Uriminzokkiri

» see uriminzokkiri.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

uriminzokkiri was, for most of its life, easier to open from ankara than from seoul. south korea blocked it under its own security law, so the audience it was written for could not legally reach it, while a turkish connection could pull the whole thing down without anybody minding. i have no memory of visiting it. i am fairly sure that i could have.

The site went up in 2003 on a server in Shanghai, and it is generally described as North Korea's first website. It carried material syndicated from KCNA and the rest of the state media apparatus in five languages, with korean and english the two that mattered most to its purpose. The name translates roughly as we the korean people, and carries the argument that korean questions are for koreans to settle without outside parties in the room. The editorial line was stated in the URL.

For a state with almost no consumer internet, it had a strikingly modern distribution strategy. Uriminzokkiri ran accounts on YouTube and Twitter, and on most of the other western platforms of the period.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The material was not subtle and was not meant to be. It was aimed over the head of the south korean government at south korean citizens, and the platforms it used were the ones those citizens actually opened every day.

It attracted the attention that comes with that. Anonymous claimed in april 2013 to have taken 15,000 user records off the site, which was an odd sort of confirmation that the thing had registered users at all. YouTube terminated its channel in 2017 after legal complaints. The site kept operating regardless, because none of those platforms were where it actually lived.

~ the day it died ~

In late december 2023 Kim Jong Un called for what was described as a fundamental turnaround in the north's policy toward the south, dropping reunification as a national goal. Reunification was the entire premise of Uriminzokkiri, down to the name on the door.

The unification section came off the site first. Then on 11 january 2024 it went dark, and it went dark at the same hour as DPRK Today and Arirang Meari, which is the signature of an instruction rather than an outage. By february the social accounts had been abandoned too.

uriminzokkiri.com still has DNS records. Nothing answers on them. The domain sits there resolving to a host that will not complete a connection, which is a fairly exact description of what the site was doing at the end anyway.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »