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Facebook Social Networks

Someone In North Korea Is Hosting a Facebook Clone (vice.com) 55

Reporter Jason Koebler shares: Someone in North Korea appears to have created a Facebook clone, according to an internet analytics company that traced the site's DNS to the notoriously isolated country. The social network is an off-the-shelf Facebook clone called dolphinPHP.
Dyn Analytics researcher Doug Madory said that "very few websites resolve to the North Korean address space, and this one does."
From the screenshots in the article, the user interface, and other elements do look similar to that of Facebook.
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Someone In North Korea Is Hosting a Facebook Clone

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  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @04:01PM (#52197893)

    (referring to the ninja in the lower-left corner [starcon.net.kp])

  • Again? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jbmartin6 ( 1232050 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @04:05PM (#52197923)
    North Korea again? What next, a story about North Korea forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10?
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      North Korea again? What next, a story about North Korea forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10?

      Quit whining and absorb the propaganda citizen.

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      At least N.K. wouldn't be so sneaky about Windows 10: they'd simply force it on you; no surprises or gimmicks.

      MS: "The corner 'X' only means "cancel" on Tuesdays of odd months, blah blah blah..."

      • At least N.K. wouldn't be so sneaky about Windows 10: they'd simply force it on you; no surprises or gimmicks.

        MS: "The corner 'X' only means "cancel" on Tuesdays of odd months, blah blah blah..."

        In some ways I would kind of prefer the brutal honesty of being told to upgrade at gunpoint in comparison to the sneaky shit that they've been pulling with Windows 10.

        Plus you already expect North Korea to be trying to watch your every move and thought. It's not really something that you'd expect from an operating system that you thought you purchased. I'm starting to pine for the days when you owned the OS on your computer, and not the other way around.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Story twist: Mass migration to North Korea to AVOID upgrades to Windows 10! Red Star OS FTW!!

  • by bkmoore ( 1910118 ) on Friday May 27, 2016 @04:06PM (#52197931)
    by getting people to spy on themselves.
    • That would have very limited usefulness, only the wealthy elite in NK can afford to get online (and by "online" I mean "onto the national intranet." The Internet is only for a select few of the political elite and military). They already know they're being watched and to keep their heads down.

      More likely, it'll be populated with millions of dummy accounts talking about how EVERYTHING IS AWESOME in North Korea. A digial Potemkin village.

      • That would have very limited usefulness, only the wealthy elite in NK can afford to get online (and by "online" I mean "onto the national intranet." The Internet is only for a select few of the political elite and military). ...

        Those are exactly the very people Kim would be most interested in spying on. He probably care much what your average peasant thinks, but he does need the support of the Army to remain in power.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    traced the site's DNS to the notoriously isolated country

    Because the domain name ending in .kp is too obvious, so they had to "trace" it. Did they use a GUI interface written in Visual Basic?

    • Do you think that TLD is a guaranteed identifier of where the site is hosted? Google's URL shortening service is hosted in Greenland? Nope. So, yes there would have to be tracing involved to find where the site is actually hosted.
      • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
        I doubt there are too many hosts (zero, in fact) in the .KP domain that don't fall under the remit of the DPRK regime. Anyway, the site (starcon.net.kp [http]) resolves to the IP address 175.45.176.19, which whois confirms is within the limited amount of IP space directly allocated to the DPRK. Assuming the information is accurate, then the owners of the IP space are Star Joint Venture Co. Ltd. of Ryugyong-dong, in the Potong-gang District of Pyongyang. That doesn't mean that someone hasn't hacked one of the web
        • Yeah, so that's not MUCH more tracing, but still more than "oh it's a .KP so it must be DPRK".
  • DolphinPHP and PHPdolphin are two different things.

  • Every Facebook user has at some tie or another gotten that flurry of messages from people on their Friends list that they are getting requests to sign up again. Your Facebook age has been copied by a spammer who will then start selling magic diets and Florida real estate to everyone on your list. This scam is so common now that facebook has a special button for reporting it.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    What is more surprising to me. Is it that North Korea has citizens who have computers, or that it took them this long to realize they could use it to keep tabs on their citizens with their real names?

  • Kim created it because he is so ronery.
  • seriously, there is no way this hasn't already been hacked by multiple agencies. PHP isn't exactly known for it's security.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      Nor is any other commonly used language. PHP has a bad reputation because it's easy to get started with, so lots and lots of people write crappy software with it who wouldn't get their piece of shit to compile in other languages.

      The security of your application still primarily depends on your application.

  • I repeat: It's probably more secure than the real Facebook.

    In fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't.

  • All of the pages are Kim Jong Un pointing at things.
  • Why are we reading an article about a website instead of just going to the goddamn website to see for ourselves? This was typical of the off-line media about 20 years ago, "let me tell you about these crazy internet kids (but never provide any URL)", now even the internet news sites are doing it, what's the point of your article if I can't experience the source for myself? Do they really think I'm going to experience the world only through their description of it and be grateful about it? That may have been

  • And WTF didn't the summary link the facebook clone?

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