Media files extracted from North Korea's Red Star OS | Hacker News Reader

Media files extracted from North Korea's Red Star OS

github.com

200 pointsda_big_ghey94 comments

Except the files with Korean names in Backgrounds/* and Wallpapers/*, everything else seems to be generic.

Names of the said files ran through Google Translate, with some minor corrections to the English output (I don't know any Korean):

    Dabaksol Guard Post Snowy Scene 다박솔초소의 설경
    Sea of Potato Flowers in Taehongdan 대홍단의 감자꽃바다
    Mt Paektu Sunrise 백두산의 해돋이
    Beom'an-ri Scenery 범안리의 선경
    Echo of Woollim Falls 울림폭포의 메아리
    Night View of Changja River 장자강의 불야경
    Azaleas of Cheoryeong 철령의 철쭉
    The Horizon of the Handdreval 한드레벌의 지평선

    Fly Higher 더 높이 날아라
    Dandelion 민들레
    Mt Paektu Heaven Lake 백두산천지
    Blue Sky 푸른 하늘
    Landscape Painting 풍경화

Edit: Incorporated corrections from @sanxiyn and @terrorOf below

corrections:

다박솔초소의 설경 - snowy scene of guard post Dabaksol

장자강 - river(강) Changja [Zhangjiagang spelling looks very Chinese-y]

백두산 천지 - the crater lake on top of the mountain baekdu is called that

Thank you for the corrections, I've edited the parent post. The lake on top of the Baekdu (Paektu?) Mountain appears to be called Heaven Lake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Lake

(Not sure why your comment was downvoted but I vouched for it, so it's back now, hopefully for good.)

South Korea and North Korea use different romanization schemes. So for example, 대홍단 is properly romanized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taehongdan_County. ("Agriculture is also key, with the county leading the nation in potato production.") Google Translate (as expected) seems unaware that it should use North Korean rominzation scheme to romanize North Korean place names.

I'm aware there are different romanization systems but not sure which is which. I've corrected Taehongdan. I guess it should say Paektu not Baekdu too?

Update: Paektu appears to be the DPRK spelling. Source: http://sori.org/hangul/romanizations.html#Roman_Consonants

> Dabaksol Guard Post Snowy Scene

That's the only one in the set that didn't let me down. It looks like someone took a Thomas Kinkade diner placemat and asked an 8 year-old to put some cannons on it.

Agreed, the birds are an especially nice touch[1] (clearly not doves of peace).

1: https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Backgr...

Those are 까치, Korean Magpie. It's a somewhat common and culturally important bird in Korea.

What do they signify?

They usually signify Korean people themselves.

I don't think they signify much, but they're considered cute little friendly buds in Korea.

I can't stop laughing at this image. I keep telling myself it can't be real but it is.

Also particularly fond of these sweet tractors.

https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Backgr...

About the only thing juche about these is Mt Paektu. The mountain is important in Korean folklore, and is featured prominently on North Korea’s seal. Due to its spiritual significance, it is the mythological birthplace of Kim Jong-il[0]. (He was actually born in the Soviet Union.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-il

Nice picture of a country scene: https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Wallpa...

Nice picture of a country scene after the kite was denounced as a counter-revolutionary conspirator: https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Wallpa...

Wallpapers:

Background01.jpg: cropped stock photo - https://tineye.com/search/175c2f3b87139c4d3bc47ed955f147eed6...

Background02.jpg: cropped istock - https://tineye.com/search/a3f7a9618a4b53a69ccfeb6f7d6fc91652...

Background03.jpg: cropped stock photo and they photoshopped the horse out - https://tineye.com/search/9d46057bc0a47472b1212b2487b48b5192...

Background04.jpg: I won't even bother, obvious HST photo

Background05.jpg: same, color adjusted

Background06.jpg: stock - https://tineye.com/search/a1846966840fc9d6d3b4aec0a3422650bc...

Background07.jpg: same as photo #2, but cropped in a different place

Background08.jpg: ?

Background09.jpg: stock, https://tineye.com/search/f2d4c13975818a67557f56a0b1184a1a9b...

Thank you for checking this. I really expected to see copyright infringements.

