Well, this is an interesting turn of events. Days after
threatening Sony Pictures for planning to release The
Interview, and weeks after allegedly committing an
extreme act of cyber-terrorism on the movie studio, North
Korea appears to be without Internet. Like, all of North
Korea. And they are missing all of the Internet.
Bloomberg News reports that the entire country of North
Korea "is offline today" as massive and unprecedented
outages are plaguing the nation. Bloomberg says that
North Korea has "four official networks connecting the
country to the Internet," and today they "went completely
black." Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn
Research in Hanover, New Hampshire, explained:
The situation now is they are totally offline. I don’t
know that someone is launching a cyber-attack
against North Korea, but this isn’t normal for them.
Usually they are up solid. It is kind of out of the
ordinary. This is not like anything I’ve seen before."
You’re probably flashing back to President Barack
Obama’s statement, in the wake of the Sony Pictures
attack, that our nation would consider a "proportional
response" to North Korea’s reported attacks on the movie
studio. According to Bloomberg News, North Korea claims
that it doesn’t know the identity of the hackers operating
under the Guardians of Peace moniker, but they were
happy that someone stepped in to block (or seriously
prevent) the release of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s
insensitive comedy, The Interview, in Christmas Day.
This has to be our retaliation, right? Unless North Korea
took the Internet down for some reason, or different
hackers knocked them out.

"We have no new information
regarding North Korea today," White House National
Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told
Bloomberg. "If in fact North Korea’s Internet has gone
down, we’d refer you to that government for comment."

Now that’s a sweet passing of the buck. Maybe you can
email North Korea’s government for a comment, if and
when they ever get their email back.
As for The Interview, we still do not know with certainty
how Sony plans to distribute the film. There have been
rumors of some form of online distribution . I think DVDs
are the best option. But somehow, some way, the movie
needs to get out, so we can support an artist’s freedom to
make crass toilet jokes at the expense of a foreign leader.
Isn’t that sort of what America’s supposed to be about?

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