They actually also interview for Chinese companies too. I have a friend who got a big shock when he saw someone wearing military uniform on Zoom. Apparently they didn't bother to hide the identities. My friend told me that the interviewee has very, very good skills (e.g. deep knowledge of X11) but he quickly declined him.
He dug a bit deeper and found out that the North Koreans have special programs for gifted kids. They send them to the schools for dedicated CS education. They also (presumably without proof) have access to the source code of various commercial closed source software.
It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal. But I always wonder, wouldn't they burn out eventually? Maybe they can switch fields or become teachers, though.
Yeah I heard the security is tight. They are basically just sitting in the hotel full-time. They can't get out because it's foreign land.
I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do but passion comes and goes so I never got the grit to actually learn much.
Knowing NK, they’re probably part of a genetic breeding program targeting complacency and intelligence. Why fix the system when you can fix the individual?
“A Deepness in the Sky”, by Vernor Vinge.
Excellent book, with a concept very close to this as an element.
You don’t need to read “A Fire Upon the Deep” first… the stories are more or less unrelated except for setting. (There is one character who is sort of in both, but going into detail about what that means would spoil it too much).
Both are excellent and worth the time. Skip the other Vinge books until you are sure you want to read everything he wrote, they are “merely” 8/10 instead of 10/10.
Vinge was a CS professor who really made sure everything “fit” together in his works. Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.
NB that Vinge was the one who popularized the concept of “the technological Singularity”. His books have interesting authors notes where he talks about coming up with ways to write about a far future when he believes that the Singularity is right on track for 2050-2100.
FWIW I found A Deepness in the Sky to be much better than his other books (I read Deepness first). Vinge’s talent for prose got better over time and it’s one of the more imaginative scifi books I’ve read. It can be consumed completely independently and after that one character’s big reveal in Deepness, they just weren’t as interesting in A Fire Upon the Deep. I really wish we had gotten a sequel to Deepeness.
Luckily I quickly discovered that the Children of Time series filled my need for more spider scifi.
> Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.
It's sometimes enormously funny when you were around to witness Usenet. Especially when you realize there's one guy who all along knows something about the story's most essential reveal - but writes like a deranged conspiracy theorist, so nobody really talks to him.
> I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do
I don’t think that’s appropriate. You’re jesting about it, NKs working abroad are basically prisoners and their families taken hostages (as in don’t come back or do something we don’t like and we’ll kill your wife and children)
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I highly recommend "The Real North Korea" by Andrei Lankov. It really helped to demystify the country for me.
I have read The Aquariums of Pyongyang and Escape from Camp 14, both of which are very good. I think that Aquariums is a better overall book, as the author adds context and background throughout the narrative. Camp 14 is more straightforward and limited to his experience, which for a North Korean is quite limited. They are pretty dated at this point (2000 and 2012, respectively) so there are probably more timely options available now.
I wish we were able to read any trustworthy insider stories. Trying to tease apart propaganda from earnest storytelling is quite difficult ini english.
I imagine "a job is a job, everyone's gotta work to eat and sleep" is a pretty universal experience, unless there are post-scarcity societies that have popped up somewhere I haven't heard of. The difference among our scoieties is the degree to which everyone else accepts that it's "just a job". And of course your ability to sleep at night.
> "One of the things that we've noted is that you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name," he recounted, "and then when you get them on Zoom calls it's a military age male Asian who can't pronounce it."
Why not simply pretend they are from South Korea?
Tinfoil: Maybe these ones are supposed to fail so everyone feels like they are so clever in stopping them.
The 'rz' phoneme has the same sound as the letter 'ż' which is a different sound from the letter 'ź' (the latter being a softer sound - one that foreigners usually find easier to reproduce).
Whether you write a word with the 'rz' or the 'ż' is governed by a set of orthographic rules that are of course peppered with numerous exceptions.
Why would we? It "just works". We've only changed how we write the letter "ż" some 30-20 years ago. It was previously "ƶ". Also, "ż" and "ź" are not accents but separate alphabet letters.
There was no typeface change for “ż” - the other typeface is sometimes used now as it was 30 years ago. See the foto at Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BB
And yet, you can see the "Straƶ Miejska" logotype linked in my comment above, with a crown on the eagle, so post-December 31, 1989[0].
It may depend on the region (I was raised in the eastern Poland) but I also remember that in the primary school we used a different symbol for the letter "s". But only in hand-writing while any printed "s" looked like it does currently. I'm unable to find the UTF-8 character resembling the hand-written version.
You could also look at Croatian, which has a similar contrast with e.g. "C", so they use "č" and "ć". This could be easily extended to "s" and "z". Or you could take "ż" and apply the same diacritic to "c" and "s".
"rz" is a bit of a special case since it's pretty much etymological - what used to be "r", and corresponds to "r" in the same roots in other Slavic languages, but became to be pronounced like "ź" in Polish. What to do about it depends on whether you want your orthography to be purely phonemic (a better choice IMO, just look at South Slavic languages - it works great for them!) or retain the etymological distinction. But even then it would be better off as a diacritic.
What would be really neat tho is having a single Latin-based notation that works consistently across all Slavic languages, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_alphabet. For example, we could use cedilla to represent post-alveolars: ç and ş - and then use acute accent to indicate palatalization ("softness"). So e.g in Czech you'd only need s/ş, in Polish you'd use s/ş/ş́, and in Russian you'd have all four possible combinations s/ś/ş/ş́.
At this point it’s a unique aspect of the language, so much so that changing sz to š for example would feel like a betrayal. There are also a few letters without similar sounds in other Slavic languages (ą and ę) so you’d end up retaining those anyway.
Those make sense since they aren't digraphs. But c'mon, comparing Czech to Polish, it's pretty clear which orthography was designed first, and which learned from the mistakes of the other :)
Reality: bunch of ponzi schemers, arrogant sub revolutionaries, greedy people, envious people. All together in a pseudo network of trust, always at each other's throats. Unrepentable and thus, impossible to forgive. Sad but not much.
so even though reality isn't exactly as the expected, they are still detecting them because they are more sensitive to situation than normies. situational awareness is not a bad thing even if the reason your heightened awareness is up for a different reason.
you've never heard the term situational awareness? that's funny.
if someone thinks there's a conspiracy behind everything so they trust nothing and then it turns out that the thing could not be trusted but because of a different reason than the suspected conspiracy doesn't make the conspiracy theorist wrong about the lack of trust. just the reason for the lack of trust.
compare that to someone that trusts everything. they get screwed because they were not paying attention to trust should be suspect. yet the kooky conspiracy person was better off even if for the not so right reason
A conspiracist shouldn’t be confused with a skeptic that attempts to practice and employ critical thinking and structured analysis to issues. Conspiracists get taken in by scams all the time because they put their trust in perceived “outsiders”. Alex Jones sold snake oil for decades to conspiracy rubes. Conspiracism is just a different dogmatic worldview.
Conspiracism is a world view and way of thinking. I think Michael Barkun sums it up well. His three principles of conspiracism are nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
In the conspiracist world view, things aren’t caused by negligence or incompetence. There aren’t systemic causes that lead to events. Opportunists don’t jump on opportunities that a chaotic event opens up. Things are caused by plans thought up and executed by cabals of powerful people (illuminati, CIA, “the elites”, banking elite, the deep state).
However things appear isn’t the “real” story. Everything is deception and whatever the true causes are hidden behind the “official narrative”. Large amounts of evidence, scientific studies, and other information are ignored and dismissed. Wild conjecture, random anomalies (“isn’t it weird” style rhetorical questions to show the “official narrative” is false), and other “alternative” evidence are embraced instead.
Things are connected and you need to find the patterns. This is often accompanied by finding “hidden messages” and symbols that show that seemingly unconnected events share a common cause and were conducted by a common group as part of some larger plan.
Skeptical thinking, by contrast, is about questioning claims and doubting things without sufficient evidence. Embracing the scientific method and accepting scientific conclusions, while still remaining open to new information. Examining biases and accepting your own limited knowledge.
A skeptic is just someone looking for real reasons besides those used in whatever propaganda suggests. That reason could be benign or not, but it doesn't mean that some secret organization/cabal is pulling the strings to make the situation what it is.
When some SaaS become unavailable due to some DNS issue, is it a conspiracy that their status page is also not updated when their status page is also affected by the outage or is it the deep state's fault trying to keep the average worker down with a cunning plan? A skeptic sees the outage and the status discrepancy as a company that just got things wrong. The conspiracy nut things the Illuminati it out to get them specifically.
Maybe it helps to have been in/around cults for more time in their youth than one would like to admit, but a skeptic and a conspiracy nut are nothing alike to me.
How so? If you want to have a discussion, you actually need to say something more substantial that two sentences saying "I disagree". What about what I said was superficial and crude? What about any of the modern things that would be called “conspiracies” doesn’t fit what I said? PizzaGate, the government did 9/11, Qanon, the government did Sandy Hook, etc.
You are talking about personas, like they're action figures or something.
"the conspiracy theorist"
"the spy"
"the trusty shieldbarer"
Then you did a mini plot to tell a small storyline that attaches itself to the conversation. I can do that too if I want.
If you do it to help people, then it's good. If you are doing it to confuse someone or get advantage, then it's a dick move.
Raising those issues about "suspecting everything" is something that I've been exposed to my whole life. Specially in the last years, it has been more intense.
Instead, I believe the stronger position is to believe in human kindness. A healthy mixture of skepticism and trust that cannot be put in a box. Being good without being a fool. Which entails the act of sometimes entertaining the dumb conspiracy agitator or other disruptive personalities.
The more you do it, the harder it is for toxic people. They quickly get into a very previsible box and even pretend they like it.
Poorly-presented staging for a scam is part of the process - it allows you to select for only the least credulous of marks. If they fall for something that obvious, then you know you can take for everything they’ve got. That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.
