[quant18]

My wild guess is: they might not have had any internet connection at all. But it really depends whether the Koryo Tours guys thought the extra cost would be worth it. I don't have any updated pricelist from Nosotek (the North Korean/Dutch joint venture outsourcing firm which wrote Pyongyang Racer), but back in 2010 they charged an extra €40 to €60 per day surcharge to clients if they wanted their team of two outsourced Pyongyang programmers to have direct internet access; otherwise the team would work "in a cleanroom environment and can not connect to the internet" and all email contact would be with the Nosotek managers only. http://www.nkeconwatch.com/nk-uploads/nosotek-pricelist.pdf

To put this in perspective, that charge is almost the same as the charge for one of the programmers themselves. My guess is, Nosotek most likely have to pay for a third guy from the government to watch the browsing habits of the first two, and that third guy has to belong to both the set of political reliables and the set of internet-savvy people --- two sets which are already small in North Korea and whose intersection is even smaller. Not to mention the cost of the extra computer and internet connection itself

More links about Nosotek:

http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/

http://www.northkoreatech.org/tag/nosotek/

http://nosotek.com/

[asmithmd1]

Very interesting contract. Did you use them for a project?

4. Communication

Communication between the engineers and the customer will only take place by email or Nosotek's bug tracking server. Phone calls are not possible. Chatting is only possible with members of Online Programming teams.

Emails exchange will only take place once pay day, answers to questions will be giving on the following day, sometimes two days later. The customer accepts that it might happen that email communication is interrupted for one or two days for technical or administrative reasons.

In case the customer sends political propaganda or agitation, Nosotek has the right to cancel the project without returning the prepaid fees.

[davorb]

They have an internal intranet with bulletin boards and even dating sites that a few select have access to. I think it's mostly there to make rich kids feel like they're not missing out. A very, very small number of people even have access to the "real" Internet.

Kim Jong Il once (around a decade ago) famously asked Madeleine Albright for her email address.