8 ms·

>the country's telecoms regulator ordered monitoring applications be installed on the smartphones of Koreans aged 18 and below This is disgusting to read, in a

• sooheon 11y ago
  It's infuriating to live in a country with such outstanding tech infrastructure to be shackled with these insane policies. Not to mention ActiveX and eight different plugin downloads for nearly any transaction, Spring/Java being considered the cutting edge in web development, and the downright Fascist porn restrictions (no I'm not bitter).
  • pki 11y ago
    Almost every Korean site tries to force feed some malware rootkit from ahnlab or nprotect, this is even more disturbing when you note that ahnlab's founder is apparently part of the Korean government now Though Korea did result in one of the funniest things I've ever seen: apparently a lot of Korean companies have a strong need to "hide their proprietary website's source code" by iframing their pages multiple layers deep and making every link javascript:GoToAboutUs() so the url doesn't show up, and then window.locationing it
    • curiously 11y ago
      Dr. Ahn even tried to run for president and likely to try again in the future. Mention 'snowden' or 'privacy' and people won't bat an eye in Korea I bet. Pretty much same with most countries. People just don't seem to give a damn, the same old 'im not a criminal so I am okay with catching terrorists by spying and controlling the rest of the population'.
  • ygmelnikova 11y ago
    What kind of degenerate society likens the restriction of teenager's ability to view porn to Fascism?
    • poikniok 11y ago
      Any society that is not fascist?
    • pki 11y ago
      I should point out that they killed off (any form of gay, really) LGBT-rights sites with the reason "perversion", not just porn If we're talking teenagers, imagine googling sex ed terms and having to enter your ssn[0] [0]http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/age-verification-at-google-korea.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/age-verification-at...
    • guard-of-terra 11y ago
      Not talking on society level but I watched porn from maybe 12 onwards. Have problems with that? Know how I should have lived better than I? You can't restrict anything anyway. Any filter is porous and everything gets thru. One hardcore image is enough. The only thing you really achieve is humiliating the teenager, make him feel not in control of his life. I know that you try to restrain me like I'm a parrot instead of taking to me; you are explicit in trying to conceal from me something that you point me at by this attempt.
    • r00fus 11y ago
      The one that sees this as a slippery slope to further intrusion into private life...
    • briandh 11y ago
      "the downright Fascist porn restrictions (no I'm not bitter)" doesn't say anything about teenagers specifically.
      • ygmelnikova 11y ago
        "the country's telecoms regulator ordered monitoring applications be installed on the smartphones of Koreans aged 18 and below"
  • sho_hn 11y ago
    The ActiveX thing is sort of an interesting historical accident. As a Korean on this site you probably know the details much better, but for onlookers: Korea decided to develop, specify and make mandatory for ecommerce it's own 128-bit block cipher called SEED, back when the US had a crypto export embargo on crypto past 40bit (Europeans, too, will remember the International Editions of browsers like Netscape Navigator), which was deemed not good enough. This ended up being implemented and officially accredited as an ActiveX control, and for the longest time there was no framework in place to accredit other implementations. Mozilla actually implemented SEED in the hopes it might be helpful, but ended up dropping it again later. This situation remains unsolved until now, although every couple of months there's a news story of supposed gov plans to do to better soon.
    • digi_owl 11y ago
      I still recall the shitstorm that was PGP. A 128-bit public key encryption system as a downloadable binary. My first encounter with the insanity that is international politics.
  • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    Hey, at least you don't live in China....
    • molikto 11y ago
      Hi, what's your current project now?
      • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        Same as always, working on a grand live programming demo for the end of this summer.
    • netheril96 11y ago
      As a Chinese citizen, I regular browse the Internet through a VPN server in South Korea just so that I can use Google to solve my technical problems. And Gmail. And stackoverflow. And travis-ci. And GitHub Gist. And Rubygems.
      • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        I've given up on VPNs...they just seem to be so flaky that after you pay your one year subscription fee, they are then blocked by the government. I just use Bing (disclosure: MS employee but would like search engine choice).
        • c1 11y ago
          Red Apricot (Hong Xing) have been working well for almost a year. It's a Chrome extension. Based on sockets proxy. Occasionally, it got blocked, but they would recover it in the next day.
        • netheril96 11y ago
          Buy a VPS and set up your own VPN. It is much cheaper and less likely to be targeted.
    • netheril96 11y ago
• jkot 11y ago
  Is it North or South Korea?
  • Zigurd 11y ago
    It's "our" Korea. That makes all the difference.
  • mg1982 11y ago
    It's important to remember that up until 60 years ago they weren't in any way separate from one another, and up until 20-30 years ago when the south's economy took off, there was little material difference between how the two countries were run.