I recently got one such contact through telegram with a so called Chinese worker asking to use my upwork account to get jobs and he will pay me a share of what he makes through my account. I had a quick chat with him to know how he got my contact info and it looks like they just scrape every profile on github and upwork and my username on github was thesame as the one on telegram. After sending him a meme of Kim Jun Un and asking him if he works for him he quickly deleted our wholesale conversation.
During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.
I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.
If they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?
This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.
Baseball was called the national pastime for a reason. Back in the day it was the sport in America. It had a degree of cultural ubiquity that’s hard to understand for us today. Also I assume the questions weren’t about the basic rules of the game but more along the lines of what was going on in the season at the time. The American soldiers would have had up to date news while the Germans would presumably not.
Nah, this is definitely one of those just-so stories that’s too cute to be true. Like it sounds like the person who came up with it started with the idea of using American cultural stuff to tell soldiers apart (which maybe happened in some form at some point) and then worked backwards to try and justify why it would be a common practice with a harsh penalty (German officers who spoke perfect english because they… actually were American… but didn’t follow baseball?)
Edit: It reminds me of my favorite definitely fake boomer story: That people used to call out speedtraps on the highway by pulling over and standing in a salute… because cops can compel you not to alert people of a speedtrap… but they can’t compel you to not salute… because that would violate the first amendment? Before the internet dudes used to just sit around telling each other stories like this.
To be knowledgeable about baseball is hard to fake. Like the GP said, I'd have been shot. I might know some names of players, and I might even get some of their positions correct. If you ask me about ERAs, RBIs, batting averages, I wouldn't have a clue. I might know a large number of teams, but I doubt I know all of them. I absolutely couldn't tell you which ones were in the NL and which were AL, nor what the differences are--something about designated hitters or not.
Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers
So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.
Historically, these kinds of questions were kept relatively simple, like how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), etc. They're also a product of a different time when baseball was much more popular in the US among US youth, with a much stronger youth monoculture, where the only way you didn't play baseball as a kid would be if you were a loner or in a wheelchair, neither of which were consistent with becoming an officer 80-90 years ago.
While it might not be widespread there were stories of it happening, and one alleged story of an American being held(but not harmed) because of his lack of knowledge.
A better one I heard is asking about the second verse of the national anthem. The enemies studied it to know it, but ask your average GI(or most americans) what the 2nd or 3rd verse is, lol.... that's a good trick.
Okay, every other commenter here is talking about how baseball is the national pastime. And, I think you understand that.
I'll rephrase the question a bit here: How could any idiot white male raised in the US in the last 120 years possibly not know about baseball?
What I think was happening was that the US GIs would ask the infiltrating German about current baseball. Not Ty Cobb stuff, but Ted Williams stuff.
Also, for the non-baseball fans here, you have to remember that there were only 16 (28) teams back then [0], essentially no trading of players, and no interleague play. So for your team, you really had to know the core 8 players and a few pitchers. Adding in the other 7 teams gets you to ~80 or so (maximum) and they would reappear on the exact same teams year after year. And there really wasn't any other sports worth mentioning in 1943 [1]. Cognitively, it's a lot less than today.
Also, the Germans wouldn't have access to the information about the 'current-ish' state of the game. It was mostly in newspapers back then, and with the war, getting information from the sports pages out of St. Louis wasn't happening.
Same as it ever was, sports is the lingua franca of the US.
[0] 8 in MLB-NL and 8 in MLB-AL, 6 in NL-NL and 6 in NL-AL (yes, the Negro leagues are the major league, but black GIs weren't on the front lines where Germans would be infiltrating (yes, it's more complicated than this simple comment))
To add to everything you said, another way to think about the importance of baseball at that time is to imagine that all the time kids now spend on Minecraft, TikTok, Pokemon, Twitch, and YouTube was instead directed at just one thing, and that one thing was baseball.
I would guess it would have to be a question of false confidence, akin to: 'What do you think of the cardinals win last night' when in fact there was not even a game. Obviously not sure if thats enough to shoot someone, but you may detect someone that is bullshitting quite well.
The first time I met my Bride's siblings, I was doing everything in my power to fit in. I noticed her brother was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat. Made the comment - is that your favorite baseball team? Her brothers were horrified. Her sisters were thrilled that I did not know either baseball or football.
I was once invited to a Super Bowl party, and I thought sure, I'll come. So I went, and watched the game for a bit on the big TV. I was asked, which team are you rooting for? I answered "the ones in the red shirts".
They did have radio back then, and the American soldiers in Germany must have been following it pretty closely from Germany to be using this interrogation method.
> During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
This did not happen.
However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines.
A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).
Operation Greif (English: Griffin) (German: Unternehmen Greif) was a special operation commanded by Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The operation was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, and its purpose was to capture one or more of the bridges over the Meuse river before they could be destroyed. German soldiers, wearing captured British and U.S. Army uniforms and using captured Allied vehicles, were to cause confusion in the rear of the Allied lines. A lack of vehicles, uniforms and equipment limited the operation and it never achieved its original aim of securing the Meuse bridges. Skorzeny's post-war trial set a precedent clarifying article 4 of the Geneva Convention: as the German soldiers removed the Allied uniforms before engaging in combat, they were not to be considered francs-tireurs.
the joke I heard growing up is they'd ask suspected spies to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and shoot them if they knew the lyrics beyond the first verse!
In Issac Asimov's 1980 short story "No Refuge Could Save", the suspected German spy is identified by a word association test based on the third verse of the national anthem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Refuge_Could_Save
I don't remember the name of the film, but there was one where (Soviet I think?) spies were caught because they threw away their copies of National Geographic.
We can laugh about this stuff here, but it seems to happen on the regular in the Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions.
Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels.
More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime.
A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed.
It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!
When the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell.
Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.
> There was even a case in which an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps, and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Juan Pujol García (Garbo), created a network of phantom sub-agents and eventually convinced the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his fictitious network were absorbed into the main double-cross system and he became so respected by Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. The Germans became dependent on the spurious information that was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double-cross agents.
Juan Pujol Garcia was awarded both the Iron Cross from Germany and the MBE from the UK, which makes him a very literal "double cross" agent having received cross-shaped medals from both sides.
I think some countries in the EU use local variants of that on interviews/exams to gain citizenship for resident foreigners. The UK, as far as I know, has a written exam but you'd better know what kinds of birds are kept at the Tower of London and stuff like that.
> Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.
The exact numbers are unknown but there are a known handful in units like the Wafen-SS. A LOT of documents were destroyed in the fall of the regime. The encounter shown in Band of Brothers supposedly did happen where a PI spoke with a German POW who grew up in America there's no documentation of it but that's not terribly surprising.
There is a very close analogue in Korean, called "say f*cking Kim Jung-un now 김정은 개새끼 해 봐", typically used as an irrelevant Shibboleth-like question to move the goalpost during a discussion. As like most such questions, this method won't last too long even if it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
>it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
Thats the good thing about being a theocratic dictator. Your rules don't have to be consistent, rational or even make sense. Oh if you slander the supreme leader while holding a goose feather that you burn at his monthly worship you are forgiven. Or whatever.
> they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
If so, there might still be limits.
You could make the challenge an n-part, back-and-forth exchange, of increasingly worse insults of that personage.
Complete with escalating to enthusiastic shouting, slapping the table for emphasis, making crude illustrative gestures, etc.
Perhaps there's only so much that an authoritarian work center will tolerate.
For legitimate candidates, doing this at the start of an interview might be sending a confusing message about the corporate office environment. On the other hand, it would serve as an icebreaker, to help candidates feel comfortable sharing. And it will tell you more about the candidate's creativity than Leetcode regurgitation does. Well, until students start buying "Cracking the Techbro Interview: Trash-Talking Edition" books, spending months memorizing lists of insults to recite in interviews, and rehearsing their delivery, with enthusiastic full-arm gesticulating. Actually, that would still be better for the field than Leetcode interviews.
You have two factors working against this. The first is that in a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any opportunities for leverage. The fear of it being (mis)used against you is enough to take it off the table as an option.
The second is that were the regime give permission to speak this way, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, beginning with a large swathe of employees working in espionage.
They could make a very specific exception with serious penalties for misuse.
Similar to how part of the Knights Templar's training was to learn to spit on a cross without spitting on Christ "in their minds" in case they were ever captured and made to do so by their captors.
> Similar to how part of the Knights Templar's training was to learn to spit on a cross without spitting on Christ "in their minds" in case they were ever captured and made to do so by their captors.
It's perhaps more rightthink (only allowing thoughts that would be approved by the party). But as with the parent, I too find the <"i never did $action" thought whilst having performed $action> reminiscent of doublethink... it's at least consistent. I think BB would approve!
It doesn’t seem that much like doublethink to me. More like, common sense. It would be convenient if everyone who was trying to trick us was required to follow their ideology to a silly logical conclusion and provide obvious tells. But, even fanatics are full people.
The Knight Templar is working for a being that can read his mind. Surely it can see through any duplicity that he needs to engage in, in that being’s service.
My understanding is that this account of the Knights Templar is dubious and obtained through torture. It also seems odd: coercion already removes culpability in due proportion, and you're still spitting on Christ.
In any case, we're talking about a dictatorial communist regime, where informants and informing on people is widespread, and where having a case file of excuses to eliminate people is standard. We shouldn't trivialize this by appealing to standards that don't apply here.
So we’ll require RTO for just about everything except paying for flights for in-person interviews, where being in an office might actually significantly matter.
Will never understand the mindset of corporate executives.
But you don't even need in-person interviews. Video interviews work fine of you have any semblance of actual competence as an interviewer, and an awareness to check for these kinds of things.
Video filters are still pretty obvious in real-time, and, like the one example given in the article, if the person says they are from Poland but can't speak Polish, that's a good sign, too.
I’ll always ask this question when these articles appear. How are North Koreans so successful in landing interviews and even jobs?
