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PC Baangs In America
VonGuard writes "Ahoy hoy! I've written a new article for the East Bay Express about the rise of the PC Baang in the Northern California Bay Area. While in Korea, Starcraft is still the most popular Baang game, here in the US, Counter-Strike reigns supreme. Are these to be the malt shops and arcades of our time?"
Saw on the news yesterday that one of the Dem's from CA is proposing that cyber cafe's be fined if minors are found to be playing violent video games. More to follow.
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
I found some of these in the Philippines back in March of 2000 in Manila. They had gaming cafes setup to play several 3-D games on a LAN. In addition they had standalone machines for surfing the internet. Nothing new.
I loooove Counter-Strike. I've been playing it for years. ;(
The thing I don't get is....why do I still suck? I mean I really suck. I'm most always the first one dead. I have a 2 ghz and a cable modem, so I can't blame the machine any more.
Guess I just go running in guns blazing cuz it's so damn fun.
Does anyone know why the korean word is being transliterated 'baang' with two 'A's? I don't remember it being anything other than a regular A sound in Korean.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
*craft takes strategy, which is probably why c-strikers don't play as much. yes, i played c-strike, beta 3 - v1.1, and i must say that i now like to play starcraft broodwars a LOT more than cs.
of course, i also wonder if those koreans have hella old machines that won't play cs, but will play starcraft. you know, that whole i-want-to-eat-so-i'll-delay-upgrading-my-computer deal. (i'm late for class, so, no, i didn't read the article.)
So *that's* where all of those open mail relays are at - they're installed on game servers in baangs...
Image if they could simulate that thrill of actually sitting next to the person you're killing. That would be a real killer app.
Karma: Bad due to google bombing - Robert Watkins woz 'ere.
Why not just write "internet cafe" or "net cafe" instead of Baang, which nobody know what mean? later on you could tell us that they are call Baangs in korea.
/. headlines either stupid or impossible to understand?
Why is it that people seem to go out of the way to make
Anyway, I've been playing C/S on net cafe for a couple of years here in Denmark (bi-weekly).
Lately a lot of people has shifted towards Battle Field 1942 though.... could be the next big thing..
TC - My Photos..
I remember a place like this just off campus, when I was in school. They basically had a LAN, with VR headsets hanging over the chairs. We went in a played Quake and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter for an hour once. Since we were all accustomed to the setups on our own PCs, we all played horribly and decided that the whole idea sucked. I think as long as people have their own game rigs, they won't spend time in these places.
It's the same reason that there's so many "cyber-cafes" in places like NYC. Living space is small with less room for desktops, so people go to a coffee house to use one.
I find this reminiscent of when I was a kid playing D and D for hours and hours and hours in high school. Seems like ages ago -- okay it WAS ages ago. But for me at least, that was the time that I found that there were geeks like me in the world. Good memories!
The US is behind the rest of the world when it comes to businesses making money off the LAN Party concept. They've been doing it in Japan, Korea, the Phillipenes, etc, for quite a while now. You'll find a few in the US that do alright. Mainly in large cities like New York. Still, it is nothing like the number of them in other countries.
:), so I don't know if they let you take your own PCs in, but I would. Because of this, you need to be in a nice enough location that people don't mind too much about tearing down their own PCs to set them up on the LAN. I would, of course, also rent PCs out to people that don't want to use their own.
I was thinking of starting one around my area, but the upfront investment is more than I can afford at the moment. I need to wait for better locations to open up anyways. You need to find someplace fairly large (but not too large), with really low rent.
Location is key, at least with my idea it is. I didn't read the article (typical Slashdot
The potential for theft shouldn't be too much of a problem. Just make sure the business PCs are clearly marked, and take a collateral upon renting that you give back when they return it. Drivers licenses would probably be good. Wouldn't hurt to require a social security card or credit card upon first rental either. *shrug*
Well, someday I'll start it up. Maybe in another couple years.
I don't actually do any of this 'online gaming' stuff, so I'm unbiased. Now...
Was this article written by a football hero or something? It seems to be obsessed with portraying PCBang culture as stereotypical asocial loser nerd pervert stuff, when in fact it's pretty much normal social life in Korea (where these things come from).
