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...
