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South Korea Bans Selfie-Stick Sales
Rambo Tribble writes "South Korea has instituted large fines for selling unregistered "selfie-sticks". The problem arises because many of the devices are using Bluetooth radio spectrum, and must be certified to do so legally. Expressing doubts that the regulations and stiff fines will influence sales, one official said of them, "It's not going to affect anything in any meaningful way, but it is nonetheless a telecommunication device subject to regulation, and that means we are obligated to crack down on uncertified ones."
Selfie-sticks? Can we please just exterminate the selfie generation and start over?
Does South Korea's regulatory framework not allow for the (wildly common in devices where low cost is more important than seriously tight integration) situation where a vendor produces a wireless module, gets that certified and approved, and then someone who doesn't want to deal with the hassle just embeds the unmodified module in their product? Or do they have that; but also have a market composed of 96.83% totally unlicensed chinese mystery modules that may be emitting just about anything and probably are?
It's a selfie stick. You stick it up yourself!
For those of us who don't know, a "selfie stick" is just a long pole or boom with a mount for a phone so you can take a picture from farther away or without the phone being in the picture.
I've seen them mostly for folks riding on the dirt where they have a GoPro or something on the end and are taking shots of the front of the vehicle zooming through the dirt.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I thought they were 'under-skirt sticks'...
rebranded as walking canes, suitable for thrashing uncultured young whelps that insist on annoying their elders by taking selfies everywhere.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Selfie sticks are not banned in South Korea as the title claims. As the summary goes on to explain, the sale of the devices is regulated which does not in any way constitute a 'ban'.
How is this different from ANY unregistered/knockoff/Chinese copy Bluetooth device? Why suddenly the issue with "selfie sticks"?
What a pain, though, to have to register in each country. Why, I'm shocked, shocked, that FCC registration is not enough. ;)
(OK, SRSLY, assume EU has some common registration. But how do smaller countries deal with this? Are there other region-wide registrations other than EU?)
Or is it that Selfie Sticks are just so wildly popular that suddenly this has become some sort of problem? I'd assume that by next Christmas, this will be a non-issue, as South Koreans will all be hopping on 500mbit/sec pogo sticks.
You could buy all sorts of devices to plug into your phone line, back when we had a clueless government monopoly running the phone system. Some had green stickers saying "this is good" and some had red triangles warning that it could not be connected to your phone system. Absolutely nobody gave a shit about the stickers and plugged whatever they wanted into their phone system. Eventually the stickers went away.
Misleading title. From TFA:
"Because they use Bluetooth, the devices are considered to be a "telecommunication device" and must be tested and registered with the South Korean agency that oversees such gadgets, an official at the Central Radio Management Office told the AFP newswire."
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
REGULATED. there is a difference. and they're basically just enforcing laws on the books already that prohibit uncertified wireless devices.
#justanotherinaccurateoversensationalizedheadlineonslashdot
The Asian tourists were using these like crazy, often stopping right in the middle of crowded places like La Rambla in Barcelona and just shoving the stick straight out in front of people. I had never seen them until 2 weeks ago but gave some consideration to snapping at least one on half after being damn near smacked in the face.
Don't let the "ban" fool you. This has nothing to do with bluetooth technology - that's only the legal loophole being used. Since the selca-bong or selfie sticks came on the scene, they've exploded in the retail sector - but stores missed the boat and street venders have made a killing in sales. Sometimes selling cheap Chinese manufactured devices for as much as W30,000 (about US$30). Seeing that they missed the boat, the big box retailers pushed the regulators to crack down on "illegal" sticks. This is all an attempt to get the monopods sold in chaebol owned stores.
A very dirty thought but that kind of selfie stick I thought off and the phone attached to one share a common feature ..
bzzzzzz bzzzzzz bzzzzzzz bzzzzzzz bzzzzzzz
Hmm. We need something to stop the camera from falling to the ground.... A wall perhaps. A table. A chair, or perhaps a rock.
If you want to get serious you can always use a tripod but that's for geeky people. I guess that these things don't exist in the selfie world.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This seems odd to me. Is bluetooth not an accepted standard in Korea?
The sticks themselves are just an extensible pole with a clip that can be adjusted to hold most cellular phones, no radio at all.
They commonly come with a little bluetooth remote that can be used to activate the camera. It's not using any frequency that any other bluetooth device wouldn't, and would be less bandwidth than - for example - some bluetooth headphones running AD2P streaming.
the irony is that bluetooth is a more open way to interface hardware to software running on iOS than the fricking port on the bottom of the device. if apple didn't wall-off access to that port then we wouldn't need to be using microwave radio to send an electrical signal 5 cm.
I didn't even know this was a thing until today. I feel old.
Narcisstick...
the government is out there looking out for us.
"Fucking waste of money"
I understand the motivation behind this, but the proliferation of cheap chips and the rise of the kitchen table chip hacker is putting paid to any particular organization attempting to control what happens to chips that anyone can buy damned near anywhere. They might find and close some small shops, but ultimately, I believe that they are only participating an expensive form of mental masturbation.
There are millions and millions of teens and 20-somethings creating demand for this item. The SK gov't is surely lacking in aggregate mental power if they have concluded that it would be possible to stop the production of the sticks in Korea, or anywhere else for that matter, or to stop their import in shirt pockets and purses, let alone bulk imports from container ships.
Korea will have less success stopping selfie sticks than any country has ever had at stopping people from smoking a weed that grows _everywhere_ except the arctic tundra and Antarctica.
Korea: Be rational, spend the money on something useful, not a meaningless crusade.
Selfie-Sticks==Drugs for narcissistic kids.
Selfies taken with front-facing cameras let you aim the camera for exactly the angle you want, as opposed to setting the timer and guessing. The catch, of course, is that you're limited by the length of your arm, and by having your arm in the picture unless you want the camera really close, so selfie-sticks give you more compositional flexibility. They're still annoying, of course, but if you want your picture in front of Mt. Rushmore, you want it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks