YouTube Disables Comments and User Uploads For Korean Users 237
Craig Mundie may want a driver's license for the Internet, but Korea has actually implemented something of that kind. And, as first-time accepted submitter Pseudonym Authority writes, in the form of an excerpt from PC World: "Google has disabled user uploads and comments on the Korean version of its YouTube video portal in reaction to a new law that requires the real name of a contributor be listed along each contribution they make. The rules, part of a Cyber Defamation Law, came into effect on April 1 for all sites with over 100,000 unique visitors per day. It requires that users provide their real name and national ID card number."
Posted Anonymously (Score:5, Funny)
Posted Anonymously just because I can.
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Replied anonymously and called you a dink.
Just because i can. For now.
I honestly feel no need to ever login here to slashdot. Even after what... a decade? damm. I rather like being able to say things that won't be held aginst me in a court of law.. Or more likely a job app. What i say today i may not agree with tomorrow. But the net doesnt work that way. Once you say it. Its attributed to you forever. And i can't imagine that ever being a good thing. At best it's neutral. At worst it can ruin y
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The Korean government is full of pederasts and catamites.
And yes, my real name is "PopeRatzo". My mother had a sick sense of humor.
Re:Posted Anonymously (Score:4, Informative)
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The main advantage of logging in is that people have a reason to take you seriously, because they can now set you as a friend or a foe. You can't believe anything any AC says.
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After a minor facebook fiasco not related to me at my previous work place (small shop/office, not many of us there), I told my boss that if our posts on facebook were to be scrutinised, even when they don't relate to work, don't defame the company, and don't involve any coworkers, they could pay me at quarter-time for all of my off hours. I worked there for another 18 months before I quit due to other issues caused by factors well outside the job's influence, but in all that time, I never again heard of an
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That last sentence sounds more arrogant than I intended. Only intended a tenth of what's positively dripping off that.
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Assuming the local PHB won't react with a suicidal business decision on impulse and without forethought is a pretty dangerous gamble.
And if things are already bad enough there to put you in those waters to begin with, (i.e. managers already making dumb and reckless business decisions) it just increases the likelyhood of such an event.
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I rather like being able to say things that won't be held aginst me in a court of law.. Or more likely a job app.
I rather like knowing that I wont get a job where the sorts of things I say here (which I filter internally before I post them) would have been held against me.
If theres a job that would discriminate or penalize me because of my religious or political views, honestly, no thanks.
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That is not what "argument from authority" means, or at least, it's not what it should mean. Argument from authority is fallacious only if the authority is trying to use his reputation to add weight to his opinion in unrelated matters. If someone is a recognized authority in a field, his ex cathedra arguments should indeed carry more weight, and should require additional effort to refute credibly.
For instance, people tend to dredge up clever-sounding quotes from Einstein on everything from religion to nucl
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Least we forget..
http://www.textfiles.com/100/anonymit [textfiles.com]
Coward! (Score:2)
You anonymous Coward!
If you have nothing to hide there is no reason for anonymity. Just use your real name.
Yours,
formfeed
Re:Posted Anonymously (Score:4, Funny)
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Well done South Korea. Anything that protects people from Youtube comments is a good thing.
Re:Posted Anonymously (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, looking further down the comments, I see some people did notice. But still, this is ridiculous. You suck, timothy.
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Re:Posted Anonymously (Score:4, Funny)
They do have a North Korean Youtube. All of the content is Kim Jong Il singing "I'm so Lonely"
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Korea? Wich Korea? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Korea? Wich Korea? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any country with "Free", "Democratic" or "People's" in its name is, almost without exception, anything but.
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True, it's like when an ad for some medical/exercise product says "verified by scientists" or "proven by science." So far every ad that's used this phrase has been for a bullshit product.
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Or maybe the United States of America, where states rights are a major issue and people from Texas (for example) will claim that they're Texan rather than American.
Before the Civil War, the common parlance was "The United States are" - now it's "The United States is". The original design was to factor out redundant effort among the States as a convenience, not to be a centrally-controlled nation with several provinces. They even called the federal government 'the general government' to describe its generi
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Of course, state's rights are almost always the enemy of progress. The upside is the "states as laboratories" which means you can vote with your feet if a law is so onerous it justifies moving out of your state. But on the downside, states' rights have been used to try to hold onto slavery, racism, and a lack of civil rights. If the states' rights arguments had won, we would not have anywhere nearly as powerful a fourth amendment today, or a bill of rights generally. The bill of rights only became appli
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Novel?
