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Why South Korea Is Shackled To Windows
baron writes with a blog post explaining in detail why 99.9% of S. Korea uses Windows. This amazing tale began in 1998 when Korea decided it couldn't wait for SSL to be standardized (which it was in 1999) and commissioned an ActiveX control for secure Web transactions. At first there was a secure Netscape plugin too, but we know how that story ended. Quoting: "This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users, and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions..." Now that Microsoft has made ActiveX more secure in Vista, every Web site in S. Korea is scrambling to get things working again and the government is advising citizens not to install Vista. At the end of all this work, they will still be a monoculture in thrall to Microsoft, with millions of users sitting behind some of the fattest pipes in the world.
"But I thought Starcraft worked on Mac too..."
It's called World of Warcraft...
I don't think you realize the popularity of Starcrft in South Korea. It's almost a national sport, there are multiple cable TV channels that show tournaments live with play-by-play commentators.
Being Korean and known as somebody who's good with computers, a lot of my friends and family members ask me to look at their computer because "it's running too slow". At first I was more than happy to, but now I dread looking at a Korean computer because:
1. it's running Windows with IE and at least 3 extraneous toolbars
2. it hasn't been defragmented since the computer was first built
3. EVERY website HAS to install software to make it run properly
4. EVERY website the user has bookmarked has at least 5 megabytes of flash (and they're all advertisements)
Everybody in Korea signs up for everything, not knowing how useless the service is, how dangerous it is on their computer, and how much traffic it eats up. Just go to www.daum.net or www.naver.co.kr, the two most popular media portals in Korea. What's worse is that Koreans prefer that kind of interface over Google.
I'm not trying to bash Koreans, Windows, or Internet Explorer at all. It's just that when you put the three together, bad things are bound to happen.
Reposting other people's comments from old stories, are we? Welcome to my foe list.
It shouldn't be a huge amount of work to get ActiveX controls working on Windows. .ocx activex control is just a COM DLL really, and ought not to be too much trouble to port to Linux Firefox (in conjunction with WINE perhaps), or to Mac OS possibly in conjunction with the Win32 api compatability layer (Darwin?). A plugin wouldn't be too difficult to write, as ActiveX is better documented than many other areas of Windows. I'm sure that if enough South Korean programmers, and there are a lot, get annoyed, the problem will be sorted, particularly with the Vista issue.
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Personnely I doubt that Vista will break these Korean ActiveX modules indefinetely, as MS can release a patch after the OS is releashed and selling, at their leisure. MS would never create a situation where an entire country is put off their flagship product, especially a country with 99.9% MS Windows usage, as stated in the article.
While I find the prevalent MS monoculture in South Korea in itself quite alarming and surprising, I don't think that the compatability issues with Vista are a cause for major concern. Nobody is foring anybody to upgrade to Vista after all.
There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face - Ben Williams
Not only is the story a dupe, but so is your post!
7 44830
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218612&cid=17
Really? This must be some time ago. I haven't encountered any problems with most government (CRA, Statcan (census) and the like) or bank websites and I'm running Firefox on Linux and Safari on the Mac (which is a minority browser). The only exception is the Air Canada site, which seems to be IE centric.
l 3 57_LIDen,00.htmlW eDoPopup.page#more_secure_browsers
In fact the Canada Revenue Agency website even supports Opera, among other things.
http://www.netfile.gc.ca/browser-e.html
CIBC, Royal Bank, ScotiaBank, TD Bank, PC Financial all support Safari and other minority browsers
http://www.cibc.com/ca/legal/browser-security.htm
http://www.royalbank.com/online/faqindex.html
http://www.scotiabank.com/cda/content/0,1608,CID4
http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/ebanking/sup-br.jsp
http://www.banking.pcfinancial.ca/a/security/what
That would be great but I don't think it will happen. When Slammer hit S. Korea in 1/2005 they were one of the few global financial systems that were affected. They made a big stink about blaming MS and then went on, business as usual, without rethinking their reliance on a single vendor who is notorious for breaking standards.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
It already is a clear and obvious error.
It's just that it wasn't so publicly shouted out as to the reason why. I cannot tell you how many attempts to break into my network come from IP Addresses in South Korea or how much spam my servers scrub away that originates in South Korea.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?