!
I couldn’t read the ringtone pages, but let me know if one of them has the melodious voice of Kim Jong Il. (I’d take that over Fergie any day.)
Oh, and they have really, really great error messages. If you try to link directly to any of their images (like this one), you get this error: “You are fool!”
I love this. Particularly good from the wallpapers page are the two doves unfurling the banner that says “PEACE”… right next to the giant fist of doom crushing the White House. Hee.
Heh, that whole site is very interesting indeed. Propoganda at its best. Everyone, lets suppliment their national budget, buy some wallpapers and ringtones!
Silly commies and their computers.
Sadly, buying anything from this page is probably a violation of the UN sanctions,and could be enough cause to get you disappeared to one of GW’s hidden “freedom camps.”
I think the best option is to buy all the wallpapers and ringtones (looks like a total outlay of about 12 bucks) and then post a page full of them.
Laugh out loud if the government of NK sends a cease and desist order. Don’t laugh so loud if they send their commandos to assassinate you.
Freedom Camps??? What planet are you from?
Well ‘Huh’, maybe it’s just me, but I’m guessing… Earth?
can someone post, for free access, these ringtones
if they have purchased them?
I don’t like the idea of giving kim jong ill my card
number or money.
Then don’t use them, tom thumb. Someone else would have had to put up their money, just like you.
And a highly principled citizen like yourself wouldn’t want to get the ringtones from someone who would give DPRK their money, right?
I’m not sure it’s a good idea to give your credit card number to a starving, cash-poor racketeering /counterfeiting /weapon’s trading crazy state.
Great stuff though. If this is available elsewhere, please let me know.
That’s hilarious/sad/weird. Can someone explain the water dripping from the navigation bar at the top of the page?
It must be difficult for Visa & MasterCard to do business with the DPRK.
Farked.
Vladimir, you mean like the “Freedom Camps” that have killed something like 1 million in the past 10 years in North Korea? If you want to check out concentration camps look no further than NK.
Website loads very slowly. Their coal-fired servers must be getting overloaded…..
GW’s freedom camps do not exist on planet earth. Probably in the heads of the same conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was engineered by the US Gov’t. Dear Leader’s “freedom/death” camps do exist unfortunately…on the same planet. So amazing how much the conspiracy theorists and the personality cultists in the world have in common.
I went to see Kim Jong Il in concert once. After the first song, he jumped into the crowd, knocked me down, sat on top of me, and brutally stuck his finger in my ass!
What a funny little man!
Just a guess…but I don’t think he meant the “Freedom Camp” comment literally.
Seriously, get over yourself and quit being such a drama queen.
Right. Dubya has not approved any secret prisons or detention or torture or anything of the sort. It’s all a vast North Korean conspiracy.
Kona said
GW’s freedom camps do not exist on planet earth. Probably in the heads of the same conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was engineered by the US Gov’t
Read a newspaper, hun…
Huh:
Though your last statement was completely incoherent, from what I could deduce you’re saying that there are no such things as US “Freedom Camps”? KK, first, you know they are referring to torture camps, right? Do you know what re-education camps are? Just checking…
Now, you may have heard on the “tee-vee” of something called “gitmo”, or “guantanamo bay”. Yes? No? KK, google or wikipedia guantanamo before posting further, please kthx.
Kind of a strike against your credibility, mate; that’s just something that any literate person should have already known, even a US citizen. Its common knowledge.
So, if that isn’t scary enough, here’s the story of a Canadian gent who was kidnapped by the United States government, sent to Syria, and tortured for a year, despite the fact that he was never charged with a crime, nor was there even any evidence against him. Yeah, turns out he was innocent. Woops, sorry for all the torture!
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1161167288245&call_pageid=968332188492
So… you are an idiot. Quod erat demonstrandum.
“…Huh?”
Yeah, cause typing Latin makes you not an idiot…
Typing Latin? No. Pointing out the idiocy of others? Yeah, a little bit.
Hahahaha pwned.
I used to use QED but nobody knew wtf it meant.
Typing Latin? No. Pointing out the idiocy of others? Yeah, a little bit.
posted by Kim Jong-Illinest
You are right. I am an idiot. Thank you for pointing that out.
Hey, wait a minute…
Infinite loop!
Seriously though, folks, I apologize, because personal attacks detract from the important message here: Please, please do not trust your government. Please do not pledge blind fealty to warmongers who invoke patriotism to opiate the masses, to justify mass murder.
But more than anything, do not trust your government. Is it really likely that, as one would be lead to believe, your own particular government just happens to be the one shining beacon of truth, and it is all the others who are gross propaganda and misinformation machines? Honestly, no. That just ain’t possible.
Uh, since posting annoying know-it-all off-topic nonsequitors appears to be expected, I thought I’d do my part. And I will make a misstatement of fact so the next purson can make fnu of me. Cheers, and remember… buy war bonds.
I have downloaded all the characters (Mobile images) they are just animated GIF’s… Anyone know where i can upload them and you can have all have them if you want. I doubt they had permission from disney or warner bros to use their characters.
BUT what they don’t have, My American Friends, is the new Kim Jong Il action figure located only at my personal site here, a new likeness of me which will bring solace to all good communists in the cold wind of capitalist aggression.
I am perhaps, the sexiest Asian dictator alive. Certainly the best film director, except for Sean Cunningham. Now come over and have some Cognac.
“Probably in the heads of the same conspiracy theorists who believe 9/11 was engineered by the US Gov’t”
One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]”. Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch, with someone who was there when he was attempting to fly a small airplane saying that Hanjour was so clumsy that he was unsure if he had driven a car before. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports after Mohammed Atta supposedly leaves two rental cars at two impossibly far-removed locations. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about”. Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name (“Hi mom, this is Mark Bingham”), more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see”. Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces most no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Further making themselves look guilty, the Bush administration steadfastly refused for over a year to allow a commission to investigate 9/11 to even be formed, only agreeing to it on the conditions that they get to dictate its scope, meaning it was based on the false pretense of the “official story” being true with no other alternatives allowed to be c
onsidered, handpicked all its members making sure the ones picked had vested interests in the truth remaining buried, and with Bush and Cheney only “testifying” together, only for an hour, behind closed doors, with their attorneys present and with their “testimonies” not being recorded by tape or even written down in notes. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastic far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.
surely much more disturbing is the wallpaper with the shagging chickens (http://www.kcckp.net/en/character/index.php?4, bottom right). Why would you want *that* on your computer screen?
Kim should start a blog. Imagine the google ad money!