Johan Nylander - a dork. And this is official.

I hope that none of the expletives I used upon reading the CNN article The photos North Korea didn't want you to see will seep into the text of this post. If they do, I wouldn't apologize though.

Johan Nylander, you see, was a "sole Western journalist covering a unique bicycle race in North Korea last month". You can read his whole story in that article, but the main point is that upon Nylander's leaving the NK territory an overzealous border guard deleted about 90 photographs from his camera. The photos were (miraculously, as Mr Nylander seems to think) recovered by a computer expert. And for some reason the intrepid reporter decided to share with the whole world - including the NK various arms of the repressive regime - the details of the pictures' recovery process:

"When they deleted the file on the card, they did not delete the whole file instantly, it just released the space of this file for future use -- the content is still there," Benjamin Wong, owner of Vector Data Recovery explained to me.

Which, I think, puts a full stop to the future attempts of visiting journalist(s) to recover their pictures. Now that NK is aware of the mistake.

It is permissible for a journalist to be unaware of computers' intricacies - even of fairly simple things like the one described above and should be known to a professional user of a digital camera. It is inexcusable for a journalist not to consult someone with a grain of common sense before publishing this useful for NK regime tip.

For that matter, there is no excuse for CNN not editing that "useful" tidbit out of the article. But then, for quite some time, I am not sure on whose side CNN really are...

Oh, and here is a picture of the hero:

He is the one on the left, if you wondered. Just so you know to keep your distance if you happen to meet him. A walking disaster area, that git has to be...