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South Korean forums will need to scan every images with AI censorship tools
- Cider9986 5mo agoOriginal: South Korean Online Communities Will Need to Scan Every Images with AI Censorship Tools
- donkeylazy456 5mo agoForcing CUDA and guiding for Ubuntu 18.04 (FYI, EOS was 2023). Do they really think single Quadro GPU server can handle heavy traffics in real-time?
- iamnothere 5mo agoIt’s insane to mandate the specific vendor used. This reads like a backroom deal was reached. Or gross incompetence.
- rwmj 5mo agoSouth Korea has history, for years their banking applications required ActiveX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...
- rurban 5mo agoAnd mandatory TLS backdoors, ie insecure transport level
- onesingleblast 5mo ago[dead]
- greenavocado 5mo agoGross not giving a damn
- zuzululu 5mo agoThey are fully aware that website operators of popular discussion forums cannot afford it. This is effectively a mass censorship/takedown of Korea's remaining corners of free speech. Imagine if a subreddit had to shut down because they have to now purchase expensive hardware just to vet each image shared. These forums are popular with the young who share meme images of the current president of Korea and this new ordinance would immediately put an end to that.
- eqvinox 5mo agoMinority Report wasn't supposed to be an instruction manual ffs. Also, will the AI curtail artistic activity? Things it doesn't recognize? We had watchdogs on personal expression before, one of the outcomes was "degenerate art" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art]
- zuzululu 5mo ago[flagged]
- eqvinox 5mo agoStarmer is about as left headed as a straight line railway across Australia. Corbyn was left (maybe). cf. https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024 https://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2024 Even if you consider that page biased in whatever way - it's still useful for comparisons on the same scale. E.g. https://www.politicalcompass.org/norway2025 https://www.politicalcompass.org/norway2025
- sophrosyne42 5mo agoStarmer is a Fabian. He is textbook, self identified left and socialist. He is pretty much a poster child for leftism.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- christkv 5mo agoThe whole uk establishment including the civil service is one giant expression of fabian thought. The civil service runs itself, appointing itself and ignoring political power. Labour with Starmer just happens to a time where fabians are in control of the entire state.
- vintermann 5mo agoNot in policy, no he definitively isn't. It's actually possible to join and have a career in political party without believing a word of what they stand for. There are examples all over the world, but Starmer is among the most blatant ones. My best theory is that he's chum with one of UK's many spy lords - that is, upper class twats with a sinecure in the secret services - and that he's trying to destroy Labour for them (and the good of the country of course). He only failed last election because the conservative party was even more self-destructive.
- 5mo ago
- petermcneeley 5mo agoThe catholic church fought the printing press for hundreds of years. Lets see how long our rulers fight the internet.
- fithisux 5mo agoIt's far worse.
- themafia 5mo agoThe printing press was very much an invention /not/ at the disposal of the citizens. It analogizes poorly to the Internet.
- lokar 5mo agoOf course not, it’s the books that people had access to.
- morkalork 5mo agoActually it's perfect. How long did it take rulers to go from fighting the printing press to using it for propaganda and their own ambitions? The internet has just speed run that same course.
- themafia 5mo ago> How long did it take rulers to go from fighting the printing press to using it for propaganda and their own ambitions? Probably the moment something negative was published about them. > The internet has just speed run that same course And citizen journalism has never been more powerful. There will be no invention of man that will eliminate jealousy, avarice or hatred. Objectively I'd rather be alive today than at any point in our recorded history.
- t-3 5mo agoHow many people are involved in ISPs, data centers, and other internet backbones? Most people are consumers rather than producers or "printing press" operators.
- matt3210 5mo agoThey have stock in nvidia
- shlewis 5mo agoNo traditional media talk about this as much as it should be. No one seems to care but the always-angry, chronically online. I had no high hopes for free internet in this country but it's getting worse than I've ever imagined.
- SidewaysView 5mo ago[flagged]
- d456fg78hj90k 5mo ago[dead]
- fithisux 5mo ago"will need"???
- october8140 5mo agoThe future is self hosted private invite only communities of vetted real life humans, likely done in person.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoAnd when you need longer reach than that? A “I vouch for this person” system?
