I was in North Korea in 2018 and I got a rare chance to check a north korean smartphone (it was chinese), one of the girls in the hotel bar where we were staying liked me very much and gave me her phone to check it, they have something like a texting app, looked like ICQ back in the day if you remember it, some games, the internet (the phone operator's internet, because there was no wifi at all anywhere) was super slow, like 40 kb/s. It was interesting to see :)
That's fascinating, thanks so much for sharing! Actual Internet access though? I didn't know such a thing was casually allowed. Or is it NK's intranet?
10:32 This is either an iPhone 11 Pro Max or iPhone XS Max. You can tell because the iPhone is in Gold, which the X didn't have as a color, and although it's hard to identify the left side of the phone (from the front) has 4 speaker grills, which the standard sized iPhones only have 3 on the left. From the front and Sides alone however it's impossible to differentiate an iPhone 11 Pro Max from a XS Max, since there are literally no physical differences from those angles
Though it's a bit difficult to tell if it's in gold because it almost looks like it's just silver getting some sort of gold reflection from a background object.
It’s a iPhone X it’s just the lighting that makes it look slightly gold you can see by that the speakers are the same on the left and right of the port. on a xs or 11 there is an antenna line on the Bottom left of the phone and the speakers arnt symmetrical
I don’t think it’s an iPhone at all. There are 4 speaker grill holes on each side. X has 6+6; Xs has 3+6; Xs Max has 4+7 … also assuming it’s gold, the antenna stripe should also be on the bottom of the device on Xs (Max) … pentalobe screws around the connector are also missing, also the lightning port has a pretty visible ring around it which cannot be seen in the video just go and watch the og video at 0.25x and pause it at the right moment
the other thing is, the camera punchout is on the top-center of the device, and no iphone had a centered camera, it reminds me of some kind of oppo phone. Going further, it has 4 speaker "dots" and none of the rounded bezzel iphones had 4 holes on either side, also the antenna bands are a little lower then on the normal iphone, in my opinion its some phone from the BBK family, or a cheap iphone knock off
at around 10:25 you can see the phone has just 1 camera placed in the top middle, where iPhone 10 would have speaker, so I'd say it's some kind of Xiaomi
I didn’t see this part but I was wondering if they hated the US so much they wouldn’t want to be using an American tech, neither would they be okay using South Korea’s Samsung, so the next obvious choice would be a Chinese brand considering their ties so Xiaomi or Huawei would be the perfect choice.
You can change the User Agent String on any browser to show anything. I can make my Note 20 Ultra 5G identify as a WinNT kernel device with matching software and everything. Ex: this is a version of iOS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Tablet/15E148 Safari/604.1 ---you can make it say whatever you like and this is the data scraped usually.
I think I might have a hunch why the iphone share increased so much, at around that time (september/october 2021) apple rolled out its new iCloud Private Relay feature, which is quite similar to a VPN. It just seems like this might be related so probably worth investigating further
My thoughts are that iOS is controlled by Apple. Giving credit where credit is do, they don't allow Government crap and Carrier junk to be baked into the OS. Thus no custom roms, apps, work around. The Apple devices show up more because it's operating "normally".
It's well known that in North Korea, the majority of smartphones (in use by the public) are no-name Android phones (according to Tourists from before the 2020 Border Closure) and their computers which previously ran Windows 7, now run their own Linux Distro called "Red Star OS" (in English) which judging by the newest version available to people outside of North Korea (due to leaks) uses the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment (probably based on Debian but idk since I have never actually looked at the ISO). The Majority of iOS users are probably from government employees who work in high-ranking offices in the big cities (so not your average tram driver or food manufacturing facility worker who probably uses a cheap Chinese Android phone rebranded for the DPRK market) as well as any foreign diplomats whom may have returned to North Korea for their diplomatic mission in the country. There is also the chance that some iPhones have been smuggled into North Korea from either China or Russia and even South Korea (before their corporate employment deal with Hyundai [I think it was with that SK company but could be wrong] went sour)...
Ya, I saw few tourist videos back before 2020, where atleast in Pyongyang people had cheap chinese android phones. These phones came with limited no of preinstalled Android apps. There was no app store to search and download new apps.
You must be smelling rock salt for fun if you think they let people use iPhone, SPECIALLY in the government. The data comes mostly from foreigners visiting the country and accessing the Internet in the country, reality is even government officials do not get access willy nilly.
They simply change the User Agent String in the browser of whatever PC or browser they're using (probs locked by the government) to an iOS of Mac string. Now everything thinks you're using Mac/iOS. The KDE Plasma desktop they use looks suspiciously like Apple in a lot of ways anyway. What's to say they didn't do this to obfuscate their real hardware?
You will be surprising the amount of smartphone user in north Korea ( quite a lot now day ) especially in Pyongyang , there Indonesian guy whom stay in nkorean a few year that film stuff with his go pro totally check it out.
@@HunnyVRC yup but he did show the amount of folk in north Korean owning smartphone increase over the year another guy are Aram ( from sing ) one thing I have seen the north Korean can't own are PC and laptop haven't seen them much in normal household
More likely, they have their own browsers and/or even operating systems to lock down what can be accessed, and a browser like that could easily just have a hard coded to send a User-Agent tag as iPhone/iOS instead of whatever they call their software when making web requests.
@@nSiLEtan Yeah they could push an update to change to the new user-agent. Bearing in mind there is a North Korean version of Linux which is for the most part a one-to-one clone of macOS... it wouldn't surprise me.