FWIW, those photos (4,5) of the Andromeda galaxy aren't from the HST. The Andromeda galaxy is about 6 times larger in the sky than the moon, so those are most likely from an amateur with a telescope (looking at the diffraction spikes, a reflector). Decent work, nothing special.

Huh, and thank you. I stand corrected. I'd immediately recognized it from NASA's apod from the olden days, but did not absorb the copyright line: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap051222.html

2005: "Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler"

There's also a fun talk about the OS from 2015's CCC: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star...

Say what you will, but these are really pretty photos. It's a shame that we so rarely see NK culture except as ways to incite non-Koreans. It would be nice if we could see more about how ordinary people live, festivals, etc.

On this image (mentioned above), every single window is lit. That seems staged to me.

https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Backgr...

Not staged in real life, but poorly Photoshopped.

you actually cannot close the curtains in NK by law (at least that was the case in 2005). Still looks photoshopped, but might not look that crazy to the person doing it given that rule.

If also may or may not have electricity in every home. I don't think every window was actually lit in Pyongyang at night.

A lot of the images look photoshopped to me - adding flowers to fields, tractors, and the lights in the windows you mentioned.

Of course I say that while thinking that most of the Mars rover photos also look photoshopped, adding sand dunes and rocks without explanation. I’ve been watching the red sky on Mars photos slowly turn blue over the decades - I guess they are trying to come clean before another nation puts a lander there and reveals NASA had been coloring the sky incorrectly. Maybe China will land a rover and show us what Mars really looks like just to spite the US?

Photos from Mars are all composites of red, green, and blue images. The way they put the colors together back on Earth depends on the purpose of the image. They might have learned a little from SpaceX on PR and started biasing published images of the Martian sky toward blue.

Using three separate filters that are each one different wavelength lets them capture more information than something like a Bayer filter where all three colors share the same space at the same time. Mars doesn't change fast enough to make three separate exposures a problem.

Yes, but the Viking landers were sensitive to six color wavelengths plus infrared and they had color calibration charts attached to the landers. They knew the true colors of Mars in the 70s. I’ve heard that they colored the sky and rocks red because they thought the public expected red and maybe that’s the reason, but they’ve been transitioning it to an increasingly blue sky and grey rocks ever since.

I searched for more on this and found a great article with photos: https://cornerofthecabinet.com/2015/10/05/what-are-the-true-...

Fake it is.

Now I want you to imagine why the WPK thinks that a cityscape at dusk with lit windows might be good propaganda?

Why something that seems boringly mundane to us, is something to brag about for the regime? Something that may uplift the OS's users ie. it makes them subconciously dream of something exotic like we do when our screensavers show us the great barrier reef. Can you spot the "exotic"-part?

If you applied this level of extrapolation to US-based OSes, you'd conclude that Windows XP users have never seen green grass or a blue sky in person (they even call it "Bliss," an obvious attempt to play with the emotions of a despondent populace) and that Mac users can only dream of experiencing a proper day and night cycle, a tragic effect of smog, light pollution, and a culture of working indoors under artificial light.

If, except I didn't. A great barrier reef, a Saharan Dune or a pack of whales is exotic, but something most of us can see at least once in our lifes if we wanted to.

Not the great barrier reef, thanks to our lifestyles.

Yes, our lifestyles are the problem. Nothing to see here in North Korea.

One could even argue that we can learn a lot from them about how to save the Great Reefs

That's not particularly inaccurate, but I get your point. Two things being true doesn't mean that any story you spin linking them is true.

That's more or less accurate (but more related to free time than location, I think).

These were obviously impressionistic "paintings" even if they were derived from real photos. Haven't you ever been on DeviantArt or whatever? They're still pretty even if they're the artist's imagining of a landscape rather than a photographic reality.

Apartments in Pyongyang, at least in certain areas, are required to keep lights on for showing any visitors/tourists an image of a lively and prosperous city.

That was the lightest touch of theatre some friends saw when they visited. The whole trip was basically full of pre-arranged sceneries and events -- say, before you enter a park, your western guide could tell you're going to see happy newlyweds there.

That doesn't seem hugely staged.

If you've got a park that's the "default" wedding place, you could well reliably predict newlyweds there during wedding season without having to explicitly place them. Or you could be aware of a public reservation list-- something you see in plenty of Western cities-- for each of the sites you're visting.

