Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

Something missing as cultural context is that deepfake, involuntary "porn", and all sorts of abuse of personal image, are a rampant and omnipresent problem in Korea. Many things are great here, but the sexual landscape when it comes to men versus women and kids, is nasty. You can't really apply a Western mindset to this without understanding just how messed up some of that stuff is. So whatever you think of the mechanism, the problem behind it is very real.

I do think a proposal that AI-filters content on small forums is a bit weird, and probably clumsy. But Korea faces a real problem and usually leans toward a bias to action and "just do it". It leads to weird stuff but also to dynamic problem solving. The part I'm trying to preempt here is measuring this against so called "universal" values; these French Revolution/Enlightenment ideas of universal rights aren't really universal, they're one culture's logic, consistent inside its own bubble but exported like it's the default for everyone. I'll say, I do like them. But other self-consistent logics exist, and I think Korea's set is one of them. It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual. Both produce aberrations, only different ones.

For example, first time I came here I thought it's crazy to have so many speeding cameras and CCTVs everywhere. Years later I didn't so much "got used to it" but I think it's a tradeoff that mostly works and I grew to appreciate it.

Korea prefers lightweight polices (literally friendly looking) with a lot of automated, bulk enforcement, instead of sparse enforcement backed by the occasional armored truck. That's a design choice, not a slide into dystopia.

So all I'm trying to convey is, keep an open mind, and don't apply some supposed "universal" mindset blindly. Critique the mechanism all you want. Just don't do it by treating one culture's values as the yardstick everyone else gets measured by.

Fwiw I think it's a misfire. But I don't think it's a slippery-slide down dystopia. It's just Tuesday.

I don't think it's a dystopia. Hanlon's razor still applies. But I beg to differ on your classification of North Korean policies as "lightweight". Korean internet policies usually mandate a very specific technology (like SEED, or apparently this new model now) and weave a web of highly-detailed, Korea-specific regulations that end up creating a monopoly or oligopoly of objectively inferior and highly insecure software.

This is not lightweight. Even the much maligned Online Safety Act in the UK that forced age verification is a far more lightweight policy than what Korea does. It doesn't mandate a specific software or hardware, it doesn't mandate a specific cipher or protocol. Even the list of methods acceptable methods for age verification is explicitly non-exhaustive[1]. And this is the current poster-child of government overreach in the west!

My example of extremely lightweight digital policies (for most things) would be Japan. Vague requirements, non-exhaustive examples, copious exceptions ("you don't have to implement X if it's technologically cumbersome"), everything can be done either manually or in a fully automated way. Is this good? I think Japan is sometimes far too lenient (e.g. on security requirements), but objectively speaking this is lightweight. Korean digital policy is not lightweight by any definition of that word. If not sending tanks to catch every revenge porn distributor is "lightweight" for you that's fine, but which country does that? If we judge a heavyweight policy by its restrictiveness, then there are probably only a handful countries that can compete with Korea.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/onli...

I wrote "lightweight polices" not policies. The police presents itself as benign looking in a public context. Enforcement of day to day offences is done mechanically by machines. A state trooper doesn't stop you on a speed check with his hand on his gun.

Yes, online policies are wild and not lightweight at all.

Ok, I think I misunderstood you. Lightweight policing, not policy. I guess this happens in the US, but in most countries cops wouldn't stop you for a traffic violation with a gun in their hand. In some countries (e.g. the UK) the police aren't even carrying guns. As far as I'm concerned is not lightweight policing but normal policing. The US is the outlier here, not Korea.

(Just FYI, polices is not a noun. The plural of police is police.)

The scale of deepfakes in Korea is horrifying: https://www.securityhero.io/state-of-deepfakes/#targeted-ind....

And in 2024, someone made a viral map with reports of deepfakes in schools: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20240830/dee....

It's very similar to age verification where there's a genuinely horrible problem that we're getting a terrible solution to by people who seemingly don't understand the internet. And the finger on the monkey's paw curls.

Compare and contrast "Saudi extremist holed up in Pakistan who has been targeting Americans for a decade succeeds in blowing up three buildings with large planes on American soil: Well, I guess it's time to invade Iraq and Afghanistan then" 8I

> It's going to sound cliché but it leans on harmony and the group where the Western one leans on the individual.

I associate "harmony" with voluntary cooperation and joy, not machines preemptively gagging people. A good exercise is to imagine what this would look like transplanted into non-tech terms: it is illegal to operate a bar, restaurant, book shop, art studio, or even to gather in medium-to-large groups of people, without a government assigned censor empowered to listen in and silence people.

Does that still look "harmonious"?

You are thinking in Western terms. In East Asian Confucian societies, "harmony" means following the rules to keep the social hierarchy in place. Staying quiet and not disrupting the status quo is more important than your sense of personal freedom.

From our Western point of view, it is very much not voluntary and joyful.

> You are thinking in Western terms.

Because that is what the English word means. The correct term to use would have been 'order'.

Actually a Greek word. Look, I didn't create the word. I live in Japan, the native word used here is 和 ("wa") that usually gets translated as "harmony": https://jisho.org/search/%E5%92%8C

If you don't agree with it, you can complaint to centuries of translators and dictionary makers.

It's possible the Japanese/Korean/Chinese terms are also misused, to make the oppression more palatable. So the misuse is faithfully translated. That doesn't mean we should go along with it. Things should be named correctly.

What's "correct" in this context? From the State's perspective it _is_ harmony, regardless of the restriction on personal freedom.

A western-context example of the same phenomenon might be the American notion of freedom. Americans often frame freedom as an absence of government restriction, but that leaves you open to exploitation (or restriction) from private entities. The same definitional dissonance exists, but it depends on which line of the emotional divide you're sitting on.

How do you handle translating that into a language used largely in a context that doesn't have that history?

The production and sale of pornography are illegal in South Korea. The South Korean government also strictly blocks access to pornography distributed from overseas. ISPs have implemented a DPI system similar to China’s to ensure internet censorship and blocking. Ultimately, the production and sharing of amateur pornography in South Korea is effectively being driven by the government, regardless of South Koreans’ moral standards.

Could you elaborate on the DPI? Are VPN's banned or only specific VPN traffic.

They aren't blocking VPNs; they are blocking access to "illegal sites" designated by the government. There have been several discussions about blocking VPNs as well, but fortunately?, nothing has been put into practice yet. However, laws are being implemented requiring major CDN providers like Cloudflare to block these sites. I still don't understand why Korea's internet freedom score is over 50 points lol.

I often agree with you to some extent. In Korea, you can't just say there's no problem with revenge porn—that's basically the logic the Korean government uses. But the issue is that the main source of revenge porn actually comes from overseas communities that Koreans use.

Of course, Korea's largest domestic community has had issues with filtering—things like terrorism threats and rape cases have occurred there. But that's because that community (DCinside) is so large. In reality, the incidents that have truly enraged the public started on Twitter (X) and Telegram. So do the key actors behind these problems end up being subject to censorship? No, they don't.

And does censorship actually eliminate the problems you mentioned? Or does it just make things darker and worse?

I myself have a typical East Asian mindset—I believe a certain level of restriction on freedom is necessary. But to be honest, I see this as internet martial law

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