There are thousands of laid off tech workers desperately trying to get even an interview, let alone a job. Yet, North Koreans having a success rate better than zero seems like a major problem.
The article even says they are interviewing candidates with long complicated names with defunct LinkedIn profiles. Yet, seemingly a normal candidate cannot get past the resume filter.
Tons of articles posted here over the recent years of how broken hiring is and the horror stories. This is taking broken to a whole new level.
I suspect one of my hires may have been North Korean. He passed all the interviews and asked for less compensation than the others, so we hired him. He avoided calls but otherwise did excellent work for about a week — until our KYC and payroll provider flagged him as a fraud.
Our HR always wanted us to do that, but I used to push back.
The company I worked for (as a hiring manager), paid fairly low wages, and expected employees to stay around for a long time, so I often judged candidates by more than “on paper” qualifications.
So basically Yo-Momma-So-Fat jokes transposed to Kim Jong-Un? Those would also capture a pretty deeply American cultural kind of humor (yo-momma jokes)
Why? It is just a fact. The guy is absolutely overweight. Who cares? Lots of people are overweight. This is also a fact. Are we not supposed to acknowledge that?
I'm not the parent commenter, but I feel the same way. Just because something is a fact (although arguably fat doesn't sound very factual) doesn't mean it needs to be discussed during an interview. If someone started Quizzing me on the chemistry of rubber tires for a software dev role, I'd walk too. If someone started listing off the various kinds of sausage there are, I'd walk too. It would make me feel like I'm not taken seriously at best, or that I'm being scammed at worst.
Beyond that, if I looked east Asian, I could also see myself walking on this question for another reason. It would feel like a comment on my ethnic background, which has no place in an interview.
I love this article. It seems like it is lifted directly from a series of LinkedIn posts I shared about my experience with North Korean job scammers. I also wrote a quick guide on how to protect yourself. Link to LinkedIn post in the blog post below.
We're considering this. Tho we want to do an interview with AI to see how they use modern tools, then the rest onsite to avoid many forms of "cheaters".
I guess it comes down to industry. We're on hn so emphasis is on technical ability and in that context what you say is true. I'm in a space that requires trustworthiness is part of the core value proposition so there is little acceptance of outsiders and much emphasis on back channel checks that the candidate is solid. NK fake candidate etc is just not a thing in that context
What's astonishing to me is the number of companies that will supposedly hire someone and give them credentials without even seeing them on camera. The proliferation of this narrative seems somewhat real and somewhat calculated to further undermine the legitimacy of remote work. But you would think something like "in-person orientation" and requiring that people use their cameras in meetings would solve a lot of the issues here.
"deepfaking" video[0] and voice is relatively easy these days, and is definitely being employed by some of these candidates. Lower the "webcam" quality a little bit, and it can be difficult for many interviewers to notice something is off.
Their position within the grasp of the first-world "stay in line or go to jail" mechanism is fake. They cannot be trusted, because they are essentially above (beyond) the law.
I presume the candidate needs to provide his address. Have someone else google street map it, and then at some point ask "what is the color of your front door?" If he takes more than 5 seconds to answer it, end the interview.
Why does knowing your front door color have anything to do with hiring? You might just be someone who's very focused on things, so much so that you ignore the environment around you to focus!
I understand that, my claim is that you'd get false negatives- people who aren't laptop farm users but don't know the color of their front door and aren't at home to check.
That was my answer when I read the question in the comment you’re replying to… because it’s actually true, and I have looked up my house on street view (as many probably have).
In fact I’d bet a good chunk of people, especially tech literate people, could tell you the most recent date of Google Street View for their house.
You could ask any question that the resident of a house would know the answer to. Like do you have any trees in your front yard. Is there a McDonald's at the street corner. Do you have a tile or asphalt roof. Do you have a 1 or a 2 car garage. And so on.
>This is most likely a laptop farm, where someone in the US agrees to run the laptop from a legitimate address for a fee, typically around $200 a computer, according to Meyers. Last year the FBI busted one such operation in Nashville, Tennessee, and charged the operator with conspiracy to cause damage to protected computers, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, intentional damage to protected computers, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to cause the unlawful employment of aliens.
I don't quite understand the "laptop farm" concept. Can anyone explain it?
Employers in the U.S. are expecting to see domestic IP addresses.
A laptop farm hosts the corporate laptop (domestically) that is sent to the remote worker. Hardware is provided to work the power remotely, along with all other functions.
Once again showing that "IP Address" filtering is pretty useless if you're trying to keep out someone who's targeting you. It probably does work somewhat to stop bots and crawlers.
You have a bunch of laptops running software that accesses services that are normally restricted (like access per IP or IPs from certain countries would set off alarm bells) the client paying for the laptop can run something that does the work or submits the work from the IP address space that is OK. I contracted for one company and saw an office that had one department with a closet full of laptops scanning Craigslist ads because they were getting blocked if they didn’t take this measure but don’t know the details but they figured out a workaround and automated it to scrape data daily from all Craigslists regions daily.
At many jobs it will need to be more sophisticated than simple IP spoofing, because the laptops have EDR software installed to monitor employee usage. It would be suspicious if the employee laptop is doing nothing but proxy internet traffic.
I suspect these farms have full-fledged remote KVM setups.
>'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly,
I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.
I would think the people doing this are not the lowest level foot soldiers but are somewhat closer to elites and as such can afford to be a tiny bit cynical if the dear leader signals his approval.
On one such call with a scammer I called him out and said he’s from North Korea. He got a bit mixed up and started rebuffing me. The call got cut off mid-sentence, as if someone else pulled the plug.
There are other tell tale signs that you can watch out for (at least for now)
In this case the person doing the mocking is the interviewer. I don't see why the interviewee doesn't just say, "I have no idea" and let the interview continue. Why would that be forbidden?
Like Cartman from South Park, if the interviewee responds, "he's not fat, he's big-boned!" that would be at least 20+ points for culture fit right there.
> I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.
The Muslim fundamentalists to did 9/11 shaved their beards to look less suspicious.
I wonder what other creative ways there are to expose North Korean employees. That fat question is hilarious but I bet there’s even more hilarious possible questions.
Easy to make a legit-looking LinkedIn profile. Start as a recruiter with unbelievable code-in-your-pajamas job openings, connect to 500 developers, then suddenly change to a developer. And phone farms aren't much of a stretch from laptop farms.
Honestly, if hiring standards have fallen so low that NK operatives are able to get through, then more power to them.
I'd be shocked if a simple 15-20 minute conversation with the interviewee's perspective manager wouldn't eliminate all chance of this happening. Video filters are still obvious in real time, any decent interviewer can tell if a person is being fed answers, just ask them more detailed information about their background and projects and not just leetcode-type questions.
All of this just goes to show how abysmal (in some cases anyway) the hiring process is for offshore workers in the first place.
You can weed these people out with basically any question. "What's the difference between an inner join and an outer join". These guys always sound like they're reading out of a textbook.
This is not a difficult problem. My last position had me take a drug test. I had to go to an actual building, show my ID, and the place/results were logged. They also did a background check, which presumably would have flagged any issues. I think I emailed a copy of my ID. One interviewer even flew me out for a day. They're making an issue out of nothing, and it's not clear why.
> and maybe also avoid hiring fully remote employees.
Background checks won’t detect fraudulent documents used to initiate the check. In my experience you need to provide typical identity information (passport, insurance number, address, etc.). If the applicant has stolen a legitimate identity, they will simply continue to provide documents consistent with that identity.
In-person interviews are the most robust solution to the problem.
I don’t think passing the job interview is too difficult if one works as a team and intended to deceive. More difficult is IMO the transfer of money. They must establish a wide networks with many “stealth” bank accounts. I suppose one can open such bank accounts with a fake identity but it’s not simple. The control of financial flow is much tighter than things on the internet.
I'm now seeing this all over the place, and if it worked up to now then that's over. NK will just give people a recommended way of answering the question, and if they follow the script they won't get in trouble. Like perhaps, Kim who? Oh, the North Korean leader? Sorry, I have no idea. Further questions about NK can just be deflected with "I don't follow that stuff, sorry".
I think it's silly as well, but I also imagine that deflecting this way would also be extremely suspicious. The agent would probably just think that the jig is up and move on to the next target.
Perhaps the thinking is that if someone is asked, how fat is Kim, they've been outed so they might as well quit. But if employers start asking that of any Asian remote work applicant, then they can just brazen it out.
My CV has so much experience in so many countries that I'd been nonchalantly asked multiple times "is this or that a lie?". At some point I realised that I don't even have to work anymore and now I don't bother applying. You deserve all this, folks.
I played a game of Taboo (a party game) yesterday night. I asked the question "the surname of the leader of party ..." (the third largest one in my country). The guy I asked it to looked at me and answered "I have no idea." He's old enough to vote even if he didn't have to do it yet. Leaders of foreign countries? Maybe he doesn't know where to place North Korea on a map, even the general area.
OK, we could say that the lack of a general culture could be a hint not to hire that person so that could be a legitimate termination of the interview anyway.
i would think some of our taboo words that a re borderline illegal and I am scared to even type the first letter of with asterixes because i am on a work computer
How are these people getting hired today when I can’t even swing a consistent interview with twenty years experience?
Not to mention it seems a VPN to Asia and back would add multiple seconds to every response, plus answer support in earpiece delay. How is that not very noticeable?
Asking a candidate about how fat someone is definitely does sound like something that would get an interviewer in trouble.
Many people are deeply insecure about their weight, many women feel very uncomfortable when men make any comment about anyone's weight, body or appearance. The candidate might post on Glassdoor or LinkedIn about the hostile (and possibly sexist or "bro-y" or noninclusive or discriminatory) environment.
Even aside from the HR type concerns, it could legitimately negatively impact the candidate's performance. Imagine an overweight applicant being asked that question, feeling flustered and embarrassed while answering "... about as fat as me?" and then trying to reverse a linked list or whatever as their next question.
