[HN Gopher] North Koreans are jailbreaking phones to access forb...
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North Koreans are jailbreaking phones to access forbidden media
Author : 8bitsrule
Score : 137 points
Date : 2022-04-27 19:35 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| decremental wrote:
| I just imagine some North Korean jailbreaking his phone and
| accessing content from the west and thinking "nope!"
| timcavel wrote:
| rmatt2000 wrote:
| This is extraordinarily brave, given what usually happens to
| people who possess illegal content in NK. I think I'll stick to
| criticizing politically unpopular people on Twitter.
| [deleted]
| coliveira wrote:
| Soon we'll have to do the same. A lot of media that has been
| considered "bad" for some definition of "bad" has been banned in
| western countries.
| azinman2 wrote:
| There is absolutely no comparison with North Korea. Sorry
| that's just preposterous.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes, it's terrible how North Korea has made it so difficult to
| have root on your own phone.
| readingnews wrote:
| I see what you did there.
|
| And I looked down at my phone.
|
| And I made myself sad.
| lazyier wrote:
| Not attacking you personally, but it's important to keep this
| stuff in mind when we make choices as customers. Consumers
| are cattle. Don't be like cattle. Use your money for good.
|
| ----------------
|
| The difference between you and North Korea is that nobody is
| holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy phones you
| can't root.
|
| Which means that it is very likely that you volunteered for
| it. Unless somebody else paid for it, like work. Then that is
| their problem. I still recommend buying your own phone.
|
| Why did you do that?
|
| Is it because the phone is a particular brand that is
| fashionable and you want that to reflect on you when you use
| the phone around other people? Is it because it is cheaper to
| buy because the phone company subsidizes the phone in order
| to sell you spyware you can't get rid of and to lock in
| reliable monthly payments from you?
|
| There are lots of reasons people do this. Maybe it's just
| ignorance. Maybe they tell themselves they don't have
| anything to hide. Maybe having control over the things in
| they own seems like too much work or too intimidating.
|
| Because it is extremely likely you actually had a choice and
| your choice was to sell your freedom in exchange for shiny
| baubles.
|
| You didn't have to do that. And you don't have to continue to
| do that. You have a choice. You have the power. You really
| do.
|
| This is important because you have the chance to financially
| reward people that want to preserve your freedom or you can
| financially reward people that take it away.
|
| This is the power you have. It is more democratic than
| voting. It also matters much more.
| asdff wrote:
| I mean otoh the market only offers so much choice and often
| established producers work to make it more difficult for up
| and comers to themselves be established. We are infact
| often cattle whose choices are limited to merely where we
| can stand within a tightly controlled field of very limited
| size, especially when many of these tools we are reliant
| upon in modern life can no longer be practically made in
| the home.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Maybe they, like many others, don't care one iota about
| having root on their phone.
|
| > sell your freedom
|
| That's hyperbolic to the point of killing the discussion.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Most people can't be experts at most things. That's how
| specialization works.
|
| It's easy to blame consumerism and people being dumb when
| you look at a single market, but there are hundreds of
| markets and in the other 99 we're the dumb ones.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to buy
| phones you can't root
|
| The DMCA (and to a lesser extent, CFAA) is routinely abused
| by software & hardware manufacturers to prevent people from
| taking control of their own devices, and if you do it at a
| large scale then you will eventually end up with a gun to
| your head.
| reedjosh wrote:
| I mean the Pixel series of phones are built to be
| unlockable/root-able straight from google..
| dane-pgp wrote:
| We need a "Right to Repair Democracy".
| [deleted]
| qclibre22 wrote:
| Can't they triangulate the location regardless? Pretty risky to
| challenge the supreme leader.
| djanogo wrote:
| US populace would also need jail broken phones as soon as the
| new DHS "Disinformation Governance Board"[1] starts blocking at
| platform/DNS/ISP level.
|
| [1]https://twitter.com/wiczipedia/status/1519282822158110721
| gsk22 wrote:
| Come on, your link provides no evidence that this Board would
| (or even could) block any internet traffic. Don't spread FUD.