@@SamTheEnglishTeacherr u talking ab red star os?? if so that shit is the biggest clone ever 😭 if it wasnt for the icons, colors, etc it’d look like an exact copy
iPhones (like all American tech) is indeed BANNED. It’s probably diplomats or high-level government officials who have access to an iPhone AND the Internet.
You said something about that company's data being anonymized. But, what I would like to hear from the CEO: Is there any way to get more insight about North Korean usage patterns? Are these devices connecting all the time, or are they only connecting at certain days/hours, such as at times when government censorship is on duty? Such insights, compared to other countries, would be of interest.
It's a country-wide firewall that changes your user agent. First they spoofed random user agents, hence the wild swings in stats. Now they spoof latest iPhone only, hence the 100% market share and orderly up to date versions each month.
This is not possible as the user-agent section is part of the HTTP request headers which would be encrypted by TLS, as per the HTTPS protocol. - Li (proxied by Mia)
@@LiEnby I'm not sure how strong man in the middle attacks can become if an entire state does it at the ISP level. I imagine it works with a reverse proxy to defeat https.
@@dani33300 ? So .. what? North Korea has their own DPRK internal address for a website and it has a different domain like say Facebook-dprk which is http only and on the dprk internal intranet and then that securely connects to real facebook and forwards your stuff over to that ? Is that what your suggesting Because this would work but it would also break in some instances
As far as I know, North Korea's Red Star OS is based on Linux. If the browser used there is based on WebKit (like some Linux browsers like Epiphany), some websites recognise it as Safari. So it may be WebKit browsers being detected as Safari.
So far as I recall from running Red Star it had no browser. If it did it would likely be ice weasel or a variant of gecko. It is fairly ancient and unclear if it’s still used or ever had wide spread usage. While an interesting thought it does not explain the iOS version signature.
I wonder if what changed was that ISP or IP range (could simply be a specific APN on a mobile network) that Android users changed IP ranges to one that is not yet properly tracked as being North Korea, and the only users left of the previous ISP are iPhone users (like.. just the Kim household or something)
Anyone with a smartphone connected to the internet in NK would be under constant close scrutiny. All smartphones would be government issued. This data makes perfect sense, they upgraded and bought in quantity to address their new PR campaign. Hence 99.99% of phones & devices were changed out within a very short timeframe. apple is the logical choice because NK doesn't want China spying via Huwai, and doesn't want SK spying via Samsung; apple serves no master but its own interests. There are maybe a dozen people in NK who can pick and choose what smartphone they want.
Sad to see that the UA-cam algorithm doesn't seem to like this as much as some of your other videos (it only recommended it to me after two days). It's s really interesting topic and I hope you won't be too discouraged by the lower view count, as we who find our way here definitely still enjoy it a lot!
Thanks man, appreciate that! In terms of CTR and AVD, this video is one of my top performers, so it's a little weird that it isn't getting promoted. Wondering if it's because spoke about Covid.
As you like roasting DHL... you should do a video about the time DHL won the KFC chicken delivery contract in the UK which was so badly handled, KFC ran out of chicken and a number of branches had to close (and DHL lost the contract).
10:28 That is probably not an iPhone. The notch at the top has a centered selfie camera whereas iPhones with notches have a much more subtle looking one to the right of the notch. The speaker grills at the bottom are identical between each other (or at least they look like it) and no visible screws next to the charging port are visible, even in the original video. Antenna lines on the sides are also way brighter than the body, which is not how they look in gold/rose gold iPhones. Hard to figure out if that is USB-C or Lightning, but most likely the former. Based on this, this is mostly likely another device not coming from Apple. Knowing possible trading routes and the stats you showed, would probably say is a Xiaomi or an older BBK device.
The fact that the borders are reopening is really interesting! I am personally quite interested in the DPRK and I didn't know this yet. Exciting! Very much looking forward to seeing what happens with the AirTag. Did you consider maybe sending a new AirTag over now? So that it can be there in time for the border to (supposedly) reopen?
For such a big switch in devices in such a small timeframe I would guess all internet connected devices are state controlled and they did an ‘enterprise’ upgrade.
Something happened to the Apple location pings last week, my apple watch catched a ping from other side of a planet while sitting on a table next to me. 😂 And they continued to send that ping from other country for almost the whole day.
I once opened my security camera app and saw some else’s entire camera setup I could view live and even watch back the last 60 days or rather. Never reported it to Eufy but you bet I switched to Google after that.
Hi, interesting Video! When I looked at it, the first what came to my mind is that maybe the Apple Private Relay has to do something with this? Because this was released at the end of 2021 at the same time the traffic increased rapidly… Maybe the normal use of the internet is blocked, but Private Relay routes the traffic over Apple Servers so it wont be blocked?
I thought about this too! Because the dates def match up. But i assumed Apple wouldn’t have North Korean IPs for the egress servers. But someone reached out recently claiming they do. I need to look into it deeper to confirm
iphones are like the first or second most used brands there, the other being samsung theres like some footage of iphone/ mac usage like in one of moranbong's concerts, where theyre using a macbook (i forgot what year its from)
10:31 you were right. The phone visible is a regular sized Apple iPhone X in white, with a screen protector. It’s not a XS. You can see it on the microphone grill. The iPhone X has a mic grill the same size as the speaker grill, the XS has a smaller mic grill than speaker grill.
Amother thing is foreigner in north korea : embassy , UN worker beside north korean elite bought from black market and north korean that work oversea ( quite large amount btw , they even work in poland a few years back )
We've bin testing this remote technology here on the east coast to slowly move data for years. I'm glad to see it being used for good purposes finally.
