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YouTube Disables Comments and User Uploads For Korean Users
Craig Mundie may want a driver's license for the Internet, but Korea has actually implemented something of that kind. And, as first-time accepted submitter Pseudonym Authority writes, in the form of an excerpt from PC World: "Google has disabled user uploads and comments on the Korean version of its YouTube video portal in reaction to a new law that requires the real name of a contributor be listed along each contribution they make. The rules, part of a Cyber Defamation Law, came into effect on April 1 for all sites with over 100,000 unique visitors per day. It requires that users provide their real name and national ID card number."
Posted Anonymously just because I can.
North Korea of course. No democratic country would have such a law.
Google did this over two years ago..seriously slashdot.. I know you're usually behind but this is embarrassing.
Wow timothy you are really clueless aren't you?
Cmdrtaco must be spinning in his grave.
This is extremely easy to bypass, just set your location to another country, done, you can upload and comment just fine.
how does a law like this get through... don't people want any privacy?
It is simple. Just tell the public that only terrorists, criminals and paedophiles want anonymity on the Internet. If people will put with being groped at airports, then it isn't so unthinkable that they would be too bothered by something that seems as trivial as requiring real names on the net.
I know this happened a while ago, but given the recent events about Google removing users from G+ that were using the service under a pseudonym, this feels really ironic.
This comes as no surprise to me, having worked and studied in Korea for over five years. There was virtually no way to access any online services - buying tickets, posting comments on news sites and the ubiquitous online cyber-cafes, online gaming - without a government ID number. As foreigners, we are issued an Alien Registration Card (ARC) which ostensibly does the same thing, however in my experience this never worked. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise, as it meant I didn't put myself in a position to be easily tracked.
That all aside, the mad cow protests of 2008 exemplify why the government wants to do this. Inflammatory comments on cyber-cafes fueled a ridiculous campaign of misinformation that led to the shutting down of downtown Seoul for months on end (not to mention riot police, water cannons, abuse of foreigners, etc). This all stems from the National Security Law, designed to prevent discussion of communist ideals, and support for the DPRK. The acceptance of that law has led to gradual acceptance of further but unrelated restrictions on free speech.
The most depressing aspect of this is that most South Koreans who I know don't see this as a problem. As long as they continue to achieve economic progress, lack of civil liberties is little more than an inconvenience. I hope the attitudes of this generation will change, but only time will tell.
That's not how it works. The real name is only attached to the back-end, not what people see. Even then, this story is 2 years old and the government here is moving away from it in a sense. They're now encouraging the use of the real name system through a proxy. Your first create an ID at another site, you then use that ID to sign-up at the target site. At some point your ID is verified, but not on the main site. They won't have your identity to reveal, but it still allows them to permanently ban trolls.
And maybe South Korea should stop acting like North Korea.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
...Are we trying to set the bar so stupidly low that a cat on a keyboard
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Sincerely Fluffy
don't people want any privacy?
No.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Read it here: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2011-08/11/content_13095102.htm
:)
FTA: "The Ministry of Public Administration and Security is set to report to ruling party lawmakers about comprehensive measures to protect personal information online, including abolishing the real-name registration system, Yonhap news agency said."
Also, this says the system was in effect since 2007
"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity" - Machine Beauty
Slashdot doesn't have web bugs on thousands of popular sites that all get sent your Slashdot cookie so that it can correlate your browsing habits across a large subset of the web. It also doesn't require to you provide your real name and won't ban your account if it discovers that some of the information that you've provided is incorrect. Oh, and it doesn't track your friends / foes to search for common interests to provide to advertisers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
And now YouTube is connected to G+, so real names for everyone!
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I switched to DuckDuckGo a while ago. It uses Yahoo's BYOSS, which uses Bing on the back end, but it doesn't record any user-identifiable information (even preferences are stored in a cookie that is just a string of preference flags, so two uses with the same preferences will have the same cookie). It uses HTTPS by default, and it (optionally) bounces you via a redirect page to strip out referrer information if you're really paranoid. The search results are okay. It has a link to send you to Google if you don't find the results you want, and the only times I've clicked on it, Google hasn't found anything useful either. Oh, and the UI is a lot nicer than Google.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem with Koreans is that online bullying is apparently wide-spread and vicious. So vicious, it appears, that some public personalities committed suicides because of anonymous attacks on them on forums that post private information, insults, lies, manipulative information and what not. Mind you, I have this image of the scary and borderline criminal Korean netscape from the Japanese media, which is to say it is probably incomplete and somewhat biased, but it probably covers with the prevailing opinion in the mainstream Korean media and political opinion.
This is not a new to Korean internet users. Most internal websites, online games etc. require your Korean national ID number (and hence real name) to sign up. Only new thing here is that an international site (i.e. Google/YouTube) is honouring that local law (which they have no real obligation to do).
There has long been laws requiring real name/ID online in Korea and from what I've observed in my time there, people don't really think much of it (though that doesn't mean they ~want~ it, per se). Plus, it's pretty easy to get fake Korean national ID numbers if you want to disguise your identity online (just ask any foreigner that has done so in order to play on Korean MMO/gaming servers).
South Korea is the free Korea. You know it is free because it has military bases of a foreign nation (the US) which is blessed by God scattered all over it. This law is good because it protects South Korea from the evil North Korea, whose military bases are only staffed by Koreans - they have no foreign military bases protecting their freedom. If South Koreans can go online and criticize the government without entering their national ID number, this might hurt freedom. Some South Korean freedom-haters tried to have elections in 1980. Thankfully, the military government went in and massacred all of these freedom-hating communists. Thankfully, US Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham authorized martial law in Gwangju after the massacre, for humanitarian reasons as they put it back then. I know North Korea is the evil Korea and South Korea is the great, freedom loving Korea, with US troops backing it. In fact five years ago, soldiers from the US air base were making friends with the local people in Gwangju. Keep showing those pictures on US TV of North Korean tanks and Kim Jong-Il whenever North Korea is mentioned, propaganda in the GDR was a little more subtle.
Damn, I hope they never discover 4chan.
He who has no
This happened 2 years ago, and the Korean government already caputulated and gave YouTube an exemption.
Look at the date of the article! It's two years old.