It spends whole sentences whining on about scantily clad cyber babes. It never once allows the possibility that playing Starcraft might just be a common pasttime for this particular generation in that particular area. It doesn't really describe PCBang culture so much as provide a handy toolkit for forcing it into that old Jocks-vs-Nerds idiom, the one some people don't quite grow out of.
I read this article because the spread of Korean culture (such as it is
The writer aparrently has a few issues with self-image. That's fine. Some people get bullied, some people feel inadequate (in this case quite rightly), and that's normal. But he should have called the article 'My own psychological issues and how I work them out by randomly insulting groups of Asian teenagers', and then I would have known not to read it.
Well, okay, it wasn't *quite* that bad.
But lord, it sure wasn't good.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
From the article, talking about CS:
The terrorists' goal is to plant a bomb and defend it until it explodes; the counter-terrorists must defuse the device or prevent it from being placed. If and when the charge is planted, a text message goes out to all players: "Someone set us up the bomb."
Someone's pulling yer leg, mate. Did you even play the game?
(Proper phrase is, of course, "The bomb has been planted")
"Video games don't affect kids. If Pac-Man affected us as kids we'd all be walking around in dark rooms eating magic pills while listening to repetitive electronic music." -Karen Price, Nintendo Representative
YOU GOTO HELL AND YOU DIE!
I think the author was trying to contrast the guys "real" life to his CS life, in an attempt to explain why he's so obsessed with the game.
Long-ass article. About as accurate as any other story I've read, meaning just enough errors to make you wonder how much else is wrong.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
We have quite a number of PC-Baang sites setting up here in Melbourne (been around in the inner city for a few years). Sure, Cyber Cafes have been around for yonks and we used them while travelling, etc. For the PC-Baangs, it was the concept of the netbash that got our attention. We occasionally would go down to one for a mega-bash when we had more people than would fit in one of our lounge rooms :)
:)
For some, it's their life (no PC at home due to space, money, travel, etc) and for others it's just a fun excursion. Judging by the number of them springing up, there's a market for them all right
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
There's nothing "basement" about these places - some of them are in very fashionable locations.
To have a peek check out Boomtown in central Copenhagen, just across from Tivoli Gardens.
This article sounds like some dark chapter from SnowCrash or Neouromancer.
Rather depressing livestyle. Spending all of your time in some virtual gaming arena in dark basement pits with no one to really talk to.
Psychologists will be figuring this one out for generations to come as our ability to socialize plummets into a level of communication limited to SMS, IRC, and other 'leet' short cuts to the process of talking to each other.
I remember when arcades were the arcades of our time.
"are these to be the Malt Shops and arcades of our times?"
no way. in Malt shops, people actually talked to each other. in arcades, you still had to interact with people to get tokens. in a videogame room, all you do is shoot people on a computer screen.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I think it is pretty obvious. And he has much disdain for the woman who he talks outside with. You know, the one with "too much eyeliner". ;)
According to the article they pay only 1$ per hour, you know here thy would be more expensive.
I don't think so. These have been around in the US for a long time. I used to frequent a place right near where I lived many years ago (well not THAT many) and played Doom, Duke, and a bunch of older games like that. This is NOT something new to the US, its just was not, and probably really still is not, considered "main stream".
That's the problem with most peoples narrow views on subcultures in the US. If its not main stream, and it suddenly starts to become main stream, its something TOTALLY new and we are now behind the times. Nope, sorry, its always been there, not my fault you choose to only look at whats "in" at that moment and ignore various goings on in the non-lime light area's of the states.
Seems like everyone here is trumpeting the virtues of these cyber cafes, but to me it seemed like all the people they profiled were absolute social retards. The first guy can't carry on a conversation, can barely seem to do his job (he is customer service after all), can't even fold a damn shirt, and if I had to bet would be severely lacking in a whole host of social skills . If we're on the verge of seeing tons and tons of places like these, this is NOT a good thing.
Every few months a journalist thinks that he is 'hip and cool' and writes a story about online games. Truth is, it just comes off as highly superficial and makes the people involved look rather shallow.
Or does the writer actually seem to have more of an interest in Ricky than his game playing? Read some of that text again. His cologne. His grace. His car. His... nipple?
Ref: Pages one and two of this story.
