This week, KCNA announced the following:
The Korean Association of Cooks has opened “Korean Dishes”, an Internet homepage.
The homepage deals with common knowledge and theories on variety of dishes and how to cook them.
It also offers such data as origins and anecdotes about dishes and global trend in cooking development.
It has a distinctive catalogue for serving housewives’ convenience. When a visitor chooses any food material in the
catalogue, she can get detailed information about lists of dishes prepared with it and their cookery.The homepage contains multimedia on national and foreign dishes. Through homepage visitors can exchange their knowledge and views with each other and acquire a wide-ranging cooking.
An official of the Korean Association of Cooks told KCNA that this homepage serves as a close companion for cooks and housewives.
Although the KCNA story does not mention the URL, it is nearly visible on the screen shot taken in the top left photo. I talked about it with Martyn Williams (check out his database of North Korean web pages here) and we agreed that it is http://www.cooks.org.kp/index.php. This web page, however, is not actually available on the “world wide web”. It appears to be available only to readers of the DPRK’s intranet, Kwangmyong, which is available through domestic computer terminals and I believe partially through the KoryoLink 3-G phone network.
Some other points of interest:
1. The screen shots indicate that that the North Korean intranet web pages are compatible with the Mozilla Firefox browser.
2. The North Korean intranet pages are prefixed with “http://www.” indicating that though they are not currently on the global Internet, it would be very simple to make them so. This means that the computer programmers in the DPRK are building the network with an infrastructure that would not preclude eventual unification with the global Internet.
Additional Information:
1. Read Martyn William’s analysis of the web pages here.
