Reverse Engineering a North Korean Sim City Game

digitalnk.com

8 points·fcambus··4 comments

"File integrity checks added by North Korean developers shows that piracy is a concern and suggests the existence a warez/cracking scene in the DPRK"

Fascinating!

> None of these options are particularly hard to implement. The first one would allow us to generate our own licence keys and would be more elegant but also more time-consuming, while the last two are trivial.

I like how you can tell the author is a scener b/c he still ranks a CRACK+KEYGEN higher than a simple CRACK.

I skimmed over a lot of the technical stuff but I found it interesting that what is basically a code review was leveraged to make analyses and hypotheses about a culture and a society at large.

Incidentally I wonder if this is not what the humanities, or at least "digital humanities" increasingly ought to be about. Rather than use algorithms to show us obvious stuff about history and literature (yay word clouds!), why not apply historiography's methodology or literary criticism to the study of computer programs and algorithms?

Computer code is almost always thought of in purely functional terms when it has the potential to tell us so much more about its authors and the society in which it was produced.

There were news articles published years ago which claimed north korea trained "100 hackers per year" as part of their cyberwarfare effort.

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