붉은별 3.0 — rebuilding the Red Star OS desktop

A 2013-era North Korean operating system, rebuilt as one 304 KB HTML file that never touches the network: menu bar, dock, traffic lights, Sogwang Office, the Naenara browser, the media mark that rewrites a copied file, and a guest account that genuinely cannot buy, send or save. It browses a 49-entry sample of the Kwangmyong address book — the network itself is a separate project.

Two projects, not one

This is the second DPRK simulator on this site, and the two are deliberately separate — different shells, different data, different jobs. Kwangmyong Network 3.0 owns the intranet: 136 catalogue entries, 30 hand-built services, a Windows-like taskbar. This one owns the machine that browses it: a macOS-like desk, 22 apps, the media mark, the read-only guest. The 49 addresses here are a sample chosen to prove the browser, the watch log and the watermark interlock — not a replacement for the full network.

Same research lineage, different artifact. Nothing is shared at runtime: no common file, no common script, no iframe between them.

Try it without leaving this page

Password field accepts anything — the refusal path is ?lang=en, ?selftest=1 and ?probe=1 at the end of the URL. Log in as 방문자 / Visitor to see the read-only account.

Where the content came from

Two constraints shaped everything. First: use the saved hosts, not invented ones. A 2016 table of Kwangmyong addresses (33 rows) plus 12 addresses read off press photographs of a 2015 Rason tourist chart plus four services that only appear in reporting — 49 catalogue entries in six categories, each with the address the source gives. This build uses a 49-entry sample of that table; the full 136-entry catalogue belongs to the Kwangmyong Network 3.0 project.

Second: search online to keep improving, which meant the visual and behavioural claims had to be sourced rather than guessed. Red Star OS 3.0 is a KDE-based Linux distribution by the Korea Computer Center; its shell imitates macOS (top menu bar, Dock, traffic-light controls on the left); Naenara is a Firefox fork restricted to the Kwangmyong intranet; Sogwang Office is an OpenOffice fork. Component names — Ryugyong Janggi, Bokem, SamTaeSong, UnBangUI, Crosswin, Companero, RSLogBrowser — are real, which is why two of them became actual apps here instead of being mentioned in a paragraph.

Real: the addresses, the categories, the component names, the shell grammar, the watermarking behaviour. Invented: every page body, article, product, price, mail, log line, quiz question and all artwork.

How an address resolves

One function owns the whole "web". Type an IP, a .kp name, a Korean site name or an English one and it lands in the same place; anything else has to fail the way the real network fails, not with a JavaScript error.

입력 (address bar)
  │
  ├─ 10.30.80.101 ────────────→ exact IP match ──→ 남산 library page
  ├─ www.gpsh.edu.kp ─────────→ host field  ────→ 남산 library page
  ├─ 남산 / Namsan ────────────→ name alias  ────→ 남산 library page
  ├─ google.com ──────────────→ not in table ────→ 《접속금지》 + 감시기록 row
  ├─ 8.8.8.8 ─────────────────→ outside 10/8 ───→ “no route”, route table shown
  └─ bogus.kp ────────────────→ .kp miss ────────→ name-not-found + suggestions

That last trio is the point. A simulator that opens every link teaches nothing about a network whose defining feature is that it doesn't reach the open internet — so the blocked page, the unrouted page and the nxdomain page are first-class, each with its own status bar, error code and log entry.

Four things that had to actually work

Version ladder — and what got cut

Failure modes — the bugs this build actually had

Verification

Not a screenshot — a real Chromium at three widths, driving the flows and then opening every app to measure it.

1440x900   selftest 45/45   probe_ok=True   console=0   pageerrors=0
 768x1024  selftest 45/45   probe_ok=True   console=0   pageerrors=0
 390x844   selftest 45/45   probe_ok=True   console=0   pageerrors=0

flows: boot → empty-password refusal → login → home page → blocked host → IP resolve
     → nxdomain → basket maths → checkout deduction → mail rows → terminal
     → watermark modal → guest read-only (4 refusals) → English build

The probe fails the build on any window outside the viewport, any window overlapping the Dock, any horizontal scroll inside an app body, an empty app, a missing menu bar or Dock, or a start menu that runs off the screen. Two of those caught real defects the DOM assertions were blind to.

Honest limits

Evidence

What's next

The obvious gap is real page content: the Wayback Machine has captures of the foreign-facing mirrors (naenara, KCNA, Rodong Sinmun) from late 2026, and baking those into local files would let the intranet pages carry real HTML instead of my written copy. The second is depth in 원격교육 — exam papers and lecture pages — because that category is the least documented and the most interesting.