| robonerd wrote:
| Sure, they just want to govern 'misinformation' but surely
| they don't mean to censor anything. Sure... Why would you
| even _dream_ of giving the DHS the benefit of the doubt?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| It always relieves me to know that while foreign regimes
| censor news, western regimes only censor misinformation.
| Glad we've kept the moral high ground.
| swader999 wrote:
| Should have just gone with Ministry of Truth. Why try to hide
| it.
| toast0 wrote:
| I was always a fan of the name House Un-American Activities
| Committee; which is the committee where they did un-
| american things. Truth in advertising.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Jailbroken = proper ownership of purchased hardware
|
| Companies retaining control should not be legal to call as a
| sale. And my guess is that people will not be happy when their
| $1000 phone is really a rental, legally speaking.
|
| EDIT: A lot of people here really hate ownership and freedom for
| hardware you bought. -1's and stockholm syndrome are definitely a
| thing.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I'm guessing most people in NK aren't carrying $1000 phones.
| They are carrying "...government-approved, Android-based
| smartphones...". Your statement about companies controlling the
| devices is certainly worth arguing for, but it's a different,
| far more draconian situation in North Korea.
| asdff wrote:
| It's the same situation, just taken to the extreme
| conclusion. We see varying shades of control of electronics
| from different governments and corporations, but at the end
| of the day putting a stop to any of these varying amounts of
| control requires the same solution: being allowed to use a
| computer for general purpose computing.
| kube-system wrote:
| In the case of North Korea, the state of computing norms in
| the rest of the world have no bearing on the situation
| there.
|
| Even Linux spies on users in North Korea.
|
| If every smartphone on the planet had full root access, NK
| would simply not allow smartphones.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Agreed. In the age of restrictive software, the term "sale"
| should be more heavily protected.
| kube-system wrote:
| These are phones locked down by the power of the North Korean
| government, not by the choice of any company.
| noasaservice wrote:
| The same techniques used to lock down US phones from owners
| is the same one NK is using.
|
| Or do you think those "features" were added in just for the
| totalitarian markets?
| kube-system wrote:
| The features you're talking about were developed to close
| legitimate security holes before they were ever used to
| lock anyone out from their phones.
| endofreach wrote:
| I don't quite understand why most of that wasn't blocked on their
| (i guess) government ISP?
| Vladimof wrote:
| That's why Google doesn't want you to unlock boot-loaders even if
| they allow you to ...
|
| I get that warning about my unlocked boot loader every time I
| boot...
| rektide wrote:
| The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help
| develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like
| this.
|
| This is still couched as consuming media. The stakes are higher,
| but I'd have us go further: try to allow person to person, group,
| & broadcast communication in places where the internet is being
| subverted & blocked.
|
| "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around
| it". -John Gilmore.
|
| Alas the current regimes, bith conservative & liberal, are more
| focused around demanding things of the internet & making up new
| regulation, bith as a direct threat to letting people operate &
| maintain presence they would online. It's extremely hard days
| seeing one of the greatest emerged possibilities in the world- a
| universal right to speech & connect- clambored over & shouted
| down like this. Stories like this & others, of helping people see
| beyond their oppressive regimes, need much bigger celebration &
| support.
| lgvln wrote:
| I'm not optimistic, considering the state of democracy in US.
| It looks like liberalism and democracy is insufficient to
| counteract the ill effects of capitalism - the transformation
| of society from a market economy to a market society.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > It looks like liberalism
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism" in this context,
| but over here, it's liberalism that has us relying on
| billionaires to buy media platforms so that _we_ get access
| to forbidden media.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| That's just not true. You can host a web server and share
| whatever legal media you'd like.
| [deleted]
| bitwize wrote:
| > "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes
| around it". -John Gilmore.
|
| This is one of those old bromides like Postel's law that just
| doesn't reflect the reality of the situation in the modern
| world. Today's modern equivalent would be "The net interprets
| heterodoxy as noise and filters it out." The most recent
| example being, a guy asked about what it would take to get
| Twitter's AS depeered for "disruptive activity" after the Musk
| acquisition:
|
| https://puck.nether.net/pipermail/outages-discussion/2022-Ap...
