Name: The Weird, Terrible Smartphones They Only Have in North Korea
Uploaded: 2024-07-04T07:05:58.000Z
Duration: 8 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It comes in three colors, has a camera that takes photos, a battery that holds electricity, and you can connect it to a full-size keyboard for some reason.

Modal verbs - B1

Now I know what you're thinking—damn, I hate my phone, it's never flown in a circle around a Korean woman's head, this must be the phone for me!

Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, but unfortunately, the Arirang 151 is only sold in North Korea.

In fact, North Korea, despite the… everything, has a thriving smartphone market.

But the kind of phones you find in North Korea, and the infrastructure set up to make them work, is pretty unique, and uniquely terrible.

So let's talk about North Korean smartphones—the good, the bad, and the ugly… but mostly the ugly.

Smartphones, and cell phones in general, are a pretty new phenomenon in North Korea.

Their first major mobile phone network wasn't functional until 2008—before then, telephone access was pretty limited.

There were landlines built in a few parts of the country, but about 90% of them were connected to government offices or other state-owned enterprises, and even for those in the North

Korean government who could afford a phone, getting one installed was a lengthy process with stacks of paperwork to justify the phone's purpose and the owner's plan to pay for it.

There was, briefly, a period from 2002 to 2004 where the government tested a small mobile phone network called Sunet using second-hand equipment from Vodafone Hungary, but it was only publicly accessible for about 18 months before Kim Jong-Il very nearly got blown up in a train accident near the Chinese border, and they shut the whole thing down.

Did the mobile phone network have anything to do with the explosion?

Not really, but someone had to get punished for that happening, and that someone was everyone.

Fast forward to 2008, and North Korea takes another crack at creating a state-controlled mobile phone network, and by creating, I mean tricking an Egyptian infrastructure company into building them a mobile phone network and then immediately stealing it.

The network is called Koryolink, and it provides North Korea's 15 largest cities, and some railways, with fairly limited 3G coverage.

But Koryolink is no ordinary cell network—it's worse.

You can only make calls to other North Korean numbers, every phone number starts with the same eight digits, and it doesn't provide any access whatsoever to the internet—obviously.

What Koryolink does provide access to, however, is North Korea's completely isolated intranet—Kwangyang.

This is basically just a private network of about 5,000 or so state-sanctioned websites.

You can read the news, book a flight on their tiny terrible airline, watch propaganda films on their national streaming service—really anything you could find on the normal internet except for free expression and Neopets… they still haven't cracked Neopets.

But of course, being able to access this veritable treasure trove of sweet, sweet content isn't worth much without a smartphone to view it on, so, in 2014, the DPRK released these images of Kim at a brand new smartphone factory to announce that they were manufacturing their very first smartphone—the AS-1201.

Now, normally I'd have to dance around explicitly accusing a foreign government of lying, but

North Korea would have to spend like 15% of their GDP to sue me, so, they're lying.

This factory doesn't produce anything, and the AS-1201 is almost certainly just an imported and rebranded version of this low-end Chinese Android, the Uniscope U-1201.

This is more or less the case for newer North Korean smartphones as well, like the Arirang 171 or Samtaesong 8—basically, there's nothing special about the way these phones are built, because North Korea probably can't build phones.

So, what sets these phones apart, then, is the absolutely crazy software that's running on them.

My writer Ben somehow found a version of North Korean Android ripped from a phone called the Pyongyang 2407, and he managed to get this screenshot and a folder of these wallpapers before this happened.

Fortunately, he didn't have to do that at all, which I told him like five times, because a group of German researchers had already managed to get it running without breaking their computers, and published all of their findings years ago, so here's what we know.

These phones come with games—lots of games.

The Arirang 151, for example, comes with five different versions of Angry Birds, a rip-off version of Candy Crush, an emulated copy of Super Mario Galaxy, and an app that seemingly just emits a really loud, high-pitched noise that's supposed to make buds go away.

But the reason these phones come pre-loaded with enough Angry Birds to last you through the end of Kim's regime is because there's no way to download new apps yourself.

Again, these phones can't access the internet, and Pyongyang doesn't have any kind of app store.

So, if you want to get new apps, you have to go to the, well, app store.

But by app store, I mean the literal, physical app store.

This is usually a counter at some other kind of retail business, like an electronics store or a food market.

These counters will have a catalog of different apps they can sell you, which they'll keep on a computer that can transfer the files directly to your phone.

All of these apps will already be verified by the DPRK—a process they will have to go through, otherwise the phones literally can't open them.

Well, fair warning, we're going to get a little technical here, so I'm going to put on a royalty-free football game really small in the corner for everyone in my audience who hates computers.

Essentially, the version of Android running on each of these phones checks every single file, every photo, every song, every application, for a special kind of encrypted signature before it can open it.

There are two kinds of signatures that these phones will accept—a file might be tagged with something called a Natasign, which is an encrypted key that can only be added by the North Korean government and confirms that it doesn't include any dangerous information like how to exploit Kim Jong-un or how cool Chicago is.

The other kind of signature is called a Selfsign, which can only be added by the device itself, like a photo using the phone's camera, and confirms that the file originated on the device and not from anywhere else.

If a file doesn't have one of these two signatures, like, say, a copy of this video, the phone will automatically delete it as soon as it's opened.

This signature system is then, in turn, protected by another program called Red Flag, which constantly runs in the background to check that the signature system hasn't been removed, and also takes a screenshot every time that an application is opened and puts it in a folder that can only be accessed by the government.

But, in case that sounded like an empty threat because you aren't yet convinced that the

North Korean government would violate the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the phone also comes preloaded with another application called Trace Viewer, whose only purpose is to show you the folder of screenshots that you can't delete, or even view, just to prove that your phone is, in fact, actually spying on you.

It all makes you grateful to use safe, American freedom phones—which, as far as I'm concerned, don't spy on me at all, because I can't see the folder of evidence.

So because Google's not listening, I might as well tell you that this website has flaws.

It's full of ads, takes a big cut of its creators' profits, and shackles us to an algorithm that disincentivizes us from creating new, exciting, and untested content.

That's why I, along with a few of my creator friends, got together to start an independent streaming service called Nebula.

It's our incubator for crazy, higher-budget experiments like my new reality competition show, The Getaway.

It's premiering on Nebula really soon, so here's just a little taste.

We really like shows that have, you know, like a sabotage element, but there's already, like, so many that have a saboteur.

There's even a bunch that have a couple of saboteurs.

As far as we know, there's none that have everyone as the saboteur.

And we thought that would be funny, didn't we?

In some way, I'm like, are there two Snitches here?

There's no script for this, so, you know.

That's a great, oh, that's gonna make the trailer, dude.

If that looks like fun, we'd all really appreciate your support by signing up and watching it on Nebula when it premieres.

Of course, signing up for Nebula will also give you access to a massive catalog of original content from other creators you might know, like Real Life Lore, City Beautiful, or Philosophy 2.

It's the best way to support independent creators like myself, and all these other folks scrolling by.

 All you need to do is go to nebula.tv and you'll even get 40% off an annual plan, which brings the monthly cost down to under $3 a month.