I wonder how incredibly naive you have to be about intelligence work to read this article and not facepalm/eyerole this article. Have we realy stooped to kindergarthen level of stories now? Idiocracy seemes to have erred on the safe side reading current media.
Woosh. It's always been allowed to call a fat person fat. File a complaint under the 1st amendment if you don't like someone asking the question. File a complaint under the 5th if are being forced to answer the question. File a complaint with Supreme Leader if this question is bothering you and these rights do not apply to you.
> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly, because it's not worth it to say something negative about that,"
They likely terminate the call because you come across as so naive and simplistic that you're unlikely to be in possession of any good IP worth stealing.
Edit: I am confused, on one hand these are sophisticated state sponsored actors, on the other, they can't respond "I don't know?". Which one is it? I think this whole "North Koreans are afraid of offending Kim Jong Un" is an overplayed trope.
Or it can be auto-triggered. I remember a history of a Call of Duty game were a number of players were being annoying, cheating and making the game horrible to play. Someone wrote in the chat "Tiananmen Square massacre" and instantly more than half the players were disconnected.
Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.
In a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any leverage. The fear of it being recorded and used against you is enough. Also, if the regime were to give permission to speak in this manner, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, including employees working in espionage.
They actually also interview for Chinese companies too. I have a friend who got a big shock when he saw someone wearing military uniform on Zoom. Apparently they didn't bother to hide the identities. My friend told me that the interviewee has very, very good skills (e.g. deep knowledge of X11) but he quickly declined him.
He dug a bit deeper and found out that the North Koreans have special programs for gifted kids. They send them to the schools for dedicated CS education. They also (presumably without proof) have access to the source code of various commercial closed source software.
It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal. But I always wonder, wouldn't they burn out eventually? Maybe they can switch fields or become teachers, though.
> wouldn't they burn out eventually?
They also might not have a choice depending on how much their skills are worth to the gov't... if North Korean.
Yeah I heard the security is tight. They are basically just sitting in the hotel full-time. They can't get out because it's foreign land.
I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do but passion comes and goes so I never got the grit to actually learn much.
Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of a "coding boot camp".
haha a true camp...
Knowing NK, they’re probably part of a genetic breeding program targeting complacency and intelligence. Why fix the system when you can fix the individual?
what a sick thought! imagine that, people that are born to code, hack, reverse engineer, etc... and loyal to the core. I want a book on this...
“A Deepness in the Sky”, by Vernor Vinge. Excellent book, with a concept very close to this as an element.
You don’t need to read “A Fire Upon the Deep” first… the stories are more or less unrelated except for setting. (There is one character who is sort of in both, but going into detail about what that means would spoil it too much).
Both are excellent and worth the time. Skip the other Vinge books until you are sure you want to read everything he wrote, they are “merely” 8/10 instead of 10/10.
Vinge was a CS professor who really made sure everything “fit” together in his works. Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.
NB that Vinge was the one who popularized the concept of “the technological Singularity”. His books have interesting authors notes where he talks about coming up with ways to write about a far future when he believes that the Singularity is right on track for 2050-2100.
FWIW I found A Deepness in the Sky to be much better than his other books (I read Deepness first). Vinge’s talent for prose got better over time and it’s one of the more imaginative scifi books I’ve read. It can be consumed completely independently and after that one character’s big reveal in Deepness, they just weren’t as interesting in A Fire Upon the Deep. I really wish we had gotten a sequel to Deepeness.
Luckily I quickly discovered that the Children of Time series filled my need for more spider scifi.
I don’t think Children of Time really matches Deepness in terms of quality, though I guess it’s a distinction between 9/10 and 10/10 :)
A Deepness in the Sky conceptualized "weaponized autism" before that phrase became a thing and I love it.
> Although “A Fire Upon the Deep”, started in the late 80s and published in 1992, posits that civilizations much more advanced and capable than ours would be communicating primarily through something like Usenet, which feels a little quaint.
It's sometimes enormously funny when you were around to witness Usenet. Especially when you realize there's one guy who all along knows something about the story's most essential reveal - but writes like a deranged conspiracy theorist, so nobody really talks to him.
Didn’t the nazis try something similar?
Already been done,
"A Brave New World" by Aldus Huxley
Plato detected
Real autists don’t need to be forced. They’ll put themselves into that cram room. It gives them superpowers. Really.
I don’t get why more companies don’t leverage this better.
> I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do
I don’t think that’s appropriate. You’re jesting about it, NKs working abroad are basically prisoners and their families taken hostages (as in don’t come back or do something we don’t like and we’ll kill your wife and children)
Hardly comparable.
Burn out doesn't seem so bad when you compare it to your family and friends who barely have enough to eat.
Yeah definitely. I wish we were able to read more insider stories.
Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I highly recommend "The Real North Korea" by Andrei Lankov. It really helped to demystify the country for me.
To get some quick insights on North Korea, Andrei Lankov talks about it in this podcast: https://podcast.silverado.org/episodes/why-north-korea-is-pl...
I have read The Aquariums of Pyongyang and Escape from Camp 14, both of which are very good. I think that Aquariums is a better overall book, as the author adds context and background throughout the narrative. Camp 14 is more straightforward and limited to his experience, which for a North Korean is quite limited. They are pretty dated at this point (2000 and 2012, respectively) so there are probably more timely options available now.
I wish we were able to read any trustworthy insider stories. Trying to tease apart propaganda from earnest storytelling is quite difficult ini english.
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I imagine "a job is a job, everyone's gotta work to eat and sleep" is a pretty universal experience, unless there are post-scarcity societies that have popped up somewhere I haven't heard of. The difference among our scoieties is the degree to which everyone else accepts that it's "just a job". And of course your ability to sleep at night.
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>It's a good pay job (comparing to other NKs) and they get to do what they love, so they are pretty loyal.
I would imagine the state takes the vast majority of their pay.
Burn out, or are shot out of a cannon.
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This comment is simultaneously fascinating and incomprehensible.
They literally all die the moment China stops subsidizing their disaster of a nation.
> "One of the things that we've noted is that you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name," he recounted, "and then when you get them on Zoom calls it's a military age male Asian who can't pronounce it."
Why not simply pretend they are from South Korea?
Tinfoil: Maybe these ones are supposed to fail so everyone feels like they are so clever in stopping them.
Friend's comment:
> Konichiwa, Brzęczyszczykiewicz-san.
> Brzęczyszczykiewicz
For anyone not familiar, this is a Polish joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
That is hilarious and would be hilarious even without any context.
If I don't bookmark it now then I'll never be able to find it again. :-)
Born?
Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody
Sometimes I wonder why Polish didn’t replace the z digrams with accented letters (č, ž etc.) like many other Slavic languages.
Ah but we have those too :)
The 'rz' phoneme has the same sound as the letter 'ż' which is a different sound from the letter 'ź' (the latter being a softer sound - one that foreigners usually find easier to reproduce).
Whether you write a word with the 'rz' or the 'ż' is governed by a set of orthographic rules that are of course peppered with numerous exceptions.
Why would we? It "just works". We've only changed how we write the letter "ż" some 30-20 years ago. It was previously "ƶ". Also, "ż" and "ź" are not accents but separate alphabet letters.
There was no typeface change for “ż” - the other typeface is sometimes used now as it was 30 years ago. See the foto at Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BB
Early primary schooling in the early 90s and some preschool teaching in the late 80s taught me to write "ż" as a "ƶ"[0].
> It represents the same sound in the Polish alphabet, remaining in active usage by some as an alternative for the letter Ż (called "Z with overdot").
> In Polish, the character Ƶ is used as an allographic variant of the letter ⟨Ż⟩ (called "Z with overdot") although once used in Old Polish.
Funnily, there's a counter-argument to "Straż Miejska" from article you linked, with "Straƶ Miejska" in another Wikipedia entry[1] :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_with_stroke
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Straz_plakietka.svg
I started school in 1980 and I don’t remember this. Also books don’t use this typeface no matter how old.
And yet, you can see the "Straƶ Miejska" logotype linked in my comment above, with a crown on the eagle, so post-December 31, 1989[0].
It may depend on the region (I was raised in the eastern Poland) but I also remember that in the primary school we used a different symbol for the letter "s". But only in hand-writing while any printed "s" looked like it does currently. I'm unable to find the UTF-8 character resembling the hand-written version.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Poland#
You’ll soon find that languages evolved over centuries do not care about consistency and simplicity in grammar rules.
Cyrillic would fit so much better.
Additionally, Polish also has more different consonants that e.g. Czech, where the haček accents were first introduced.
sz contrast with ś/si, as does cz and ć/ci, or ż/rz and ź/zi, or dż and dź/dzi
(might have swapped one or two)
Add in some good etymological reasons why the consonant+i combinations are not respelled and the whole thing makes a lot of sense.
You could also look at Croatian, which has a similar contrast with e.g. "C", so they use "č" and "ć". This could be easily extended to "s" and "z". Or you could take "ż" and apply the same diacritic to "c" and "s".
"rz" is a bit of a special case since it's pretty much etymological - what used to be "r", and corresponds to "r" in the same roots in other Slavic languages, but became to be pronounced like "ź" in Polish. What to do about it depends on whether you want your orthography to be purely phonemic (a better choice IMO, just look at South Slavic languages - it works great for them!) or retain the etymological distinction. But even then it would be better off as a diacritic.
What would be really neat tho is having a single Latin-based notation that works consistently across all Slavic languages, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_alphabet. For example, we could use cedilla to represent post-alveolars: ç and ş - and then use acute accent to indicate palatalization ("softness"). So e.g in Czech you'd only need s/ş, in Polish you'd use s/ş/ş́, and in Russian you'd have all four possible combinations s/ś/ş/ş́.