|
| It's probably difficult and unpopular among the large telecom
| firms to do this now, but with the right incentives we may see
| sites depeered for political reasons in the future.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > The United States should back it's (alleged) principles &
| help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian
| software, like this.
|
| Says someone who's clearly never lived in an authoritarian
| regime.
|
| Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North Korea
| ?
|
| What do you think will happen to your average North Korean who
| gets caught with this US-backed anti-authoritarian software ?
| rektide wrote:
| If i had all the answers i'd be doing it. Wifi-p2p,
| bluetooth-le broadcasts... who knows. We need more trying
| stuff.
|
| This salty snippy rejectionist behavior doesnt help. Being so
| certain of failure, convincing everyone not to try to improve
| things, swearing all attempts are futile... dont you see what
| vaccuous sucking nihilism this is? It's badgering & bullying
| to have a stance that is so uncompromising, that is phrased
| so demeaningly. It's excessive.
|
| I dont know what happens. Maybe we find some fantastic covert
| plausible deniability systems- launch the tech as a small
| payload in every top 10 site on the planet. Maybe NK doesnt
| end up being a good spot for freedomware. Maybe it helps
| Russia, or Myanmar. Doing nothing will help no oppressed
| people ever: that I promise. Lets not be cowards, let's find
| some principled things to explore & advance, lets try.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, how does such software currently spread in North Korea?
| And, what do you think will happen to your average North
| Korean who gets caught with the current non-US-backed anti-
| authoritarian software?
|
| But then when we look deeper, it gets more complicated. Could
| we make software that is easier to use and harder to detect?
| Probably. If someone gets caught with it, will they be in
| _more_ trouble than they would with non-US-backed software
| that had similar functionality? Very likely. If the time
| comes when NK figures out how to track it, and more people
| have it on their phones because we encouraged them, and the
| hammer comes down on them, but more information got into NK
| because of this, is that a good trade-off or a bad one? (I 'm
| not even going to propose an answer to that question...)
|
| Love your username, by the way.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >Tell me, how would the US "spread" such software in North
| Korea ?
|
| Maybe in a way similar to Stuxnet?
| pessimizer wrote:
| The United States doesn't help people in the United States
| jailbreak their phones.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Surely reporting this, including specific phone models, will only
| make it even more difficult for them?
| not2b wrote:
| No, because they already know this is going on, and they know
| the small number of phone models available in NK.
| chernevik wrote:
| Umm, is this newsworthy?
|
| I am surely glad it is happening, and hope that it happens more.
|
| But perhaps the article draws regime attention to
| vulnerabilities, and helps the regime defeat them?
|
| Not everything interesting should be published.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you think that the North Koreans would be unwares that
| people are trying to circumvent anything unless they read it on
| HN, then you are just not very imaginative.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Weird to see "jailbreak" used in the context of Android phones,
| but I guess a it's fitting for an operating system where people
| can only ever install what the maker of their operating system
| allows.
|
| For a totalitarian regime, it's a little surprising to see the
| devices still getting cracked, especially with the relatively
| small portion of the populace that can afford to get a computer
| science education.
| sva_ wrote:
| They often run very old versions, also on their Linux systems
| ("Red Star OS"). For someone with outside knowledge, it'd
| probably be trivial to acquire root
| firephonestival wrote:
| North Koreans have been "jailbreaking" their electronics for a
| long time.
|
| There are some good books about how ordinary people lived up to
| around Kim Jong-Un's reign, such as "Nothing to Envy" and
| "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader".
|
| Devices such as TVs and radios were always set to only receive
| state broadcasts, and they are subject to regular inspections.
| But the safety measures were cheaply produced on a small scale,
| often a simple mechanical limit on a dial housed behind tamper-
| evident stickers.