Can anybody who hangs out at these places heavy on clan gaming comment on the racial profile of customers ? In the old days, when I used to MUD, 95% of the people were Asian. Is there a disproportionate number of Asians (i.e. a greater proportion then Asians are represented in the surrounding population) in these places -forgetting, of course, the places located in Asia ? I'm betting there is, and if so, I wonder what this could mean ...
There were a couple of other niggling inaccuracies before this, but I let them slide as pandering to a non-technical audience, but this is so wrong it hurts. (See http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Leet-speak.ht ml for a more historically accurate description of the phenomenon.)
I wonder: did the writer make this up off the top of his head, or did the m4d g4m3Rz he's doing his best Katz impression over tell him that?
Posted with Mozilla
Religiously. Just never seen those mods, I guess.
i spend $45/month for a cable modem so i'll never go to a "PC Baan". i can drink beer and smoke at home too (don't smoke though). i would immagine that people who frequent these places spend as much money or more for gaming per month than i do from the comfort of my own home.
There's one fairly close to my house... I'm not going anywhere near it! I can play games a heck of a lot safer in my place.
The place was robbed at gunpoint by an asian gang in the summer, and some guy was just beat up and shot inside the place this week.
I should move...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
/*I'd love to moderate this discussion, but I feel the overwhelming need to comment. When I say, "America," I mean the United States. */
America is big. America is digitally divided.
These facts preclude cyber cafes from being popular in every community that is not a large metropolis or a very hip compact area.
We have too much land, and we live too far apart. Those who are greatly interested in computers can afford one or a few.
If I could walk out my door or hop on the subway and be in a comfortable Internet cafe in ten minutes, I would consider it. If this cyber cafe offered many attributes over my home setup, I might consider it. However, I live in a heavily-suburban metropolitan area of about 450,000 people. I would have to get in my car and drive twenty minutes from my home to the closest cyber cafe, which offers high usage fees, sophomoric l33t teenagers, and bad grub. There is an Internet cafe very close to my office downtown, but I have a better free connection at work, on which I can use my personally-owned laptop.
With blindingly fast computers becoming dirt cheap and especially with broadband proliferating, Americans have few incentives, from a technological standpoint, to patronize an Internet cafe. Some kids/adults who want to play LAN games might enjoy it, but the best part of playing a lan game is yelling profanity across the hall at your opponent, excepting the low lag. It just requires too much effort for most Americans to get to the cyber cafes, and the only benefit they get is maybe a little camaraderie. Save your money and setup a home LAN.
For some areas, like NYC or any dense urban environment, cyber cafes can be successful. Success requires two things, assuming for the moment that you already have an incredible business design with enough startup capital. First, many people need to live within a ten minute travel time. Second, living space needs to be prohibitively expensive for an average family to have a LAN room. Most of America does not meet those two criteria.
I might be simplifying the situation, but I've participated (as a free network consultant) in two failed Internet cafes, one in outer New Orleans and one in Birmingham, AL. So I hope I'm not totally ignorant.
The one near my store recently disappeared, aka closed down. I guess we just don't have enough people who are willing to pay-to-play in this area.
Nobody has mentioned this very obvious problem: almost all of these Cybercafes/Baaaangs/Whatevers are very Windows-centric. Most 31337 64m3rz run XP on their "chopped and lowered" rigs. The possibility for transmitting viruses, trojans and other random malware is a hideously strong one.
I am not sure if HLC/S runs on Linux yet or not. However, UT runs on Linux and so does Quake. All the various servers run on free *NIXen. But you really don't see alternative OSes at Cybercafes.
And there is the small problem of wannabe hoodlums starting shit at the Cybercafes. This is so absurd it's not even funny. California is going to seriously crack down on anything resembling a Cybercafe this legislative session. Thanks a lot, assholes.
