A man overrides his camera's firmware to bring rare pictures of North Korea back
I went to North Korea in January as an American (incidentally on the same tour as the kid who is currently being detained there and in the same group). As mentioned in the article, Americans can&#x27;t go on the train, so I can&#x27;t speak to his experiences specifically, but I have a few reactions to this.<p>1. He probably didn&#x27;t need to modify his camera firmware - I took pictures of basically whatever I wanted and they didn&#x27;t look or care. The only exception to this was the (singular) grocery store, which I thought was hilarious because it was actually pretty nice. (With surprisingly good food, too! I&#x27;m still snacking on some of the candies I bought there.) I went on a helicopter ride and took a bunch of pictures of anti-aircraft guns and the like hoping that they would make me delete them and I would have a story to tell, but no such luck.<p>2. There&#x27;s a big difference between the different tour companies. Some of them really sold the dystopian totalitarian state experience, with extremely strict guides who yelled at people on the tour and checked everybody&#x27;s cameras and so on. The people on those tours seemed to have signed up for that experience and were, I think, happy to receive it. My group was drunk off our collective asses literally 24&#x2F;7, our guides were making dick jokes, a guy wandered off on his own on New Years Eve and didn&#x27;t get back to the hotel until ~3am after getting in a fistfight with a cab driver, and it was generally a party. It seems to me like the author of this article went in looking for a dystopia to photograph, and the tour company gave him one.<p>3. North Korea is poor as hell, obviously has a horrible government, etc. If you&#x27;ve been to other extremely poor parts of the globe it&#x27;s obvious that it&#x27;s a poor country trying to pretend to be a rich one. The successful example of neighboring South Korea makes their failure to provide for their citizens even sadder. But I would guess total quality of life is comparable or better in the DPRK than many other places I&#x27;ve been. (Somalia, nasty bits of Bangladesh, etc)<p>4. The citizens and possibly government are (not totally unreasonably) terrified that the US is going to invade and crush them like ants at any given moment. I think this drives a lot of their government&#x27;s malinvestments.