Websites will need to find new systems to authenticate users once new laws come in to place in South Korea. According to Yonhap News Agency, the Korea Communications Commission announced last Friday that national security numbers will no longer be allowed to be collected from August 8 this year. Sites which have collected users’ identification numbers must also destroy the information within a period of two years.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/60107315@N00/2962277374

Read the full story

Major Portal Sites to Stop Collecting National ID Numbers

Major Portal sites such as Naver and Daum are to stop collecting national identification numbers from next year when users sign up for services. The decision has come after privacy concerns that have been escalating due to a spate of incidents in which users’ personal information was leaked by major internet sites. Both Naver and Daum have announced that they will not collect users’ national identification numbers until the end of next year. Daum also plans to gradually remove all numbers that are currently registered in its database. In the future, users may instead have to confirm their identity by other means such as cellphone, credit card or I-pin. According to Yonhap news, portal Nate stopped receiving identification numbers in July last year after the personal data of 35 million users was leaked by operator SK Communications.

You can read more information about the real-name system at Nanoomi blogs, Popular Gusts and Footman’s Frothings.


Kakao Talk More Popular than Texting

According to an article by Chosun Business released yesterday, phone users send 1.3 times more messages with Kakao Talk than by general text messages. Kakao Talk continues to grow and in a survey of Android users that was carried out by online market research company Rankey, Kakao Talk was accessed an average of 143.8 times during one week. Earlier this year users were upset after the company changed their data collection policies. Nevertheless the real-time messenger now has approximately 25,000,000 users globally and is available in Korean, English, Japanese and many other languages.


The Shutdown Law – One Month Later

The controversial gaming “shutdown law” has now been in place for just over one month. The policy is a new measure which came into effect on the 20th of November to help curb online game addiction, a major problem among teens and children in South Korea. The law is supposed to prevent gamers under the age of 16 from connecting to game servers between midnight and 6am but many say it has had little affect. According to a recent Yonhap article, many students are calling the policy a failure and have simply been using their parents identification numbers to play games past midnight. Another major weak point of the law is that Korea’s most popular game Starcraft is still able to be played without restriction. Others are also protesting the principle of the law, claiming that it has removed a way for students to rest once they get home from studying at academies.

Nanoomi blogger Niels Footman blogged about the law before it came into place earlier this year.

For a country known to most of the world as a sea of black surrounded by the nighttime lights of the booming economies of Northeast Asia, North Korea is surprisingly active on the Internet.

North Korea’s slow embrace of the Internet as well as current challenges facing South Korea’s cyber community were discussed in depth during an Aug. 6 panel hosted by the Asian American Journalists Association in Seoul. Nanoomi volunteers helped organize the event and round up interested local journalists, foreign correspondents and those curious about the Internet in the world’s most wired country and arguably one of the world’s least.

The panel, moderated by Steve Herman of VOA, covered the use and challenges faced by both Koreas in the information age.

Martyn Williams from IDG News Service was up first and gave an insightful look into North Korea’s use of the Internet over the past decade and how they are using it now. It was interesting to learn that one of North Korea’s first websites was a gambling site which claimed to be fairer than other sites. He also discussed North Korea’s recent move of opening up the Internet to foreign journalists within North Korea.

I especially liked how Martyn went into detail about when North Korea really started to become active on the Internet and described the different sites plus social networking accounts which North Korea operates. Since most of these sites are blocked here in South Korea, it was great to finally get a look at what modern North Korean websites look like. I was surprised to see that some sites are available in many different languages.

The next presentation was by Myung Seungeun, CEO of TNM. Unfortunately due to personal reasons he was unable to make the event but Cynthia Yoo from Nanoomi did a wonderful job of presenting it on his behalf. The presentation was about censorship of the internet within South Korea and went into detail about the ‘real name’ system which is currently in place here. You can see the presentation and read a full translation here.

After the presentations there was a Q & A session where we were joined by a veteran of the South Korean media scene, Sungkyu Lee, currently CEO of muzalive.com, a Korean music social network.

Lee helped answer questions about Korea’s real name system and portal sites.

