In the cramped, dust-moted office of , circa 2006, two developers stared at a problem. Their media player, KMPlayer, was a beast—it could play a corrupted AVI file from a LimeWire folder that other players would choke on. But it was ugly. Default grey, with buttons that looked like they belonged on a Windows 98 cash register.

“We need skins,” said , the lead coder. “People judge code by its curves.”

She whispered, “Skins don’t just cover things up, Jun-ho. Sometimes, they show you what’s underneath.”

Jun-ho burst in the next morning, pale. “The network logs show our player, last night, pinged a server in Pyongyang. Exactly 127 bytes. No more, no less.”