|
| The Tumen River has also been a traditionally porous border
| where black market media (and cosmetics, food, electronics,
| etc) could flow freely. As is usual in an authoritarian regime,
| well-connected people can ignore the rules, smart/wealthy
| people can work around them, and the occasional unlucky person
| can be made into an example.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| > The Tumen River has also been a traditionally porous border
| where black market media (and cosmetics, food, electronics,
| etc) could flow freely. As is usual in an authoritarian
| regime, well-connected people can ignore the rules,
| smart/wealthy people can work around them, and the occasional
| unlucky person can be made into an example.
|
| Sounds about right. Yeah and also, there's media that is
| freely distributed just for fun, and I think everyone can
| play Starcraft...there has to be a way. Game of cat and
| mouse. It's not just about what's forbidden and what's not
| it's also about bribing a little bit here, a little bit
| there...working the system, find a little something in the
| regular Wednesday (?) black market, hear a little
| secret...and as long as you're visibly contributing to
| society overall, you can push the envelope. Same as anywhere,
| Cuba is big on "sobrecumplir" meaning exceed expectations. If
| you do that, you can do all kinds of stuff.
|
| So what is also missing from these viewpoints is that yeah on
| an individual basis, individual freedom, Koreans have fairly
| little of that to be sure. And it's not only due to rules,
| the rules and strictness is interwoven with the poverty, they
| cannot be thought of independently. If a country is poor, its
| prisons have to be that much worse than a rich country's for
| them to be a deterrent to theft. And that's just one example.
|
| But collective freedom! Now that's a different story. These
| Koreans have a lot of that! Basically they gave up all their
| individual freedom in exchange for all the collective freedom
| they could possibly get. That's how you end up with Juche,
| for instance, mostly a way to accept poverty down the line
| but in exchange never allow foreign powers to perform
| manipulation through trade. And in fact, in the last "maximum
| pressure" period that Trump imposed, Korea didn't budge or
| suffer.[1] And for collective freedom the people--to my
| fullest understanding--need an autocrat, autocrator [2], the
| one guy everyone else in society stands in the way of bullets
| for, and who then thinks of all of them in return without any
| interference from foreign manipulation. Democracy is then in
| terms of the neurons of the autocrator. Any one of these
| neurons can change his mind completely[2], without tallying
| ballots or recounts.
|
| [1] The price of rice didn't change under sanctions. A big
| reason given, though there were several, was that because
| North Korea's agriculture was generally not mechanized, State
| Dept. couldn't squeeze them on the availability of spare
| parts for machines. That was a huge surprise for State...and
| on top of that the counterfeiting. So while United States can
| owns the ability to print dollars, _so does North Korea_. How
| good would you think they would get if they made it a
| national priority? The brightest minds, thinking of ways to
| make a Benjamin cheaper than $100. It 's a super simple goal.
| I think anybody can forge them for $1000 apiece, but to get
| it down under $100, ah! So while South Korea sends its
| brightest minds (in this case best test scores, they are
| totally subscribed to that) to eg Stanford, North Korea keeps
| them right put, working on sovereignty. Nationalism. Like
| they can get a 99 percentile student on every square
| millimeter of the $100 dollar bill. And get this, the North
| historically had better students than the South, especially
| the most mountainous areas, those had the most Yangban
| standardized exam passers. Because what else will you do with
| your time but study!
|
| That's what I gather from reading beyond the curriculum of
| Stanford's Korean History class.
|
| [2] I think in Russia the Czar is called an autocrator
| internally, Czar was the external name.
|
| [3] This concept was enshrined in the Choson dynasty,
| absolutely any son of the King could inherit the throne,
| without any restrictions on whom his mother was. Although I
| know little of palatial uh...well conspiracies, what else
| could you call them...dynamics. Dynamics. There were rules,
| and nuance, and many interests at play.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >well-connected people can ignore the rules, smart/wealthy
| people can work around them, and the occasional unlucky
| person can be made into an example.
|
| This is true of any regime, really. Just that the rules are
| more restrictive in the more authoritarian version.
| Kye wrote:
| Humans are adaptable. I figured out how to connect all the
| computers in the house over a LAN and dial the living room
| computer's modem on activity when I was little. Computer
| science is just a way of discovering and sharing a niche of
| adaptations.
