North Korea's internet only has 28 websites

A misconfiguration in one of North Korea's nameservers Monday night briefly gave the world a glimpse into what the internet looks like in the Hermit Kingdom. Turns out, there wasn't much to see: Across the entire country, there are apparently only 28 registered domain names. Unsurprisingly, Wired reported, that makes North Korea the "smallest top-level domain in the world."

The domains .com and .net, by contrast, have more than 140 million websites registered between them, but the nameserver mishap showed North Korea's .kp domain has just 28 sites. (A nameserver is the internet-connected device that translates domain names to IP addresses, allowing you to type google.com into your URL bar rather than Google's IP address, 8.8.8.8.)

Among the 28 domain names registered under the .kp domain are official state news organizations, official government websites, the homepage of a state-owned airline, sites about North Korean movies and food, and a page for the country's elderly care fund. Only a handful of North Koreans have access to an "outward-facing internet connection," Wired reported; otherwise, most citizens' interaction with the online world is confined to those 28 sites.

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The misconfiguration was discovered Tuesday by security engineer Matt Bryant, who explained on GitHub how he came across the Hermit Kingdom's internet information. You can read more about Bryant's methods, and see the full list of North Korea's .kp domains, here.