Let me guess. This is about the hydrogen bomb!

C’mon, that’s front-page news. This is about an OS the communist dictatorship has developed for its citizens.

An OS?

Yes. Red Star is North Korea’s home-grown computer operating system that two German researchers recently discovered is super-paranoid like the regime, and tries to snoop on the digital lives of users.

I’m sure the OS has an Apple flavour, given Kim Jong-un’s passion for Macs.

You said it! Like his father, Kim Jong-il, the current Korean supremo also loves being photographed near Macs. North Korea has been developing its own OS for over a decade. Red Star — which looks and works like the Apple OS X blended into Windows XP — is based on Fedora 11, a Linux 2009 version.

The OS, obviously, allows for zero privacy features. And, as you would have guessed, most of the North Koreans are being asked to use the RS OS.

But frankly, who tested the OS for the rest of the world?

Researchers Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schiess of the German IT security firm ERNW have had a chance to test the OS and its codes outside North Korea. And they have found out that the platform offers an “illusion of technological progress” while maintaining room for total state surveillance.

What’s the modus operandi here?

Basically, every file within the RS OS has been “marked individually”, which means the government can see exactly who viewed what, when, and how. Moreover, if users modify files, that will also be seen. If a user changes core functions, such as disabling the antivirus or firewall, the computer reboots.

The regime’s key target is those who copy and share foreign media content (films, mostly). Such content is shared widely using USB sticks.

If you are trying to copy some documents into a pen drive, the files will be watermarked and the government will immediately know what has been copied and by whom. If you are a journalist trying to smuggle some important data out of the country, just forget about it.

Of course, this is North Korea!

The project, in fact, was the ambition of the late leader Kim Jong-Il. He wanted the country to develop an operating system of its own. Mind you, North Koreans have little access to the world wide web or the internet as we know it. The country has a crude intranet through which citizens supposedly interact.

But the regime uses the network to supply its propaganda literature and influence public opinion. The intranet allows access to state media and some “approved” websites. That said, the regime would have felt that the people might have felt left out on the technological front and wanted to fill the gap. Red Star seems to be the answer to that.

Are there private computers in North Korea? It’s a dark country digitally, I’m told.

Of course there are. During the Soviet era, the Communist republic boasted of quite advanced technologies — all that vanished after Communist Russia fell like nine pins in 1991.

To be fair, private computer use in North Korea has been rising over the past decade, but most machines reportedly run on Windows XP, now nearly 15 years old. North Korea’s paranoid regime may have wanted to avoid any code that might be used by intelligence agencies.

Is Korea the only country to develop such an OS?

Well, Cuba has an OS of its own called National Nova, which is suitably flexible and modern. China and Russia have also tried to build their own.

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