smokehard

The Korea Times is reporting that Koreans aren’t all that excited about Chrome; Google’s new web browser. This does not come as much of a surprise to me. If there is one thing you can say about Korea, it’s that when it comes to the internet, Korea is almost entirely reliant on Microsoft products and services and is doing little to move away from 90’s technology.

Most Korean Internet sites are reliant on Active-X, a program used to install software components on Web pages to enable particular functions, which can run on IE only. (Link)

Three words: Active-X sucks balls. The only sites I encounter that even use Active-X controls are Korean, and because Active-X is potentially very dangerous, the world of browsers, apart from IE, is pretty much just telling the technology to fuck off. Even Microsoft curbed Active-X capability in Vista, only to make concessions for the lucrative Korean market. But why are Korean sites so addicted to Active-X? Well the main reason is, yes of course it is, ridiculous government regulations.

The key reason ActiveX is mandated by financial institutions is that Korea has its own national encryption scheme called SEED that is used in place of SSL.  The reason this came to be stemmed from the fact that US export law in the late 1990s didn’t permit the export of web browsers with more than 40 bit encryption.  This meant that an ActiveX SEED plug-in was used in place of browser SSL.  While there are Java and Netscape implementations of SEED, it was almost never implemented.  ActiveX is so dominant that KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunications and Clearings Institute) won’t even assign users security certificates unless they’re using Internet Explorer with ActiveX. (Link)

Here is a little more about SEED:

The history goes back to 1998, when the 128 bit SSL protocol was still not finalized (it was finalized by the IETF as RFC 2246 in Jan. ‘99.) South Korean legislation did not allow 40 bit encryption for online transactions (and Bill Clinton did not allow for the export of 128 bit encryption until December 1999) and the demand for 128 bit encryption was so great that the South Korean government funded (via the Korean Information Security Agency) a block cipher called SEED. SEED is, of course, used nowhere else except South Korea, because every other nation waited for the 128 bit SSL protocol to be finalized (and exported from the US) and have standardized on that.

In the early years of SEED, users downloaded the SEED plugin to their IE or Netscape browsers, either an Active X control or a NSplugin, which was then tied to a certificate issued by a Korean government certificate authority. (Can you see where this is going?) When Netscape lost the browser war, the NSplugin fell out of use and for years, S. Korean users have only had an Active X control with the SEED cipher to do their online banking or commerce or government.

So we end up in 2007, 9 years after SEED was created for Korean users, and one legacy of the fall of Netscape is that Korean computer/Internet users only have an Active X control to do any encrypted communication online. (Link)

On top of Korean websites being required to use Active-X for online transactions and other nonsense, the industry as a whole ignores internationally recognized standards (Korea is like Microsoft IE!).

Korea has a huge issue with web compatibility. Most sites use Active-X, and even if they don’t the majority rely on IE bugs and quirks, instead of following the standards. Looking at almost all of the top sites in any none-IE browser is like looking at a page after it has went through a blender, with mis-placed elements everywhere, and missing content. If IE7 made all of its changes in quirks mode as well as standards mode the Korean web industry would be in even bigger trouble. (Link)

In addition to stupid government regulations, the government also poured millions into promoting the idea that sites should be designed and “optimized” for Microsoft Internet Explorer, something that really makes no sense whatsoever.

In the late 90’s, the government started to subsidise IT-related education (web designing courses, in particular) offered by private academies. Many of them are members of “Microsoft Partner Program”. Most of these government subsidised courses were devoted to the sole purpose of propagating MS-optimized, proprietary web designing techniques. As a result of several years of these government funded “education programs”, very few people in Korea now have any knowledge of standard compliant web page designing. (Link)

All of these above quotes simply reinforce the idea that Korea is not the “digital leader” it proclaims itself to be. Because of government regulations and a reliance on ‘old’ technology and practices, Korea is, in fact, far behind when it comes to internet technology and the provision of services. Perhaps this is why Korea keeps falling further and further behind when it comes to competitiveness and productivity; they rely on 90’s technology and try to adapt that technology for both the present and future. You just can’t do that in today’s world, and the longer Koreans do so and the longer the Korean government waits to change regulations the bigger the shock will be when they “must” do so. Some netizens sued the Korean government, but I have no idea what has happened since. There does not seem to be any information on the lawsuits outcome, well none that I can find.

For more on this, check out the “lurid stories” on OpenWeb Korea. It’s good to know there are people in Korea trying to change things, but their battle will certainly be a long and frustrating one.