The HN headline is more clickbaitey than the original article, which has a different headline and goes out if its way to point out that Amazon and HBO are likely not the ones doing the outsourcing to North Korea.
> There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators. In fact, as the editing comments on all the files, including those related to US-based animations, were written in Chinese, it is likely that the contracting arrangement was several steps downstream from the major producers.
But that's the most interesting part of the article - that Amazon and HBO projects are being worked on by NORTH KOREAN workers!!! I totally agree with the HN headline and I'm glad it got me to click and read the entire article.
It's also wild that it somehow makes financial sense to outsource a core input into your product. A company that makes animations outsourcing animation makes as much sense to me as a software company outsourcing engineering. Though we do have a plane company that outsources making planes, but that's going some sort of way right now...
Oooh I can try tackling a bit of this (I'll try not to ramble... )
But anyway studios have been outsourcing animation work to Asian countries for a while now.
You might have seen some of the work product from one of the larger Japanese animation studios: TMS Enterainment who has worked on things like Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, The New Batman Adventures in addition to shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Transformers in the 80-90s.
Some more recent(ish) examples are Cartoon Network outsourcing the animation for Steven Universe to Rough Draft Korea located South Korea and Nickelodeon outsourced some of the work for Korra to a Japanese company called Pierrot.
I'm just rambling at this point so I'm going to just leave a few links below that can do a better job of illustrating than I'm able to.
Heck, The Simpsons has been largely animated in South Korea since the beginning over thirty years ago! They've even made jokes about that in the show itself.
Animation has been outsourced for decades, typically with in-house artists providing the key frames and outsourced animators doing the “in between” frames.
I can see how one company might focus only on developing its technical skill in animation, rather than other aspects that are important to a production (like writing, music, marketing, etc), and do contract work for anyone who wants to make an animated production, no matter the story / market / etc. Sort of like how TSMC mostly focuses on semiconductor manufacturing excellence and leaves the design to other companies, with only a small amount of its production used to manufacture its own component designs.
But for studios where mastery of a certain animation style is critical to their work, vertical integration makes sense too.
From the prospective of these companies, the "core input" of the product is already in their hands: The intellectual property of the stories/characters. Media productions from this core IP is down the value chain.
This is fairly standard for mature products. In the early days the whole production process is tightly integrated, but as components and processes mature there is less room for there to be some “secret sauce.” Once that happens it makes sense to outsource it to other firms who compete on cost while you focus on parts where you can differentiate.
That said, companies frequently misstep determining where they can safely outsource and where they must keep things integrated.
Original title "buried the lede" and was too long for HN, so I edited it.
It may be useful to see how others linked to this news - the original place I found this was at Engadget, which had this title: "Some Amazon and Max cartoons may have been partially animated in North Korea" https://www.engadget.com/some-amazon-and-max-cartoons-may-ha...
I linked the original report, which makes no mention of animation, but is the obvious focus of the article. The point isn't who did the outsourcing, but what was done, IMO.
The length limit on HN titles sometimes makes nuance difficult - maybe I should have added "may have been outsourced" instead. I was not going for clickbait/misrepresentation.
I wish that all people who exist in the business world would learn to appreciate that levels of indirection do not absolve anyone of wrongdoing. The law might give them a pass but that doesn’t make them innocent.
It will take awhile before regulatory requirements catch up and leverage technology that is already available today, but automated lineage capture of Relationship Bill Of Materials (RBOM) is already possible. We lack the data interchange standards and compliance compulsion to reify. That is in turn possibly due to regulatory and legislative capture? Other than the fleets of white shoe law firms that would be deployed against passage of such regulation, I do not know why structuring laws are in place for "trifling" $10K USD transfers, and not for these larger, more economically devastating cases of indirection.
there's a difference between "click bait" (a misleading title specifically crafted to drive instinctual interest but which is not an accurate summation of the content) and titles accurately describing something truly interesting or surprising with more details inside. This is a case of the latter
(and whatever the opposite of "click bait" is, that's how I'd describe the original title!)
> he HN headline is more clickbaitey than the original article, which has a different headline and goes out if its way to point out that Amazon and HBO are likely not the ones doing the outsourcing to North Korea
That is the beauty of the subcontractor shell game and one of the top reasons why companies do it, no one has to take responsibility.