- Pay08 5mo agoThat has largely worked for private trackers.
- shit_game 5mo agolobste.rs has a pretty decent system with a global invite tree, where users can provide access for other people. it comes with the benefit of creating an association graph of accounts that allows for swift moderation, and lets the userbase grow within a community of people likely to appreciate the culture.
- Gigachad 5mo agoThat's pretty much the present today. Tbh I'm fine with the public internet just dying off at this point and people going back to their local smaller scale groups.
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- mx7zysuj4xew 5mo agoI'd prefer the 2011/2012 era before mass moderation was possible and before people began policing for "toxicity". We still had the culture and vestiges of freedom of the old web, alongside with the network effect of millions of "normal" people joining in the conversation through their iphones
- prodigycorp 5mo agoKorea is backwards in technology in every possible way. - For the longest time, you needed a windows computer to access any sort of government or banking service, and it's still the case for most services - Because of the reliance on crappy windows laptops, you see everyone who uses a laptop carries an external mouse around to places like coffee shops (bc their trackpads suck) - the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats - watching korean news is farcical - every time they cut to public footage, literally 80% of the frame is blurred. I see no point in even watching the news. - APIs and API documentation for stuff is sooooo poorly designed/written. Like, it's a f-ing joke. - External map providers were iced out of hte market until this past year - You need a phone number to sign up for literally anything. There are so many more examples but these are just the ones off the top of my head. There is not an inch of breathing room for dynamism. Koreas issues arent political. This is what happens in pure oligopolies. People on twitter love to fantasize about Korea being so technofuturistic but the truth is that the startup culture is terrible, there's no venture capital scene, and the big companies write all the rules
- Pay08 5mo ago> the de-facto document format are crappy hancom formats What's hancom?
- mparkms 5mo agoAwful Korean-developed MS Office clone. edit: for more context, it was initially adopted because it had better support for Korean language features, but now it serves basically no purpose other than be a pain in the ass for anyone who has to deal with their proprietary, incompatible with everything file formats.
- jibal 5mo agoA web search will give you a faster and better answer than you will get by asking here.
- Pay08 5mo agoApparently not, since most of the results I get (that are in English) are about a lawsuit they lost for violating the AGPL.
- indiandeodorant 5mo ago[flagged]
- zb3 5mo agoDo they specify a particular model? Is that model public?
- malloryerik 5mo agoWill this affect non-Korean online communities in Korea? Like Instagram?
- polski-g 5mo agoPeople predict that by 2032, the only country on earth to host websites will be the USA.
- jdw64 5mo agoThe problem is that using an AI censorship tool requires purchasing a solution from a specific vendor. And the deadline is effectively less than a month. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this—South Korea especially has many IT zombie companies that sustain themselves through government contracts. In practice, there’s a local CMS structure in place, and Korean programmers, who are generally weak in English, have to rely on that local CMS, which makes them weak in programming as well. (This is why, despite being a country with a high proportion of highly educated people, South Korea has relatively few prominent programmers.) South Korea was the first country in the world to implement an internet censorship law. There is a historical record of censorship, regardless of which administration—left or right—was in power. That said, it’s a complicated issue because these censorship systems also tend to create state IT contracts and job opportunities. To make things more concrete: most local bulletin board systems and forum platforms are heavily tied to a specific commercial CMS. This is not a coincidence — government-affiliated projects often mandate that CMS, and developers here, lacking both English proficiency and exposure to global open-source alternatives, end up locked into its ecosystem. As a result, even basic AI censorship features become dependent on that vendor’s proprietary modules. When a tight deadline (less than a month) forces a purchase, there’s no room to explore better, cheaper, or more transparent options. The structure itself perpetuates vendor lock-in, weak technical capacity, and a cycle of superficial compliance rather than genuine innovation.
- AYBABTME 5mo agoSomething missing as cultural context is that deepfake, involuntary "porn", and all sorts of abuse of personal image, are a rampant and omnipresent problem in Korea. Many things are great here, but the sexual landscape when it comes to men versus women and kids, is nasty. You can't really apply a Western mindset to this without understanding just how messed up some of that stuff is. So whatever you think of the mechanism, the problem behind it is very real. I do think a proposal that AI-filters content on small forums is a bit weird, and probably clumsy. But Korea faces a real problem and usually leans toward a bias to action and "just do it". It leads to weird stuff but also to dynamic problem solving. The part I'm trying to preempt here is measuring this against so called "universal" values; these French Revolution/Enlightenment ideas of universal rights aren't really universal, they're one culture's logic, consistent inside its own bubble but exported like it's the default for everyone. I'll say, I do like them. But other self-consistent logics exist, and I think Korea's set is one of them. It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual. Both produce aberrations, only different ones. For example, first time I came here I thought it's crazy to have so many speeding cameras and CCTVs everywhere. Years later I didn't so much "got used to it" but I think it's a tradeoff that mostly works and I grew to appreciate it. Korea prefers lightweight polices (literally friendly looking) with a lot of automated, bulk enforcement, instead of sparse enforcement backed by the occasional armored truck. That's a design choice, not a slide into dystopia. So all I'm trying to convey is, keep an open mind, and don't apply some supposed "universal" mindset blindly. Critique the mechanism all you want. Just don't do it by treating one culture's values as the yardstick everyone else gets measured by. Fwiw I think it's a misfire. But I don't think it's a slippery-slide down dystopia. It's just Tuesday.
- jdw64 5mo agoI often agree with you to some extent. In Korea, you can't just say there's no problem with revenge porn—that's basically the logic the Korean government uses. But the issue is that the main source of revenge porn actually comes from overseas communities that Koreans use. Of course, Korea's largest domestic community has had issues with filtering—things like terrorism threats and rape cases have occurred there. But that's because that community (DCinside) is so large. In reality, the incidents that have truly enraged the public started on Twitter (X) and Telegram. So do the key actors behind these problems end up being subject to censorship? No, they don't. And does censorship actually eliminate the problems you mentioned? Or does it just make things darker and worse? I myself have a typical East Asian mindset—I believe a certain level of restriction on freedom is necessary. But to be honest, I see this as internet martial law
- DeathArrow 5mo agoCan't they simply move their hosting and domains to other countries?
- prmoustache 5mo agoMoving servers never move liability of citizens operating them
- gblargg 5mo agoIt would be funny if someone hacked the database to block any praise of the current politicians and this censorship, only allowing criticism of it.
- Cider9986 5mo agoThere seems to be less hacktivism now.
- HlessClaudesman 5mo agoPenis depictions will evolve.
- jeroenhd 5mo agoLooks like South Korea is taking a page out of its northern neighbour's book. Will this impact software exported out of Korea? I can't imagine Samsung will gain any popularity if their phones come prepackaged with AI censorship tools. It massively backfired when Apple planned to do it on iPhones.
- suburban_strike 5mo agoMy Samsung has "Galaxy AI" all over it, it's just an S23. I've tried to use it out of curiosity and it rejects a lot of my image edits as inappropriate (violence) so the foundation is set.
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo ago12 months time every country will require it.
- sharpshadow 5mo agoThey had the “Nth Room” case[0] which may have laid the road for a stronger approval to this. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Room_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Room_case
- boltless 5mo agoIt was a horrible case indeed, but weren't they using Telegram.
- 3vo-ai 5mo ago[flagged]
- renoir 5mo agoHuh, their internet forums look like Hacker News or such old-time sites rather than modern apps like Reddit or something. In terms of UI UX and use of web tech. Surprised these have like 20% population of country as visitors. I wonder if it’s their language that made them stick with older forum style rather than English speaking world’s apps? I like their way more.
- GaryBluto 5mo agoI wonder if this will create a market for freer forums for Koreans that are hosted in other countries?
- temporallobe 5mo agoWhat is CMS in this context?
- sbinnee 5mo agoIt’s just funny that I get to know about this sort of Korean policies in HN not from main media (I live in Korea). I had a few chances to apply for government grants in a startup. There is a lot of blind money for new techs but people managing it are simply not competent enough to understand them. Also, like some comments mentioned, tech infra around their management system is often old and very insecure.
- functionmouse 5mo agoU.S. social media has been doing this for a while, right?