“Following its fourth nuclear test in January, North Korea pushed ahead with the fifth nuclear test in September even while floods were in progress”, Sun Nahm-kook, spokesman at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. “This means any web address that ends with “.kp” is linked to the notoriously isolated nation, much like addresses that end “.au” are linked to Australia and “.jp” are linked to Japan. Actually, it’s incredibly boring – with only 28 websites in existence.
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Both South Korea and China have condemned North Korea for the provocation, but the two sides disagree on the best way to deter the regime from further threats.
That’s a remarkably small number. It had the US-style “gov” and “edu” second-level domains, and the one somewhat original extension was “rep.kp”, which seemed to be dedicated to North Korea’s technical department.
The list included a travel website, tour-booking information, pages for a university and for sports and a benign website about Korean cuisine.
In a world that is increasingly globally interconnected with websites and domains, we have more than 140 million.com and.net domains to surf.
But others are more unusual.
The Korean Central News Agency site is dominated by pictures of, and good news articles about the nation’s leader Kim Jong-Un.
Numerous sites and their web addresses had been previously known, experts say, but the coding error revealed for the first time every site assigned the.kp address.
“This was detected by the TL;DR Project, an effort to attempt zone transfers against all top-level domain name servers every two hours and keep a running GitHub repo with the resulting data”.
From there, the list made its way to the popular forum site Reddit, and people began exploring the sites and discussing what they found.
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“Bet NK has one less DNS administrator now”, one Reddit user observed. Films look to be taken care of via a domain called Korfilm.com.kp, but this was mostly text when we checked. On Tuesday, GitHub posted the list of 28 North Korean websites. A significant section of the population has access to a national intranet known as the Kwangmyong – a network of government-approved websites, which were not part of the leak.
