North Korea tourism promotion video - Not every link is welcome!
Seems like North Korea's government doesn't even have enough money to pay
for bandwidth.
Boingboing
posted an item
about a North Korea tourism promotion video on the [North]
Korean Friendship Association's
website. The NFA works for the understanding of the North Korean culture and
fully cooperates with the Committee For Cultural Relations with Foreign
Countries in Pyongyang. Boingboing has hundreds of thousands of readers, so
the pointer caused an unprecedented spike in traffic to the KFA's website.
An hour later the video was replaced and clicking on the link to the video
led to the following message:
"Due to some inconsiderate people linking directly to our multimedia we were
forced to take the content offline since it generated too much traffic. This
kind of careless linking to high-profile sites is typical of the internet
where people no longer respect that such links could make free content less
available. We will never charge money to pay for the bandwidth, so if people
are going to expect high-quality content they should make their own copy of
the large file and share it from their own server."
The message was replaced some time later by the following:
"Access to the requested object was denied. We are sorry we had to take this
popular movie offline, to conserve bandwidth. Some websites that exist only
for pointing fingers and people's amusement, and not to explore culture, has
recently begun to link directly to this file and other large multimedia
files. This resulted in poor quality of our normal services. We encourage
people to share files on the internet to conserve resources, and we are
considering expanding our selection of free multimedia content (Flash, MP3
and MPG/ASX/ASF) to make as much as possible available to as many as
possible so that they may learn about our culture. The logical course of
action is to use P2P technology such as found in the Bit-Torrent system. We
will announce when the use of such system is available. In the mean time, we
have to restrict access to some areas. Please check back in one week. Thank
you for your attention and letters of support."
