Kim Jong-un’s Operating System Now Available in the Free World

A hacker has leaked an operating system called “RedStar 3.0” that North Korea has been using to free itself of the rest of the earth’s technology.

The software is publicly available on the file-sharing site Pastebin, but it won’t be easy for most consumers to load this package of email and word processor applications, soothing island screenshots and folk music.

DPRK friends are somewhat of a system requirement. The product is only available in the syllabary Hangul alphabet. Seoul has been removed from the available timezone settings.

Slipstream, the hacker, who boasts about “pulling data out of North Korea’s ass since 2014,” posted North Korea’s esoteric OS a few days ago.

It is a Linux-based system that looks like Apple’s Mac OSX. 

The software package does not have a large user base, both because most DPRK commoners don’t have computers and because of export restrictions.

But signing in with a numerical code is real easy:  just make one up.

Images of the operating system were first revealed in fall 2013, by former Google employee Will Scott. He learned about the system while teaching for a few months at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Scott’s students told him that, since DPRK is at war with America, the country developed its own operating system.

“Mail is called ‘carrier pigeon,’ there are preinstalled games, the boot jingle is a popular Korean folksong, and the retail price is also adjusted for the country’s spending power—you can get a copy of the system for less than five bucks,” Motherboard reports.