> "rz" is a bit of a special case (...) pronounced like "ź" in Polish
Tiny correction: "rz" is spelled exactly like "ż", while "ź" sounds differently.
At this point it’s a unique aspect of the language, so much so that changing sz to š for example would feel like a betrayal. There are also a few letters without similar sounds in other Slavic languages (ą and ę) so you’d end up retaining those anyway.
Those make sense since they aren't digraphs. But c'mon, comparing Czech to Polish, it's pretty clear which orthography was designed first, and which learned from the mistakes of the other :)
Ok, is it a declaration of war?!
Naaah, let's exchange knedlíky and pierogi recipes, make silly jokes about the other language over a few beers and we're good.
Why not have both?
When you are dealing with intelligence services and others who work through deceit that sort of thinking is not tinfoil.
I have come to a conclusion about this "tinfoil" thing.
Expectation: intelligence services, spies, secrets
Reality: bunch of ponzi schemers, arrogant sub revolutionaries, greedy people, envious people. All together in a pseudo network of trust, always at each other's throats. Unrepentable and thus, impossible to forgive. Sad but not much.
Isn't that what intelligence services and spies are like too? Adam Curtis wrote a great article on it once:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk...
so even though reality isn't exactly as the expected, they are still detecting them because they are more sensitive to situation than normies. situational awareness is not a bad thing even if the reason your heightened awareness is up for a different reason.
What are you even talking about?
Sounds like complete bullshit. Your response is exactly the sort of thing I see as a social scam. Situation awareness? That makes no fucking sense.
you've never heard the term situational awareness? that's funny.
if someone thinks there's a conspiracy behind everything so they trust nothing and then it turns out that the thing could not be trusted but because of a different reason than the suspected conspiracy doesn't make the conspiracy theorist wrong about the lack of trust. just the reason for the lack of trust.
compare that to someone that trusts everything. they get screwed because they were not paying attention to trust should be suspect. yet the kooky conspiracy person was better off even if for the not so right reason
A conspiracist shouldn’t be confused with a skeptic that attempts to practice and employ critical thinking and structured analysis to issues. Conspiracists get taken in by scams all the time because they put their trust in perceived “outsiders”. Alex Jones sold snake oil for decades to conspiracy rubes. Conspiracism is just a different dogmatic worldview.
Can you elaborate on the difference?
Conspiracism is a world view and way of thinking. I think Michael Barkun sums it up well. His three principles of conspiracism are nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
In the conspiracist world view, things aren’t caused by negligence or incompetence. There aren’t systemic causes that lead to events. Opportunists don’t jump on opportunities that a chaotic event opens up. Things are caused by plans thought up and executed by cabals of powerful people (illuminati, CIA, “the elites”, banking elite, the deep state).
However things appear isn’t the “real” story. Everything is deception and whatever the true causes are hidden behind the “official narrative”. Large amounts of evidence, scientific studies, and other information are ignored and dismissed. Wild conjecture, random anomalies (“isn’t it weird” style rhetorical questions to show the “official narrative” is false), and other “alternative” evidence are embraced instead.
Things are connected and you need to find the patterns. This is often accompanied by finding “hidden messages” and symbols that show that seemingly unconnected events share a common cause and were conducted by a common group as part of some larger plan.
Skeptical thinking, by contrast, is about questioning claims and doubting things without sufficient evidence. Embracing the scientific method and accepting scientific conclusions, while still remaining open to new information. Examining biases and accepting your own limited knowledge.
That sounds like a very superficial take on it. Like you're describing Fox Mulder and Scully. Those are very crude simplifications.
A skeptic is just someone looking for real reasons besides those used in whatever propaganda suggests. That reason could be benign or not, but it doesn't mean that some secret organization/cabal is pulling the strings to make the situation what it is.
When some SaaS become unavailable due to some DNS issue, is it a conspiracy that their status page is also not updated when their status page is also affected by the outage or is it the deep state's fault trying to keep the average worker down with a cunning plan? A skeptic sees the outage and the status discrepancy as a company that just got things wrong. The conspiracy nut things the Illuminati it out to get them specifically.
Maybe it helps to have been in/around cults for more time in their youth than one would like to admit, but a skeptic and a conspiracy nut are nothing alike to me.
How so? If you want to have a discussion, you actually need to say something more substantial that two sentences saying "I disagree". What about what I said was superficial and crude? What about any of the modern things that would be called “conspiracies” doesn’t fit what I said? PizzaGate, the government did 9/11, Qanon, the government did Sandy Hook, etc.
Sounds like bullshit.
You are talking about personas, like they're action figures or something.
"the conspiracy theorist"
"the spy"
"the trusty shieldbarer"
Then you did a mini plot to tell a small storyline that attaches itself to the conversation. I can do that too if I want.
If you do it to help people, then it's good. If you are doing it to confuse someone or get advantage, then it's a dick move.
Raising those issues about "suspecting everything" is something that I've been exposed to my whole life. Specially in the last years, it has been more intense.
Instead, I believe the stronger position is to believe in human kindness. A healthy mixture of skepticism and trust that cannot be put in a box. Being good without being a fool. Which entails the act of sometimes entertaining the dumb conspiracy agitator or other disruptive personalities.
The more you do it, the harder it is for toxic people. They quickly get into a very previsible box and even pretend they like it.
You seriously never noticed John Krasinski is Asian? Hats off to you for not seeing race!
Poorly-presented staging for a scam is part of the process - it allows you to select for only the least credulous of marks. If they fall for something that obvious, then you know you can take for everything they’ve got. That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.
>That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.
I always hear people repeating this, but in my experience this is not true. People doing mass scams are just not very competent.
Might work, but they'd have to learn to mask their NK accent.
I recently got one such contact through telegram with a so called Chinese worker asking to use my upwork account to get jobs and he will pay me a share of what he makes through my account. I had a quick chat with him to know how he got my contact info and it looks like they just scrape every profile on github and upwork and my username on github was thesame as the one on telegram. After sending him a meme of Kim Jun Un and asking him if he works for him he quickly deleted our wholesale conversation.
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During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.
I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.
If they spoke perfect English and grew up in the US, why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?
This sounds like it can't have been true, or at least, can't have been common practice, because the false positive rate would be way too high for shooting a person.
Baseball was called the national pastime for a reason. Back in the day it was the sport in America. It had a degree of cultural ubiquity that’s hard to understand for us today. Also I assume the questions weren’t about the basic rules of the game but more along the lines of what was going on in the season at the time. The American soldiers would have had up to date news while the Germans would presumably not.
Nah, this is definitely one of those just-so stories that’s too cute to be true. Like it sounds like the person who came up with it started with the idea of using American cultural stuff to tell soldiers apart (which maybe happened in some form at some point) and then worked backwards to try and justify why it would be a common practice with a harsh penalty (German officers who spoke perfect english because they… actually were American… but didn’t follow baseball?)
Edit: It reminds me of my favorite definitely fake boomer story: That people used to call out speedtraps on the highway by pulling over and standing in a salute… because cops can compel you not to alert people of a speedtrap… but they can’t compel you to not salute… because that would violate the first amendment? Before the internet dudes used to just sit around telling each other stories like this.
To be knowledgeable about baseball is hard to fake. Like the GP said, I'd have been shot. I might know some names of players, and I might even get some of their positions correct. If you ask me about ERAs, RBIs, batting averages, I wouldn't have a clue. I might know a large number of teams, but I doubt I know all of them. I absolutely couldn't tell you which ones were in the NL and which were AL, nor what the differences are--something about designated hitters or not.
Also, they could just have them count three strikes using their fingers
So it's perfectly reasonable that a person of German ancestry would just not care about American sports.
I'm not saying it wouldn't detect spies, but a test is no good if it also results in summary executions of one in every five apple-pie Americans.
When you're fighting for your life, yes it would be acceptable, and yes it happened.
There's no evidence people were summarily executed for bad answers. People were detained through this method though
Operation Greif
What was described above is someone asking another person a factoid about baseball and then shooting them if given an incorrect answer.
You're referring to instances of captured spies (potentially captured by said baseball questions) being tried as spies and executed.
The former did not happen, the latter did happen (which I don't think anyone here would've disputed).
Historically, these kinds of questions were kept relatively simple, like how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), etc. They're also a product of a different time when baseball was much more popular in the US among US youth, with a much stronger youth monoculture, where the only way you didn't play baseball as a kid would be if you were a loner or in a wheelchair, neither of which were consistent with becoming an officer 80-90 years ago.
Wouldn't that also apply to the spies, if they grew up in the US?
It would seem like a German who spoke perfect American English bc they had grown up here would be able to answer these basic facts
>how many bases are there, how many strikes, how many balls, how many innings, what's the name of the referee (answer: umpire), et
What percentage of Germans who grew up in the US and speak perfect American English can't answer those basic questions correctly?
While it might not be widespread there were stories of it happening, and one alleged story of an American being held(but not harmed) because of his lack of knowledge.
A better one I heard is asking about the second verse of the national anthem. The enemies studied it to know it, but ask your average GI(or most americans) what the 2nd or 3rd verse is, lol.... that's a good trick.
Okay, every other commenter here is talking about how baseball is the national pastime. And, I think you understand that.
I'll rephrase the question a bit here: How could any idiot white male raised in the US in the last 120 years possibly not know about baseball?
What I think was happening was that the US GIs would ask the infiltrating German about current baseball. Not Ty Cobb stuff, but Ted Williams stuff.
Also, for the non-baseball fans here, you have to remember that there were only 16 (28) teams back then [0], essentially no trading of players, and no interleague play. So for your team, you really had to know the core 8 players and a few pitchers. Adding in the other 7 teams gets you to ~80 or so (maximum) and they would reappear on the exact same teams year after year. And there really wasn't any other sports worth mentioning in 1943 [1]. Cognitively, it's a lot less than today.
Also, the Germans wouldn't have access to the information about the 'current-ish' state of the game. It was mostly in newspapers back then, and with the war, getting information from the sports pages out of St. Louis wasn't happening.