So with all these concerns, I would rather tote my box to a LAN party amongst friends rather than a Cybercafe full of strangers.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
all my students do in their spare time is play CS and this online rpg from taiwan called stone age, and i frequent the net bars around here and every1 plays cs and online rpgs, i saw one machine with q3 and asked people if they wanted to play, they are all stuck on CS, in stone age, all they want to do is level up and they read all these strategy guides,,,the net cafes are smoky places where people have huge CS lan parties basicially, people chat on QQicq and play CS/stone age,,, other people might play weiqi or other chess games online,,,,,, it would take a long time to make china move on to the next thing like 1942 , i was in the main electronics district in shenzhen last weekend and there was a LAN party of CS with a big screen television so every1 could watch, there was a decent size crowd,,,this is off topic,but in all arcades here ,,most of them are 90%+ filled with king of fighters machines,,,my personal hell, but thats what practically all my students like CS and KOF
needs to learn how to write more succinctly. A nine page article about Ricky? WTF, man?
...to see if you get a +2 on Karma.
Old DND player, 80's
Relive the BBS Past - One Byte at a Time! www.ssabbs.com
From the article:
PC Baangs are a unique Korean institution
Unless I didn't understand the description in the article, I would say that's plain incorrect. On a Sept 01 trip to Turkey, I saw plenty of "internet cafes", mostly being used as gaming rooms. I was one of the few people in there actually using it to browse the web and check email; most others were playing, I think, Counter-Strike.
Cheap, but smoky.
--
$tar -xvf
Norabang = Karaoke Room
Bidio Bang = Video room (rent a DVD and watch it there and then)
Bidio-bang Never caught on overseas. And while Karaoke came and died in the west, it remains an oriental sensation (I can only talk for Japan and Korea).
Similarily, I dont think the PC Bangs (somebody change that name plEase) won't last long in the US.
Three steps to failure.
1, Their profit margin is too low, cut maintenance costs.
2, They will start to look run down and become scary places,
3, Kids won't want to go there.
Lifespan = 28months.
The article was highlighting the growth of PC Baangs in California in the United States of America. Everyone knows they've been extremely popular in Asia for quite some time.
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
After I got through the pointless paragraphs of mall details and got into the actual meat of the story, I was faced with an immediate factual error. Valve did NOT create Counter-Strike. It was an amateur mod effort done as a personal (unpaid) project. It was only later, after a slew of releases, that Valve hired CS's creators and acquired the mod as an official add-on to Half-Life.
At that point, I stopped reading the article.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
If you like StarCraft you might want to check out Warlords Battlecry 2. This is what Warcraft 3 should have been. A bunch of races (Human, Dwarf, Dark Dwarf, Barbarian, Minotaurs, Daemon, Orc, Fey, High Elf, Wood Elf, Dark Elf, and Undead) to master and the ability to build up hero characters to lead them in battle. My friends that use to play StarCraft now play WBC2. Check it out.
..taking Counter-Strike's place as the best H/L mod.
Dolemite
______________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Shouldn't that be
"Someone set up us the bomb" and not "Someone set us up the bomb"?
Is that born-again Christianity group really a Korean thing?
I lost a high school friend that I had for years because she got sucked away into a Korean super-Christian group at the beginning of college. She became less and less interested in hanging out with me, being a white male non-believer and we drifted totally apart. Now I get mass mailings from her every so often that always have the closing: "With His Love". I always felt like it was more for the social group than anything else. And it was creepy.
This was in the US but the group was all immigrant/first-generation Koreans.
This is real, professional, investigative reporting at its finest:
"Ricky is full of shit."
You know some of my buddies still make fun of me at LANs for playing CS. But online, there are a ton of people and I'm still in a CS clan (www.clan-mr.com). Even so, NS and DoD and the like are always trying to overhaul the #1 spot and yet CS maintains. The clan always talks about the newest game and how that will replace CS in our clan, and in the 3.5 years I've played, nothing has over thrown it. The graphics maybe a bit older and the net code may not be the newest, but it is one helluva fun game to play.
-Valiss
Monday, January 20, 2003= %7B58BBB257-7566-4B53-A2F4-EA315C8F5416%7D
A teenager killed in a Coquitlam Internet cafe on the weekend was beaten by three suspects before being shot to death, the cafe's owner said yesterday. - http://www.canada.com/vancouver/news/story.asp?id
i think they played one game of CS to many!
remove NOT from email.
The article was rife with errors, "Valve created Counter-Strike", wrong, it bought Counter-Strike a Mod created mostly by two guys. I would give the creation date at the earliest as '99, it really began to take off in 2000. Ricky did not create the term "Deagle" for the Desert Eagle, commonly used in the community for years. I could go on. I stopped playing CS long ago due to the rampant cheating. I know steps have been taken to help stop some of it but I am sure it still exists. The Cybercafe/PC Baang (which btw is nothing new in the US) would be good to make sure that your opponents are not cheating, which is impossible to truly verify playing online. That $50 I spent on Half-Life is the best money I ever spent. HL was a great game and well worth the $ all by itself, then throw in Team Fortress Classis, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Front Line Force, to name but just a few. It is difficult to keep with the young 'ins though. I am 34 and I just don't have the reflexes anymore. I can no longer keep up in UT2003, however I find America's Army to be a game for me as it is more realistic, therefore it moves at a slower speed, and rewards patience and stealth well.
great ... 9 pages of schlock journalism from some
:D
over-dramatic hack
hey buddy! fuck off and die
I don't know Korean but I'd assume the pronounciation is like most other non-English/non-French languages where every letter is pronounced making: Baang two syllables and thus: Bah-Ahng. Now whether the accent is on first or second syllable: BAH-ahng or bah-AHNG.
BTW there is a PC Baang at the Milpitas Great Mall (near the Theater-side entrance). P.S. Avoid the sushi place across courtyard - their fish is not fresh.
Aside from the laundry list of inaccuracies (uniquely Korean - c'mon; L337-speak "invented" by Quake players - yeah; and so on), the article was incredibly condescending towards its subjects. Was it integral to the article to spend several paragraphs telling us how pathetic Ricky/sataN was (in the author's HO)? It may have been, if the purpose of the article was to make eastbayexpress.com readers fill superior to gamer geeks. I got the distinct impression that the author wanted his readers to feel that he and they were superior to the gamers. Why else would the author imply there was something wrong with this lifestyle? Are they hurting anyone? Are they enjoying themselves? Did the author expect /.er's to approve of this article? He may be as out of touch with reality as he believes Ricky and Vinh Bui are.
Decide what you would be, then do what you have to do.
CS was fun when there were no script kiddies, wall hackers and other assorted cheaters who's lack of self esteem drove them to cheating.
Quake 3 is like this too. That's why the only players you see on Q3 servers are cheaters, everyone else left because they were tired of the lack of response from ID.
Companies try (ID Software excluded they could care less about their reputation or fixing hacking issues) to keep up on this but all too often it's a non-stop effort to keep the games fair.
Manhwa Bang = Comic Book Room (rent and take home, or read them on site)
I spent many a happy hour in Manhwa Bangs, but again, something that probably wouldn't catch on too well in the US.
Now it's becoming too easy to get the hacks though. They're aren't quite as common in CS (and it's hard to tell if somebody is hacking) - and sometimes other factors such as latency, etc, are also important. But in some games when there are only two players left... player A is hiding, and those dead can see the map as player B directly homes in on player A's hiding spot...
Same in SC... when we're playing a clan game and planning a drop - somehow 3 times the enemy has moved his little squid of anti-air units directly in path ofthe dropships.
Some players just suck and whine a lot, but there are also a lot of obvious map hackers, cheaters, etc out there.
Leck mich am Arsch
It's not like we didn't have dark rooms and pill popping clubbers until the 90s. The only new addition is electronic music. Nobody in the 80s would have said that kids aren't munching pills in dark rooms because they were.
if minors are caught in 'R' rated movies?
This is different how?
This article probably would be somewhat informative to a total outsider to online games (and will move magazines - the cover features an Artic Warfare guy carrying an AK from the viewpoint of a sniper rifle) but it's pretty misleading in some areas. There are annoying factual errors - for instance, it says "deagle" is one player's pet name for the Desert Eagle. More importantly, it implies that the typical CS player is a hardcore clanner who plays only in game rooms and whose life may even revolve around playing CS, which definitely sends the wrong message to the layperson.
I rather have a Britney Baang or a Christina Baang.
He's obviously never played the game, and is technologically clueless.
The place you are refering is in VANCOUVER 9or near lougheed anyway) and it is in such a state because there are lots of vietnameese gangs in that area? Dont you read newspapers? Anyway go to yaletown, downtown, N Van, West Van, hell even Richmond (the part where all the malls are) has GREAT gaming places, LOW prices and extremely "normal" atmospheres (as in nobody EVER got beat-up). So stop being biased.