You're oversimplifying the issue, which does nothing to bring us closer to a solution.
If you tell X to get something done and ALSO give X rules that they must follow and X gets the thing done but __breaks the rules__ then this is different. It is also different if you have reasonable suspicion to expect them to break the rules or are using subversive language to tell them to break the rules. These are different things and have different consequences.
If you are truely acting in good faith, then yes, it is a defense. But determining if that's true is not an easy task.
There is good faith, coercion, negligence, and willful negligence. These are different things.
I'd go further to say that rules without any verification aren't really rules. You don't make a rule without the suspicion that it'd be more efficient to break them, and if you're not verifying their adherence to those rules, your rule is meaningless.
This is the iterated game that morally bankrupt manufacturers (IE the vast majority) play to insulate themselves in these sort of scandals:
- First, they get caught doing A,B,C, so they pass rules about A,B,C
- Then they outsource to someone who is willing to do A,B,C, then they get caught outsourcing to violators
- Then, they impose rules about A,B,C on these firms, but do no verification of the firms adherence to those rules.
It insulates them of liability without ever increasing costs (because the firms still get to break the rules and the company gets to say "I'm Shocked! I told you not to do that!")
The verification process is exceptionally difficult. We're on HN and I think it should be rather common knowledge that attackers almost always beat defenders because the game is asymmetric. Attackers only need to find a single flaw while defenders need to find a large number of defenses. There is a huge difference in the resource expenditures between these two groups. This is related to the reasons why one single person can fuck shit up (e.g. a bad driver can impact tens of thousands of other drivers) but it is difficult for a single person to fix things. It is the nature of unstable equilibria.
A society, of any form, depends on trust. Like it or not, there are no trustless systems available to us. Certainly not at any meaningful scale.
This does not mean one should be negligent, but rather I'm saying that it isn't easy and the best intentioned can still be taken advantage of. We should recognize this and accommodate this fact when approaching solutions or we will end up with many undesired results.
If it's possible to accidentally pay north Korea that should be the fault of whatever financial institution (which is held to far more KYC and AML than animators) caused that to happen, presuming it went through the financial system. HBO likely had no mens rea beyond cash flow out animation flow in.
If I can't trust the bank to know more about the UBO of some rando after KYC what the hell are we doing this for?
That’s kind of the point: these companies are using outsourcing to avoid the expense of obligations they would have if they did things in house. It’s the same way we end up seeing workers being mistreated or placed in risky situations on behalf of major American companies who would never risk that in a domestic factory with their name on it.
A good outcome of this would be more restrictions on outsourcing to China since it’s been repeatedly shown that they will not maintain meaningful restrictions on North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc.:
> All three cities are known to have many North Korean-operated businesses and are main centers for North Korea’s IT workers who live overseas.
What do you mean with "syndrome"? Of course business customers can not be held responsible for what other businesses do. If Amazon buys floor tiles for their factories from a company that provides floor tiles to many other companies, how can Amazon be held responsible for any of their unethical practices?
Or is it the faith of hackers that any misdoing in the world should always be traced back and blamed on a tech giant? From the article:
"There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators."
If Amazon sells me floor tiles full of asbestos, they should sure as hell be held responsible, they can't just absolve it with "oh but we bought it from another company, go complain to them"
So why is it different if they sell me floor tiles made with slave labor?
Global retailers like H&M and IKEA do do audits of their supply chain to try to stop labor abuse (although how effective they are at that is up to debate)
We outsourced to company X, who is bound by law and contract not to engage in illegal actions. Company X, without our knowledge or approval subcontracted illegally.
If this is true, we just need to make companies liable for their subcontractors. They apparently know they can escape responsibility by farming out work they're not supposed to do.
I dont think it is worth it. Existing law already punishes companies operating in bad faith, and I would want companies operating in good faith to remain protected.
The Amazon and HBO are the victims here. They were the ones harmed and deceived.
I don't think they were victims or deceived. It's normal for companies to set metrics that can't be legitimately achieved and then closing their eyes and pretending they don't know what's going on. A waste disposal company in Canada had a quota for "overflow fines", which ended with employees overfilling dumpsters themselves. Call centers set unachievable metrics that require employees to redirect and mark issues as resolved instead of following protocol. Samsung recently had a contractor destroy customer property to void the warranty.
