Did you know North Korea’s Internet consists of 28 websites?

In 2012, North Korea took control of its own top-level DNS. Managing it doesn’t take a lot of work as there are only 28 websites registered. That’s because North Korea is even tighter with Internet access than it is with its physical borders!

So how do we know there are only 28 records on their nameservers? Because recently they apparently made a minor configuration mistake and that allowed outsiders to peek behind the curtain.

28 .kp domains certainly aren’t very many, but it’s not like that matters to the vast majority of North Koreans. Most don’t have Internet access in the first place, and those that do, well, they’re granted the privilege of being spoon-fed whatever information the state wants them to see. So really, 28 is probably more than enough to get the job done.

What kind of sites does North Korea’s walled-off Internet play host to? They’ve got a Yahoo! clone set up at portal.co.kp, but it’s probably safe to assume that it’s not syndicating news from The Daily Beast. Another site appears to be a copy of Movie4k — you know, minus all the movies and TV shows that the government doesn’t want to allow its citizens to watch.

Naturally, plenty of people who saw the list of domains were curious. As curious people tend to do on the Internet, they started banging domain names into their browsers’ address bars hoping to catch a glimpse of North Korea’s tiny, isolated corner of the web.

Either they’re not equipped to handle the kind of traffic that’s heading their way or the state has decided to lock things down. Most of the sites are unreachable now, but reports seem to indicate that it was all pretty mundane stuff anyway… so you’re not missing out on much if you can’t get anything to load!

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