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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.
Have fun getting all your money stolen in 10 years when Microsoft finally realizes ActiveX sucks!
Second Post!!!
But I thought Starcraft worked on Mac too...
Laugh. Its funny.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
First post.
and how difficult to get it back
This is not just for Computing but the concept is more important than ever now, in Computing
Sounds like those loonies at the WTO should get involved. A national government and banking sector creating a monopoly in a separate industry is worse than privatized public transport. I propose an embargo until they remedy the situation.
I know that there is a joke in here somewhere..
Each processor would proceed sequentially as if it had been better for them not to rise against Saul.
... the NSA loves you when you do!
http://outcampaign.org/
Kinda makes you think that Massachusetts with their push for open formats, etc might
be on to something. (If you we're already thinking that.)
Just Satan calls the shots.
Kind of bashing Windows I guess, but it makes me wonder if it's even possible to convert to more open standards at a reasonable price? Even with the "more secure" ActiveX controls, its still easier to modify those existing controls in VS than it is to rebuild the site under OSS.
Sigh. Owning a Monopoly must be nice.
when the government jumps the gun and does what it thinks is best for everyone.
Apparently, the dupe detection software was written in south korea and uses activex to authenticate
4
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/24/21023
too bad kdawson just upgraded to vista
Kids, diversity is bad, MMMM KAY?
Dup du-wop dupe dee duup duuop
Isnt this the same reason they CANT go to Vista, that and MS finally got rid of ActiveX? Oh well, guess their banking apps should NOT have been tied to a OS they have no control over.
"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.
Shackle their minds when they're bent on the cross,
when ignorance reigns, life is lost.
Ran into this with my partner, who is Korean. Her online banking uses incredibly invasive, poorly conceived and programmed software called nProtect. Which installs a bloody device driver to function. It actually blue screened Vista randomly. It does not install without Administrator level access to the machine (obviously). In addition, it required that you run IE7 in Administrator mode when attempting to log in. Also, many many websites did not function reliably with Vista and IE7, their ActiveX controls expecting to have administrator level access to the machine. Advanced technologically? Hardly. Just proprietary and locked in, and not very security conscious. The amount of times I had to click "Allow this website to install an ActiveX control" is just insane, I don't want to think of the amount of remote code execution vulnerabilities present on a machine with all these controls installed. They're pretty much conditioned to allow the website to install any old thing, really, since so many of their websites require it.
We all know how good, greasy fat pipes are a botnet-master dream. Maybe that's why I see so much SPAM from S.Korean IPs.
Also, a major flaw in MS-Win could render this country's Internet infrastructure and systems useless.
They really should reconsider this decision. Strategically it isn't a good one. And I don't mean creating another monopoly with Linux or whatever, just give the users a choice, so that their OS environment gets more colored.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
Just break the glass and escape through the window.
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
Alternatively, from the better-than-what-they're-using-in-north-korea department
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
information on why the S. Korean government is urging users not to upgrade. Perhaps this would have been better included in the next slashback?
They like bling, but it is usually devoid of substance.
things need to look cool, regardless of how pointless it is.
take one example: the KBS (www.kbs.com) website. the main page is impossibly heavy to load, and has a mixture of flash, java, activex and whatnot. all cruft, no real value except for the bling factor.
Anyone? I'd love to see a widescale analysis of how much vendor lockin actually costs. When it's this bad I imagine it's disastrous
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Don't you mean tubes? Because tubes and pipes are totally different.
Just imagine HAVING to use Windows, oh the humanity!
...that the grass is not always greener. Maybe now we can drop all the posts and stories about how the Koreans have it so much better with their massively fast pipes, and how the US is sooo far behind.
Yeah, I'm not getting how this is anybody's fault except S. Korea's. SEED is an open specification. There is no reason the Korean community can't develop a plug-in for other systems. All that is required is for the S. Korean CA to allow it. Again, that's S. Korea's fault.
The only fault of Microsoft's lies in an area that the author is grossly misinformed. He says "In IE 7 and in Vista, Microsoft has re-architected Active X controls in such a way to make them 'more safe' by requiring a user action for the control to run", and then links to a page about the Eolas patent resolution. Many places have had to recode websites and controls after this change. While it is Microsoft's fault for the implementation, the impact on S. Korea is entirely up to them.
Sorry, you made your bed.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
No, the problem is that incompetently created websites use delicate nonportable nonstandard proprietary software that is only interoperative with one single obsolete platform.
Don't blame Vista; blame people who aren't responsible, experienced, or forward-looking enough to see why complying with standards is so necessary.
Now let's see how people will fix their glaring mistake. Will they "fix" it by repeating it (i.e. rewriting ActiveX controls to be compatible with Vista, so that they can get paid to screw their customers again in 5 years when the next version of Windows comes out) or will they fix it by removing the irresponsible dependencies?
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.
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.
A
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
Yeah, it's a dupe.
This is exactly why the generalized use of proprietary and not standard software is a bad idea. Being the most common platform, doesn't make it a standard either since the all country relies on something you have totally no control about.
daum.net is 40KB of html (with all CSS and javascript inline) compressed. It uncompresses to over 150KB ppv, absolutely unbelievable. That web team are way beyond the reach of the almighty clue bat; they need shooting.
Microsoft isn't that bad. The only reason people keep bashing them is
because they are the market leader. Do you think things got this way
because their software sucks? Of course not. The free market decided
to make them king. It's that simple.
Pragmatists need to step up to the plate and start throwing around a little
street logic because the idealists (which seems to be a lot of people
at Slashdot) don't have much to stand on here.
I've used just about every major operating system from the last 25 or 30
years. And I can attest that computers have never been more capable,
accessible, and easy to use as they are now. Microsoft is the Model-T of
operating systems. They have brought computing to the masses.
And yes I've used Linux a lot. Face it, you walk into any computer store
and what do you find? Hardware where only Microsoft *whatever version*
is supported. It doesn't make sense to put resources into other systems
with so little market share. A lot of hardware is working in Linux now.
But try buying a printer, scanner, or some other specialty hardware. Forget
it. You're going to have endless trouble unless you're using Windows. Period.
The pragmatist is going to want to just plug it in and move on. The idealist
is going to waste his life away trying to get something to work, sometimes only
partially. Be my guest. I have better things to do with my time;-)
Just thinking about it makes me want to tell my firewall to shun all traffic from large swaths of the world...
Another question: Couldn't this be forced through liability? I.e. These companies need to switch to using the now much-more secure SSL to handle transactions, or find themselves liable when their customers identities are stolen through their weak quasi-encryption scheme. That's why US companies did it--they didn't want to get sued because a weak protocol was cracked.
Who did what now?
If I were N. Korea this is what I would be developing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Even though Linus thinks virtualization is overhyped, I think this will bring a huge leap in consumer choice in these kind of environments. If the virtualized and the host environments can merge well from a user's perspective (thinks like file access, clipboard, menu's, etc.), people would be able to use IE/win for those things they really have to use IE on windows, and for the rest they can really use whatever environment they like.
In almost all new markets untill this date, it has been possible to make huge sums of money. As markets mature competition takes over. John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates would be names you would've never heard of if they were born 30 years later.
Consumers, businesses, and governments are slow learners, but they do learn. In a couple of decades, this whole Microsoft thing will only be known to us geeks and some historians.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The Government of Canada uses a public key infrastructure system, that only works in some browsers. Famously for the past census, only some people could access it.
Some important sites, such as banks and airlines, don't support other browsers or require plugins as well. It is getting better with the important cross platform critical mass of Firefox, but far from perfect.
Is it a public highway, or something designed only for Ford Explorers(tm)?
After this was posted two days ago as Koreans Advised to "Avoid Vista" for Now, there was a lot of confusion created.
It's good that you put up this article for us, helping to clarify that we're talking about South Korea and not North Korea.
Thank you. My comrades in North Korea will be relieved to hear this.
this is a country where one of the most popular sports is watching people play online games, a quick search for korean gamer scored 1.2 million hits with a number of articles talking about south korea as the gaming capital of the world.
maybe this has something to do with a fervent windows dedication? linux games are still limted to cedega, and no one wants to pay for play, although some people don't care, like my friend who pays their dev fee on top of his WoW subscription; i guess it depends on your disposable income.
what i'm saying is maybe ActiveX isn't the only factor here, maybe DirectX is a big (bigger?) one.
waspleg
It's typical that a Slashdot editor would use the word "Shackled". Oh, heaven forbid the majority of a country uses the predominate operating system in the world. Actually, I kinda get a kick out of Slashdot's bias toward their anti-Micro$oft philosophy.
or I should read your comment as an open call to hack Korean's ActiveX based transactions to smitherings?
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
as to the problem that would quickly happen to the rest of the world too if it weren't for OpenSource and GNU/Linux, and the EU fighting Microsoft.
The problem with open source people and free software advocates is that they think this is a battle of words. They come up with 'clever' misnames like "treacherous computing" or "digital restrictions management" and then clap each other on the back and beam at how smart they feel. Then they get nowhere with their cause, and they wonder why the rest of the world doesn't just bow before their clever sloganmaking.
This isn't a troll or a flame. It's the plain truth. It's a little ugly, sure, but that's not my fault. I just observed it.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
So, will RMS support the North now??
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
that is the model folks
It's not the size of the pipe, it's what you do with it.
After seeing both stories (Twice the time to think about it! Thanks, slashdot.) it's not obvious why this is the case. Firefox is big now, and has plenty of active development going on, both in the core and in the extensions. Why isn't anyone just writing a SEED extension to support this format?
... So why doesn't anyone just start using it again?
That'd remove the cross-platform problems. (You'd still have the cross-browser problems, but IE+Firefox is infinitely better than just IE, even if Opera/Safari/etc don't work)
Patents, maybe? Or just lack of developer interests? Maybe there's no South Korean Firefox programmers.
Also, the information about the two plugins doesn't make sense. There used to be a Netscape plugin, but then IE won the browser wars, so it stopped being used.
Firefox supports Netscape plugins (I think), I doubt the bits have rotted.
I respond to your sigs
The only computer I saw over there not running windows was in the engine room of a LNG carrier
How is "digital restrictions management" less proper or less accurate than "digital rights management"?
Its purpose is to manage restrictions on what users can or cannot do with the content. In what way does it manage rights?
Starcraft doesn't run on Linux. Duh.
I knew you could.
Give Gates a chance and the US will be "shackled" as well.
ActiveX controls - the SECOND biggest stupid POS Microsoft ever produced - after the Registry.
Or maybe it's the DLL - I'm currently fighting a client's ancient Windows 95 machine (don't ask!) that is locked in DLL hell with the oleaut32.dll crap...
Somebody put Microsoft out of business NOW! Please!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No talk about Fan Death?!?!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Interesting you should mention the free market. MS is not a fan.
_ case
f t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_anti-trust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microso
I'm going over here and I don't know why!
"I kinda get a kick out of Slashdot's bias toward their anti-Micro$oft philosophy."
And i get a kick out MS worshipers who get upset when someone calls their baby UGLY.
Don't make this personal. For the record, I program linux software. I'm not an MS worshiper. Sometimes you've got to call a spade a spade regardless of how you get modded.
I suspect the decision was made by the White House and the NSA who basically told South Korea "if you want us to protect you from the North, you will install Windows with the NSA backdoor".
No country would make such a stupid decision to be held hostage by a foreigh company - but might if forced by another government.
Not only old people use Windows...
Next time when Microsoft buys itself another "independant" study comparing the Total Cost of Ownership of Windows with Linux, will they also include all these costs the Koreans are paying to keep up?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sometimes you also have to call a queen a queen.
You are a queen.
You're nothing; like me.
The blog entry explains why S. Korea is in such a bad position. What I would like to know is, other than holding off on Vista, what is being recommended as a proper long term solution? For example are they recommending companies to adapt to standard web standards?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
South Korea is one country that shares a language with only one other country (North Korea).
The matter is worse in other parts of the world where many more were affected.
A while ago, I wrote about Microsoft and Arabization and the issue of browser independence.
Remember that there are about 300 million native Arabic speakers, and it is the 5th language or so worldwide, spread over 20+ countries. Not to mention the many others who read or speak Arabic as a second language.
In the mid to late 1990s, Microsoft entrenched itself in the Arabic internet market. Most sites were just unusable form anything other than Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Since MS IE does not adhere to standards, and it became the dominant browser by the early 2000s, this monopoly further entrenched Microsoft as the sole technology provider for web sites in the Middle East.
Speaking to a developer at a fairly large company about it, he said : "forget Mac and Linux, we say the application requires Microsoft IE 5 [at the time]". I was flabbergasted by that attitude.
Not only is he mandating a certain browser, but an entire operating system and hardware architecture! And that went unchallenged.
Fortunately, things started to improve over the last year or two, with FireFox gaining ground, and there is no single government forcing a monoculture via banking security or something like that. Sites that used not to work (including Al Jazeera Arabic web site) are usable once more, perhaps with a few glitches here and there.
Still, most people use Hotmail for their email, and MSN for chat (voice and text). It may take time, but I hope the spread of FireFox, Mac OS/X and to a lesser extent Linux will continue to keep web site developers cross platform, and never force the monoculture that was prevalent up until a few years ago.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You know what is amazing is that I can use any browser with my bank's online banking software. So I can use any operating system. So I can use any random computer anywhere (friend's, work, library, random internet kiosk at the breckenridge ski resort up on the mountain) And that I never considered that amazing before today.
Perhaps I'm paranoid, but I find it amazing that you would use a random computer to do online banking. Who knows what key logging software has been maliciously installed.
At least in South Korea
Well -- you can't come to my birthday party!
Perhaps some super-informed /.er can let us know if Mr. Jong II allows the use of Firefox and SSL for banking transactions in his country.
Actually, South Korea's adoption and full implementation of the superior Windows brand computing systems took place in response to the fact that North Korea's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il has been a proponent of open source computing solutions, such as GNU/Linux since the mid-90's. It is a known fact that over 80% of the linux kernel was written in North Korean prison camps under brutal conditions. For example, North Korean programmers had only two types of coffee flavorings available in the Kim Il Sung Memorial break room... and it pains me to tell you that hazelnut was not one of the two. It is somewhat ironic that a repressive dictator such as Kim Jong Il would be such a rabid supporter of supposedly "free" software such as Linux (photos recently smuggled out of the Hermit Kingdom show Kim Jong Il wearing a "Stallman's beard" t-shirt that he purchased on cafe press, holding a "Linux Power Tools" O'Reilley book, and crunching on a box of "Penguin Mints" from think geek... looks like that embargo isn't really working out.
o rea.missile/
North Korea did recently take a plunge into using Windows software, the results can be seen here:
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/asiapcf/07/04/k
Peace!
kekekeke
Can you tell me, not later than Tuesday, what that "kekekeke" means?
You have a good point. I guess in today's environment I need to restrict it.
But you know, even your work computers may have key loggers installed (by management no less).
So I guess the only reasonably (but not completely) safe computer would be your home computer.
The benefits are very large. I guess I should put any significant funds in a bank that I have to walk in the door and keep a few thousand in another bank for day to day convenience and bill paying. That's effectively what I do now but I was not doing it conciously.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Where did he say "digital restrictions management" was a less proper or less accurate name? You're going slightly off topic to make yourself look good, because if you had actually stuck to the point you wouldn't have gotten modded insightful.
If they want tight control and security, why not deliver the applications using RDP, VNC, X, or ICA. There are simple JAVA applet clients that can be embedded into a webpage for any of those protocols. There's even a Java applet to tunnel those thru ssh is they don't support encryption natively..
Hey, clearly the country sees no disincentive to being an IT fiefdom of Microsoft, but I certainly won't buy anything made solely with Microsoft software. I haven't bought Microsoft products in years as a personal boycott of the company. If everything imported from South Korea has been built by the Microsoft Monopoly machine, it simply won't be coming into my household. Obviously, one little guy boycotting Korean products isn't going to make a difference. But the same is true of my Microsoft boycott, yet I continue to hope that one day more of my peers will realize that we have a government-sponsored monopoly running our computers, and all the money for the monopoly is going to that monopoly company. Is this right? Can anybody still say, "free enterprise" with a straight face? IT, computers, and software now touch everything we touch, and it's just not right to let it be controlled by a single private entity that has no accountability.
Oops... this really got me started. But I need to stop before I spend the next hour here. :-)
you don't have a sense of humor
I'm here. I bought stuff last night using Firefox on Ubuntu. I've had no problems with SSL using Firefox, Konqueror, etc. My web-surfing experience has been no different than it has been anywhere else. If Korea is a "monoculture" then it's because of a cultural issue, not a technical issue.
Government advising Koreans not to install Vista? I can bet half a million Koreans run on Vista already!
in 2003, we had a worldwide attack of SQL Server worm that left South Korea completely in the dark on the 'net.h tml
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/slammer.
It completely dropped out of internet because of this SQL Server worm.
This should have made Korea realize that depending on one technology (especially MSFT) is a death knell to their online experience.
Instead these guys have gone ahead to make it more dependent on MSFT especially ActiveX which has been proven it is unsafe on 'net.
Haven't they learned anything at all.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Why is this modded down? The man's correct. I guess he didn't explain well enough.
Just giving a damn good reason isn't enough. If I wrote down the solution to world hunger, stuck it in an envelope, sealed it, and stuck it in my sock drawer, I have not solved world hunger. I just created a POTENTIAL solution. Geeks are talking to each other about solutions, but not letting people, the masses, know. Firefox is even going to have TV ads if they haven't already to let the general public know about their browser. They got a million names in the new york times or something like that. Two page ad.
What I'm trying to say is, make the public aware. Heh, if only Second Life was ousted as using some kind of odd DRM, and that became the new thing all the newspapers talk about when they mention SL...
For context, click Parent.
From TFA: To add insult to injury, the monopolist who absolutely controls the Korean market for computers won't delay the launch of Vista to alllow for Korean websites to re-code their sites.
Gee, because Korean websites had absolutely no advance notice that Vista was coming out. Nope. No one heard about that one in advance.
I'm getting really tired of Slashdot publishing vendor complaints about Vista catching them all by surprise. Vista's anything but a surprise.
A hardware-based key cracker might not be all that adaptable. Forcing the attacker to build new hardware JUST FOR ATTACKING YOU is rather nice.
Even software-based key crackers would require a bit of effort to retarget. You might not be worth the effort. The effort could well involve putting a contract out for bids, waiting, selecting a bidder, and waiting some more.
After a year here I still have trouble figuring out the culture. My experience in the computing area has scared the hell out of me. Our school network is plagued with problems of which could be solved by 3 hours of a decent techs time. Instead they just reformat the machines manually from time to time. The CD drives which are required for some of the courses I teach rarely work, because they have put non tower cases on their sides no one would even consider putting them the right way. Our school grade book software employed some of the worst design I have ever come across coupled with a set of activeX controls which broke after installing MS Security updates (It stayed broken for any computer with the updates for about 7 months.) Everyone uses sites like naver and daum and thinks they are great. In fact when I go into the korean teachers room they are generally talking on cell phones and buying purses off naver. There are huge numbers of PC rooms in every neighborhood and most of them seem to be equally badly administered. Next to our school building there is a place called techno world which consists of 8 floors all but two of which are packed with very small individual retailers selling basically the same crap as the people next to them for the same price. I needed a firewire drive enclosure and out of the 40+ stores which sold computer parts and computers one of them had one firewire enclosure. I'm pretty certain that if there were a gang of malicious money hungry hackers out fluent in windows and hangul there they could quite quickly do millions of dollars in fraud without much effort. On the upside the number of apple stores has quadrupled since I got here, of course half the machines in each store are running XP. Also, someone will deliver a decent Korean meal for $3.50 or so.