Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
DPRK Textbooks (archive.org)
118 points by duttaditya18 on Oct 9, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments


If you want to hear English short wave radio broadcasts from North Korea, it is quite entertaining. Here's what to do:

1. Choose the time you want to listen and note the "target area" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Korea#English

2. Choose a WebSDR in the "target area" from this list: http://kiwisdr.com/public/

3. Tune the WebSDR to the correct frequency and listen. You might try a 2 or 3 different WebSDRs in the "target area" in order to get the best reception

The broadcasts are much shorter than an hour, contrary to what Wikipedia says. The format is usually:

1. National anthem (very imposing and sounds like a Soviet military anthem in my opinion)

2. News / headlines. This lasts maybe 3-5 minutes and then is repeated several times

3. Music

Sometimes the music is before the news. Last time I listened, it was the 73rd anniversary of North Korea's indepedennce and so the news was about all of the congratulations from other nations -- the list of which was quite amusing (Cuba, Syria, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Russia others I don't recall).


If you live somewhere like the US west coast you can even use an $8 digital shortwave radio (V-111 is a good reference model of this type) and it's very easy to pick them up in the morning, just go for a walk and hit scan. Same with Cuban numbers stations.

When you're tired of inscrutable audio you can switch over to RNZ or BBC Pacifica and there's often good programming.


> just go for a walk and hit scan

Direct tune to 9435 or 11710 at either 6:00 AM or 8:00 AM Pacific time.

You’re not going to find it on "scan" without scanning through literally thousands of other stations first and without setting the scan sensitivity very high. You're going to become very frustrated long before you find it that way.


Nah, it's not that hard. The V-111 will pick up about 8-15 stations off the whip on a SW band scan these days on the US west coast in the morning. In very good conditions you may perhaps have to wade through 30-50 stations, and DPRK will be among the most clear.


Do you have frequencies for the Cuban number stations?


They change. If you want to try direct tuning you'll want to check with monitoring groups or newest YouTube videos, etc. Otherwise if you are in the US...aka near a secret agent ;-)... scanning around works well enough.

I don't know if this is still the case but they used to use a freeware Windows XP encryption application. The amused author wrote a bit about it, IIRC.


Part of the fun is discovering the communities that follow this stuff.


OP here. I have not found any such community. Do you know any?


I don't but sometimes I enjoy listening to Radio Reloj. It's so unique.


As a silly amusement, people mashed up DPRK propaganda broadcast in Russian with hiphop beats :D

https://www.wykop.pl/wpis/16379237/1-wlaczasz-radio-glos-kor...

Edit: a reference in English: https://www.rferl.org/a/27485988.html



Lol, they even have a Youtube channel...


Surely I can postpone my next commit to check this out.. spare a link?


https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtwhlnjc_XIsuAquW0SIgUQ/vid...

I suddenly remembered all those Norko tourists I seen in Vladivostok. These were very shy ones https://ibb.co/6BvNdFw . There used to be years when the city was squirming with them, then they suddenly all disappeared almost overnight.

Funny moments I remember. Two Korean tourists stood in line for an icecream stall, started chitchat. Then one in better dress turns to another, suddenly suspicious, sees Kim's pin on another guy's tshirt, and then he freezes, turning pale, and speechless.


Those YouTube videos are not in English. The instructions I gave are for English broadcasts. Also, the YouTube videos don’t follow the same format as the radio broadcasts. They seem more polished , but I did not spend a lot of time with them.


I think some of these aren't North Korean-authored, but international textbooks in unofficial translation. For example, Google matches code samples from "CTBooks1/ANSI_C++.pdf" to this textbook from 1999 (and the front-cover graphic is identical),

https://books.google.com/books/about/Object_oriented_Softwar...

I think the version they're translating is a UK print edition, because the currency unit in the code is "£".

But the series about Red Star OS [0] are very certainly DPRK-authored.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

The music textbooks are worth noticing (they're very obviously North Korean -- e.g. "Lesson 1. Song of Kim Il-sung"). It's all in Western notation. References both Western and Korean instruments. There's bow markings on the score of "Song of Kim Il-sung", so I infer that violins are at least somewhat common in secondary schools (or why else are they there?)


I would assume they copy Chinese textbooks as it's the only border.

I wonder if, when discussing ANSI C++, they admit what ANSI means.


They copy anything. They don't have a legal concept of copyright in North Korea, so why wouldn't they?

And their CS majors supposedly have monitored but uncensored access to general internet. I'm sure they know that the A in ANSI means American.


At least it covers UML. That'll set them back a few decades.


haha. someone introduce Agile to North Korea. They're not going anywhere now.


The 'A' is short for Juche


Yes. There is a huge difference between normal population and party or military members. The elites have access to education.


> I would assume they copy Chinese textbooks as it's the only border.

Could be from Hong Kong when they used sterling?


They share a border with Russia as well.


I uploaded these a few years back. glad to see people running across them!

They came from a DPRK tablet, and it took some reversing work to recover the PDFs. There's a talk about what went into getting them uploaded: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9279-dprk_consumer_technology


That's awesome. Sometime I'd also love to see a file tree rundown of the USBs that were airdropped too. I'm curious about the contents but also how much was translated or even published directly for recipients.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: