Vox Sentences: The great North Korean internet outage of 2014

1. Internet-Free North Korea

Warning: this is probably not how the internet outage actually happened. (Shutterstock)

• North Korea is currently being targeted in a massive cyberattack.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• "While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected, there was no definitive evidence of it."

  [NYT / Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger]

• The US is a prime suspect, after Barack Obama promised a response to North Korea's alleged involvement in the Sony hacks.

  [Vox / Tim Lee]

• Then again, China is investigating North Korea's role in the Sony hacks — and controls North Korea's entire connection to the internet.

  [Bloomberg]

• China's patience for the North Korean regime's antagonistic foreign policy appears to be waning, suggesting China might be behind the outage.

  [NYT / Jane Perlez]

• It's also possible North Korea shut off its connection unilaterally. We just don't know enough to say at this point.

• North Korea has its own internal version of the internet, limited to a few handpicked sites and email.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• "Almost all of the network within North Korea is restricted to the capital city, Pyongyang."

  [Ars Technica / Peter Bright]

• The North Korean government released a long rant that included, among other things, a "quasi-denial of responsibility for the Sony hack, strong hints that North Korea was in fact responsible, a threat to attack the White House, and so much more."

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

2. Cop killer

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (right) and New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton (left) on December 22, 2014 in New York, NY. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

• Two NYPD officers were shot and killed in Brooklyn on Saturday.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The suspected gunman, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, shot himself dead after the killings.

• He had a long criminal rap sheet and posted comments on Instagram suggesting he acted in retribution for police killings of civilians, like Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

  [Washington Post / Jerry Markon and Peter Hermann]

• He was wanted in Baltimore County, but that police department's efforts to alert the NYPD via fax and teletype failed to prevent the murders.

  [Slate / Lily Hay Newman]

• The New York police union chief said Mayor Bill de Blasio has "blood on his hands"; de Blasio had expressed empathy with protesters following the non-indictment in Eric Garner's killing by the NYPD.

  [Capitol New York / Azi Paybarah]

• Rudy Giuliani, who repeatedly defended police who used excessive force when he was mayor, blamed President Obama and #BlackLivesMatter protesters for the killings.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• This attempt to put the blame for the murders on protesters fails, for at least three reasons.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• "Notably, none of these intellectually dishonest statements quote or link to any actual rhetoric spoken by Mayor de Blasio, Eric Holder, or President Obama. "

  [The Atlantic / Conor Friedersdorf]

• De Blasio has asked protests against police killings to cease in the wake of the shootings.

  [NY Mag / Margaret Hartmann]

• Deliberate, criminal killings of police officers are rare, and accidental killings are more common.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

3. Misc.

• After the GED high school equivalency test was altered this year, the number of people passing it fell 90 percent.

  [Cleveland Scene / Daniel McGraw]

• The real-life CIA officer that Jessica Chastain's Zero Dark Thirty character was based on was a major architect of the torture program. She's still at the agency.

  [Slate / Daniel Politi]

• Amazon stopped selling a novel because it had too many hyphens.

  [The Guardian / Alison Flood]

• Coal miners have one of the lowest rates of depression of any occupation.

  [The Atlantic / Joe Pinsker]

• The makers of Cards Against Humanity are becoming campaign finance activists and leveraging their customer base to do it.

  [Washington Post / Jaime Fuller]

4. Verbatim

• "No country has ever made nerdery punishable by imprisonment or death."

  [Wired / Adam Rogers]

• "My father, who is not a behavioral economist, would surely reject this last analysis and say if I ate the chocolates, that must have been the rational thing for me to do; therefore, the chocolates were a great gift."

  [NYT / Josh Barro]

• "How is it that in over a century of research, we still know so little about pain that we haven't been able to create a powerful, non-opioid painkiller?"

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• "The idea that facts belong to someone is crazy. It’s a fiction we use to ensure that fact-creators keep creating facts."

  [Tom Lee]

• "There in the dirt was a perfect set of baby teeth."

  [Tampa Bay Times / Ben Montgomery]