Seems clear to me. What is constitutional free speech but a privilege extended to US citizens guaranteed by the power of the federal government? Where would it come from if the federal government didn't guarantee it? The constitution seems to
The Constitution doesn't mean that. (Score:2)
Actually, no. The privileges and immunities clause has pretty much been written out of the constitution--it refers only to a very few things, such as the right to petition the government. In the MacDonald case (Chicago 2nd amendment case a few years back) there was an effort to make it mean something, but SCOTUS decided the only reason they wanted it to was to write law review articles--they used the due process clause instead, IIRC, but they certainly didn't use the PI clause.
https://secure.wikimedia.org [wikimedia.org]
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Times change. I am not bashing you with the following comment if you are a states' rights supporter, but are you just focused on that issue or the whole picture? That is just the largest and most promoted example I see, as a US citizen, being thrown around. It isn't the only example of that.
* Europe is following after the US. It is now in a state of affairs similar to what the early United States were in.
* Locally communities are merging. Access to cars and good roads have destroyed smaller communities
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And when Texans brag to non-Texans that their state constitution uniquely grants them the right to secede from the union at any time, we tell them "what are you waiting for?"
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Also, there is no way in hell I'd support secession with someone like Perry in charge. I think he would use it as an excuse to set up some kind of theocratic-leaning state. Even worse, he might support an interventionist foreign policy. I'd be worried what the 'new' constitution would look like under this kind of leadership. We're better off as part of the US for now. This also has the nice side effect of propping
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Honest question - what fraction of that 8% of GDP is DoD spending that would evaporate on secession day?
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True, there are democratic places that even if every citizen had a chance to vote for a law, would still pass asinine draconian laws. Heck look at the USA, they'd have a fair chance at banning gay marriage with a constitutional amendment, disbanding the EPA, revoking all environmental regulation and drilling in ANWR, or passing any damn thing with "cyber" and "security" in it (or "terrorists" and "security," for that matter). And a lot of places are much worse. There are places in the Caribbean where you'd
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We probably should disband the EPA, it is not only ineffectual at its stated goals but it actually works against the will of the people today. The same is true of nearly every government organization, you name it, we can come up with an example of how it is doing evil. FDA is big pharma's tool. USDA is Monsanto's tool. CIA under Bush Sr. became the Cocaine Import Agency. Need I go on?
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"The will of the people" is often not a good thing. That's why our society was designed as a constitutional democratic republic, rather than as a straight democracy. Not saying the delegates don't get it wrong -- they often do, and spectacularly -- but I think they do better than the masses do. For instance, with 80% or so of the country being Christian, general sentiment doesn't favor equal rights and immunities for atheists. But the republic does, because the constitution lays out principles that transcen
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If you actually look at the history of the EC disagreeing with the popular vote I don't think you will think that it is a good thing.
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The EC? European Comission?
If that's what you're talking about, I'm not surprised at the level of fail you indicate; the attempt to place one governmental entity over a large number of radically different cultures was fated to create discord from the very start. You need at least some kind of unified outlook in the populace to come to reasonable consensus on broad rule-making.
The US is a different case. We started small and to the extent that our states and regions express different cultures, they are mostl
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It could have been deliberately posted on april 1st just to avoid scrutiny.
NK: "We're passing an outlandish law today" ...
world: har har har har
NK: *enforces it*
world: wtf you were serious?
NK: "you snooze you lose. It's already entrenched try and stop us"
Seriously old news (Score:5, Informative)
Google did this over two years ago..seriously slashdot.. I know you're usually behind but this is embarrassing.
Wow timothy you are really clueless aren't you?
Cmdrtaco must be spinning in his grave.
This is extremely easy to bypass, just set your location to another country, done, you can upload and comment just fine.
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First line under the title: Apr 13, 2009 3:50 am
For those with disabled javascript the date is hidden.
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Dewey Defeats Truman!
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Youtube comments (Score:2)
Yes, I'm all for disabling these globally. No good has come of allowing people to comment, or vote on videos.
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Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I can't remember geocities being that bad.
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Agreed. Geocities was full of bad design and lame fanfic, but it wasn't an idiot-sink. It was comparable to today's Blogger / Wordpress sites or Facebook pages (and make no mistake, if Facebook allowed it, most kids' pages would have a Matrix or Hello Kitty color scheme with auto-playing music just like the old Geocities pages. Up until about mid/late teens that is considered cool, I know, I was guilty of running such websites...). It took a little skill to get those sites up and running - not much, but bey
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With the decline of Myspace and Geocities the internet needed a new idiot-sink
Isn't that what Facebook is for?
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That's the nice thing about Facebook, you can set your news feed only to the people who you actually care about.
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The problem with widespread internet take-up is that more and more idiots are finding their way onto the internet. With the decline of Myspace and Geocities the internet needed a new idiot-sink.
Honestly, I think we have a bigger problem with the number of people with superiority complexes on the internet, who assume that because someone doesnt understand technology or isnt a great typist, they must be utterly worthless as a person.
Its always fun dealing with (new) friends who constantly apologize for not knowing tech, because they assume that as a tech guy I will obviously look down on them for it. Thanks everyone for establishing that stereotype.
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No YouTube comments are idiotic not because of bad spelling, grammar, caps... The stuff they say is just stupid. I remembering one time I was watching some clips from an 80's TV show, for nostalgia and there was one sentence where the Bad Guy showed a little be of complexity to his character and said one sentence outside of what a Bad Guy would say and there was posts upon posts of people feeling sorry for the bad guys (who were otherwise quite evil) just from that one sentence.
No YouTube comments are not i
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Irony can be beautiful sometimes :) (Score:2)
Google takes strong stance against name collection after it says no to fake names on google+ :) haha... oh well, oops, things happen I guess
G+, Anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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"this feels really ironic."
It shouldn't, because it's not.
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Is this what a free ride feels like? (when I'm already late)
Really and honestly, it is edge on. Google has said that certain services will be full identity required, while others will not be. Youtube evidently will not be. However, I do remember them saying I would have to connect it to a Google/Gmail account awhile back...
Like 10,000 knives, when all I need is a spoon. Maybe, just maybe if I cut off my tongue, maybe I'll have one soon.
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I use Scroogle SSL through Privoxy on the local machine.
Scrubbing FTW.
Anything grey-area goes through a foreign proxy.
Who cares about the crazy north koreans (Score:2)
Seriously, who cares about the crazy North Korean dictatorship. I'm sure they're doing other outlandish things to like blacking out half the internet with their not-so-great-firewall and..
Oh.Shit. It's not the North Koreans... [guardian.co.uk]
Fuck. Well, I never knew the South Koreans were supposedly so bad at internet that they need to be tracked and punished.
I guess now when they whomp me at Starcraft I'll at least have their real names so I can know who beat me IRL.
This is not new, nor a surprise (Score:5, Informative)
This comes as no surprise to me, having worked and studied in Korea for over five years. There was virtually no way to access any online services - buying tickets, posting comments on news sites and the ubiquitous online cyber-cafes, online gaming - without a government ID number. As foreigners, we are issued an Alien Registration Card (ARC) which ostensibly does the same thing, however in my experience this never worked. Perhaps that was a blessing in disguise, as it meant I didn't put myself in a position to be easily tracked.
That all aside, the mad cow protests of 2008 [wikipedia.org] exemplify why the government wants to do this. Inflammatory comments on cyber-cafes fueled a ridiculous campaign of misinformation that led to the shutting down of downtown Seoul for months on end (not to mention riot police, water cannons, abuse of foreigners, etc). This all stems from the National Security Law [wikipedia.org], designed to prevent discussion of communist ideals, and support for the DPRK. The acceptance of that law has led to gradual acceptance of further but unrelated restrictions on free speech.
The most depressing aspect of this is that most South Koreans who I know don't see this as a problem. As long as they continue to achieve economic progress, lack of civil liberties is little more than an inconvenience. I hope the attitudes of this generation will change, but only time will tell.
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I'm not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing. If you've been keeping up with the Chosun Ilbo, you may have noticed that there are an increasing number of crimes being routed over the 'net. For example, there've been a lot of cases of online bullying leading to suicides, and unsavoury stories of middle school students being blackmailed into prostitution via online means. Not to mention all the cases of internet addiction.
I admit that this may not be the best idea. Ideally, the police would investiga
What a terrible law . . . (Score:2)
There are a lot of people elsewhere who think this sort of crap makes sense--mostly people sick of cleaning up forums full of trolls. Even some major sites, like Techcrunch, have made the mistake of switching to Facebook for their blog comment system. It really makes me sad to see that kind of thing happen.
Sure, you cut back on trolling but you cut back on a lot of good stuff too when people don't feel free to speak honestly. I'm not willing to make a political statement of any sort attached to my real n
Re:What a terrible law . . . (Score:4, Informative)
That's not how it works. The real name is only attached to the back-end, not what people see. Even then, this story is 2 years old and the government here is moving away from it in a sense. They're now encouraging the use of the real name system through a proxy. Your first create an ID at another site, you then use that ID to sign-up at the target site. At some point your ID is verified, but not on the main site. They won't have your identity to reveal, but it still allows them to permanently ban trolls.
Congradulations!! (Score:2)
Congrats first time accepted submitter Pseudonym Authority, your presence has made Slashdot even worse. Seriously though, who thought it would be a good idea to accept a submitter for the first time for posting an article FROM FUCKING APR 13, 2009!!!!!!!
Are we trying to set the bar so stupidly low that a cat on a keyboard can become a Slashdot submitter, and then not only accept the submission but announce it in glory and praise?