Companies like amazon are extremely powerful. They set the terms of the agreement, they set the project requirements and metrics, and then pretend that whatever happens has nothing to do with them.
Well, like I said, Apple is known for having hardline stances with their partners - it could easily be mandated that employee wages need to be 2X$ or whatever.
Though, Apple has the exact same issue you claim Foxconn might have - funneling value to shareholders over laborers.
It is a defense. Even in a court of law not knowing about something can potentially protect you from punishment.
It is just a part of the nature of outsourcing. Your supplier might just choose to outsource himself and have the work done by companies you couldn't possibly work with. For a digital good this is extremely hard to monitor. How would a Californian studio possibly know what company their supplier outsources to?
If this were codified into law I would suspect that it would quickly lead to monopolization. I can't imagine how the world would work without contractors. Imagine if Apple had to operate the mines, build the machines to mine the materials, to build the machines to build those machines, build the silicon foundry, and all the things along from dirt in the ground to the iPhone. Boy, you'd get nothing done. Because that's the world with no "outsourcing." It is too broad of a word.
Sure, having suppliers is completely inevitable for any company.
"We only do X" is one of the best tools to manage complexity.
I think what the other poster is referring to is specifically the practice of companies to have work done by workers in areas of the world where labor is cheap. That particular practice is something very different than e.g. buying chips from a foundry. Specifically buying parts from q supplier involves very little management, outsourcing work means you have to actively involved in the management of the offshore labor.
> I think what the other poster is referring to is specifically the practice of companies to have work done by workers in areas of the world where labor is cheap.
Sure, but part of what I wanted to (albeit indirectly) convey is the difficulty of creating a meaningful rule about this. Even if you locked work within a country's borders (I imagine this would have terrible consequences too), this concept scales.
I understand the complaint, but I think we need to also recognize the complexity of the issue if we're to do anything meaningful about it. Trivializing it will get us nowhere and often leads to bad laws that get more abused than the original ones.
I agree, you actually always have to work with other companies. The alternative is not possible.
In general it is very easy and safe to work with companies in the same country as you, as they are bound by identical laws to you and litigation and control is relatively easy. They also can't legally re-outsource to companies you can't outsource to. Similar things are true if the company is in a broadly aligned country. E.g. the US and Germany.
The further away, physically, ideologically, linguistically and legally away the country of the other company is the worse it becomes and the harder it is to effectively control them.
Yeah, I agree that this is definitely a weighting factor. But neither do I think it is good to return to isolationism. Globalism, despite its many flaws, has clearly contributed to the long peace. Encourages negotiations at the table rather than on the battlefield given that in the end, wars are primarily economically driven. Better to destroy economies than people, even if the former can indirectly result in the latter. (wish there were better solutions and a larger gain, but that's a whole other conversation fraught with far more complexity)
What direct evidence exists to say that globalism clearly contribute to long peace? As far as I know, there is only proof of globalism failing to contribute to peace, where invading nations continue their invasions even after heavy sanctions.
I mean what constitutes "proof" for you? Does it need to be void of abstraction and indirect causal chains? Because if so, good luck. If you allow for this I think there's plenty of strong evidence for it and many others have written about this. I mean we see these same trends through scale and history, so it is not as far of a stretch as I think many of those that are quick to dismiss the hypothesis claim. Absolutely nothing in our modern world will be adequately explained without abstraction and consideration of complex interacting chains (this even includes the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. While there's often claimed a clear aggressor the truth is that aggressions have been taken by all parties over a long time. To be clear, I'm not saying any specific party is justified in their actions nor am I saying all parties are equal. But the ambiguity is simply because I don't want to start a long complex off topic thread over these current hot topics, not because of a lack of alliance).
But given your response I think there maybe confusion as to what is being referred to when discussing "Long Peace." It is not the absence of war, it is the absence of __direct__ war between __major powers__. This may not be clear since being born into long peace (as presumably you are <80 years old), is that this is the only type of war we've experienced and directly know. Prior to this, major powers directly fought, and quite frequently. Usually this is discussed with respect to Europe but the general trend is true elsewhere and similar patterns exist on the Indian subcontinent as well as Asia and even in the Americas. It is also worth noting that even wars between these smaller powers has decreased (likely due to the connections with larger powers and how many are unwilling to go to direct war with larger powers).
While sanctions certainly aren't absolutely effective, that's not entirely the point either. The point is to make these actions more resource intensive, not impossible. Even our direct discussion about NK is illustrative of this, as they have to spend resources to be covert and it is clear that this sub-sub-...-contracting would be more economically fruitful were they not have to operate though these sidechannels and could operate directly. I mentioned in another comment about how society operates in unstable equilibria and how this is why there's a clear imbalance between red teams and blue teams, where the blue team has a much harder job. The same is true here too. Just because they can bypass sanctions also doesn't mean they are ineffective. It is important to not binarize things.
And to clarify, globalism isn't necessarily American dominance, but rather that countries are negotiating on the economic table. While described by Pax Americana there have also been Pax Britannica, Pax Romana, and others which saw similar trajectories but never before at the global scale as the world was not operating globally previously. In that sense it is often explained how this trend has happened through human history and correlates heavily with globalization.
If you're going to make an argument I'd suggest one about delay, as (in my opinion) one can more easily create a stronger argument about how the proposed explanations of long peace (note that there is not a singular one, and no serious person believes a singular factor is the cause, as should be apparent by the initial lines in my comment), rather displace the inevitable wars and death. That these result in growing tensions where the pressures accumulate and result in large scale and more horrible war. But we must also explain the much longer historical trend and it isn't unreasonable to believe that issues like these are more akin to a damped oscillator rather than a clear monotonic decay (which is measured to not be true but also confounded with the suggested argument).
Boots on the ground isn't enough. Even in a company where everyone is physically at the same location overseeing who does what work is near impossible for any large scale projects.
But yes, please let management know that outsource is only attractive on paper. Every experience I have had with it is has been bad. The communication gap is just so much larger and your ability to oversee what gets done and how it gets done just evaporates.
The ethical/legal problem is just one result of that, but even without it outsourcing often just costs far more in hidden expenses.
Is financing North Korea bad? I understand that is illegal for American companies because it is an enemy of the Empire, but I applaud those willing to break the law to help the enemies of the Empire.
I'm sure you buy all sorts of products that are built using conflict minerals, slave labour, etc.
Is your ignorance a defense? Should we hold you accountable for the entire supply chain that goes into what you consume?
Or can we just say that you should put in a reasonable amount of effort towards avoiding this (with reasonable being defined by the legislature and the judiciary)?
The few times I was involved in some outsourcing the outsourcing company was contractually obliged to actually be the one doing the work. Not that folks might not cheat and get away with it, but there were financial implications and a somewhat close working relationship that meant that ... it would have been hard to fake.
In this case does the original company just not care at all?
The subcontracting situation reminds me of a news article about someone in China hiring a hitman, the hitman then subcontracted to another hitman, who then subcontracted to another, then another, then another. Each hitman was offered half the money of the upstream. The last hitman defected and informed the target.
That's very telling as far as how outsourcing changes incentives.
My experience with outsourcing has always been it becomes a contract game / poor incentives based around contract metrics and in the end a complete waste of money.
I would be surprised if the same wasn't the case here. Any half competent legal department would at least have it be part of their contract that the subcontractor can't outsource to parties with whom the contracting party is not allowed to cooperate.
But how do you verify who does the work? Contracts are nice and all, but how do you make sure they are followed?
You can put someone at your partner’s location, have a trusted third party audit them, etc. Companies don’t like to spend the money but that’s true of every safeguard against misconduct and society is almost always better off for the investment.
When I saw the title, I immediately thought of the show "Invincible" which had abysmal animation, and lo and behold, its right there are the top of the list.
Our of curiosity why did you think Invincible had abysmal animation? Which is ironic since in the last seasons they even broke the fourth wall and did a tongue in cheek poke at their audience who criticize their animation quality explaining how they're under crunch and what techniques they use to cut corners. Quite clever actually.
Didn't think they were covering up their North Korean animators though lol.
They didn't do themselves any favors by putting out a nicely animated teaser for season 2, which was made by a studio that otherwise didn't work on season 2 at all (they were busy animating Captain Laserhawk for Netflix)
I’ve only seen season 1 but it’s barely even animation. It looks like “motion comics”.
I enjoyed it anyway (I liked the comic, and this is playing out like a “second draft” with some stuff tightened up, so that’s really cool to see) but it’s one of the worst-looking animated anythings I’ve seen. It’s on par with the bottom half of amateur Flash animation in the ‘00s.
If you are outsourcing over the entire globe things like this tend to happen.
There is very little you can actually do to verify how the work you require really gets done, especially if the format is purely digital and there is no physical process you could monitor.
Companies building things in China have been caught in that trap multiple times and somewhere down the line the work was allegedly done by highly mistreated populations, potentially in slave like conditions. Certainly no company would want this to happen, as it is obviously a major PR disaster, but it is just very hard to oversee.
Sure. You can avoid all of this by doing the work in house or even just working with companies bound by the same laws as you are. Obviously management doesn't see it your way though.
> If you are outsourcing over the entire globe things like this tend to happen. There is very little you can actually do to verify how the work you require really gets done
There’s very little you can do at minimal cost. They could have on-site auditors or collocated employees, but that cuts into the margins. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing: each poorly-monitored subcontractor is a security risk and likely hiding labor law or environmental violations so an outcome of less outsourcing to China would be a net-win.
The economics of where you live are very different in a communist (Or whatever NK calls itself now) state. I would assume that the people with these jobs don't have an American-style commute.
Honestly if N Korea had a cheap/low-barrier remote visa it might be attractive. I would imagine having an oppressive authoritarian regime looking at you as a prime tax slave might mean none of the prols would risk getting their head chopped off to mess with you. Meanwhile labor/rent/food gotta be hella cheap.
You go there to work remotely. Food/labor/rest are super cheap.
Everyone is starving to death there, to the point where meth is casually used by most people to stave off hunger pangs.
Not to mention, if they decide they may just get some fun leverage out of a foreign hostage, they may just decide to claim you committed a crime and beat you half (or 3/4's) to death.
This is just the news stories I can recall off the top of my head as well...
Not everyone all the time of course. There would just be barren earth instead of a country.
The food supply is prioritized for the military. Food insecurity is frequent for civilians.
A pattern we have seen play out many times: NK makes a threat of some sort. The West and its allies try to talk them down. As part of negotiations they demand food. Sometimes they get it.
If a nation demanding food not to blow up its neighbor is not dealing with food insecurity in its society at large I will eat my hat.
North Korea doesn't have a great history with respect to foreign "guests"[1].
Here's a choice quote:
>The four lived together in a two-bedroom house outside of Pyongyang, where they were forced to study the writings of then-leader Kim Il Sung and were subject to regular beatings. They were also featured prominently in propaganda magazines and movies.
Totally agree, but I'll point out they entered as technically enemy combatants, not with a visa.
And dresnok said the opposite and retired fat and with alcohol cirrhotic liver and a nice stolen wife and downtown apartment, which is far more than he would've got in USA as such a lazy, stupid, criminal that he was. He even become a local celebrity as a movie star playing as a white devil.
It’s not like people are regularly entering as anything other than defectors and the one guys wife said she was tricked into going there and held against her will.
Yes "stolen" wife. Great for dresnok as his worst fear was broken homes (he came from one and experienced divorce) so the held against will was a huge selling point for him. From watching docs in his final days I sincerely believe the stolen wife who couldn't divorce was his biggest selling point in staying.
I kind of see the idea but... I don't think it's worth the risk. Authority figures in dictatorships just aren't always rational. They're by definition not capitalists anyway.
Most North Koreans face starvation on a regular basis, and being excited about the prospect of having a cowed population that serves you is either sociopathic or psychopathic, or both. Seek some help.
All of that being said that when those in power think you made a single mistake, you're dead.
I genuinly don't understand why North Korea and China have such a... "good"?... relationship.
Since this seems like an open secret, idk it just boggles my mind. Like I constantly see articles about it happening, but I have yet to see anything about why it is the way it is.
Obviously cheap labor is one thing, but I wouldn't think even China can ignore the threat of North Korea working on missiles?
It also makes me wonder, if the people writing these comments know that they are working with people from North Korea or if they just assume its another company.
Generally, how far downstream does the US State Department expect companies to vet vendors for sanctions violation? Due diligence this many layers deep is expensive, especially if hostile (investigative work to proactively discover dishonest sourcing reports.) I would think it would vary by industry--e.g. animation is obviously less stringent than medical devices so would have fewer reporting and certification structures already set up. Does anyone have experience dealing with this?
The entire chain all the way down is sanctioned, the US can and will climb up and down that chain to punish sanctions violations. A company like Disney will have to have a Sanctions Compliance Program and like any other compliance regime, there are standards, external auditors, etc. to make sure enough is being done, and "enough" can be a bit of a moving target. If you get caught having sanctioned suppliers, those standards and auditing get kicked up a notch, if you did a really bad job maybe fines or criminal charges.
There isn't ever a sense of "I'm doing enough and therefore the sanctions violations happening are no longer my fault". It's somewhat up to you to determine your risk and tailor your compliance program to address them and to adjust if you're ever wrong.
How guilty you are is a function of how good a job the state department thinks you're doing trying to avoid sanctions violations.
> How guilty you are is a function of how good a job the state department thinks you're doing trying to avoid sanctions violations.
Is the standard for this codified in clear language anywhere, or is it merely based on the whims of some federal prosecutor/judge? If I make digital watches, and I buy coin cell batteries from a supplier who buys battery precursors from a supplier who buys LiCoO2 from a manufacturer who buys lithium-rich brine from a supplier who buys lithium mining equipment from a sanctioned entity, how much of the full brunt of Uncle Sam's retribution can I expect to come crashing down on me?
Feds have 99+% conviction rate and infinite money and time, meanwhile you sit in cage and deal with frozen accounts while trying to pay your attorney. They imprisoned weev for doing arithmetic on wget'ing a public website.
Worst sin is angering the gods. I would imagine most the time theyll probably just ask nicely for you to stop, then bury you if you don't, but for political or convenient targets they seem fine going straight for the throat.
The hyperbole isn’t helping your argument here. Weev spent time brute-forcing collection of personal information which they discussed using for phishing, manipulating AT&T’s stock price, and potentially shorting the stock:
They were too bumbling to actually do anything that serious but being too broke to run a stock scam isn’t exactly a great character testimonial, and all of that is well outside of professional ethical boundaries in the infosec community.
Its not hyperbole, you're just using misguided rhetoric of the prosecution. Weev has escaped to Ukraine in any case, those same bumbling idiots making your argument had their conviction dropped on appeal.
It’s certainly possible that a court might have found his actions did not violate the relevant laws, but that was not the case in the first trial where he had full opportunity to challenge the prosecution’s claims. You might characterize that as “misguided rhetoric” but that should be your cue to ask whether it’s really true that you understand the situation better than his real legal team.
The main reason the Feds’ conviction rate is so high is they’re lazy cowards who only try cases that are extremely easy to convict. It’s not that they do nothing but there are shitty incentives in place to only put cases in front of judges that are certain.
Since they are using your money to do this work, is this not what a taxpayer would want? How long are you gonna keep that gig if you are a coin flippin kind of prosecutor, and when your boss runs for whatever office, he gets crucified for wasting taxpayer money on uncertain cases?
State Department will have all the docs one needs to avoid any problems. In your example, the real risk would be that the lithium mining equipment is dual-use, ie: they also use it to mine yellowcake uranium ore, or when your watch business takes off, they struggle to provide enough brine, and bring in specialists from Afghanistan, who streamline the process and who's Dari has a Tehran accent.
They can let you keep making money until it's promotion time, or an example needs to be made for an election campaign or they find out your watches seem to be the chronometer of choice of the latest insurgency.
More based on the whims of a prosecutor. Many small companies violate sanctions (usually unknowingly) and don't get prosecuted. But stick out too much, and you'll likely get hammered.
Quite contrary I would say. An American megacorp will always know how much profit from the US sanctions it can do and get away with it. Sometimes a slap on the wrist can happen, but in general... You do want those campaign donations flowing, do you? Then there is no reason to rock the boat.
Smaller companies from other countries may not be so lucky so they may actually refrain from such activities.
Yes, of course, but I was asking what level of due diligence is expected to verify that the chain does not violate sanctions.
In other words, when a problem like this is discovered, the US State Department will assign more blame to the company if their attempts to avoid violating sanctions fell below a threshold; what is that threshold for the arts industry.
Do you have to check just for the product that you're selling or for the inputs into that product?
Do you have to check that the tablets, keyboards and mice used by your employees and those of outsourcing companies were not made in North Korea? Do you have to check that the ink used on the keyboards weren't made in North Korea? Do you have to check that the coal for the power station for the keyboard factory didn't come from North Korea?
Yeah, but "outsource it to a bunch of companies who then outsource it" is literally how the economy works. The most mundane product you can imagine has a network of upstream suppliers that is essentially incomprehensible in its complexity.
Ok, so you expect the airline to mine the ore to make the tools needed to mine the ore needed to make the aluminum used in the packaging of the snacks they give out on board?
These aren't North Korean entrepreneurs building businesses in a free market. Any enterprise in North Korea should be understood as slave labor to provide support for a criminal regime.
Are you describing Europe? Our taxes definitely feel like they are going to the "regime", making politicians and the wealthy richer, not the everyday worker.
It can be part of a long-term strategy, like sowing the seeds of progress through the cultural effect that the animation itself, and the trade relations have. Or, it can just further fuel the oppressive system that they have, helping them keeping up longer, delaying its inevitable collapse.
That's one of the approaches indeed. I think it has merit, since trade relations create dependency, and dependency can be leveraged to enact change in the other's behavior.
At the end of the day though, politics is complex, and it's also tied to the people who participate in it. So while many people can suffer as result of a systemic change, the people who brought that to action might have different incentives, might not had the foresight, might have weighed the pros and cons and calculated with it, might sacrifice short-term good for a longer good... might be corrupt even.
TL;DR it's complicated, and it probably has an official, and a real reason as well.
Recent American efforts at regime change have fared poorly in hindsight. Attempted during the fall of the USSR, led directly to the oligarchs, and eventually Putin. Deposing Saddam left destroyed a middle class secular nation, who cheerfully began the ethnic cleansing, so that Iraq is now Kurds, Sunni and majority Shiites, none and turned Iran into a regional power by eliminating Iraq, as well as Afghanistan. Our man Musharraf, a loyal ally? Ditched him too, and the ISI showed its gratitude by rearming the Taliban. We got Gaddafi! Turns out he was burying enough people migrating from Africa to be a firm deterrent. Those people flooded into Europe, and the liberal democracies we allegedly want to nourish in other lands were pushed to the far right. Now Germany is beginning to arm itself, and France is following. Japan also, which will agitate the Koreas and China greatly. So the risk here is replacing the Pax Americana, fantastically lucrative for American by the way, with the spectre of proliferation, which the Pax had blocked fairly successfully.
One wonders where (ugh) Kissinger's Realpolitik would have led us. Regardless, what we do know is that the Norks are hardly pro-american after years of indoctrination.
>It's not like theyr'e happy about a dictator running the country doing international crazy stuff and oppressing them.
As are we. It'd be way worse too if not for The Leader's clearsighted vision in acquiring nuclear capability, against our best efforts.
It's a little ironic considering part of season 2 has some meta commentary on how hard it is to create animated shows. Guess the easy way is to indirectly outsource it to NK!
That season definitely was a little slow, but it left me wanting more, so I read through the comics. Based on the quality of what the show has done so far and of the source material I'm still excited for the next season whenever it finally comes
Seems like a difficult problem to solve. It shows the importance of paying close attention. NK has shown to be quite good at bypassing sanctions but it seems that the link is almost always through China. It would seem that the best way to go about this would be through stricter negotiations with them, since they are already acting as a significant intermediary. Either they know about this or the great firewall is not so great (I suspect a bit of both).
Edit: Interesting to see that this particular thread is getting heavy traffic and attacked. I'm not sure I've seen this happen on HN before, at least not a front page post. @Dang, I guess we can add a signup filter to prevent similar usernames being generated within a timeframe, since presumably these come from different IPs. Should be a simple regex filter and provide some warning system? Anyone else know?
It’s certainly interesting seeing the thread get attacked so obviously - that’s a first as far as I’ve seen on HN.
In terms of the actual story I think that we should be careful not to introduce insane KYC for contractors just to avoid the NK boogeyman.
