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TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

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Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#21

Between this and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_law South Korea sounds like pretty oppressive country to live in.

Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more.

I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages directly inside my apartment at 8AM to say stuff like "there's a farmer's market in the parking lot today (like every week)". I asked them to stop spamming my household via their PA system for non-emergency stuff and they thought I was a antisocial psychopath.

Then I learned and just disconnect the PA system. They don't mean to invade my privacy, but my privacy boundaries aren't the same as theirs.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#22

Between this and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_law South Korea sounds like pretty oppressive country to live in.

Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more. I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages dir…

Wait, is this typical to had PA system in your apartment controlled by your landlord there? Can you tell more about this? I'm genuinely interested.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#23

Between this and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_law South Korea sounds like pretty oppressive country to live in.

It depends on what you consider oppressive. In terms of international freedom indices, South Korea is about as free as the United States of America ( https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores or https://rsf.org/en/index ) or not far from it ( https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i... ) Of course this doesn't say much if you don't consider the USA to be a very free country but I'd r…

> Of course this doesn't say much if you don't consider the USA to be a very free country

It's not a matter of personal opinion. Many reputable sources place US in a pretty bad place compared to all other developed countries.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#24

Between this and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_law South Korea sounds like pretty oppressive country to live in.

Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more. I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages dir…

Haha, now I vaguely remember something like that in soviet union’s “rest houses” (was a kid, may mistake it for something else). I think I slept next to a speaker on the wall and wanted to kick it.

It’s very nice of you to respect cultural aspects, but I suspect that at least some koreans also simply disconnect it and accept the risks :)

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different cultural norms. Korea has a strong paternalistic tangent running through. Corporations are paternalistic, governments are paternalistic. As a foreigner you might feel this is simply oppression, because you lack the context so it comes to you as simply oppressive and nothing more. I'm one of those foreigners who didn't appreciate that my apartment's management office would blast public broadcast messages dir…

Wait, is this typical to had PA system in your apartment controlled by your landlord there? Can you tell more about this? I'm genuinely interested.

Wasn't controlled by the landlord, but by the management team which is paid by the condo fee. If you own the condo, you pay that fee, if you rent it from a landlord you also pay it. The management team I believe is hired by the residents committee which is elected by the residents. Sort of like an HOA, I guess? There were elections during my stay and we were invited to participate, but I didn't care enough and this was a temporary situation.

This was in a large apartment tower complex in the semi-countryside. Not sure if it's always like that, it's the only apartment I stayed in. In Seoul I've only lived in villas.

Perhaps it's a countryside thing because I've also noticed noisy public speakerphones in the streets blasting PAs about random stuff, but I haven't seen it in Seoul.

Overall though, the local governments do spam your phone with alerts about all sorts of remotely relevant (IMO) things on a daily/hourly basis. I find it annoying but it's just how it is here. Today they were spamming about possible debris from a NASA satellite deorbiting.

Here is a very collectively oriented society. That's my take on it. High trust communities, so much so that things like this are possible: https://mobile.twitter.com/AntoineGrondin/status/16123864859...

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on what you consider oppressive. In terms of international freedom indices, South Korea is about as free as the United States of America ( https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores or https://rsf.org/en/index ) or not far from it ( https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i... ) Of course this doesn't say much if you don't consider the USA to be a very free country but I'd r…

I consider lack of digital freedom quite oppressive, especially given "software eating the world" trend. The fact that they even can tell the age of person playing games during night time in the first place sounds quite sketchy to me (I guess I'm supposed to tie my gaming account to my real id?).

In Korea you do. In part because of multiple things such as a desire to prevent defamation, which is a big deal in Korea because people take their reputation very seriously and bullying is a big problem as a result, having notably lead to multiple high profile suicides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_cyber_defamation_...

The laws on libel and slander are notorious for being very alien to westerners. In particular saying something true but bad about someone isn't typically libel in other countries, but in Korea it is: true or false, you shouldn't speak ill of people.

It's a very different society where very different tradeoffs have been made.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, is this typical to had PA system in your apartment controlled by your landlord there? Can you tell more about this? I'm genuinely interested.

Wasn't controlled by the landlord, but by the management team which is paid by the condo fee. If you own the condo, you pay that fee, if you rent it from a landlord you also pay it. The management team I believe is hired by the residents committee which is elected by the residents. Sort of like an HOA, I guess? There were elections during my stay and we were invited to participate, but I didn't care enough and this w…

Apartments in Seoul is mostly similar to your experience in countryside.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#28
> The real number of users is likely considerably higher, the software being installed on pretty much any computer in South Korea.

This is a bit of an exaggeration. Plenty of young people hate this stuff enough that they do all of their banking through their phone and if they absolutely must do it on a pc, they either use an old disused laptop, do it at work, do it at an internet cafe (not that those don't bring risks) or make sure to remove the spyware the second they've completed the task at hand.

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#29
post #18

Between this and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_law South Korea sounds like pretty oppressive country to live in.

Like Japan, it's a "one and a half party state"; while there are multiple parties and free elections, in practice one party wins a majority almost all the time and there's very little space for diverse viewpoints.

It's more like "two party state" though. Take a look at presidential election results[0]: after Chun Doo-hwan's(전두환) military dictatorship ended, candidates from conservative and liberal parties were elected taking turns.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_elections_in_Sout...

Re: TouchEn nxKey: A keylogging anti-keylogger solution

#30
post #28

> The real number of users is likely considerably higher, the software being installed on pretty much any computer in South Korea. This is a bit of an exaggeration. Plenty of young people hate this stuff enough that they do all of their banking through their phone and if they absolutely must do it on a pc, they either use an old disused laptop, do it at work, do it at an internet cafe (not that those don't bring risk…

> or make sure to remove the spyware the second they've completed the task at hand.

Yup. The problem is that those spywares are not cleanly uninstalled and leave junks on the disk. Some independent developers even created a dedicated tool for removing those "security" software to solve the problem.

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