Well, this is an interesting turn of events. Days after threatening Sony Pictures for planning to release The Interview, and weeks after allegedly committing an extreme act of cyber-terrorism on the movie studio, North Korea appears to be without Internet. Like, all of North Korea. And they are missing all of the Internet.
Bloomberg News reports that the entire country of North Korea "is offline today" as massive and unprecedented outages are plaguing the nation. Bloomberg says that North Korea has "four official networks connecting the country to the Internet," and today they "went completely black." Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research in Hanover, New Hampshire, explained:
The situation now is they are totally offline. I don’t know that someone is launching a cyber-attack against North Korea, but this isn’t normal for them. Usually they are up solid. It is kind of out of the ordinary. This is not like anything I’ve seen before."
You’re probably flashing back to President Barack Obama’s statement, in the wake of the Sony Pictures attack, that our nation would consider a "proportional response" to North Korea’s reported attacks on the movie studio. According to Bloomberg News, North Korea claims that it doesn’t know the identity of the hackers operating under the Guardians of Peace moniker, but they were happy that someone stepped in to block (or seriously prevent) the release of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s insensitive comedy, The Interview, in Christmas Day.
This has to be our retaliation, right? Unless North Korea took the Internet down for some reason, or different hackers knocked them out. "We have no new information regarding North Korea today," White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told Bloomberg. "If in fact North Korea’s Internet has gone down, we’d refer you to that government for comment."
Now that’s a sweet passing of the buck. Maybe you can email North Korea’s government for a comment, if and when they ever get their email back.
As for The Interview, we still do not know with certainty how Sony plans to distribute the film. There have been rumors of some form of online distribution. I think DVDs are the best option. But somehow, some way, the movie needs to get out, so we can support an artist’s freedom to make crass toilet jokes at the expense of a foreign leader. Isn’t that sort of what America’s supposed to be about?
