North Korea has fewer websites than were created for GTA 5

Alan Martin September 22, 2016

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There are around 25 million people in North Korea and now, thanks to a misconfigured top-level name server, we know that they have roughly one website for every 892,857 citizens.

That’s right – the secretive state has just 28 .kp domains in total. The discovery was made on Tuesday by Matt Bryant, a security engineer who immediately posted his discovery to GitHub. Explaining the discovery, Bryant wrote: “On Sept 19, 2016 at approximately 10:00PM (PDT), one of North Korea’s top level nameservers was accidentally configured to allow global DNS zone transfers. This allows anyone who performs an AXFR (zone transfer) request to the country’s ns2.kptc.kp nameserver to get a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data.”

The websites have now reverted to their default state of only being accessible from within the country, but thanks to Reddit we have a few screenshots of what the web looks like from the inside, with internet pages covering travel, propaganda, cookery, social networking and more propaganda. Click on the gallery to see for yourself.[gallery:0]

What this means in practice, as Reddit users LefthandedLunatic and BaconBakin highlighted, is that the fictional state of San Andreas from Grand Theft Auto V has significantly more websites than the actual real-life state of North Korea – 83 to 28. Of course, both have a long way to go before they catch up with Tokelau – the tiny Pacific island that remarkably boasts the world’s busiest web suffix.