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?
> but among those that were not VPN-related was an IP address in Spain and three in China
I wonder if the IP in Spain was related to Alejandro Cao de Benós
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.
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.
The real question is does North Korean let their animators work remote in a LOCL area.
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.
Let's not forget the use of pirated software to produce the animations.
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?
Isn't North Korea working on something like cartoon animation, a good thing?
Why is the USA sanctioning the citizens of North Korea?
It's not like theyre happy about a dictator running the country doing international crazy stuff and oppressing them.
I feel like we should be supporting any capitalistic effort they make so that they can build up resources to combat their dictator from within.
So it looks like Season 3 of Invincible is a go.
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?
Seems like this thread is being DDoSed (maybe by the Norks).
> video interviews
From what I hear, the live deepfakes are getting good enough to make these near worthless.
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@dang looks like we have a troll who's creating multiple accounts.
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They were animating stuff? For money? The thing that hits me the most about this, I think, is the depravity of it all.
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.
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.