Same as it ever was, sports is the lingua franca of the US.
[0] 8 in MLB-NL and 8 in MLB-AL, 6 in NL-NL and 6 in NL-AL (yes, the Negro leagues are the major league, but black GIs weren't on the front lines where Germans would be infiltrating (yes, it's more complicated than this simple comment))
[1] The NFL was pretty nascent still.
To add to everything you said, another way to think about the importance of baseball at that time is to imagine that all the time kids now spend on Minecraft, TikTok, Pokemon, Twitch, and YouTube was instead directed at just one thing, and that one thing was baseball.
I would guess it would have to be a question of false confidence, akin to: 'What do you think of the cardinals win last night' when in fact there was not even a game. Obviously not sure if thats enough to shoot someone, but you may detect someone that is bullshitting quite well.
The first time I met my Bride's siblings, I was doing everything in my power to fit in. I noticed her brother was wearing a Miami Dolphins hat. Made the comment - is that your favorite baseball team? Her brothers were horrified. Her sisters were thrilled that I did not know either baseball or football.
I'd get shot for getting that one wrong, too.
I was once invited to a Super Bowl party, and I thought sure, I'll come. So I went, and watched the game for a bit on the big TV. I was asked, which team are you rooting for? I answered "the ones in the red shirts".
That didn't go over well.
> why would they be less knowledgeable about baseball than any other American who happened to have little interest in baseball?
Because their knowledge of teams and scores and wins and players would be 4 years out of date.
Amazing how nobody can imagine a world before the internet and satellite television.
Following American baseball news from Germany in detail would be virtually impossible in the 1940s.
They did have radio back then, and the American soldiers in Germany must have been following it pretty closely from Germany to be using this interrogation method.
> During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
This did not happen.
However, at the time, in the massive confusion of a wholly unexpected large-scale German attack, rumours and paranoia were rife, including that of German parachute landings behind the lines.
A result of this was the widespread belief, at the time, that Germans had infiltrated and were giving fake orders, etc, and so troops were indeed widely being suspected, and asked for example the capital of Illinois and so on (and being asked by privates, who did not know that the actual capital is Springfield rather than Chicago, to generals, who did know).
Operation Greif (English: Griffin) (German: Unternehmen Greif) was a special operation commanded by Waffen-SS commando Otto Skorzeny during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The operation was the brainchild of Adolf Hitler, and its purpose was to capture one or more of the bridges over the Meuse river before they could be destroyed. German soldiers, wearing captured British and U.S. Army uniforms and using captured Allied vehicles, were to cause confusion in the rear of the Allied lines. A lack of vehicles, uniforms and equipment limited the operation and it never achieved its original aim of securing the Meuse bridges. Skorzeny's post-war trial set a precedent clarifying article 4 of the Geneva Convention: as the German soldiers removed the Allied uniforms before engaging in combat, they were not to be considered francs-tireurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif
the joke I heard growing up is they'd ask suspected spies to sing the Star Spangled Banner, and shoot them if they knew the lyrics beyond the first verse!
In Issac Asimov's 1980 short story "No Refuge Could Save", the suspected German spy is identified by a word association test based on the third verse of the national anthem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Refuge_Could_Save
What are the last two words of the star spangled banner? "Play ball!"
reminds me of a spoof game show I saw once.
It was something like Are you as smart as a 5th grader?
A question would be something like "Who was the 5th president?" and the answer was "Benjamin Franklin" or similar. :)
Maybe a spy could finally explain to me what it means for light to be donzerly.
I think you may have misheard the lyrics. It's "donzer lee lights". Obviously, "donzerly" is not a word, but all lee lights are donzer.
Oh, it makes so much more sense now.
Implicitly, I suppose that makes the lights on the windward side blitzen.
Ok, I found the German imposter right here.
Oh no! Damn you, Gene Autry!
The general don zerlyite was an important figure in the defense of Ft McHenrry
dawn's early light :-)
I don't remember the name of the film, but there was one where (Soviet I think?) spies were caught because they threw away their copies of National Geographic.
I have my grandmother's NGs from the 1920's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Greif
We can laugh about this stuff here, but it seems to happen on the regular in the Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic liturgy is so stringently regulated that it is in fact very difficult for any priest or layman to stay current after a decade or more has passed. Perhaps this is one of the genius moves of the vernacular liturgy: that the Latin liturgy hardly changed its words for 500 years, but English and other languages are being constantly retranslated and reinterpreted with new Missal editions.
Case in point: the neutering of the Church for 40 years. The Church was made an "it" in English, and only after a top-down correction was issued did she become feminine again. This did a lot of trauma to many Catholics on visceral levels.
More up to date changes include the addition of "Holy" to "...for our good and the good of all His [Holy] Church]." this one is guaranteed to catch out anyone who's not been to Mass in 10+ years, such as at a wedding, funeral, or Christmastime.
A very recent priest's change is "...who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, [One] God, forever and ever. Amen." the "One" is now omitted, as of last year or so, and in fact every church was compelled to scratch it out in their existing Missals until new editions could be printed.
It is these sort of very subtle yet urgent changes that can really trip someone up if they're not 100% current with liturgical directives. So if you ever suspect you got a fake priest marrying you, see if he says "One God" or not!
When the pre-cursor to MI5 would interrogate suspected German spies during the war, they would ask them to talk about squirrels, and they'd mangle the word so badly, no matter who well trained, that it was an easy tell.
Related: after the war, they were concerned that there were Nazi spies still in England they hadn't uncovered. When the files in Berlin were seized, they went through every single asset sent to England. Not only had they successfully identified every agent, and turned quite a few into double-agents, they also noted that very few agents going the other way had ever been detected.
Yup. They managed to catch and frequently turn literally everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System
> There was even a case in which an agent started running deception operations independently from Portugal using little more than guidebooks, maps, and a very vivid imagination to convince his Abwehr handlers that he was spying in the UK. This agent, Juan Pujol García (Garbo), created a network of phantom sub-agents and eventually convinced the British authorities that he could be useful. He and his fictitious network were absorbed into the main double-cross system and he became so respected by Abwehr that they stopped landing agents in Britain after 1942. The Germans became dependent on the spurious information that was fed to them by Garbo's network and the other double-cross agents.
Juan Pujol Garcia was awarded both the Iron Cross from Germany and the MBE from the UK, which makes him a very literal "double cross" agent having received cross-shaped medals from both sides.
I'm very curious to know if he ever wore them both. Would be a fun double-take to someone in the know.
The problem was of course that they were looking too far west.
In the movie “Stalag 17”, the Germans place a spy among the US prisoners. The spy is a German who grew up in the US and speaks English without accent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_17
I remember seeing something similar on Masters of the Air, where the Resistance would question downed airmen :
https://youtube.com/shorts/EJmmq0yc08U?si=dnFXr0IgJh18pmp-
I think some countries in the EU use local variants of that on interviews/exams to gain citizenship for resident foreigners. The UK, as far as I know, has a written exam but you'd better know what kinds of birds are kept at the Tower of London and stuff like that.
> Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.
Curious if you have any links that go into this further. Were they Americans of German descent who rejoined family in Germany, or? I'm sure it's not monolithic but curious if there was a pattern.
The exact numbers are unknown but there are a known handful in units like the Wafen-SS. A LOT of documents were destroyed in the fall of the regime. The encounter shown in Band of Brothers supposedly did happen where a PI spoke with a German POW who grew up in America there's no documentation of it but that's not terribly surprising.
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/german-ame...
Very interesting, thanks much for the link!
Mark Felton has a good video on it: https://youtu.be/1dninvXjUzA?si=Qdm6D97qPb8Dmzbl
Otto Skorzeny was an interesting man.
Drei Gläser!
[dead]
There is a very close analogue in Korean, called "say f*cking Kim Jung-un now 김정은 개새끼 해 봐", typically used as an irrelevant Shibboleth-like question to move the goalpost during a discussion. As like most such questions, this method won't last too long even if it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
>it supposedly works right now; they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
Thats the good thing about being a theocratic dictator. Your rules don't have to be consistent, rational or even make sense. Oh if you slander the supreme leader while holding a goose feather that you burn at his monthly worship you are forgiven. Or whatever.
> they will be absolutely allowed to say so if the interviewer demands that.
If so, there might still be limits.
You could make the challenge an n-part, back-and-forth exchange, of increasingly worse insults of that personage.
Complete with escalating to enthusiastic shouting, slapping the table for emphasis, making crude illustrative gestures, etc.
Perhaps there's only so much that an authoritarian work center will tolerate.
For legitimate candidates, doing this at the start of an interview might be sending a confusing message about the corporate office environment. On the other hand, it would serve as an icebreaker, to help candidates feel comfortable sharing. And it will tell you more about the candidate's creativity than Leetcode regurgitation does. Well, until students start buying "Cracking the Techbro Interview: Trash-Talking Edition" books, spending months memorizing lists of insults to recite in interviews, and rehearsing their delivery, with enthusiastic full-arm gesticulating. Actually, that would still be better for the field than Leetcode interviews.
Not exactly.
You have two factors working against this. The first is that in a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any opportunities for leverage. The fear of it being (mis)used against you is enough to take it off the table as an option.
The second is that were the regime give permission to speak this way, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, beginning with a large swathe of employees working in espionage.
They could make a very specific exception with serious penalties for misuse.
Similar to how part of the Knights Templar's training was to learn to spit on a cross without spitting on Christ "in their minds" in case they were ever captured and made to do so by their captors.
> Similar to how part of the Knights Templar's training was to learn to spit on a cross without spitting on Christ "in their minds" in case they were ever captured and made to do so by their captors.
Eerily reminiscent of 1984's doublethink.
I don't think the comparison is apt.
Doublethink is to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously. The spitting on the cross thing is to say/do something without actually believing it.