That isn't an iPhone. If you look at the phone closely then you see that the screen is curved around on the left and right. Apple doesnt use curved screens so that is definitely not an iPhone
I’ve been to the DPRK twice and have never seen a person using an iPhone. It’s purely android, and most of it are cheap Chinese OEM supplied older android phones. Combine that with the fact that the DPRK only started deploying LTE in December 2023 and the penetration of the LTE network is still spotty, that data is pretty off. I would assume the possibility of iPhone usage would be greater in provinces bordering China as there are greater numbers of phones there in general, all there in the hopes of illicitly tapping into a Chinese mobile network from across the border to make forbidden international calls.
It was me. I was in North Korea and smuggled an iPhone. I used several VPN services and sources I don‘t want to mention to get a connection to the internet from there.
Can you not just alter your user agent string and change everything? Their red-star OS looks similar to early OSX, so what if they changed the user agent string to ident as iOS or Mac? It's stupid easy to do and if you're not specifically pulling other information from the page by other means, this could just be a means of obfuscation of what they actually do use....
the title of this video is exactly what I thought when you said your apple air tag was tracked as being in n korea. Air tags connect via iphones around it.
Yep, that's an iPhone XS or XS Max for sure. As that was a year that came in a gold version. -- Btw, love the videos ... wish you made them more often.
Thank you for making another video. Please make more. TY............. What providers does NK have? The data usage for Apple phones is higher than others. Hence Are their internet g etc.? 4G service companies strong? I can't see how NK can have such a high usage age of iPhones if their Internet coverage isn't vital. thinking TY!
@@WatchNoah very few, there must be some stable connections for this amount of iPhone users. The video is excellent. I hope he adds more to this piece.
That phone from Song A definitely looks like an iPhone x/xs/xs max. maybe it could be an iPhone XR. Interesting. I hope that one day we can freely talk to people from North Korea on the Internet but that probably takes many years if that ever happens
There are addons that you can install on your browser that replicate different devices. If I was using edge but wanted to replicate search results that an iPhone would display, you can replicate that on an edge browser which would then claim it is the most recent update.
My theory would list a few possible reasons. First could be that since Samsung is a South Korean company, they would not want to have a company south of the DMZ to have huge market share. The DPRK could cite spying concerns and they could pass that as law. Would have to check on that, but seems logical. Second, Huawei exports could have been limited due to the semiconductor shortage throughout the pandemic, and the fact the market share is expected to be so small, it wouldn’t make sense to send DPRK officials an updated phone when everywhere else has a huge return. Same could be said for all other brands for official sales. A third possibility is the black market that North Koreans rely on to get foreign films, tv shows, etc. For years they would get it on Video Tapes, DVDs, and USB drives. But simply getting an iPhone could hold much more data. Plus, if it’s a jail broken iPhone, the it would give them more apps and movies, and they won’t have to sign up for an Apple ID to use it. That would be considering it’s NOT a high government official’s device that can access the greater World Wide Web. And it would indeed help the governments influencer goals to have a smart phone that is more recognizable to their intended western audience. They can even say they like XYZ game on the App Store and play it every day.
There have been some NK IP address owners on the Chinese internet lately (you know, Chinese social media platforms will show everyone's IP address attribution). From what I've heard from the owner of the NK IP address, it's likely that one (or possibly several ?) VPN providers got a NK VPS and used it to set up a proxy server. Anyway, NK IP and VPS do exist, but they seem to have very little bandwidth. as for accessing sites like google? since I havent got this VPN yet, I dont know :-)
An alternative explanation could be user agent spoofing. I can use firefox on a linux computer and using a simple browser extension to make it look like im using safari on IOS with the click of a button. That browser extension generally shows the newest operating system and browser versions at the top of the list so that could explain why north koreans are using the newest version of IOS. The the question is why IOS and not any of the other possible user agents they could choose from?
@@MegaLag Because of the low sample size - it could be something really boring, like a crawler/scraper based in North Korea using user agent spoofing, with a sample size this small, the uptick could literally be represented by single campaign/operation; up-to-date user agent strings are readily available online, and thus the activity that appears as if users are updating their iPhones could also be the a crawler script updating it's user agent string. Why iOS? Well looking past the North Korean IP address, an iOS user agent will easily drown in the logs/statistics, and while the practice does not make much sense to me, I have experienced some website operators blacklisting certain user agent strings; such measures are probably implemented out of ignorance, however a common user agent string (and an up-to-date one) circumvents this. The proper behavior of crawlers/scrapers is to use a unique and identifiable user agent string, so that they are easily filtered out of statistics, but due to misguided attempts at security such as user agent blacklisting, they do not always do so.
10:27 that isnt an iphone, it looks like it has a teardrop camera or the camera is in the middle atleast, apple doesnt design their iphones like, they put the speaker in the middle with the camera off to the right side. Many android companies do design phones with the camera centered.
I think there is also a good percentage of tourists (yes it's a thing) and the phone you spotted 10:30 it's most definitely not an iPhone. I would say most likely an older Huawei that's exclusive to China if you look at the bottom grills it's 100% not an iPhone layout
I just saw your colorblind glasses (and had to check out more), so now I gotta say: Dude, you gotta upload more! Your videos are great (sure, they can improve, but you are the next Johnny Harris), just get more consistent so we can all discover you!
(But take care of yourself, so if this is all you feel like is realistic then stick to it! I've been burned out, and it's better to take an extra year to "make it")
Wrong. The user agent string of a browser can be spoofed. There's a ton of browser extensions out there that do it. All that's happening here is that the user agent string is being spoofed & declaring the platform the browser's running on to be iOS.
