North Korea is evading sanctions by animating Max and Amazon shows
North Korea is evading sanctions by animating Max and Amazon shows
Thousands of exposed files on North Korean server tell the tale.
Thousands of exposed files on North Korean server tell the tale.
Based on the title, I thought it meant they were pulling a "wikiHow" and rotoscoping/reanimating existing movies and TV shows. No, they're contract animators working for HBO Max and Amazon.
When Roy discovered the exposed cloud server, it was being updated on a daily basis. Martyn Williams, a senior fellow on the 38 North Project who helped analyze the contents of the server, says the server likely allowed work to be sent to and from North Korean animators. The server itself is still live, but it mysteriously stopped being used at the end of February. While there is a login page, its contents can be accessed without a username and password. “I found the login page after I found all the exposed files,” Roy says.
I wonder if anyone can find the cloud server, and if so, archive the contents. It's always fascinating seeing behind-the-scenes details about shows, but official behind-the-scenes footage always lacks depth. It'd be cool to archive that stuff.
The fact that it's not rotoscoped North Korean remakes proves we're not in the Good Place.
Sanctions placed upon the North Korean regime, for its ongoing human rights abuses and nuclear warfare programs, prohibit US companies from working with DPRK companies or individuals
Does that mean the rest of the world is morally obliged to do the same to the US for the same reasons?
NK literally doesn't have famine because the West gives them food.
I don’t fuck with the North Korean government but starting a population because of their leaders they can’t even elect is fucked up and our leaders are conquering the world while we pay them to do it and no one punishes us for it
why are they so poor? why is Cuba so poor? How many countries has north korea bombed? How many coups have they orchestrated around the world? How many genocides have they committed and are committing? Collective punishment is a war crime, the North Korean people and the Cuban people shouldn’t suffer and starve for the crimes of their leaders. If you think they should but don’t think we deserve punishment for them millions of innocent people or governments kill then maybe you should wonder why you think that
I propose the title "Amazon and HBO Max offshore work, which ended up paying North Korea. But the stock market responded well."
uncritical support for the DPRK in its heroic struggle to liberate occupied Korea from the genocidal American empire.
Good for them. Maybe the sanctions should be removed since:
A) they obviously dont work and
B) if socialism is so bad i'm sure the state will fall on it's own without outside pressure
NK
Socialism
Choose one
Tankies, at least on Lemmy, tend to base their opinion less on actual leftist ideology and entirely on "US bad". That's why they love Putin's Russia so much, why they support the oppressive North Korean dictatorship, and also why they manage to "broken clock" themselves into the right side of the Israeli genocide of Palestine.
Sanctions never worked as intended. Troll farms are nowadays more powerful.
Sanctions never work
ed as intended.
Lol
Isn't this common knowledge? Plenty of animated series from the 80s and onwards were animated in NK.
sanctions on NK goes from hard to soft im waves over the years. arguably the heaviest sanctions were imposed from nuclear tests they conducted in like the 2000s. not sure where sanctions on animation came into place, but they very well could've been allowed at one point when tensions weren't as high.
But like... Where can I watch these?
Amazon and HBO. They were doing animation for the proper shows. Not creating North Korean clones.
Ohhh I completely misunderstood that. I really wanted to watch bootleg animations with the same audio.
Awww, I was hoping for "sweded" movies!
Fucking tankies in this thread.
Hello
Oh hush snowflake
Block em.
Certainly makes it easy when they expose themselves
Glad neither are getting my money
Sanctions placed upon the North Korean regime, for its ongoing human rights abuses and nuclear warfare programs
Damn where are the sanctions on the US? You know, the only country crazy enough to use those nukes on actual human beings instead of just using it as a deterrence like the DPRK does?
You’re delusional
What part isn't true tho?
Jingoists are hilarious on all sides.
Some of the projects included work from season 3 of the Amazon show Invincible
hype
Why would they do that instead of pirating it?
Where are the files?
This seems like one of those news stories about North Korea that nobody bothered to think critically about, let alone verify.
The article isn’t talking about taking the end product, it is about North Korean’s involved with the movie’s production by providing low cost manual labor for animating or ‘drafting’ the images for the shows (and then presumably a portion of this income is fed into the state). They’re not supposed to be doing this, but have identified ways to get jobs passed to them via some sort of broker who allocated part of the work to them or gets their citizens placed using fake credentials.
Oh I see, I assumed the article was going to be "north korea is making animated versions of existing films for silly reasons", because the article started with "north koreans are only allowed to use the internet with someone else sitting right next to them and approving every 5 minutes"
What's more likely is Amazon and HBO contracted a South Korean studio who subcontracted a Chinese studio for some of the more mundane animations, and they proceeded to sub-subcontract a North Korean studio.
There's a lot of outsourcing for animation, this happened like 15 years ago with Avatar: The Last Airbender, where one of the South Korean studios involved with Book 3 subcontracted some work to China (cursory Google says DR Movie, which collaborated with a Chinese studio based in Qingdao)
Why would they do that instead of pirating it?
I realize you're from Hexbear and hence incapable of rational thought, but you could still pretend to read the article before commenting.
I'm honestly surprised North Koreans have the education to animate in today's market. Like, who trained them to use the software needed? How did they buy the software?
Sanctions can't block access to education and software lol.
It can certainly block the sale of software and services. For example:
Customers that purchase Microsoft 365 may assign a Microsoft 365 license, respectively, to a user that resides anywhere in the world, except for Cuba, Iran, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Sudan, and Syria.
Kind of hard to educate when you don't have access to McHill.