It's perhaps more rightthink (only allowing thoughts that would be approved by the party). But as with the parent, I too find the <"i never did $action" thought whilst having performed $action> reminiscent of doublethink... it's at least consistent. I think BB would approve!
Very much the current USA zeitgeist.
It doesn’t seem that much like doublethink to me. More like, common sense. It would be convenient if everyone who was trying to trick us was required to follow their ideology to a silly logical conclusion and provide obvious tells. But, even fanatics are full people.
The Knight Templar is working for a being that can read his mind. Surely it can see through any duplicity that he needs to engage in, in that being’s service.
My understanding is that this account of the Knights Templar is dubious and obtained through torture. It also seems odd: coercion already removes culpability in due proportion, and you're still spitting on Christ.
In any case, we're talking about a dictatorial communist regime, where informants and informing on people is widespread, and where having a case file of excuses to eliminate people is standard. We shouldn't trivialize this by appealing to standards that don't apply here.
So we’ll require RTO for just about everything except paying for flights for in-person interviews, where being in an office might actually significantly matter.
Will never understand the mindset of corporate executives.
But you don't even need in-person interviews. Video interviews work fine of you have any semblance of actual competence as an interviewer, and an awareness to check for these kinds of things.
Video filters are still pretty obvious in real-time, and, like the one example given in the article, if the person says they are from Poland but can't speak Polish, that's a good sign, too.
The only reason they paid for them in the first place is because they couldn’t get candidates otherwise. Not a problem anymore.
and now they’re trying to reduce staff, hence RTO.
nothing confusing about the situation.
I’ll always ask this question when these articles appear. How are North Koreans so successful in landing interviews and even jobs?
There are thousands of laid off tech workers desperately trying to get even an interview, let alone a job. Yet, North Koreans having a success rate better than zero seems like a major problem.
The article even says they are interviewing candidates with long complicated names with defunct LinkedIn profiles. Yet, seemingly a normal candidate cannot get past the resume filter.
Tons of articles posted here over the recent years of how broken hiring is and the horror stories. This is taking broken to a whole new level.
I suspect one of my hires may have been North Korean. He passed all the interviews and asked for less compensation than the others, so we hired him. He avoided calls but otherwise did excellent work for about a week — until our KYC and payroll provider flagged him as a fraud.
> asked for less compensation than the others, so we hired him
In todays's lesson, we develop an understanding of the old term "You get what you pay for."
Not sure what you suggest with this factoid. We hire the cheapest out of multiple equally qualified candidates.
Our HR always wanted us to do that, but I used to push back.
The company I worked for (as a hiring manager), paid fairly low wages, and expected employees to stay around for a long time, so I often judged candidates by more than “on paper” qualifications.
They actually study and are incredibly good programmers
They have a whole team of people behind them.
> 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly,
A more likely reason is that you just called them out. See how most scams work. There is no reason to stick around instead of pursuing easier targets.
On top of that, if necessary and meanwhile, others of the same team might do better at the same time for the same employer and succeed by contrast.
Kim jong un is so fat he has his own event horizon.
You're hired.
My son and I have done "Yo-Momma battles" with ChatGPT, and one that it gave me where I laughed out loud was:
- so fat that when she jumped into a swimming pool, NASA found water on Mars.
Quoting the Korean Comic, “When I take my shirt off I have a one pack”.
https://youtu.be/mC68d-Mj270
So basically Yo-Momma-So-Fat jokes transposed to Kim Jong-Un? Those would also capture a pretty deeply American cultural kind of humor (yo-momma jokes)
He's so fat that when he jumps he jumps the Earth tilts a bit more.
Kim jong un is so fat he jumped and got stuck.
Hired
As an American, if someone asked me in the middle of an interview to declare "the north korean leader is fat", i'd consider walking out too.
Why? It is just a fact. The guy is absolutely overweight. Who cares? Lots of people are overweight. This is also a fact. Are we not supposed to acknowledge that?
I'm not the parent commenter, but I feel the same way. Just because something is a fact (although arguably fat doesn't sound very factual) doesn't mean it needs to be discussed during an interview. If someone started Quizzing me on the chemistry of rubber tires for a software dev role, I'd walk too. If someone started listing off the various kinds of sausage there are, I'd walk too. It would make me feel like I'm not taken seriously at best, or that I'm being scammed at worst.
Beyond that, if I looked east Asian, I could also see myself walking on this question for another reason. It would feel like a comment on my ethnic background, which has no place in an interview.
In American culture it's considered rude and gossipy.
Unless I knew what the reason was for asking, it would be like if an interviewer suddenly talked about how much weight Adele was gaining.
Personally, I won't work with paranoid people.
found the NK spy.
I love this article. It seems like it is lifted directly from a series of LinkedIn posts I shared about my experience with North Korean job scammers. I also wrote a quick guide on how to protect yourself. Link to LinkedIn post in the blog post below.
https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...
It’s a bit more in-depth and offers a few other ways to identify the fake devs.
I interviewed this loser too.
Or, we can just start doing interviews in person again.
Massive alpha in this for devs who can shake someone's hand and make appropriate eye contact
Big bonuses if you can do small talk (I can't) and like a sports team (I don't)
We're considering this. Tho we want to do an interview with AI to see how they use modern tools, then the rest onsite to avoid many forms of "cheaters".
Or for some industries back channel checks in network
Only really works in industries that are “small world”
> Or for some industries back channel checks in network
Even in small-world industries, assuming they occasionally accept outsiders, they will still encounter some form of this problem.
>assuming they occasionally accept outsiders
I guess it comes down to industry. We're on hn so emphasis is on technical ability and in that context what you say is true. I'm in a space that requires trustworthiness is part of the core value proposition so there is little acceptance of outsiders and much emphasis on back channel checks that the candidate is solid. NK fake candidate etc is just not a thing in that context
This happened to me where an interviewee used me as a reference (not a good idea!) and the interviewer knew me and called to verify.
What's astonishing to me is the number of companies that will supposedly hire someone and give them credentials without even seeing them on camera. The proliferation of this narrative seems somewhat real and somewhat calculated to further undermine the legitimacy of remote work. But you would think something like "in-person orientation" and requiring that people use their cameras in meetings would solve a lot of the issues here.
"deepfaking" video[0] and voice is relatively easy these days, and is definitely being employed by some of these candidates. Lower the "webcam" quality a little bit, and it can be difficult for many interviewers to notice something is off.
[0] https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam
So require a 4k wide angle camera. These are high skill high pay jobs it's hardly an unreasonable burden.
Someone should make a Netflix series about a North Korean fake worker because their lives and work sounds very interesting (different).
> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?
I wont be surprised if the list of "must-denounce" will be growing and in the future there'd be a litany of "mock the enemy" for every interview.
Is this article really about north korean fake* workers?
It looks to me that it describes what a sham the interview process is instead.
* are they really fake? I'm led to believe they actually do the work...
Their position within the grasp of the first-world "stay in line or go to jail" mechanism is fake. They cannot be trusted, because they are essentially above (beyond) the law.
I presume the candidate needs to provide his address. Have someone else google street map it, and then at some point ask "what is the color of your front door?" If he takes more than 5 seconds to answer it, end the interview.
If you can check it easily, so can they. Also I have no idea what my front door color is.
> If you can check it easily, so can they
Within 5 seconds? I doubt they could load google maps that fast.
> Also I have no idea what my front door color is
No hire!
Why does knowing your front door color have anything to do with hiring? You might just be someone who's very focused on things, so much so that you ignore the environment around you to focus!
Read the article. It's about detecting laptop farms.
I understand that, my claim is that you'd get false negatives- people who aren't laptop farm users but don't know the color of their front door and aren't at home to check.
Same, I couldn't tell you without checking.
We mostly enter through a side door, and the back door.
... and I also couldn't tell you what color either of those are.
"It's been repainted since the Google Street View car last photographed it."
An answer that's also suspicious, because it means they know what you're implying by asking, and they've prepared for it.
That was my answer when I read the question in the comment you’re replying to… because it’s actually true, and I have looked up my house on street view (as many probably have).
In fact I’d bet a good chunk of people, especially tech literate people, could tell you the most recent date of Google Street View for their house.
You could ask any question that the resident of a house would know the answer to. Like do you have any trees in your front yard. Is there a McDonald's at the street corner. Do you have a tile or asphalt roof. Do you have a 1 or a 2 car garage. And so on.
My front door is not the same color as the streetview picture, which is almost a decade out-of-date.
[edit]
Actually over a decade out of date (timestamp says March 2012, but somehow also copyright 2025).
>This is most likely a laptop farm, where someone in the US agrees to run the laptop from a legitimate address for a fee, typically around $200 a computer, according to Meyers. Last year the FBI busted one such operation in Nashville, Tennessee, and charged the operator with conspiracy to cause damage to protected computers, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, intentional damage to protected computers, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to cause the unlawful employment of aliens.
I don't quite understand the "laptop farm" concept. Can anyone explain it?
Employers in the U.S. are expecting to see domestic IP addresses.
A laptop farm hosts the corporate laptop (domestically) that is sent to the remote worker. Hardware is provided to work the power remotely, along with all other functions.
https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/us-wom...
https://sashaingber.substack.com/p/the-23-year-old-who-infil...
https://cyberscoop.com/doj-indicts-five-in-north-korean-fake...
https://therecord.media/arizona-woman-pleads-guilty-north-ko...
Oh I get it now, thanks.
Once again showing that "IP Address" filtering is pretty useless if you're trying to keep out someone who's targeting you. It probably does work somewhat to stop bots and crawlers.
You have a bunch of laptops running software that accesses services that are normally restricted (like access per IP or IPs from certain countries would set off alarm bells) the client paying for the laptop can run something that does the work or submits the work from the IP address space that is OK. I contracted for one company and saw an office that had one department with a closet full of laptops scanning Craigslist ads because they were getting blocked if they didn’t take this measure but don’t know the details but they figured out a workaround and automated it to scrape data daily from all Craigslists regions daily.
