

South Korea ends Microsoft's online shopping monopoly - dko
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100701/tc_afp/skoreaitinternetbankingmicrosoft_20100701053219

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code_duck
Wow... talk about a reign of terror. This is a great example of why
governments should never, ever be involved in proscribing use of specific
technologies. ActiveX chosen for the sake of security?

... or, say, anything else that involves interpreting complex technical issues
such as software patents.

~~~
masklinn
> This is a great example of why governments should never, ever be involved in
> proscribing use of specific technologies.

I don't know about that. It's now a liability, but a decade ago it probably
helped the meteoritic rise of broadband (and broadband-based services
including secure ones) and internet usage in Korea. And was part of it anyway
(the Korean government very heavily pushed broadband and internet usage in the
90s and early 00s)

~~~
dko
Exactly. Governments usually tender out massive contracts to the private
sector, and there were very few companies at that time that could probably
meet the technical demands. Hence the lock-in.

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wmwong
This is wonderful news. I remember hearing about this monopoly a while back
and was horrified. I always wondered why so many Korean sites were optimized
for IE. I'm glad this has happened and can't wait to see the improvements that
will come out of this.

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lenni
Exactly, it seems weird that a country which has the fastest internet in the
world has tied itself to the slowest browser around.

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quant18
To be fair, the ActiveX encryption requirement only applied to domestic credit
cards. If you were paying by foreign-issued credit card --- even if you were
buying stuff from a Korean shop for delivery within Korea --- it was perfectly
legal for the merchant to skip the ActiveX junk (and resident registration
number verification, the other major nightmare for foreigners) and just use
good old https.

Unfortunately, few ever bothered. Kyobo Books deserves some props at this
point for getting this working early --- ordered stuff from them at Christmas
with a foreign credit card and foreign billing address, and everything worked
perfectly. Their competitors like Aladdin and Yes24 deserve a collective smack
upside the head.

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ashearer
According to the article, the iPhone was ultimately the trigger that finally
broke the country's ActiveX dependence, and will thereby open up the desktop
browser market as a side effect.

It's a success story with parallels to Apple's ongoing attempt to break the
web's de facto Flash requirement, and to Mozilla's stand to break dependence
on non-free video codecs.

But Apple and Mozilla's new battles are harder. In toppling ActiveX, the
iPhone (and the phones it inspired) got a gift from Windows Mobile, by being
so stagnant that it left a huge opening. But the iPhone now has a credible
competitor in Android, with newly-minted Flash support. And Mozilla has high-
quality competitors that offer H.264 support. (Chrome will support both WebM
and H.264, so Google isn't taking the hard-line stance that would follow if
they valued breaking H.264 over immediate gains in market share.)

For now, Apple has the iPad's market to itself, which gives it great latitude
to further weaken Flash. Mozilla is in a more difficult position, so it will
be interesting to see what they are able to achieve.

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thristian
For background information, here's a write-up on the matter:

[http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2010/04/28/the-security-of-
inter...](http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2010/04/28/the-security-of-internet-
banking-in-south-korea/)

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TeHCrAzY
I find it amusing that "Active X" is referred to as a data-encryption
framework

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icefox
Like flash this was another stumbling block for anyone that wanted to make a
browser and I am glad to see if fall. I got more then one request to add
ActiveX to Arora.

"South Korean regulators realised the rules were preventing businesses from
offering services to smartphones."

I wish it had been because of all of the existing browsers that don't support
ActiveX on the desktop, but I'll take browsers on the smartphone as the
reason.

~~~
rbanffy
Probably because after a decade of Windows/IE lock, their very idea of
internet is a blue "e" on their desktop.

After this long, I bet most South Koreans think we, non-IE users, are nothing
but an eccentric bunch.

