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YouTube Halts Uploads and Comments In Korea
adeelarshad82 quotes AppScount.com with this disconcerting bit from what many people rank the world's best-connected country: "YouTube users in Korea are no longer able to upload new videos or comment on existing ones. The changes come in response to the country's recent Cyber Defamation Law. Enacted on April 1st, the law requires users of all sites with more than 100,000 uniques a day to provide real names and national ID numbers, in order to curb anonymous comments."
It's pretty easy to circumvent the restriction. All korean users have to do to keep uploading and commenting is to go in their profile and change their country of origin to something different than Korea.
Now without all that inane commenting, they can concentrate on important things - like nuclear war.
As soon as there could be a danger that someone could actually hear (or, gasp, listen to!) what you have to say, i.e. when there's something akin to an audience, you have to provide identification, so it's easier to ... to what, exactly? To track you down and send you behind bars for talking about a serious problem (aka "lying according to the powers that be")?
I recommend a look at TOR. That way you're from Russia, China, the Netherlands, Australia, the US... all at once. Often enough while visiting one single page.
How do you think I get around another one of YouTube's favorites: "this video is not available in your country"? Fine. Since I can't change your policy, I change the country I come from. Today I feel very Russian.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's surprising that Google ejects South Korea while continuing to hand over its user information to Brazil and India and kowtowing to Chinese for Censorship .
Very odd.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...maybe N. Korea will attach soon and set them free.
We all know that the Evil North Korean Communists are against freedom of speech!
What? South Korea? Oh, never mind...
This is South Korea. The democracy. The US client state. Requiring citizen ID numbers and outlawing anonymous free speech.
Not North Korea. The communist dictatorship.
Make no mistake. Since the article makes a point to keep saying "Korea", a significant portion of US readers will conflate the two.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
[...] to provide real names and national ID numbers, in order to curb anonymous comments.
Can someone please explain just how does this prevent me from registering with a fake name/number combination? OK, suppose websites check the name against the number. How does this prevent me from using my next door neighbor's credentials? Or that other guy's I know? Or, if I work in the government and have access to the said database (if it exists), then why shouldn't I use a random name every time? Are they expecting records not ever to leak? I find the whole situation baffling.
but i always wonder how they do these geographically isolated site changes...
if its geoip it depends greatly on the database, but then again im certain the government
would be more than willing to hand over a listing of subnets theyd like to see restricted to youtube.
governments certainly make running a massive media service like youtube ludicrously difficult for admins.
i cant imagine keeping a cluster strictly for china, and another strictly for korea, while my global cluster
cant have any access to either and vice versa.
dont misconstrue the comment to mean i endorse the censorship, im quite against it. I am however in awe
of youtube and google engineers when it comes to bending to the social will of governments who insist crazy things like, say, 100% logging
of everything however camp X-Ray must be censored out of any maps.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Most of such cases might be related to the economic protectionism measures under the pretense of the attack on free speech, rather than real attack on free speech.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
What is happening to the Korean today is what happens to people working for Corporations when they suddenly are banned from checking their personal email, facebook, etc. They can stop for a while the dissent, but the level of bitterness increases gradually until a real crisis will happen.
an IP address check could be circumvented by using a proxy outside of the country
True, but who would pay for such a proxy? YouTube could just block the popular open proxies using the same database that Wikipedia uses. Wikipedia tolerates proxies that require authentication, but YouTube is designed around video, which uses a lot more bandwidth than Wikipedia's text.
They don't trust their birds.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Neither country's official name has the word "North" or "South". "South" Korea is officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), while "North" Korea is officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).
in this case South korea, simply stating 'korea' is ambiguous, clarifying north/south really doenst take a moment
Well they could do the whole nuclear war thing....
If North Korea could make a working atomic bomb
and
If North Korea could make a working missle
It's like a slice from "Goofus and Gallant".
Princes all over Nigeria express wide support for the new law introduced by Korean legislature.
In democracies there is often a case where the minority gets a law passed because the majority is not paying attention, and then the law is reversed eventually.
Policies like this may be part of that...once the average man is inconvenienced he suddenly becomes a politician.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
IMO, this is a much bigger deal coming from South Korea, a democracy, rather than North Korea. Shouldn't that be made a little more clear in the summary?
> It's surprising that Google ejects South Korea while continuing to hand over its user information to Brazil and India and kowtowing to Chinese for Censorship .
The only thing worse would be to say this while cursing.
