North Korea Trumps China On Sensorship And PC Usage Spying

According to the BBC a Russian student studying in North Korea, of all places, has revealed a government created operating system (OS) sold to residents known as Red Star. The OS, according to researchers in South Korea, is aimed at monitoring user activity, though very few North Koreans have computers or Internet access.

It is designed "to control [North Korea's] own information security", a report by South Korea's Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) said.

"Due to few applicable programmes available, Red Star will not even by easily distributed in North Korea," it added.

Red Star is Linux-based and is influenced by Microsoft with versions Office embedded and an e-mail system called Pigeon as well as a Mozilla Firefox browser - which opens to the North Korean government website as the home page.

I'm not surprised by this, just that it's made the news! Would we expect anything less of this dictatorship? Perhaps the BBC is simply looking for anything to report other than iPad...

North Suspected In South Korea / US Denial Of Service Attacks

The South Korean government is warning that about 20,000 computers infected by a virus as part of an alleged denial of service (DOS) attack are expected to have their data destroyed by the vicious code, starting today. The DOS affected high profile sites in both South Korea and the United States including the South Korean Spy Agency, a bank and a top newspaper as well as the US Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and the Transportation Department.

According to the CBC "Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think-tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, adding that he "heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into" South Korean networks."