Korea Fighting Pseudonyms on the 'Net

ThreeDayMonk writes "According to the Chosun Ilbo, Korean net firms, pushed by the government, are moving to require message board users to use their real names: 'The current regulation that requires those who post messages on government and public organizations' web sites to use their real names is likely to be expanded soon to private portal sites.' The Japanese version of the page has more information. Apparently, citizen ID numbers will be used to verify identity."

Comments

this is a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean look at slashdot. If people were forced to use their real names then I think that trolling would pretty much be eliminated, and there probably wouldn't even be any need for moderation either. Do you think people would hide goatse.cx links if their posts could be easily traced back to them? Would people still sneak in movie spoilers? Maybe one guy would try it, but then someone would show up at his door with a baseball bat the next day.

Also, forcing people to use real names would eliminate some other big problems. Look at the amazon.com book reviews. Book publishers frequently post dozens of positive reviews for their own books to sell more copies. Forcing the usage of real names would mean that this could only be done once per person. And even then, you could do a little background searching to determine that the guy who said "THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER" was really the author's brother.

Last and most importantly, this would save usenet. Usenet is becoming unusable today due to stupid spam posters, idiot trolls, and crazy psychos looking to start flame wars. You could argue that there is a real need for anonymity online, but I really disagree. The fact of the matter is that Morpheus dies, the Matrix is destroyed, and Neo is revealed to be a program and not a real human at the end of Matrix Revolutions. So to those that disagree with me, I ask you to consider my position carefully.