When someone does something good, it's idiotic to say "they're still doing bad in X Y and Z" because it doesn't provide an incentive for them to change behavior. They should be rewarded for the good behavior and it should give them gooey feelings, good press coverage, and maybe even help their bottom line--even if they're still doing stuff that's wrong. Sure, maybe you mention the stuff at the bottom of an article--but the thrust of the message should be "this is a positive thing" rather than "you're an evil evil person/group who did one goodish thing."
Positive reinforcement. Not "if you do something good we'll blast you for everything else you're doing that we don't agree with."
Read the comments section on any video on a topic to do with the conflicts in East Asia during WWII.
The distrust, discrimination and downright hatred instilled in Koreans, Chinese and Japanese for each other laid bare for all the world to see.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
This is not anything new at all in Korea. All the Korean websites I know of require Korean ID to create an account. It is the law.
Helps keep the hermit society as an outsider it is nearly impossible to get a login for the sites as you don't have the Korean ID.
Neither is "America" the official name of the USA.
But "America" is the A in USA: "United States of America". "North" is part of "State of North Carolina" and "State of North Dakota", but not "Democratic People's Republic of Korea".
Do you folks think North Korea needs to enact a law for people exercising free speech? They'd just as easily be able to make them disappear with or without said law.
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
You know what is really hilarious in this Youtube Korea fiasco?
I'd like to think of google's decision to ban uploads for the users with the location set to "Korea" as a sort of tongue-in-cheek rebellion against the Draconian "Real Name Act", for even a relatively-computer-illiterate Korean is able to bypass the ban by simply changing the location setting. I even get the feeling that google is actually actively encouraging the bypass "hack", with kind advertisements of the effect achieved by changing one's region setting.
Now, for ordinary Korean citizen youtubers, changing the location setting means just the one-time inconvenience of a few simple clicks in the preference panel and that's it. No harm done. Nothing to write home about.
When your youtube account officially represents government agencies, however, it becomes a whole lot different story. Your region setting now takes on a symbolic meaning, and you would think twice before fiddling with the region setting , which is there for the whole wide world to see , to upload some promotional video clips.
Imagine you're in the hypothetical year 2003, right before G. Bush is about to invade Iraq. In this alternate Earth, US enacted their own version of the "Real Name Act", forcing google to ban uploads from the users with the country setting of "US". The White House, eager to upload video clips emphasizing the threats the Iraqi-owned WMD -- still a vaporware even in this fantastic version of the alternate Universe -- will pose to the world, decides to change the country setting for the White House account to...
"Get Real!", you would say. Well, this is what will be "really" happening to the Korean version of the White House (so called the "Blue House") youtube account, sort of.
"Blue House" has been uploading weekly radio speech by the Korean President Lee, titled "Address to the Nation" to Youtube on the channel http://www.youtube.com/presidentmblee. How was the blue house to handle the google decision? They couldn't just kill the "show", since they had officially pronounced that the Blue House would be "proudly" uploading the speeches to youtube long before they could anticipate this type of conundrum.
Last week, on the heels of the upload ban decision by google, there followed an announcement by the blue house spokesperson that the gov't will continue the uploading, only this time, the account owner's country content preference will be set to...
well, fortunately for them, one of the option was this :
"Worldwide".
Their explanation?
"The president's speeches are uploaded for the benefit of the worldwide audience".
Like anyone outside Korea would even care what Lee has to say ( Even the Koreans themselves mostly couldn't care less. Lee is largely a subject of taunt and ridicule amongst the Korean internet users.)
The excuse becomes lamer when we find out that the content of the speeches almost exclusively consist of government propaganda on the internal affairs of Korea. Even the title itself is "Address to the Nation", not to the "World".
I would classify this hilarious fiasco as a classic example of "Self-defeating Legislations".
Yeah, of course you've never seen anything made in North Korea because of trade embargoes.
And whose fault are those, other than Kim Jong Mentally-il?
So if I say "Korea starts up a nuclear reactor" or "Korea develops a missile" or "Korea violates the rights of it's citizens", you think of South Korea?
The Korea that has chosen to cooperate with other nations is ROK, so it's the first Korea to come to my mind. If I hear about "Korea" doing something that sounds to me uncharacteristic of ROK, I go check the source to see if it's actually ROK or really North Korea, which in turn shapes my perception of both Koreas. Another way to think about it is sort of like Virginia: "Virginia" by itself means Virginia, not West Virginia.
This was a very informative post. Obviously, YourExcellency has sinned so his default '1' score will prevent anyone from learning about the South Korean government's ironic location change.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?