>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 all seriousness. Not allowed to have a blog without linking it to their SSN, not allowed to play games without linking it to their SSN, all communications monitored, chat logged.. holy shit. Getting a mobile phone also requires one.. (and that's not even counting the heavy internet censorship, porn illegality and free speech restrictions)
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).
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
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice moving of the goalposts there. An authoritarian intrusion into private behaviour is an example of an activity done by a fascist state, hence the GP's adjective. But your comment converts that into the entire ideology of facism.
Also, nice job inserting 'teenagers' into a comment that made no mention of any age group.
Porn magazines? How quaint. Speaking of moving the goalposts again, the porn control in the article is a mandated smartphone app.
And no, my country does not require minors to install state-mandated applications on their smartphones. For any reason, porn or otherwise.
Also, pornography isn't degenerate. It's just sex. Exploitative pornagraphy is bad, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But we generally prevent minors from accessing it because they're not emotionally equipped to deal with sex stuff - same reason we have age of consent laws. Or do you also think that sex itself is degenerate, and that's why there are laws around teenagers and who they can have sex with?
sooheon, who suggested that he/she lives in Korea, made no such stipulation. Of note, distribution (and maybe possession -- I am not sure) of porn is illegal in Korea in general -- not just for those under 18.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The logic of child porn legislation seems to mimic that of drug laws. Catching the suppliers are hard (multiple jurisdictions etc) so instead catch the consumers and so hope to dry up the market.
Thing is that we are dealing with a mangled sex drive here, and you can't get any more basic than that (the sex drive can even override the drive for self preservation).
The only way to really solve the problem would be to find a way to test for it clinically, and some way to rectify the problem at a neural level. But i wonder what other devils we will uncork if we ever get the means to do so...
Simple. Once we have a good test, the one's who test positive will be institutionalized for life, likely kept on drugs. It would be to the extent that it might be more humane to take them out and shoot them. Especially if this test would work while they were still children.
Fundamentally, the risk of bad outcomes is the price we pay for living in a free society. I would rather recognize the right of everyone to say anything, and occasionally do great things, than cower behind speech restrictions designed to produce a safe, bland uniformity.
> I would rather recognize the right of everyone to say anything, and occasionally do great things, than cower behind speech restrictions designed to produce a safe, bland uniformity.
"Safe, bland uniformity"? Lives are at stake. People's safety is at stake.
> "Safety"? Coming from your ilk, which calls all dissent "harassment",
Well aren't you a nasty piece of work. Using a straw man to claim harassment doesn't exist.
> Mean words on the internet put nobody's life at risk.
Completely untrue. People have been bullied into suicide many, many times. Vulnerable people can have their address revealed and receive physical attacks or be outright murdered. Hate speech can incite violence.
Get out of your fantasy land. Speech and action are not divorced, and words usually hurt far more than sticks or stones.
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.
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).
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/, 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.
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.
> 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.
This is the digital equivalent of America's beer laws - you cannot drink till you are 21; but hey you can vote, get married, join the army (and drive a tank or handle nukes presumably) but NO DRINKING!
Every single American college person I have talked to (almost without exception) talks about the non-stop binges they go on when they hit 21.
Now the South Korean kids will go on Digital binges when they hit 18 - what will that be like (!).
Like Korean teenagers won't immediately develop a code words to evade this. I'm not sure if there's already an equivalent to l33tsp34k in Korean, but if not, there is now.
I think you're absolutely right. Not sure about Korean, but Japanese youngn's have already invented their own obfuscated script called ギャル文字 (Gyaru-moji): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyaru-moji. I've tried to read it but it's quite difficult. What's interesting, however, is how fast it could evolve. The authorities will have a hard time keeping up even when they do catch on.
I'm not even sure what words they're censoring, that might not even be it potentially. If it's 술 then you'd get like 500 other words stuck in context with it like I dunno, 요술. Filtering for certain words is probably a lot easier in Korean than in English and concatenating that all together is probably about as easy to guess as 13375p34k in English.
Haha I like that. Most likely will be ㅁㅈ though unless that's already on the list. Anecdotally I've seen whole messages written using the first piece of the Hangeul square. Seems like that would be a nightmare to keep track of for these programs and relatively easy for kids to perfect.
>"Smart Sheriff" app was funded by the South Korean government primarily to block access to pornography and other offensive content online. But its features go well beyond that.
So forcibly blocking "offensive content" is a-ok, it's only when it goes beyond that that there's a problem.
> "Smart Relief" is a mobile app for parental control of Android smartphones. [...] Smart Relief is not one of the 15 apps [that the government requires to be installed on teen phones] but shares similar features with them.
Why isn't this article dissecting one of the apps that is mandatory for teenager's phones, then?
This is disgusting to read, in all seriousness. Not allowed to have a blog without linking it to their SSN, not allowed to play games without linking it to their SSN, all communications monitored, chat logged.. holy shit. Getting a mobile phone also requires one.. (and that's not even counting the heavy internet censorship, porn illegality and free speech restrictions)