| tragictrash wrote:
| I don't think computer science education applies here. These
| people are looking for a solution and smart enough to follow
| the bread crumbs.
|
| That's what we do best - adapt.
| DaltonCoffee wrote:
| Isn't most jailbreaking and protections tampering done by
| people w/o high school, let alone cs degrees.
| eugeniub wrote:
| No, you need to know Dijkstra's algorithm in order to tinker
| with an OS. /s
| emteycz wrote:
| Yeah, we learned it as kids at my primary school. Forums and
| people there will help a lot if you ask nicely. I guess North
| Koreans have to learn it from other people directly,
| though... that's probably much harder. Cubans have huge data
| libraries shared on USB flashdrives, I wonder if North
| Koreans have it too.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Cubans have huge data libraries shared on USB flashdrives
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Paquete_Semanal
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Definitely, but those people generally have access to the
| Internet. Modern Android security isn't what people used to
| jailbreak 30 years ago before the internet.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The person inventing the jailbreak method is typically
| "classically trained" in CS, notable exceptions like Geohot.
| [deleted]
| muybasado wrote:
| aaron695 wrote:
| dragonelite wrote:
| Well the world is already fracturing in multiple spheres of
| entertainment, cyber and politics. Just waiting for the west to
| power up their great firewall with the US clean network
| initiative.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| If you found this article interesting and are curious for
| examples of North Korea's extensive digital surveillance, I
| recommend watching "Florian Grunow, Niklaus Schiess: Lifting the
| Fog on Red Star OS": https://youtu.be/8LGDM9exlZw
|
| The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its
| citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video is
| from 6 years ago, so they've probably only improved their
| surveillance)
| pueblito wrote:
| > The depths to which North Korea goes to track and monitor its
| citizens is a lot more complex than I thought (and this video
| is from 6 years ago, so they've probably only improved their
| surveillance)
|
| If you think that's wild, get a load of what the NSA and GCHQ
| do
| erdos4d wrote:
| Yeah, I've yet to hear of NK sending submarines to tap
| undersea cables or storing essentially all internet traffic
| for future decryption efforts. Their little spy OS seems
| pretty quaint in comparison.
| MaxLeiter wrote:
| I expect the Five Eyes to have that level of sophistication
| jacquesm wrote:
| No need to tap any cables if you're the OEM for the gear
| at the endpoints.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| This is probably the real reason why Chinese networking
| equipment was banned in the US and other Five Eyes
| countries.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| This was the stated reason too, at least here in Europe.
| National security, which is a polite way of saying the
| Chinese would tap them. Which they definitely would,
| since we would too in their position.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| No, I meant that using Chinese networking equipment was
| banned because it wouldn't have a Five Eyes backdoor.
| erdos4d wrote:
| Yeah, that's kinda what I was saying, they definitely
| do:)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not sure why this is being down voted as it is a true
| story. The underwater recording unit was on display in the
| Kremlin (is it still?) with a "Made in USA" plaque attached
| for all to see.
|
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-
| how...
| [deleted]
| core-utility wrote:
| On the same subject, Darknet Diaries podcast did an episode on
| PRK and the smuggling of "illegal" media in. It's a good
| listen.
|
| Episode 71: Information Monopoly
|
| https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/71/
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| _USBs are a significant form of sharing information in North
| Korea. Many citizens have devices with USB ports and SD card
| slots. So for many years, North Korean defectors have
| organized efforts to smuggle outside info into North Korea on
| USB drives to counter Kim Jong-un's constant propaganda. But
| these groups were buying memory devices at cost with limited
| resources. Flash Drives For Freedom is a campaign that
| travels the world inspiring people to donate their own memory
| drives. An initiative launched and managed by the Human
| Rights Foundation, Flash Drives for Freedom is significantly
| increasing the capacities of these North Korean defector
| groups._
|
| https://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/
| nes350 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/hTbRU
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(page generated 2022-04-27 23:00 UTC)