I was impressed by the amount of questions that were asked by the members of the audience. There was a lot of interest in the real name system which was linked to a hacking incident a few weeks back.

The attack on South Korean company SK Communications Co., which runs the country’s third most visited portal site, released some 35 million users’ personal data, making it the worst hacking attack in the history of the country of roughly 48 million. South Korea’s real name system, which in effect holds Internet companies responsible for what users say on their websites is viewed by many to be a contributing factor to the severity of the attack. Having this information encourages the telecommunications companies to store users’ personal data for long periods of time to help protect itself from future lawsuits.

Martyn explained that although a lot of these hacking incidents are blamed on North Korea, it is hard to know if this is the truth or not.

It was a casual event held at a great venue, Platoon Kunsthalle in Nonhyun-dong. Platoon is an amazing building made from shipping containers with plenty of space for media, art and other culture related events. They also have a bar and DJ equipment if you need them for your function.

We started off with a barbecue lunch that was beautifully cooked by Elaine Ayo from Yonhap and Ramy Inocencio from CNN International. They did a fantastic job on what was a scorching hot day.

Journalists, bloggers and many others enjoyed the lunch with a drink or two.

It was an event that was pulled off well by all those involved and although I’m not a member of the AAJA myself, I look forward to attending more events like this in the future. It was definitely great to finally see so many faces I had only previously seen as twitter updates!

It’s now less than two months until Korea begins to enforce the highly contentious “shutdown law,” which will bar kids aged 16 and under from playing online games between the hours of midnight and 6am.  But now, adding to doubts about whether it will actually achieve anything, the law is facing another thorny question: given Nate/Cyworld’s recent security breach, is it right to compel youngsters to register their personal information with gaming companies?

On the 16th of this month, at a forum titled “Information Rights Through Revisions to the Game Law,” Jang Yeo-gyeong of the Progressive Network Centre said, “If the shutdown law is enforced, we’ll have the real-name system being applied to games too, so once again, criticism will arise about the gathering of personal data.”

The rarefied surrounds of a PC bang (room).

Read the full story

KTH is prodding Korea further along the path to global internet standards by allowing users to login to the Paran portal and the I’m In location-based service, among other things, using their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

However, Korea’s netizens aren’t quite free of “the man’s” watchful glare just yet.

Read the full story

Of all Korea’s internet quirks, perhaps none has raised both domestic and international hackles like the real-name system. Implemented, at least in part, to try to curb the worst excesses of anonymous netizens in Korea, it has led to accusations of “big brother” politics at home, and saw YouTube (which was unwilling to have its Korean site submit to the law) make South Korea the only country in the world where users could access the site, but couldn’t post on its comment boards.

But changes in the internet landscape, prompted largely by social media, are raising questions about the viability of the whole system.

Read the full story

In a not unrelated topic to yesterday’s post, ZDNet takes a look at the startling progress of Facebook and Twitter in Korea this year, and what local SNS services are doing to respond.

As the article notes, both Twitter and Facebook have captured the Korean imagination in a way that previous internet imports — MySpace, Yahoo, even (until very recently) Google — never managed. The number of Koreans using Facebook has jumped by 50 percent in the last six months to reach more than two million, while debates and news on Twitter now wield a sizeable influence on public opinion.

Read the full story

In a K-pop-heavy round-up of Korean tech/social media blogs:

• Bloter.net has an interview with Joyce Kim, who after a stellar academic career (Cornell, Harvard, law school) decided to ditch her job as a lawyer and start up Soompi.com, a site aimed at making Korean films, soap operas and pop music more accessible to English speakers. The article begins with some observations about how hard it is, language issues aside, for foreigners to access sites offering Korean dramas and K-pop music (Korea’s real-name registration system, Korean sites’ insistence on using Internet Explorer, and the dearth of English-language sites in the US).
  Kim says her site now gets more than 1.2 million hits a month (of whom only 10 percent are Korean) and that Korean pop culture has enormous potential among American youngsters, who Kim reckons view Hollywood as increasingly stale. About the difficulties facing start-ups in Korea, Kim has this to say:

Read the full story