Everybody’s been freaking out in the past couple of weeks by news that South Korea is building a new broadband network that will be 50 times faster than the average connection elsewhere. That’s fast! Too bad South Koreans won’t be able to use maps or access thousands of sites.
The Economist just published some less than flattering details of South Korea’s recent internet policy. It’s pretty discouraging. Did you know, for instance, that Korean censors deleted about 23,000 web pages last year and blocked an additional 63,000? Did you know you can’t access any North Korean websites from South Korea? It gets worse:
A law dating back to the Korean war forbids South Korean maps from being taken out of the country. Because North and South are technically still at war, the law has been expanded to include electronic mapping data — which means that Google, for instance, cannot process South Korean mapping data on its servers and therefore cannot offer driving directions inside the country. In 2010 the UN determined that the KCSC “essentially operates as a censorship body.”
Welp, at least the uncensored sites will load pretty quickly. That means less time for South Koreans to sit around wondering where the rest of the internet is. [Economist]
SSL proxy
That will definitely help with the turn by turn:
well, at least they have speed.
Can anybody access North Korean intranet websites outside of North Koreans? No. Well done Giz with your easy and convenient way to incite the anti north eastern hatred... 'If they're different, we must fear them'
Last edited February 12, 2014 9:43 pm
I think they mean sites like this - http://www.korea-dpr.com
It's all porn. Good ol' pr0n is illegal here, so nothing terribly 1984 about that. If you try, you get a government warning (pic: http://postimg.org/image/9b9w5ne17/). So... everyone just uses proxies. Not that big a deal, really.
True, weirdly enough. Naver, which is the more common map site here (and the only one with street view) is the same. But frankly, every taxi and car I've been in here has GPS units with driving directions, so... again, not so much of a problem. Once more, it's just inconvenient rather than being the nightmare face of some kind of oppressive boogey-man government repression.
23000 + 63000 = 86000. How many pages are on the internet again? Many billions?
Firstly, why would you want to? That shit is worse than GeoCities in 1995, and there's less than a dozen NK websites to begin with. But WTF do you expect SK to do considering they're technically at war? FFS.
Frankly, this is some kind of slow news day fear-mongering crap. I call BS journalism.
Also, source = I'm living in Korea right now.
Last edited February 12, 2014 11:45 pm