If such measures were introduced, that would seriously restrict the ability to work with people from around the world. I also fear that scammy companies such as id.me will lobby for such measures in order to extract profit from companies who want to contract abroad, all the while not actually stopping sophisticated threat actors.
Yeah that is something I'd be worried about as a potential "solution." It should not involve placing spyware on contractor's systems. And it should not involve bureaucracy dependency hell either.
Edit: Interesting to see that this particular thread is getting heavy traffic and attacked.
It isn't, the spam is spread across multiple front page stories. There might be some IP address rotation but I'm not sure why it's allowed to get through when it would be so easy to filter.
Problem: the Norks actually are starving, have a poor but fairly large standing army, and are sitting on China's border, and are not estranged from South Korea, on a personal level. China would prefer not to have a humanitarian catastrophe on it's borders, starving people looking for food, causing mayhem. Gunning the starvies down antagonizes the South, needlessly, and of course, having an unstable state actor as a loose ally is not the worst thing in the world. Iran has Hezbollah. China has the Norks. America... spends a lot of time vetoing UN resolutions against allies in the Levant, do they not?
@dang is a signifier that makes it easier for dang to visually see his name (or search and differentiate from the more common word) in comments. I was writing an email but I won't send if you got this covered. Thanks
Well __I__ can visually distinguish a username more easily with @ in front of it. Just the same way as I, and many others, use various typographical marks to indicate various things. It does also make a *manual* thread search easier.
I feel reasonably confident that the vast majority of people doing this are not expecting @dang to be pinged, but are just using it either due to habit and/or a visual indicator. Either way, I'm not sure why this is such a big deal and worth more than a single exchange. Potentially someone doesn't know, it is okay to inform them, but after "I know" or "I didn't know" there is no more to be said.
It's not that big of a deal, the main problem with it is people assume this is actually a way to get moderator attention for something. It's great that you don't but plenty of users don't know that nor are they aware of the reliable method of emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
The other, probably more important reason not to do it is that it gums up threads with pointless meta which runs against the site conventions. If a comment starts with @dang, it probably doesn't belong in the thread. Just like that meeting, it could have been an email.
> The other, probably more important reason not to do it is that it gums up threads with pointless meta which runs against the site conventions.
It seems like we are complaining about the same issue. Again, why does this conversation exist since it has clearly been established that I am aware and that anyone reading is aware. If you got a problem with how I use typographical indicators, sorry, I'm going to keep doing it. You can keep starting these metas if you want, but it seems hypocritical to me. I'll just stop responding to prevent more metas, because I've been given no indication that anyone thinks it actually pings @dang other than people who get upset at people using "@". Seems like a classic assumption, where people try to solve a problem that doesn't exist (or exists in a very small percentage).
And as you can read, I did not start with @dang. It was an edit, and into the edit. And as you can read, I was going to send an email but then saw several users note they did, so wish to not spam the email any more.
I think we're done here and have derailed the thread enough. I don't think anyone's opinion is changing, and that's perfectly fine.
I've been given no indication that anyone thinks it actually pings @dang
You can find lots of comments by people who think that and replies by dang explaining it does nothing. The idea that we just have no clue what the effects of this are and why moderators think it is best avoided is just an odd one. The busybodies repeat this because the moderators do. Well, that and they're busybodies.
I did not start with @dang.
It doesn't matter, editing your comment to add meta is the thing that ends up derailing comments and threads. It's spamming your own comments, effectively - such comments are regularly moderated to the bottoms of threads.
I think I've only seen it once before and that too was on a politically contentious thread. Definitely is rare and I don't blame anyone for being suspicious given that the spam started quite quickly after this post was created (and how all comments got initially downvoted). Who is definitely within question, but without a doubt the HN sight is under attack and is getting significant traffic that is slowing it down.
This more than anything says why we need SORA AI now, and to replace these animators with AI. We cannot be allow to have reputable US firms engaging with a foreign adversary. Replacing these workers with AI should do the trick in this compliance snafu.
> There is no evidence to suggest that the companies identified in the images had any knowledge that a part of their project had been subcontracted to North Korean animators. In fact, as the editing comments on all the files, including those related to US-based animations, were written in Chinese, it is likely that the contracting arrangement was several steps downstream from the major producers.
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