Perhaps StarLink? - maybe wifi is restricted, so it’s not entirely inconceivable that the DPRK gave certain folks these kits to access the greater internet.
I don't know the details if the starlink protocol, but I'd guess it would be a server at the base station of the satellites that would actually make the web request, then translate it for satellite usage, and the base station would probably be in America or similar, so all the ips would show as American
Of course its CEO is Aodhan Cullen. He got the internet hero award here in Ireland many years ago. Gotta respect him opening up channels of communication and being transparent. Proof that we Irish are A1
Am i the one asking myself why a website would track my screen size? A mobile phone's screen size you would know by the model of the phone, which they already collect. Why do they want to know the size of my monitor?
I had a buddy from North Korea that moved to Canada and went to my church. He told me the phones there were way more advanced then any junk we have here
I dare to say that the majority of those iOS devices are from their state-approved influencers like that little girl you showed, probably easier to run Instagram on an iPhone and allow it internet access than trying to install it on their customized Android with no Google Services
@amnottabs My point was that, if the government has given special permission for this person to access Instagram, then it would be just as easy to access it via Google Play (or other means) on an Android phone, as it would be to issue her with an iPhone specifically to use Instagram.
@@GeeEee75idk maybe for the status symbol of the iPhone? I mean I compared the ease of use of an iPhone against their domestic Android devices not a regular Android with Google services
The fact that one of your first Air Tags is still alive is amazing...especially since that one lawyer said they would deactivate after a few days.
Every time it gets misdelivered, it gets 6 months of charge. It'll outlive the courier and possibly the heat death of the universe.
@@lainwired3946 I think the AirTag would turn to dust before it could lose charge.
@@CatsT.M it also gets a refurb courtesy of the Jong family at every pitstop
@@lainwired3946 Ahh, of course, very kind of them.
@@lainwired3946 you mean the Kim family?
I was in North Korea in 2018 and I got a rare chance to check a north korean smartphone (it was chinese), one of the girls in the hotel bar where we were staying liked me very much and gave me her phone to check it, they have something like a texting app, looked like ICQ back in the day if you remember it, some games, the internet (the phone operator's internet, because there was no wifi at all anywhere) was super slow, like 40 kb/s. It was interesting to see :)
oh wow, with sanctions i'm honestly surprised the internet was that good
@@unreaall It was kilobits, like in the early 90''s ;)
@@georgih I think he don't know what a kb is 😂
That's fascinating, thanks so much for sharing! Actual Internet access though? I didn't know such a thing was casually allowed. Or is it NK's intranet?
@@TRDiscordian intranet definitely. Even the linux based os that they used supposedly was only setup to run on nk's intranet
This guys channel went from using airtags to do some cool experiments to exposing billion dollar shipping industries to tracking down North Korea
fr
Next he's going to break out of the Matrix
Stolen my comment on his last video
@@GTNTAnimations Precisely!
He a hundred percent did
10:32 This is either an iPhone 11 Pro Max or iPhone XS Max.
You can tell because the iPhone is in Gold, which the X didn't have as a color, and although it's hard to identify the left side of the phone (from the front) has 4 speaker grills, which the standard sized iPhones only have 3 on the left. From the front and Sides alone however it's impossible to differentiate an iPhone 11 Pro Max from a XS Max, since there are literally no physical differences from those angles
Though it's a bit difficult to tell if it's in gold because it almost looks like it's just silver getting some sort of gold reflection from a background object.
It’s a iPhone X it’s just the lighting that makes it look slightly gold you can see by that the speakers are the same on the left and right of the port. on a xs or 11 there is an antenna line on the Bottom left of the phone and the speakers arnt symmetrical
I don’t think it’s an iPhone at all.
There are 4 speaker grill holes on each side.
X has 6+6; Xs has 3+6; Xs Max has 4+7 …
also assuming it’s gold, the antenna stripe should also be on the bottom of the device on Xs (Max) … pentalobe screws around the connector are also missing, also the lightning port has a pretty visible ring around it which cannot be seen in the video
just go and watch the og video at 0.25x and pause it at the right moment
@@matuslivora7469 It’s just the low resolution video, plus the XS Max has 4+6 speaker grills, not 4+7
the other thing is, the camera punchout is on the top-center of the device, and no iphone had a centered camera, it reminds me of some kind of oppo phone. Going further, it has 4 speaker "dots" and none of the rounded bezzel iphones had 4 holes on either side, also the antenna bands are a little lower then on the normal iphone, in my opinion its some phone from the BBK family, or a cheap iphone knock off
at around 10:25 you can see the phone has just 1 camera placed in the top middle, where iPhone 10 would have speaker, so I'd say it's some kind of Xiaomi
you are right
I didn’t see this part but I was wondering if they hated the US so much they wouldn’t want to be using an American tech, neither would they be okay using South Korea’s Samsung, so the next obvious choice would be a Chinese brand considering their ties so Xiaomi or Huawei would be the perfect choice.
To me is pyongyang 2425 or pyongyang 2428
That's definitely a huawei they did many phones (some exclusive to China) with iPhone looking bodies
You can change the User Agent String on any browser to show anything. I can make my Note 20 Ultra 5G identify as a WinNT kernel device with matching software and everything. Ex: this is a version of iOS: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.0 Tablet/15E148 Safari/604.1 ---you can make it say whatever you like and this is the data scraped usually.
I think I might have a hunch why the iphone share increased so much, at around that time (september/october 2021) apple rolled out its new iCloud Private Relay feature, which is quite similar to a VPN. It just seems like this might be related so probably worth investigating further
It is NOT at all similar to VPN. It serves a very different purpose.
My thoughts are that iOS is controlled by Apple. Giving credit where credit is do, they don't allow Government crap and Carrier junk to be baked into the OS. Thus no custom roms, apps, work around. The Apple devices show up more because it's operating "normally".
@@EndWokenessAtAllCost well it USES VPN technology
@ No
It's well known that in North Korea, the majority of smartphones (in use by the public) are no-name Android phones (according to Tourists from before the 2020 Border Closure) and their computers which previously ran Windows 7, now run their own Linux Distro called "Red Star OS" (in English) which judging by the newest version available to people outside of North Korea (due to leaks) uses the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment (probably based on Debian but idk since I have never actually looked at the ISO).
The Majority of iOS users are probably from government employees who work in high-ranking offices in the big cities (so not your average tram driver or food manufacturing facility worker who probably uses a cheap Chinese Android phone rebranded for the DPRK market) as well as any foreign diplomats whom may have returned to North Korea for their diplomatic mission in the country. There is also the chance that some iPhones have been smuggled into North Korea from either China or Russia and even South Korea (before their corporate employment deal with Hyundai [I think it was with that SK company but could be wrong] went sour)...
Ya, I saw few tourist videos back before 2020, where atleast in Pyongyang people had cheap chinese android phones.
These phones came with limited no of preinstalled Android apps.
There was no app store to search and download new apps.
This is pretty much the exact same conclusion I came to however you put it into words far better then I ever could
You must be smelling rock salt for fun if you think they let people use iPhone, SPECIALLY in the government. The data comes mostly from foreigners visiting the country and accessing the Internet in the country, reality is even government officials do not get access willy nilly.
They simply change the User Agent String in the browser of whatever PC or browser they're using (probs locked by the government) to an iOS of Mac string. Now everything thinks you're using Mac/iOS. The KDE Plasma desktop they use looks suspiciously like Apple in a lot of ways anyway. What's to say they didn't do this to obfuscate their real hardware?
It's not surprising. A very few people deemed to be VIP in NK are allowed to have cell phones and internet access.
You will be surprising the amount of smartphone user in north Korea ( quite a lot now day ) especially in Pyongyang , there Indonesian guy whom stay in nkorean a few year that film stuff with his go pro totally check it out.
@@jerryle379 Pretty much only diplomats. He works for the Indonesian embassy in Pyongyang
@@HunnyVRC yup but he did show the amount of folk in north Korean owning smartphone increase over the year another guy are Aram ( from sing ) one thing I have seen the north Korean can't own are PC and laptop haven't seen them much in normal household
More likely, they have their own browsers and/or even operating systems to lock down what can be accessed, and a browser like that could easily just have a hard coded to send a User-Agent tag as iPhone/iOS instead of whatever they call their software when making web requests.
That wouldn't explain the change of iOS versions correlated with their release dates.
@@nSiLEtan Yeah they could push an update to change to the new user-agent. Bearing in mind there is a North Korean version of Linux which is for the most part a one-to-one clone of macOS... it wouldn't surprise me.
Or, more likely, the DPRK propaganda flood the so called « influencers » with iPhones so they can fake their everyday lives better
@@SamTheEnglishTeacherr u talking ab red star os?? if so that shit is the biggest clone ever 😭 if it wasnt for the icons, colors, etc it’d look like an exact copy
@@nSiLEtan It's just a string sent with a HTTP request. Easiest thing to keep maintained and updated.
how don’t they ban iPhones in NK?? 🇰🇵
Here before this blows up
Maybe the NK President gives them to his generals and import officers if they worship him…
Because Kim is an Apple fan. All images released showing computers were all iMacs
iPhones (like all American tech) is indeed BANNED. It’s probably diplomats or high-level government officials who have access to an iPhone AND the Internet.
Kim himself uses a Mac.
You said something about that company's data being anonymized. But, what I would like to hear from the CEO: Is there any way to get more insight about North Korean usage patterns? Are these devices connecting all the time, or are they only connecting at certain days/hours, such as at times when government censorship is on duty? Such insights, compared to other countries, would be of interest.
Yeah I would also love to dig into the data a bit more.
Prob all VPN data
It's a country-wide firewall that changes your user agent. First they spoofed random user agents, hence the wild swings in stats. Now they spoof latest iPhone only, hence the 100% market share and orderly up to date versions each month.
This is not possible as the user-agent section is part of the HTTP request headers which would be encrypted by TLS, as per the HTTPS protocol.
- Li (proxied by Mia)
@@LiEnby But we can probably assume any great firewall will MITM their own users, decrypting and re-encrypting all https traffic with their own keys.
@@dani33300 but then the server would reject the connection? DPRK doesn't own whatever site the tracking stuff is on
@@LiEnby I'm not sure how strong man in the middle attacks can become if an entire state does it at the ISP level. I imagine it works with a reverse proxy to defeat https.
@@dani33300 ? So .. what? North Korea has their own DPRK internal address for a website and it has a different domain like say Facebook-dprk which is http only and on the dprk internal intranet
and then that securely connects to real facebook and forwards your stuff over to that ? Is that what your suggesting
Because this would work but it would also break in some instances
Send another airtag in case this dies from battery... it will be a shame to lose the opportunity
As far as I know, North Korea's Red Star OS is based on Linux. If the browser used there is based on WebKit (like some Linux browsers like Epiphany), some websites recognise it as Safari. So it may be WebKit browsers being detected as Safari.
So far as I recall from running Red Star it had no browser. If it did it would likely be ice weasel or a variant of gecko. It is fairly ancient and unclear if it’s still used or ever had wide spread usage. While an interesting thought it does not explain the iOS version signature.
@@JeremyWestAU hmm, good point.
It would not be due to iOS versions being communicated
Red Star OS uses Firefox. Google 4.0 version leaks. Statracker still says most desktop use coming out of DPRK use Chromium however.
I wonder if what changed was that ISP or IP range (could simply be a specific APN on a mobile network) that Android users changed IP ranges to one that is not yet properly tracked as being North Korea, and the only users left of the previous ISP are iPhone users (like.. just the Kim household or something)
Anyone with a smartphone connected to the internet in NK would be under constant close scrutiny. All smartphones would be government issued. This data makes perfect sense, they upgraded and bought in quantity to address their new PR campaign. Hence 99.99% of phones & devices were changed out within a very short timeframe. apple is the logical choice because NK doesn't want China spying via Huwai, and doesn't want SK spying via Samsung; apple serves no master but its own interests.
There are maybe a dozen people in NK who can pick and choose what smartphone they want.
@@masondegaulle5731 "apple serves no master but its own interests" lmao
@@Lego455200930 especially since Apple got caught not patching a bug the CCP was using to spy on Uigurs
Sad to see that the UA-cam algorithm doesn't seem to like this as much as some of your other videos (it only recommended it to me after two days). It's s really interesting topic and I hope you won't be too discouraged by the lower view count, as we who find our way here definitely still enjoy it a lot!
Thanks man, appreciate that! In terms of CTR and AVD, this video is one of my top performers, so it's a little weird that it isn't getting promoted. Wondering if it's because spoke about Covid.
@@MegaLagwell that's definitely interesting. Hopefully your next videos do better, because they really deserve to!
@@MegaLagdefinitely weird. Anything NK usually gets flagged up. Probably didn't call it a regime enough
As you like roasting DHL... you should do a video about the time DHL won the KFC chicken delivery contract in the UK which was so badly handled, KFC ran out of chicken and a number of branches had to close (and DHL lost the contract).
Yer i remember that! Alot of franchise owners lost alot of money!
10:28 That is probably not an iPhone. The notch at the top has a centered selfie camera whereas iPhones with notches have a much more subtle looking one to the right of the notch. The speaker grills at the bottom are identical between each other (or at least they look like it) and no visible screws next to the charging port are visible, even in the original video. Antenna lines on the sides are also way brighter than the body, which is not how they look in gold/rose gold iPhones. Hard to figure out if that is USB-C or Lightning, but most likely the former. Based on this, this is mostly likely another device not coming from Apple. Knowing possible trading routes and the stats you showed, would probably say is a Xiaomi or an older BBK device.
Pyongyang 2427/Pyongyang 2428 phone 😊
It looks really similar to the iPhone XS. Maybe a clone, or maybe the compression hide the details.
Its obvious now. My country has internet and phones.
We got north korean influencers before gta 6
4:19 In a world where UA-camrs are self-censoring, it’s great to see MegaLag keeping it 100 and saying GigaBitches. Love it.
The fact that the borders are reopening is really interesting! I am personally quite interested in the DPRK and I didn't know this yet. Exciting! Very much looking forward to seeing what happens with the AirTag. Did you consider maybe sending a new AirTag over now? So that it can be there in time for the border to (supposedly) reopen?
For such a big switch in devices in such a small timeframe I would guess all internet connected devices are state controlled and they did an ‘enterprise’ upgrade.
Sounds feasible.
I wonder what their reaction will be when they find the airtag
4:18 “gigabitches” my new favorite term. Thank you.
Imagine if you’ve actually just accidentally blown the lid off a secret deal between DPRK and Apple
10:30 that's not an iPhone it's a North Korean smartphone known as Pyongyang 2425. You can search it up.
Something happened to the Apple location pings last week, my apple watch catched a ping from other side of a planet while sitting on a table next to me. 😂 And they continued to send that ping from other country for almost the whole day.
You can report that to Apple.
GPS anomaly or someone playing with AirTag spoofing.
I once opened my security camera app and saw some else’s entire camera setup I could view live and even watch back the last 60 days or rather.
Never reported it to Eufy but you bet I switched to Google after that.
Hi, interesting Video!
When I looked at it, the first what came to my mind is that maybe the Apple Private Relay has to do something with this?
Because this was released at the end of 2021 at the same time the traffic increased rapidly…
Maybe the normal use of the internet is blocked, but Private Relay routes the traffic over Apple Servers so it wont be blocked?
I thought about this too! Because the dates def match up. But i assumed Apple wouldn’t have North Korean IPs for the egress servers. But someone reached out recently claiming they do. I need to look into it deeper to confirm
you can tell it's not an iphone by the charging port, the edges are usually bevelled around a real ones charging port
I kinda expected you to point out that all those North Korean ‘influencers’ are just propaganda accounts and not actual vloggers
I don't think anyone is assuming otherwise
@@Mirtuali figured but was still confused
Update please in 2025
i really respect how honest and realistic the interviewee is, it's a nice change from the sketchy colorblind glasses people
iphones are like the first or second most used brands there, the other being samsung
theres like some footage of iphone/ mac usage like in one of moranbong's concerts, where theyre using a macbook
(i forgot what year its from)
10:31 you were right. The phone visible is a regular sized Apple iPhone X in white, with a screen protector.
It’s not a XS. You can see it on the microphone grill. The iPhone X has a mic grill the same size as the speaker grill, the XS has a smaller mic grill than speaker grill.
Boarders are opening up soon - time to try again?
Borders have been partial open for a while. Just not sure if post and parcels will resume. Hopefully though!
Amother thing is foreigner in north korea : embassy , UN worker beside north korean elite bought from black market and north korean that work oversea ( quite large amount btw , they even work in poland a few years back )
We've bin testing this remote technology here on the east coast to slowly move data for years. I'm glad to see it being used for good purposes finally.
I love following your stories, such a great story teller. Respect from England 🏴 👊
Thanks man! Glad you're enjoying the content :)
Wait, that Statcounter CEO is named Aegon? As in The Conqueror? Thats pretty badass!
Bruh in Korea the airtag location doesn't work...
2:23 I thought they don't have internet. Only a few gets access to the internet and that's also very restricted
Make a video about North Korean influencers. I personally find it extremely interesting
This is such a good, interesting video!
That isn't an iPhone. If you look at the phone closely then you see that the screen is curved around on the left and right. Apple doesnt use curved screens so that is definitely not an iPhone
i still have the absurd dream of having a server in DPRK
imagine all the copyright infringement you could get away with!
Imagining the next video would be Megalag travelling to North Korea to find out those mystery
amounts are so low that maybe they just got one shipping container phones for goverment officials.
You need to hand deliver an air tag, then we can see what happens to it
This feels like a giant ad for this tracking service
I’ve been to the DPRK twice and have never seen a person using an iPhone. It’s purely android, and most of it are cheap Chinese OEM supplied older android phones.
Combine that with the fact that the DPRK only started deploying LTE in December 2023 and the penetration of the LTE network is still spotty, that data is pretty off.
I would assume the possibility of iPhone usage would be greater in provinces bordering China as there are greater numbers of phones there in general, all there in the hopes of illicitly tapping into a Chinese mobile network from across the border to make forbidden international calls.
It was me. I was in North Korea and smuggled an iPhone. I used several VPN services and sources I don‘t want to mention to get a connection to the internet from there.
🤡🤡🤡
North Korea has it’s own smartphone brands connected to Kwangmyong which most normal North Koreans but it’s only connected inside North Korea.
Why would North Korea let a random package in the country especially when it’s x-rayed and is clearly some form of electronic
Can you not just alter your user agent string and change everything? Their red-star OS looks similar to early OSX, so what if they changed the user agent string to ident as iOS or Mac? It's stupid easy to do and if you're not specifically pulling other information from the page by other means, this could just be a means of obfuscation of what they actually do use....
the title of this video is exactly what I thought when you said your apple air tag was tracked as being in n korea. Air tags connect via iphones around it.
Next video: Tracking down Kim Jong-Un to see if he has an IPhone
Even unlocked for worldwide usage including with satellite phone connection devices might be something cool happening.
Yep, that's an iPhone XS or XS Max for sure. As that was a year that came in a gold version. -- Btw, love the videos ... wish you made them more often.
2:43 The sample size for Antarctica is 1. 😄
That gold-ish iPhone in Song A's video is likely a xiaomi-esque iPhone clone of some sort
Thank you for making another video. Please make more. TY............. What providers does NK have? The data usage for Apple phones is higher than others. Hence Are their internet g etc.? 4G service companies strong? I can't see how NK can have such a high usage age of iPhones if their Internet coverage isn't vital. thinking TY!
They probably don't have any cellular data infrastructure but instead some WiFi for very few privileged people I would guess
@@WatchNoah very few, there must be some stable connections for this amount of iPhone users. The video is excellent. I hope he adds more to this piece.
University
@@joebidenofficialpotus It can't account for that much usage? I see the idea, but it cant be that great.
4:19 it’s Gigabytes I believe. That sounded really close to a bad word
He said gigabitches and it was funny
But does Apple Maps and the Find My service actually work in North Korea, if there was an iPhone?
That phone from Song A definitely looks like an iPhone x/xs/xs max. maybe it could be an iPhone XR. Interesting. I hope that one day we can freely talk to people from North Korea on the Internet but that probably takes many years if that ever happens
what about user agent? The data might not come from an apple device but rather some korean browser using apple's user agent.
There are addons that you can install on your browser that replicate different devices. If I was using edge but wanted to replicate search results that an iPhone would display, you can replicate that on an edge browser which would then claim it is the most recent update.
My theory would list a few possible reasons.
First could be that since Samsung is a South Korean company, they would not want to have a company south of the DMZ to have huge market share. The DPRK could cite spying concerns and they could pass that as law. Would have to check on that, but seems logical.
Second, Huawei exports could have been limited due to the semiconductor shortage throughout the pandemic, and the fact the market share is expected to be so small, it wouldn’t make sense to send DPRK officials an updated phone when everywhere else has a huge return. Same could be said for all other brands for official sales.
A third possibility is the black market that North Koreans rely on to get foreign films, tv shows, etc. For years they would get it on Video Tapes, DVDs, and USB drives. But simply getting an iPhone could hold much more data. Plus, if it’s a jail broken iPhone, the it would give them more apps and movies, and they won’t have to sign up for an Apple ID to use it. That would be considering it’s NOT a high government official’s device that can access the greater World Wide Web.
And it would indeed help the governments influencer goals to have a smart phone that is more recognizable to their intended western audience. They can even say they like XYZ game on the App Store and play it every day.
There have been some NK IP address owners on the Chinese internet lately (you know, Chinese social media platforms will show everyone's IP address attribution).
From what I've heard from the owner of the NK IP address, it's likely that one (or possibly several ?) VPN providers got a NK VPS and used it to set up a proxy server.
Anyway, NK IP and VPS do exist, but they seem to have very little bandwidth. as for accessing sites like google? since I havent got this VPN yet, I dont know :-)
What if the AirTag dies right before shipping?
An alternative explanation could be user agent spoofing. I can use firefox on a linux computer and using a simple browser extension to make it look like im using safari on IOS with the click of a button. That browser extension generally shows the newest operating system and browser versions at the top of the list so that could explain why north koreans are using the newest version of IOS. The the question is why IOS and not any of the other possible user agents they could choose from?
Yeah user agent spoofing has been around for a long time. As you said, why now and why only iPhones?
And also change ios version every time new one comes out?
@@MegaLag Because of the low sample size - it could be something really boring, like a crawler/scraper based in North Korea using user agent spoofing, with a sample size this small, the uptick could literally be represented by single campaign/operation; up-to-date user agent strings are readily available online, and thus the activity that appears as if users are updating their iPhones could also be the a crawler script updating it's user agent string.
Why iOS? Well looking past the North Korean IP address, an iOS user agent will easily drown in the logs/statistics, and while the practice does not make much sense to me, I have experienced some website operators blacklisting certain user agent strings; such measures are probably implemented out of ignorance, however a common user agent string (and an up-to-date one) circumvents this. The proper behavior of crawlers/scrapers is to use a unique and identifiable user agent string, so that they are easily filtered out of statistics, but due to misguided attempts at security such as user agent blacklisting, they do not always do so.
Same, my first thought was VPNs. I thought for sure that would be the case, but maybe not.
Dude's background looks like he's calling from North Korea.
10:27 that isnt an iphone, it looks like it has a teardrop camera or the camera is in the middle atleast, apple doesnt design their iphones like, they put the speaker in the middle with the camera off to the right side. Many android companies do design phones with the camera centered.
It’s probably tracking only a few phones and which ones are active that visited those sites at the time so that why it’s so sporadic
0.24% Samsung users in North Korea: Haha, I am in danger...
I remember watching that video, cant believe its been 2 years
you make cool uncovering stuff videos, you deserve way more subs
It could be mostly the blogger's IP.
I think there is also a good percentage of tourists (yes it's a thing) and the phone you spotted 10:30 it's most definitely not an iPhone. I would say most likely an older Huawei that's exclusive to China if you look at the bottom grills it's 100% not an iPhone layout
I just saw your colorblind glasses (and had to check out more), so now I gotta say: Dude, you gotta upload more! Your videos are great (sure, they can improve, but you are the next Johnny Harris), just get more consistent so we can all discover you!
(But take care of yourself, so if this is all you feel like is realistic then stick to it! I've been burned out, and it's better to take an extra year to "make it")
Johnny Harris is just a neoliberal ideologue. This dude actually makes well researched videos, the only place CIA Harris has him beat is editing.
Could it be from a small amount of tourist who visited North Korea? It’s a regally strange the spike is really high unless is small numbers
"Totally anonymously".........
Wrong. The user agent string of a browser can be spoofed. There's a ton of browser extensions out there that do it. All that's happening here is that the user agent string is being spoofed & declaring the platform the browser's running on to be iOS.
The browser, operating system, etc information can be spoofed. Why though?
Perhaps StarLink? - maybe wifi is restricted, so it’s not entirely inconceivable that the DPRK gave certain folks these kits to access the greater internet.
I don't know the details if the starlink protocol, but I'd guess it would be a server at the base station of the satellites that would actually make the web request, then translate it for satellite usage, and the base station would probably be in America or similar, so all the ips would show as American
Of course its CEO is Aodhan Cullen. He got the internet hero award here in Ireland many years ago. Gotta respect him opening up channels of communication and being transparent.
Proof that we Irish are A1
Interesting that billions of pings per day from most of the planet tell us little, while a single ping from NK would tell us a lot.
I thought that iPhone was banned in North Korea
Update when?
Am i the one asking myself why a website would track my screen size? A mobile phone's screen size you would know by the model of the phone, which they already collect. Why do they want to know the size of my monitor?
I had a buddy from
North Korea that moved to Canada and went to my church. He told me the phones there were way more advanced then any junk we have here
its mostly likely a gold version of the iphone 8 plus
i cant get over the fact of how long ive been following these videos
We need to rule out VPNs that aren’t currently being filtered out
9:57 the book is in Chinese
I dare to say that the majority of those iOS devices are from their state-approved influencers like that little girl you showed, probably easier to run Instagram on an iPhone and allow it internet access than trying to install it on their customized Android with no Google Services
Now explain it to me so that it makes sense. Like why would the Apple app store be easier than Google Play?
@@GeeEee75 sorry but even after re-reading my original comment I don't understand your question
@amnottabs My point was that, if the government has given special permission for this person to access Instagram, then it would be just as easy to access it via Google Play (or other means) on an Android phone, as it would be to issue her with an iPhone specifically to use Instagram.
@@GeeEee75idk maybe for the status symbol of the iPhone? I mean I compared the ease of use of an iPhone against their domestic Android devices not a regular Android with Google services
@@amnottabs You don't need Google services to download apps onto an Android phone. That's why I think it's more likely to be an Android phone.
ahhh i remember your first video from years
is there a update to this story because i have been following this for the last 2 years and i want to know if there is a happy ending to this story