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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.
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.
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"
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).
Yes, you can lie and submit a fake name/number combination. How they implement the verification system is their problem. Some never check at all, many others just check the hash value (the national ID number has its last digit generated from a simple hash function), others check against other databases suchas ones from credit rating agencies, and ask for a photocopy of their ID card if it doesn't exist on the database. Sadly, records occasionally leak due to incompetent server admins, rouge employees, and even careless people posting their ID publicly on the net. There actually has been some class action lawsuits regarding ID leaks, and several prosecutions related to databasae leaks.
The only thing that prevents you from using a fake or somebody else's name/number is that doing so is a criminal offense.
I think that the national ID number must be abolished or make it practically useless other than as a hash number, since it is so easy to obtain someone else's ID number and abuse it.
(ps : I am a South Korean.)
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".