I have a question. Why is North Korea allowed to use Internet ? There is a process, which is crucial to Internet, and it is called "routing". In order to have data moved around everyone who participates in Internet has to cooperate to make routing work. 

 

North Kore, obviously, does not allow its people to benefit from Internet. People don't have computers, phones, or other devices, and even if they had, there would be a censorship. As it is, only the government and the military benefit from the Internet, and they are using it against other countries.

 

Why not just block and deny any routing to and from North Korea ? 

 

DG

 

Because the Internet doesn’t work that way. There is nothing that tells you if a user is in North Korea or Nigeria or the USA. You can sometimes identify the routers it has passed through, but there are ways to strip those off as well. There are even services that will do it for you. As for the physical connection, if the USSR or China supplies it to the NK, then there is no way to know they are not legitimate users in those countries.

 

I guess China could act as firewall for NK, completely shielding their network traffic, but why would they want to do it ? Especially for illegal activities. It just mean trouble, possible problems with other countries, and there are complaints already because of Chinese own activities.  It is not like NK has much to offer in return, and Internet is not essential for keeping regime alive.

DG

 

 

So, China might act as firewall for NK, but, as I said in previous post, why would they want to do it ? Apart from the political issues, it is a technical problem that requires some resources to be solved. The question is, to what end....

 

Also NK has government web site, and their own DNS domain. It means and they, probably, have some fixed (static) IP addresses assigned to them. NK probably wants their government site to be accessible from outside, which implies inbound traffic.Those addresses might be blocked, too.

 

BTW, the site design is, surprisingly,  quite decent, much better than many other government sites.  

 

DG

 

China doesn’t act as a firewall for NK, all they (or the Russians) would provide is a communications link to one or more of their hubs. Any domain, address, and firewall issues would be done by NK.

 

While NK undoubtedly has their own DNS domain and a static IP address, what makes you think that is where their government web site that can be accessed from the outside world is? Odds are that any non-Korean language version is located on a server in Europe or the USA, and there may even be backup locations.

 

Also, the key syllable in ‘internet’ is net. There internet is not a simple linear connection from point A to point B, there are an infinite number of possible paths, and the internet is designed to use them to get around blockages. (Actually, it was designed to remain functioning after a nuclear exchange destroyed many of its links and nodes.) Ask any of the authoritarian governments, like China and Iran, that are trying to control their citizens access to the internet. They fail not because they are stupid, but because the internet is not designed to allow blockages.  Don't expect it to be any easier from the outside.

I think I am going to give up. A large part of my post about Internet routing protocols has been deleted twice, once yesterday and once the day before yesterday. I couldn't delete it accidentally twice, so it is either a technical problem with or SP staff is playing odd kind of pranks with me.

 

Sorry, WarNerd, I don't agree with your explanation of Internet routing, but I can't discuss it here because my posts are getting edited somehow showing only partly on the site. I simply have no patience to write the same part for the third time.

 

DG

 

I have had better luck switching to the HTML view and editing my posts there. That way you can spot and remove all the garbage inserted by the editor that makes the site do screwy things.