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Comment by sooheon | Hacker News Reader

It's infuriating to live in a country with such outstanding tech infrastructure to be shackled with these insane policies. Not to mention ActiveX and eight different plugin downloads for nearly any transaction, Spring/Java being considered the cutting edge in web development, and the downright Fascist porn restrictions (no I'm not bitter).

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Almost every Korean site tries to force feed some malware rootkit from ahnlab or nprotect, this is even more disturbing when you note that ahnlab's founder is apparently part of the Korean government now

Though Korea did result in one of the funniest things I've ever seen: apparently a lot of Korean companies have a strong need to "hide their proprietary website's source code" by iframing their pages multiple layers deep and making every link javascript:GoToAboutUs() so the url doesn't show up, and then window.locationing it

Dr. Ahn even tried to run for president and likely to try again in the future.

Mention 'snowden' or 'privacy' and people won't bat an eye in Korea I bet. Pretty much same with most countries. People just don't seem to give a damn, the same old 'im not a criminal so I am okay with catching terrorists by spying and controlling the rest of the population'.

The ActiveX thing is sort of an interesting historical accident. As a Korean on this site you probably know the details much better, but for onlookers: Korea decided to develop, specify and make mandatory for ecommerce it's own 128-bit block cipher called SEED, back when the US had a crypto export embargo on crypto past 40bit (Europeans, too, will remember the International Editions of browsers like Netscape Navigator), which was deemed not good enough. This ended up being implemented and officially accredited as an ActiveX control, and for the longest time there was no framework in place to accredit other implementations. Mozilla actually implemented SEED in the hopes it might be helpful, but ended up dropping it again later. This situation remains unsolved until now, although every couple of months there's a news story of supposed gov plans to do to better soon.

I still recall the shitstorm that was PGP. A 128-bit public key encryption system as a downloadable binary. My first encounter with the insanity that is international politics.

Hey, at least you don't live in China....

Hi, what's your current project now?

Same as always, working on a grand live programming demo for the end of this summer.

As a Chinese citizen, I regular browse the Internet through a VPN server in South Korea just so that I can use Google to solve my technical problems. And Gmail. And stackoverflow. And travis-ci. And GitHub Gist. And Rubygems.

I've given up on VPNs...they just seem to be so flaky that after you pay your one year subscription fee, they are then blocked by the government.

I just use Bing (disclosure: MS employee but would like search engine choice).

Red Apricot (Hong Xing) have been working well for almost a year.

It's a Chrome extension. Based on sockets proxy.

Occasionally, it got blocked, but they would recover it in the next day.

Buy a VPS and set up your own VPN. It is much cheaper and less likely to be targeted.

What kind of degenerate society likens the restriction of teenager's ability to view porn to Fascism?

Any society that is not fascist?

I should point out that they killed off (any form of gay, really) LGBT-rights sites with the reason "perversion", not just porn

If we're talking teenagers, imagine googling sex ed terms and having to enter your ssn[0]

[0]http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/03/age-verification-at...

Not talking on society level but I watched porn from maybe 12 onwards. Have problems with that? Know how I should have lived better than I?

You can't restrict anything anyway. Any filter is porous and everything gets thru. One hardcore image is enough.

The only thing you really achieve is humiliating the teenager, make him feel not in control of his life.

I know that you try to restrain me like I'm a parrot instead of taking to me; you are explicit in trying to conceal from me something that you point me at by this attempt.

The one that sees this as a slippery slope to further intrusion into private life...

"the downright Fascist porn restrictions (no I'm not bitter)" doesn't say anything about teenagers specifically.

"the country's telecoms regulator ordered monitoring applications be installed on the smartphones of Koreans aged 18 and below"

I read the article too.

sooheon, who suggested that he/she lives in Korea, made no such stipulation. Of note, distribution (and maybe possession -- I am not sure) of porn is illegal in Korea in general -- not just for those under 18.

Confucius would've loved you

More like a sweet pair of Milonov and Mizulina, judging by her (?) nickname.

Nice moving of the goalposts there. An authoritarian intrusion into private behaviour is an example of an activity done by a fascist state, hence the GP's adjective. But your comment converts that into the entire ideology of facism.

Also, nice job inserting 'teenagers' into a comment that made no mention of any age group.

As mentioned above, the article is referring to those 'under 18'. Does your 'state' not restrict access to porn magazines for those under 18 now?

In Florida it's a felony. Florida Statute 847.012 - Max 5 years.

Why? Because it's degenerate, and <i>your</i> state agrees.

Porn magazines? How quaint. Speaking of moving the goalposts again, the porn control in the article is a mandated smartphone app.

And no, my country does not require minors to install state-mandated applications on their smartphones. For any reason, porn or otherwise.

Also, pornography isn't degenerate. It's just sex. Exploitative pornagraphy is bad, but there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But we generally prevent minors from accessing it because they're not emotionally equipped to deal with sex stuff - same reason we have age of consent laws. Or do you also think that sex itself is degenerate, and that's why there are laws around teenagers and who they can have sex with?

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