At many jobs it will need to be more sophisticated than simple IP spoofing, because the laptops have EDR software installed to monitor employee usage. It would be suspicious if the employee laptop is doing nothing but proxy internet traffic.
I suspect these farms have full-fledged remote KVM setups.
Most likely. A remote KVM isn’t that expensive anymore, e.g. https://jetkvm.com/
>'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly,
I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.
I would think the people doing this are not the lowest level foot soldiers but are somewhat closer to elites and as such can afford to be a tiny bit cynical if the dear leader signals his approval.
On one such call with a scammer I called him out and said he’s from North Korea. He got a bit mixed up and started rebuffing me. The call got cut off mid-sentence, as if someone else pulled the plug.
There are other tell tale signs that you can watch out for (at least for now)
In this case the person doing the mocking is the interviewer. I don't see why the interviewee doesn't just say, "I have no idea" and let the interview continue. Why would that be forbidden?
I'd ask him to estimate, being able to do Fermi estimations is a skill engineers need to have: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/19567/how-did-en...
Totally. "Let's simplify, and assume a spherical Kim Jong Un in vacuum..."
The only correct answer is that he is a rippling mass of pure beefcake muscle.
Like Cartman from South Park, if the interviewee responds, "he's not fat, he's big-boned!" that would be at least 20+ points for culture fit right there.
That would be a failing answer.
> I'd think it just takes a blessing from the dear leader to mock his rotundness in front of the evil capitalists, as long as it brings in the dough and the corporate secrets.
The Muslim fundamentalists to did 9/11 shaved their beards to look less suspicious.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this whole thread is rather silly because if this is a game of chess their next move is very obvious.
I wonder what other creative ways there are to expose North Korean employees. That fat question is hilarious but I bet there’s even more hilarious possible questions.
Look at their LinkedIn profile. All the scammers had non-existent profiles in their resumes.
Call their phone number. All the scammers had non-working phone numbers in their resumes.
I wrote an article about this based on my experience: https://koliber.com/articles/how-to-avoid-hiring-a-north-kor...
Easy to make a legit-looking LinkedIn profile. Start as a recruiter with unbelievable code-in-your-pajamas job openings, connect to 500 developers, then suddenly change to a developer. And phone farms aren't much of a stretch from laptop farms.
Yet they don’t do it.
they don’t need too yet. plenty of suckers still.
"Please read me the imdb plot synopsis of the film The Interview."
Honestly, if hiring standards have fallen so low that NK operatives are able to get through, then more power to them.
I'd be shocked if a simple 15-20 minute conversation with the interviewee's perspective manager wouldn't eliminate all chance of this happening. Video filters are still obvious in real time, any decent interviewer can tell if a person is being fed answers, just ask them more detailed information about their background and projects and not just leetcode-type questions.
All of this just goes to show how abysmal (in some cases anyway) the hiring process is for offshore workers in the first place.
You can weed these people out with basically any question. "What's the difference between an inner join and an outer join". These guys always sound like they're reading out of a textbook.
This is not a difficult problem. My last position had me take a drug test. I had to go to an actual building, show my ID, and the place/results were logged. They also did a background check, which presumably would have flagged any issues. I think I emailed a copy of my ID. One interviewer even flew me out for a day. They're making an issue out of nothing, and it's not clear why.
> and maybe also avoid hiring fully remote employees.
There it is.
Background checks won’t detect fraudulent documents used to initiate the check. In my experience you need to provide typical identity information (passport, insurance number, address, etc.). If the applicant has stolen a legitimate identity, they will simply continue to provide documents consistent with that identity.
In-person interviews are the most robust solution to the problem.
I don’t think passing the job interview is too difficult if one works as a team and intended to deceive. More difficult is IMO the transfer of money. They must establish a wide networks with many “stealth” bank accounts. I suppose one can open such bank accounts with a fake identity but it’s not simple. The control of financial flow is much tighter than things on the internet.
I'm now seeing this all over the place, and if it worked up to now then that's over. NK will just give people a recommended way of answering the question, and if they follow the script they won't get in trouble. Like perhaps, Kim who? Oh, the North Korean leader? Sorry, I have no idea. Further questions about NK can just be deflected with "I don't follow that stuff, sorry".
I think it's silly as well, but I also imagine that deflecting this way would also be extremely suspicious. The agent would probably just think that the jig is up and move on to the next target.
Perhaps the thinking is that if someone is asked, how fat is Kim, they've been outed so they might as well quit. But if employers start asking that of any Asian remote work applicant, then they can just brazen it out.
My CV has so much experience in so many countries that I'd been nonchalantly asked multiple times "is this or that a lie?". At some point I realised that I don't even have to work anymore and now I don't bother applying. You deserve all this, folks.
To save you the click and skim, the question is:
> ”How fat is Kim Jong Un?”
A legitimate answer could be "who?"
I played a game of Taboo (a party game) yesterday night. I asked the question "the surname of the leader of party ..." (the third largest one in my country). The guy I asked it to looked at me and answered "I have no idea." He's old enough to vote even if he didn't have to do it yet. Leaders of foreign countries? Maybe he doesn't know where to place North Korea on a map, even the general area.
OK, we could say that the lack of a general culture could be a hint not to hire that person so that could be a legitimate termination of the interview anyway.
Culture fit questions everywhere. Wouldn’t want to hire someone of the wrong social class. They might “shoot hoops” or something similarly vulgar.
That would be a good answer. But they are very poor at this game and can’t answer basic challenges gracefully.
They do seem to be decent programmers though based on my experience with these scam interviews.
> ”How fat is Dear Leader?”
6'4 - 210lbs
If they can say the line with a straight face they are either an incredible poker player or the wrong kind of American.
I wonder what the American version of this question would be
i would think some of our taboo words that a re borderline illegal and I am scared to even type the first letter of with asterixes because i am on a work computer
According to Perplexity, he is 308 pounds! Wow!
How are these people getting hired today when I can’t even swing a consistent interview with twenty years experience?
Not to mention it seems a VPN to Asia and back would add multiple seconds to every response, plus answer support in earpiece delay. How is that not very noticeable?
Related video: https://youtu.be/QebpXFM1ha0
"I found North Korean Spies on Discord..." by NoTextToSpeech
In light of this, employee referrals and in person interviews should become increasingly important.
Sadly, most corporate executives will learn the wrong lessons from this and instead use this as an opportunity to push RTO even more.
Book recommendation for this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_(novel)
> ask 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly, because it's not worth it to say something negative about that
No body positivity in North Korea?
NK planning a heist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM
I'll keep that in mind. I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.
> I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.
The dear leader approves of your workplace!
Ask the suspicious candidates what they think of the murderous North Korean regime. Avoids body shaming.
Differently slim ;)
I assume any similar question that could lead someone to be critical of North Korea would do.
> I'd probably be crucified by HR for saying fat at work though.
Really? What kind of company would make a big deal out of that?
Almost any of them?
Asking a candidate about how fat someone is definitely does sound like something that would get an interviewer in trouble.
Many people are deeply insecure about their weight, many women feel very uncomfortable when men make any comment about anyone's weight, body or appearance. The candidate might post on Glassdoor or LinkedIn about the hostile (and possibly sexist or "bro-y" or noninclusive or discriminatory) environment.
Even aside from the HR type concerns, it could legitimately negatively impact the candidate's performance. Imagine an overweight applicant being asked that question, feeling flustered and embarrassed while answering "... about as fat as me?" and then trying to reverse a linked list or whatever as their next question.
smells like 'can't say anything anymore' coded whining.
No I really would be uncomfortable at work asking that question to an interviewee.
Eventually they will get permission to say it during these operations
CAPTCHAs in real life.
I wonder how incredibly naive you have to be about intelligence work to read this article and not facepalm/eyerole this article. Have we realy stooped to kindergarthen level of stories now? Idiocracy seemes to have erred on the safe side reading current media.
I'm reminded of SMBC Comics' recent proposal for detecting the use of AI:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/security
isn't it fat shaming? or because it's some bad guy, is it allowed? what if I'm fat, and don't want to answer
Woosh. It's always been allowed to call a fat person fat. File a complaint under the 1st amendment if you don't like someone asking the question. File a complaint under the 5th if are being forced to answer the question. File a complaint with Supreme Leader if this question is bothering you and these rights do not apply to you.
“We need you to insult him as bad as you can, and we will then send it to NK, wait a month, and if you are still around you are hired”
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> "My favorite interview question, because we've interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of 'How fat is Kim Jong Un?' They terminate the call instantly, because it's not worth it to say something negative about that,"
They likely terminate the call because you come across as so naive and simplistic that you're unlikely to be in possession of any good IP worth stealing.
Edit: I am confused, on one hand these are sophisticated state sponsored actors, on the other, they can't respond "I don't know?". Which one is it? I think this whole "North Koreans are afraid of offending Kim Jong Un" is an overplayed trope.
Or it can be auto-triggered. I remember a history of a Call of Duty game were a number of players were being annoying, cheating and making the game horrible to play. Someone wrote in the chat "Tiananmen Square massacre" and instantly more than half the players were disconnected.
Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.
In a communist/totalitarian regime, you don't want to give informants any leverage. The fear of it being recorded and used against you is enough. Also, if the regime were to give permission to speak in this manner, it risks normalizing irreverence toward Kim Jong Un, including employees working in espionage.
Wow, it even works on HN!
https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/north-korean-it-workers-spamm...
You can just generalise the question like these interviewers. I’d criticise Kim Jong Un just to see what was up with this interview question.
No. All it took is to call them out for being North Korean and they terminated the call.
North Korean spotted
Nice Try Kim Jong Un
Surely it's not stupidiif it works?
There is a large contingent of society that will even call you a terrible person if it works. shrug