North Korea only has 28 websites (sad!)
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}
The world got a sneak peek at North Korea's secretive Internet service this week, which we now know includes a grand total of 28 websites.
On Sept. 19, one of North Korea's top-level nameservers was incorrectly configured to reveal a list of websites under the .kp domain. Security engineer Matt Bryant discovered the data and posted it to GitHub.
"One of North Korea's top-level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global [domain name system] zone transfers," the file description says. "This allows anyone who performs [a zone transfer] request to the country's ns2.kptc.kp nameserver to get a copy of the nation's top-level DNS data."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}
Many of the sites seem fairly commonplace by global Web standards: Air Koryo airline, Korean recipes, insurance company, elderly care fund, Pyongyang International Film Festival, Kim Il Sung University. But some, as Motherboard points out, offer deeper insight into government propaganda: the website for the country's official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, includes headlines like "Kim Jong Un Sends Birthday Spreads to Veteran Scholars." A full list was shared to Reddit, though a number of links are still inaccessible.
"We now have a complete list of domain names for the country and it's surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) very small," Bryant told Motherboard.
North Koreans have very limited to non-existent access to the Web. In 2008, the government launched Koryolink, a 3G mobile service offering voice calls in major cities and rail routes; locals, however, could still not place international calls or connect to the Web. Five years later, global visitors to the country were allowed to access Koryolink's 3G services on mobile devices.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}
In April, North Korea formally banned Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and South Korean websites, as well as gambling and porn services.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.