 | ||
Kwangmyong (Chosŏn'gŭl: 광명; Hancha: 光明; English: Light) is a North Korean "walled garden" national intranet service opened in 2000. It may be accessed by web browsers, incorporates email services, news groups, and an internal web search engine. The network uses its own DNS service to use domain names that are not used on the global Internet. Sites are accessible by either a URL or an IP address.
Contents
Only a small number of government officials and tourists are allowed to use the global Internet, making Kwangmyong the only computer network available to North Korean citizens. It is a free service for public use.
Content
The Kwangmyong network is composed of multiple websites and services, including but not limited to: political, economic, scientific and cultural information and fields of knowledge among other topics; an emailing service; a social networking service; domestic news services; scientific research websites of academic and scholarly works devoted to the network through web-based academic exchanges and information sharing such as the Academy of Sciences for Science and Technology (Chosŏn'gŭl: 과학기술전시관; Hancha: 科學技術展示館) and the Academy of Sciences for Medical Science (Chosŏn'gŭl: 의학과학정보센터); websites of various North Korean government agencies including provincial government, cultural institutions, universities and some of the major industrial and commercial organizations; censored websites from the Internet (mostly related to science) that are downloaded, undergo review and censorship, and publication on the Kwangmyong; an electronic library; and a few e-commerce websites by commercial organizations. As of 2014, Kwangmyong is estimated to have between 1,000 and 5,500 websites.
Network access
Kwangmyong is only accessible from within North Korea. Access is available within major cities and counties, as well as universities and major industrial and commercial organizations. There are several internet cafés in Pyongyang.
Kwangmyong has 24-hour unlimited access by dial-up telephone line. As of 2013, a number of Android based tablet computer products, including the Samjiyon tablet computer, can be purchased in North Korea that give access to Kwangmyong.
Languages
The network uses Korean as the main interface language, and is maintained by more than 2,000 language experts, according to official information, in expanding services in Russian, Chinese, English, French, German and Japanese, in which there is a real-time, online translation service for the seven languages, with a database containing over 2,000,000 words, to assist users who may not be familiar with foreign languages.
Information control
Kwangmyong is designed to be used only within North Korea, and referred to as an "intranet". Kwangmyong prevents domestic users within North Korea to access foreign content or information and prevents the leakages of classified data. It functions as a form of information censorship, preventing undesirable information from being accessed. Thus, sensitive topics and information are unlikely to surface on Kwangmyong due to the absence of a link to the outside world and the censorship that occurs. Kwangmyong is maintained by government-related entities. However, large amounts of material from the Internet end up on Kwangmyong, following processing.
Given that there is no direct connection to the outside Internet, unwanted information cannot enter the network. Information is filtered and processed by government agencies before being hosted on the North Korean Intranet. Burma and Cuba also use a similar network system that is separated from the rest of the Internet, and Iran has been reported as having future plans to implement such a network, though it's claimed that it would work alongside Internet and wouldn't replace it.