    • curiously 11y ago
      night and day difference. It makes me cringe when people try to group them up together. If they were indeed similar and identical they should've produced the same result but it hasn't, one is a failed state and will forever be noted as an embarrassment to human race, the other a thriving developed country. North Korea even had a head start by a far margin. Up until 1970s, North Korea was pretty much the better equipped, better fed, and stronger military force. South Korea would not have survived had it not had military dictatorship guarding against North Korean aggression both externally and internally (lot of bitter South Koreans wanting communism).
• Lawtonfogle 11y ago
  Every day the envelope gets pushed further and further. This is one of the driving factors behind my shifting view to be behind an unlimited Freedom of Speech/Information viewpoint. No restriction on any speech/information, including monitoring that would have a chilling effect. I realize it isn't perfect, but I think it is better than the alternative. Also, someone needs to take the extreme stance because if the only two groups are the ones who are willing to compromise and the others at the opposite extreme, the latter is going to eventually win.
  • Forbo 11y ago
    I hate to play devil's advocate, but what about things like intellectual property or (ugh, even saying this makes me feel like a scumbag politician) child pornography? I can see the argument for the virtual variety of CP, but what about the real kind? I'm genuinely curious how the unlimited viewpoint can be defended against these types of arguments.
    • akira2501 11y ago
      > but what about the real kind? You mean the kind of child abuse that's been occurring for centuries before we even thought up the electron? Or are just worried about how these images of abuse end up getting distributed? If it's the latter, then fine, censor the internet. If it's the former, you're going to need a more comprehensive plan.
    • olefoo 11y ago
      Intellectual property is ideal theft. It exists mainly to employ lawyers and enrich middlemen. That some creators are accidentally rewarded is a byproduct that is used to justify the rest of it.
    • innguest 11y ago
      There are very good counter arguments you can easily find online. I'll give you my favorites. For intellectual property, it is not real property. Property is the category of things that are material and can exchange hands. Data, like speech, does not get literally exchanged, but copied. So there's no such thing as intellectual property. Imagine you can memorize whole books. Would that be illegal? What if your friends could phone you and ask you to recite some paragraphs from memory, would that be illegal? What if you were part of a group of people that memorized the books they own and they ask each other to recite over the phone one page a day from a book they don't have? A hard-drive is a shortcut for that brain capacity we don't yet have. But if we did have that capacity to memorize, it would not be illegal. So instead of enjoying hard-drives to freely books and songs, we are criminalizing an arbitrary human enhancement. For child pornography, I find it hard to justify the suppression of criminal evidence. We all should fear a government that has the power to arrest someone and suppress the evidence for their crime. If someone kills someone else even if just to film it, that would be a crime (or many crimes) but the video should not be illegal to possess. Evidence of gruesome deaths (intentional or not) are likewise legal to possess. What should be illegal is the act in itself, not the documentation with which we prove the crime.
• task_queue 11y ago
  At least they're open about it.
• amyjess 11y ago
  On top of that, Korean Internet connections come with mandatory porn filters in order to protect the local prostitution industry. It's shameful.
  • noobermin 11y ago
    Do you have a link for this? As crazy as the linked article is, I find this hard to believe about SK too.
    • bjornsteffanson 11y ago
      Typing this response from downtown Seoul, and can confirm that censorship is very prevalent. There are thousands of blacklisted sites -- they are simply forwarded to http://warning.or.kr/ http://warning.or.kr/, which reads "This site has been legally blocked by government regulations." The numbers on the table below are different agencies you can call to appeal the block if you think it's unwarranted. Most people who are annoyed by it just VPN to Japan and ignore it.
• sho_hn 11y ago
  Very good read: http://opennetkorea.org/en/wp/administrative-censorship http://opennetkorea.org/en/wp/administrative-censorship Related: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/south-korea-only-thing-worse-online-censorship https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/south-korea-only-thing...
• fossuser 11y ago
  Most of these 'teen alerts' are related to sex - which somehow makes this even worse.
• braythwayt 11y ago
  > all communications monitored, chat logged.. holy shit. It is disturbing to read that Korea is forcing its teenagers to live under the kind of oppressive surveillance that is enforced by countries like the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia.
  • guard-of-terra 11y ago
    Is there anybody defending those? Unless there are, your downvoting is well deserved.
• digi_owl 11y ago
  What is glossed over by most of western media is that SK was a right wing dictatorship until the 90s. And to this day holds a very conservative and paternal attitude. Likely the reason it gets a pass is because it has the shit can that is NK next door. In a sense the Korean peninsula is the cold war in a microcosm.