The website of Voice of Korea, the DPRK’s international shortwave radio service, has dumped its proprietary software player.

The site previously required use of the player by users to hear its audio clips posted online (see, right), but that’s not now the case.

Users can now listen with Flash, and that opens the audio up for the first time to Mac and Linux users. It also means that Windows users who were uneasy about downloading a North Korean software package onto their computers can now listen to the audio.

Users don’t have to download the linked Flash package. Flash can be downloaded from Adobe, but is probably already present in most computers.

I don’t visit everyday, so I’m unsure exactly when the change was made, but the proprietary player was there in early February. I know because I asked a security expert to scan it for malware. At the time it was being identified by some anti-virus packages as malicious, but an in-depth security scan revealed no problems. It was likely a false-positive, I was told.