North Korea’s Dot-KP domain name system returned to the Internet in the last few days. (See the bottom of this post for updates.)

Offline for months, the service has resumed via servers run by Star JV, the Internet joint venture formed by the North Korean government and Thailand’s Loxley Pacific. As reported previously, dot-kp was run by the KCC Europe operation in Germany but went offline in the third quarter of last year.

Two websites are already available via KP domain names. Both are hosted on the same web server. The first, Naenara, has been available for a few months via an IP address and the second, Friend.com.kp, has been offline since its domain name disappeared. You can find out more about each site in The North Korean Website List.

I’ve done a little digging around in the DNS (domain name system) records for KP and found the following eight KP top-level domains have been prepared for future use: net.kp, com.kp, edu.kp, gov.kp, org.kp, rep.kp, tra.kp and co.kp.

Both Naenara and Friend are already using com.kp. A domain name has been prepared for the Star Internet provider: star.net.kp, and one for the state-run Korea Posts and Telecommunications Co.: kptc.kp. I can’t find any other registered domain names at present.

UPDATE 1: On January 12 a the KCNA website that had been available at IP address 175.45.179.68 became available at www.star.edu.kp. The site has been carrying that name in its footer for a while:

The site also appears to be available via a Chinese name, www.kp.col.cn, but I have no details on that name or how it relates to the site.

UPDATE 2: My story at PC World: North Korean Domain Names Return to the Internet