The goal of the North Korean regime is to control everything, including having total power over computer use in the country.

That's why North Korea has its own operating system. The operating system is called Red Star OS, and it's a Linux-based operating system designed to give Kim Jong-un a total view of all computer use in North Korea, monitoring users and any attempts to exert control over the system.

Recently, the operating system was checked out by Niklaus Schiess and Florian Grunow, who investigated it because it goes completely against the goal of Linux, which is aimed at being freely available to everyone who wants it. Not only that, but Linux users are able to modify the operating system.

According to Schiess and Grunow, the operating system is a fully featured desktop system, just like Windows, OS X, and other Linux-based operating systems. Red Star is based on Fedora 11, a version of Linux that was first distributed back in 2009. It includes everything that users might need from an OS, including a word processor, music creation software, and even a modified Firefox OS web browser. In general, the operating system mimics that of Apple's OS X.

That, however, is reportedly where the similarities to Western operating systems end. Red Star is built to monitor users, and that it does. For example, when a USB device is plugged in, the files on the USB are all marked. The OS takes the serial number of the USB, encrypts the number, and writes that code into the file itself, meaning that the file can be tracked whenever it is opened and modified.

Red Star also comes with a number of preinstalled security features. The OS comes with its own anti-virus system, which gets updates from a server located in North Korea. According to the researchers, however, the anti-virus software wasn't designed to prevent attacks from outside the country, but rather from the OS' own users.

Via: Motherboard

Photo: John Pavelka | Flickr