A North Korean imposter was uncovered, working as a sysadmin at Amazon U.S., after their keystroke input lag raised suspicions with security specialists at the online retail giant. Normally, a U.S.-based remote worker’s computer would send keystroke data within tens of milliseconds. This suspicious individual’s keyboard lag was “more than 110 milliseconds,” reports Bloomberg.
Amazon is commendably proactive in its pursuit of impostors, according to the source report. The news site talked with Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, Stephen Schmidt, about this fascinating new case of North Koreans trying to infiltrate U.S. organizations to raise hard currency for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and sometimes indulge in espionage and/or sabotage.
I’m aware of all that about Gaza. No excuses from me, I find it horrifying and shameful. Same as far as sanctions go (I do agree with the Russia ones where it’s a tool to get an actual war to end, or sanctions against individuals in certain contexts). I agree with you on the last point too, it’s just that Jeff doesn’t style himself as a hero of the Proletariat. I dunno who’s responsible for more human suffering between the two, but the hypocrisy does piss me off. They can both get fucked as far as I’m concerned.
Good, at least we agree that sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela are horrifying and they murder hundreds of thousands.
My main problem with the big criticism against North Korea is how little we actually know of the country, the level of corruption, and the actual reasons why the people there have a low material standard of living.
North Korea is a reclusive and inwards country not because of a personal idea of the Kim family, but because of its recent history. In the 1950s, North Korea was bombed by the USA with an unimaginable amount of explosives, in one of the most violent and extensive bombing campaigns in human history, to the point that [85% of all buildings in the country were destroyed] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_North_Korea?wprov=sfla1), and hundreds of thousands if not millions died violent deaths (without counting starvation and disease from the destruction of all infrastructure). The country was quite literally bombed into the stone age.
After being utterly destroyed, when the Korean War froze, North Korea was subjected to an almost complete economic embargo by all nations except the eastern block, so it could rely only in the USSR for trade. As a country without much in the way of arable lands (mountainous and cold) or natural resources (its only reliable energy sources are coal and hydro), it was forced by external forces to adopt its current policy of Juche.
When in 1990 the USSR was dissolved, North Korea, much like Cuba, saw itself entirely isolated from the world, unable to trade with any partner due to the immense economic sanctions it was subjected to for the cardinal sin of being communist. This caused a massive rise in poverty in the country, problems with energy generation, food supplies…
Maybe if North Korea had been allowed to freely trade in the international market to exploit its advantages and cover its disadvantages, it would have thrived much more than it has, and it wouldn’t rely so much on state power to secure its own ideological thesis without external interference. Most of what we read about North Korea is false anyway, stuff like the “intergenerational gulags” is literally made up much like the Iraq WMDs.
My point is: the west is entirely responsible for the current state of North Korea, from the entire destruction of the country to its isolation in the international economic sphere. Criticizing from our high point of view the people that have been subjected to millions of deaths from our actions isn’t exactly the most honest thing to do, especially when it’s done using false stuff like the intergenerational prisons I mentioned. North Korea has a lot of problems, no doubt, but the way to solve these problems is to let them flourish and develop by themselves, not to further continue murdering millions of them through economic sanctions.