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True, South Korea is also something special... everyone was required to have internet explorer with activeX for a very long time there to do banking and online

• kuschku 9y ago
  The alternative to that would have been no SSL at all. The US required that all exported crypto would be limited, so South Korea instead built their own crypto. And browsers couldn't implement that themselves (also due to export regulations), so South Korea had to implement it as plugin for the then most-used browsers, which was mostly IE.
  • Denvercoder9 9y ago
    The US doesn't limit exported crypto anymore since 2000, and South Korea was still using the ActiveX-based solution as late as last year.
    • kuschku 9y ago
      Actually, the US still partially restrict it (I as a German had to file dozens of forms with the US DoD due to that already), but you are correct, TLS up to 1.3 is entirely public worldwide. But obviously, by 2000, many sites were already using the South Korean crypto, and deprecating it would be just as complicated as deprecating TLS 1.0 or SHA1 TLS Certificates in the US. The browser vendors consider that impossible — the South Korean situation is just as problematic.