Documents found on a North Korean server suggest US studios may have unknowingly outsourced animation work
Documents found on a North Korean server suggest US studios may have unknowingly outsourced animation work
North Korean illustrators and graphic designers appear to have helped produce work for US animation studios unbeknownst to those companies, suggesting that unreleased episodes of a few popular American cartoons could include work from one of the most closed-off economies in the world.
The revelation comes from a trove of documents recently discovered by US researchers inside a computer server housed in North Korea. It’s unclear how the files ended up in this tightly controlled portion of the internet, but the researchers who analyzed them told CNN they appear to be the result of work that was unknowingly outsourced to North Korean workers.
That’s a lot of words to avoid saying a system was hacked or broken into. Call it what it is.
“Hacking” has become too broad a term, with a lingering air of malicious intent. In my opinion, those extra words avoid accusation and assumption.
I think they’re saying that it isn’t clear what the outsourcing chain was that led to North Koreans doing this animation work.
Hacking has lost all meaning though, case in point that public official from Minnesota who accused a journalist of “hacking” because the journalist opened up their browser dev tools pane and looked at the client side code.
What? The US researchers found a website that did not require credentials to access, and this “trove” was found on that site. There was no hacking or breaking in there. The data seems to be pretty clear cut work delivered by North Koreans to US companies, if not the story wouldn’t be written as such. I fail to see where hacking enters in to this conversation.
That’s not to say NK isn’t hacking for profit, they definitely are.
It wouldn't be the first time. SEK studio also did an episode of Avatar: the Last Airbender (The Awakening) and Futurama: Bender's Big Score, from foreign studios further outsourcing to them.