Geez, does this guy get paid by the word, or is he a regular NPR listener?
"Ricky Menjivar stands five-seven with short, spiky black hair and the scent of Calvin Klein's Crave..."
Who gives a damn? I lost interest in the story before he even got to the subject matter!
You're wrong.
Actually, PC Rooms have been in existence for at least a good 4 years now. That's a lifespan of at lesat 48 months, and it's still going on strong.
And this is why you're wrong:
1) Profit margins aren't low. At $3-7 per hour, the price for the game, computer, and connection can be recouped in at least one month (maybe 2).
2) True. There have been some incidents on teenage crime. However, all this means is that people who frequent these spots of a certain ilk (and they will still get business). I'd hardly call it scary, though. It's mostly kids who should be home doing homework.
3) Why won't kids want to go there? Is this supposed to be related to point #2? Go to a number of PC rooms (in the bay area or LA) and you'll find plenty of kids there. So, on that point, you're wrong.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Taiwan young man, 20 something, allegedly died from gaming in a PC cafe after a continuous session of 27 hours.
A Korean young man, 20 something, allegedly died from gaming in a PC cafe after a whooping non-stop 60+ hours (around 3 days)
A Hong Kong teen, allegedly commited suicide by jumping off a building after he lost his highly priced artifact from an attack by an anonymous player (or hacker, translation was rough here). He was playing at a PC cafe at the time.
News source from a Hong Kong technology newspaper weekly.
Yes, spread that shit over here, please........
I found some inaccuracies in the article. Counter-Strike was not released in 1998 by Valve. Half-Life was. CS came out later and was made by those "CS Team" guys. Also, bomb planting scenarios aren't the only ones in CS. There's also hostage rescue and assasination.
"Their profit margin is too low, cut maintenance costs."
WRONG!!
I personally know a friend who had a pc cafe that brought in $25,000 in per month during the summer. I couldn't believer either. Maybe $2,000 for rent $500 for a T1 line and you can only imagine what his profits are.
Korean spam subjects must start with [????] or (????) things.
???? is 4bytes korean word which means advertisement.
Of course some illegal spams(is spam legal??) don't have that.
And Korea government passed a law that spams must have @ at the end of subject from 2003 summer.
so, Korean spam's subjects will be like
[????] Hey~ look at this~ You will get million dollars @
or
(????) Hey~ look at this~ You will get million dollars @
South Korea is fighting againt spamers.. but not that effective... -.-;
I saw a trailer for a new counterstrike documentary at the CPL championships last summer, it looks like it really gets CS and the players right (I feel like a lot of media coverage misses the whole point of CS or just sensationalizes the violence). I'm not sure when or where the doc is coming out (they said spring 2003 I think??) but the site is http://www.thegamingproject.com
Teaching English in SK...
Real estate is at a premium here. Apartments and housings are usually pretty cramped, so your home isn't really all that much of a social space. People who can afford it usually like to congregate outside of the home for things like eating and entertainment (As an aside, good luck finding a golf-course, but there are quite a few inner-city driving ranges). Besides, for feasibility reasons, it makes more sense to have a LAN party in a good-sized PC Bang than in a tiny living room.
It's definitely grown from a subculture to an aspect of Korean culture, though. There's even a channel on TV where you can watch Starcraft duels. There's also Warcraft and E-Golf, but for whatever reason (cheap hardware cost?) Starcraft still rules. However, there are also very popular Diablo-style MMPORPGs that are Asian in origin. Back in Canada (Toronto, specifically) there were some Internet Cafes that were run and packed full of Asians playing various online games.
Still, to get the meandering point back on track, I think that the PC Bang concept is more a product of the culture. To that end, it won't take off in the US like it has in Korea until Americans need PC Bangs the same way that Koreans do.
(And I do think it's PC Bang (not Baang), although there really doesn't appear to be in practice one proper way to romanize Korean. Even the city I'm currently in properly translates phonetically to Daegu, but if you send mail here it has to be written "Taegu". Go figure.)
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
It's easier to block them by just doing a whois on KR-NIC and adding all of those IP ranges into your no-access lists. :) Set those to go to a new iptables chain and choose which ports the Koreans can contact, or redirect them to a special "we hate spammers" web site.