Remember when they rolled out the Idle tag, at least we could block that! Maybe
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dfhjdsg...dsdgjku8io8nss555%%%
Sincerely Fluffy
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And, as first-time accepted submitter.... The process seems to take about two years.
Could have been worse (Score:2)
It could have been worse. The article could have been from APR 1, 2009.
It turns out S.Korea now wants to scrap this act! (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: "The Ministry of Public Administration and Security is set to report to ruling party lawmakers about comprehensive measures to protect personal information online, including abolishing the real-name registration system, Yonhap news agency said."
Also, this says the system was in effect since 2007
How do they tell for sure? (Score:2)
Stupid law is stupid (Score:2)
I'm quite certain that Korea could have implemented a national OpenID server (perhaps operated privately and under strict rules about information disclosure) where people could register and create aliases but still be accountable should someone pay a large deposit and file the legal paperw
Does any of the admins RTFA? (Score:2)
Or the submitters?
From TFA:
"By Martyn Williams, IDG News Apr 13, 2009 3:50 am "
2 and a half years late is not exactly news. What next, Apple inc hires back Jobs and fires Scully?
why not just post from google+? (Score:2)
all you need to do is have google verify the person opening the account is who they say they are... oh wait..
Read that wrong. (Score:2)
Can they do it for the US too? (Score:2)
Seriously, about 83% of the comments on youtube are adolescent and ignorant.
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lol wut?
Censorship? (Score:2)
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Actually in Korea they have a history of wearing special masks while criticizing the government..
South Korea is the free Korea (Score:3)
Part of me likes this. (Score:2)
This is old news (Score:3)
Two year old article. (Score:3)
Re:How do... (Score:5, Insightful)
how does a law like this get through... don't people want any privacy?
It is simple. Just tell the public that only terrorists, criminals and paedophiles want anonymity on the Internet. If people will put with being groped at airports, then it isn't so unthinkable that they would be too bothered by something that seems as trivial as requiring real names on the net.
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Just tell the public that only terrorists, criminals and paedophiles want anonymity on the Internet.
How much money [youtube.com] will it take to make us safe from anonymous Internet users?
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This reminds me of the Telemedia Act in Germany, which requires an Impressum [wikipedia.org], and in 1998 (date is as I recall, so possibly incorrect) it was ruled that it applies to web sites, so Germans need to post at minimum name, street address, and telephone number or email address on the site. Technically it applies to anything written including blogs and posts to forums, but I doubt it is enforced much for forums (the government has gone after bloggers, however). Not sure why that law exists, but I imagine it is to
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Nope - that law applies only to commercial websites. Private websites and blogs are not affected unless they have ads on them.
The point of the law is to protect consumers' rights which are very strong here. Basically - if a company wants to make business with you, they have to state who they are and who is responsible and if they have the right to do business at all (some professions). There are some practical issues since the law is somewhat ambiguously worded and needed to be clarified by courts. The proc
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don't people want any privacy?
No.
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Not familiar with the popular opinion in korea ofcourse, they may actually want this, but how does a law like this get through... don't people want any privacy?
If the staggering success of Facebook is any indication, the answer is clearly "No. They do not."
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IMO Facebook isn't much different from posting on Slashdot or any other message board, with the exception that you're a lot more likely to have met the people you chat to on Facebook, unless you actively participate in lots of random group pages. There's nothing forcing you to put private info up on Facebook, nor is there anything stopping you from saying private things on Slashdot.
Re:How do... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't give them ideas..
Plus I don't care what the advertisers know. At worst, I'll get adverts for something useful. At best, I'll be using an adblocker (which I do on desktop machines, but not my tablet yet).
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Clearly you have not read Facebook's terms of service. The fact that you disobeyed those terms and your act wasn't immediately detected doesn't exonerate Facebook, or "prove" that those terms of service don't apply.
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Damn, I hope they never discover 4chan.
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This is not a new to Korean internet users. Most internal websites, online games etc. require your Korean national ID number (and hence real name) to sign up. Only new thing here is that an international site (i.e. Google/YouTube) is honouring that local law (which they have no real obligation to do).
There has long been laws requiring real name/ID online in Korea and from what I've observed in my time there, people don't really think much of it (though that doesn't mean they ~want~ it, per se). Plus, it's p
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And maybe South Korea should stop acting like North Korea.
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While we're using inflationary language, someone should just go ahead and call them Nazi Germany and get it over with. I mean, clearly censoring the internet is the same as being Hitler, right?
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He just well, effectively "closed off [wikipedia.org]" this thread. (not really, he doesn't have that much cred.; illus. purposes only.)
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the fact that this story is 2 years old is rather relevant..it's not like google is taking both actions at the same time..
apparently timothy must have gotten mod points..
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Whooosh