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South Korea Begins To Deprecate ActiveX
jones_supa writes The reliance on proprietary technologies to deliver web services varies from country to country. South Korea's ActiveX problem has been in the news before. Yonhap brings us a short report that the government plans to finally start cleaning up this troublesome technology from public websites later this month, as Korea gears up to create a more friendly Internet environment. The country's online financial websites and shopping malls often use ActiveX to have their payments and identification programs securely downloaded to users' personal computers.
The main difference that makes HTML5/JS/CSS "open" in this case is that any person or company can use the technology free of charge in any capacity without fear of a copyright claim or demands for payment. With ActiveX, only the end users who write scripts may use it free of charge. If you want to implement it in a browser or some other capacity, you have to sign a licence agreement with Microsoft or get sued. That's what "open" means in this case though I fully understand and agree with the FOSS community that this is not what "open" should mean but, I'll take it over the alternatives we have at the moment.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
"ActiveX is a software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly in the context of the World Wide Web. It was introduced in 1996 and is commonly used in its Windows operating system. In principle it is not dependent on Microsoft Windows, but in practice, most ActiveX controls require either Microsoft Windows or a Windows emulator. Most also require the client to be running on Intel x86 hardware, because they contain compiled code." HTML5 is a standards based format, so is CSS. JavaScript has been standardized in the ECMAScript language specification.
South Korea is a very advanced and prosperous country, with income levels broadly similar to the European average. They most certainly have computers.
I worked with ActiveX technology close to 15 years ago. It was a much simpler era, where there was little need to worry about platforms other than Windows+IE, and where most of us hadn't really caught on yet to how ruthless the hackers were going to become. And frankly there wasn't a whole lot of alternative for pushing real app functionality from the web in those days. Some people were using Java, which certainly wasn't any more secure, and eventually Flash began to gain traction. So it's not completely hard to understand how we got where we are.
China
In case anyone is wondering what ActiveX is, it's essentially a Windows program you download that runs natively on your computer. It gets to draw to the specified element in the browser, which makes it look like it's part of a webpage. There isn't (or wasn't) any kind of sandboxing or security once the ActiveX component was installed - it could do anything it wanted on your computer like any other Windows program, because that's essentially what it was. The only security was whether or not you installed the ActiveX component in the first place. If I remember correctly they are really just DLLs, and used Component Object Model for the standard in which the DLL exposes methods, etc.
Better known as 318230.
In the 80's, before China opened up, everything was 'made in korea'. Korea's huge industrial success was what lead, in part, to China's economical thaw.
I've written many ActiveX controls, some for use in a browser, some not.
At no point was I required to sign or agree to a license to do so.
With requiring a license he was talking about creating the ActiveX runtime environment for a web browser.
Two decades ago would be about when Hyundai cars were introduced to Europe. That is pretty significant, we don't hear of cars from Vietnam or even China (I believe China has a huge car industry, but it's not sold globally and we can't even cite one constructor from China whereas I know S.K. has Samsung, Kia, Hundyai and SsangYong. I forgot Daewoo cars)
A decade ago : South Korea known for being where most RAM is made, and then a ton of flash memory as well. We can't have our PC compatibles and shit without South Korea, in the same way we can't do without Taiwan for the motherboards or Thailand for the hard drives.