It was staged according to the western guide though. I suppose they saw the exact same couple often enough. Some others:

* Spot the same nice cars parked in different parts of the city. They were moved to the tourist routes for display.

* Entering a tower, someone was late opening it up for the group. When reaching the top, there already was a couple admiring the views, obviously they were already waiting there.

It was all a big theatre.

It's a shame they are not real

except that one folder

Try here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NorthKoreaPics/

Avoid comments ,)

Wow, it's so weirdly normal and anormal at the same time. The image of the tobacco cessation center was certainly interesting.

Here is the most interesting one I found yet : https://www.reddit.com/r/NorthKoreaPics/comments/hy45ky/roll...

North Korean officials smoking marijuana casually.

This seems to be nothing more than a rolled paper napkin.

I’m surprised nobody mentioned it in the reddit thread.

The person who took the picture disagrees, and claims to have witnessed the smoking, and there are also other reports in the thread and greater media of such activities.

Some of them are, but all of the ones in this folder are very, very poorly photoshopped: https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/tree/main/Backgr...

Are they supposed to be "photos", or are these paintings or something? I honestly can't tell. Doesn't look that much different from stylized wallpapers I see all the time in the West, to be honest.

Edit: Yeah ... I think these are photoshops, and they're done so poorly that I couldn't distinguish it immediately from a painting. Maybe the style is intentional, if I'm giving benefit of the doubt.

It's for sure, at least in part, different aesthetic languages in play here. North Korea seems to be really into a 'faded', almost pastel color balance even for new works and including photographs. You see it all over their consumer packaging too.

Those are paintings made with photoshop. It's intentional. It's not any weirder than the people with big arms and tiny heads you would see on tech companies websites

My personal favorite was:

https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Backgr...

I'm not sure why you'd even forge this photo. I mean, I understand it's portraying industrial agricultural capability and typical propoganda North Korea pumps out, but across an empty field vs harvesting a bountiful crop? Like 95% of that photo is forged and it doesn't even make sense to me.

It's not a forgery, it's a painting made for very different tastes than ours

It's shopped, and badly. The foreground tractor isn't even the same perspective as the rest of the scene. Why would a painter do that?

Because they're painting with photoshop ? If they made the same picture with watercolours, would it be a 'forgery' or a 'shop' as well ? There's never been any intent to make the viewer believe that what they're seeing is actually real. It's just a painting, it's not really well done, and it's done with photoshop instead of more traditional techniques. Some parts of the painting are taken from photographs but that is not unusual in asian paintings

Ah I see, you're using some strange definition of the word "painting" which somehow includes shoddy photoshop collages.

According to modern painting theory, photography is just one more technique that painters can use to put colors on the canvas. This is not a fringe use of the word "painting", but part of its definition since at least 50 years ago.

You can actually visit NK (not now bc of Corona):

https://www.youngpioneertours.com/

https://www.facebook.com/YoungPioneerTours/

(Disclaimer: while I have no involvement in this company, it is run by some buddies of mine)

South Korea also has really beautiful landscapes. I wish it was possible to explore the northern part. Maybe one day.

> It would be nice if we could see more about how ordinary [North Korean] people live

I don't think "nice" is the word to use here.

If you find the aesthetic choices here interesting, I can recommend the book Made in North Korea: Graphics From Everyday Life in the DPRK, a collection primarily of consumer packaging from North Korea.

This one is more interesting: https://github.com/takeshixx/redstar-tools

I hope the author has removed all meta-data or otherwise reencoded the images such that no traceback is possible to the source to the OS.

There was a talk [1] that IIRC mentioned that some userid is "baked" into the OS and its apps and can potentially be traced back to an individual.

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7174-lifting_the_fog_on_red_star...

This is almost certainly from the ISO that is already online. Some Chinese person on a forum told me once that they went to North Korea and were able to just buy the OS at a store, but I don't know how accurate this is.

Considering they can purchase phone apps very easily on convenience stores, that seems reasonable to me.

My guess is the sign on the hill doesn't read "H O L L Y W O O D."

https://github.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/blob/main/Backgr...

I watched a YouTube video of a train journey through the DPRK. There were signs of that exact kind very frequently. I think they have slogans along the lines of “Long Live the Korean Workers' Party!” from what I remember, though the one in that image doesn't seem to contain the right characters for that. There was probably another slogan that I forgot.

I think it's praising the Kims.

It reads 위대한 령도자 김정일 동지 만세! or Hail Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il!

"Leader Comrade" is a hilarious pair of words

I wish it was possible to live in Backgrounds/images/선군8경's North Korea. Alas, it's but a fantasy.

Obligatory, for ease of browsing: https://github1s.com/BlackOtton/RedStar-Media/

Ooh, neat!

Isn't this a violation of copyright? Assuming edia is protected by international law even when you don't particularly like the nation that produced said content.

North Korea has local copyright laws and is a signatory to the Berne Convention.

And yet, Red Star OS does not open-source any upstream contributions. I'm sure there were some modifications made that were not disclosed in compliance with applicable licenses.

IIRC it's mostly bog-standard. Most of their modifications are either simply changing the branding, changing the i18n files, or adding custom software. That said, it would probably be quite fun to send GPL-compliance requests for source code, I almost want to try :)

Hah, someone ought to tell rms. If anyone would actually go to N. Korea and confront Kim, it would be him. Or maybe the gov't could go after N. Korea on the license violation under the Berne convention? Like tax evasion bringing down Al Capone, though I'm sure it wouldn't work.

what are they going to do, sue?

(this is my answer to every one of my actions that may be construed as copyright infringement)

https://archive.vn/QHkz8

Yep. Like the hysteria about China trolling through my (American citizen) data from my phone. CCP probably isn't going to extraordinarily rendition me, whatever horrible, unkind, true-or-untrue things I say about them. The US Government? Fuck no I don't want them going through my data, they've already proven they don't actually give a fuck about the piece of paper from which they derive power.

There’s a whole industry that basically exists to accept these terms from Federal and State government. They skim a few points, get screwed by the receivables for late payment, and accept whatever onerous terms that are imposed.

For example, a global company needs to report on how many Northern Irish employees are Catholic or Protestant to sell crap to New York City. Nobody wants to deal with crap like that, so the reseller sucks it up.

> North Korea has local copyright laws and is a signatory to the Berne Convention.

They're also a democracy (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

and fratricide. Ask Kim.

Please leave the Kardashians out of this.

Are you serious? Let me remind you that the Kim family's little regime has killed hundred of thousands of people and is under a complete economic embargo for its human rights violations. I can defame, republish, and make money off of anything that comes out of there if I choose, and there is nothing that they can do to stop me.

Sending a representative of the regime to a court in the US to pursue copyright is by itself an earth-shattering precedent, and if it happens the rep will probably be laughed out of that courtroom right into a jail cell if they don't try to defect. The point is, feed your citizens before trying to be taken seriously.

> if it happens the rep will probably be laughed out of that courtroom right into a jail cell if they don't try to defect

The US does not jail representatives of enemy nations as a matter of course. There is a North Korean representative in New York (to the UN) and they are not being arrested and thrown in jail. As long as they follow the local laws, I expect that any other representative (like a hypothetical one that wants to sue for alleged copyright infringement) would be similarly protected by the law.

Diplomats don't need to follow local laws, though if they break them they cause political problems and usually have to leave the country.

(For example, the US diplomat's wife who was driving negligently and killed a British person last year.)

I believe they are making a point.

It’s easy to see the cruelties of other regimes but a bit harder to distinguish the propaganda coming from within one’s own regime.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26139364

Possibly. More of an interesting question philosophically than purely legally, IMO.

The issue of copyright in traditionally Communist countries is interesting, as they don't generally recognize it. North Korea had no copyright at all until they passed a (probably purely for show) law meeting the minimum requirements of the Berne Convention in 2001 so they could enter some global treaties and trade arrangements.

Internally, there appears to really be no such concept in North Korean society.

Not a lawyer, but (for the US at least) it appears the US recgonizes the DPRK as a co-signatory to the Berne treaty (https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38a.pdf), which implies the US recognizes DPRK copyright.

That having been said, I don't know the copyright status of these ripped resources WRT how the DPRK treats them (what's the copyright on the OS itself)?

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