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South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

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Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any real economist. Any real economist can cite many monoplies that arise through market forces alone. > Inevitably, if any industry is profitable, competition will arise. This is not true. There are many different definitions of "profit", and there are many cases where an industry that makes a real business profit will not support a competitor that makes an economic profit. The obvious example is markets with very…

> He became dominant through backroom deals and anti-competitive practices. Backroom deals AKA corruption. Corruption and regulation are two sides of the same coin. Had the market been perfectly competitive (ie. state governments not succumbing to corruption) the monopoly likely would not have formed and lasted. Your only example merely proves my point. Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free f…

> Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free from government 'intervention' (either regulation OR corruption).

How about you cite an example of an open market that is free from government intervention?

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#83
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where to start. Eh, you might reserve that tone for posts in which you're mostly correct. Ma Bell was not in any real sense broken up at any point in time. Presumably you're referring to the consent decree that took effect in 1984, but it's also possible you've been fooled by the fig-leaf Comm Act of '96. The result of all that mummery is that right now we have 2.5 phone companies in the USA (which organ…

I don't see why Capitalists are so often misguided about their Ideology. Capitalism is not a system of capital ownership that encourages competition directly, it is a system of capital ownership that encourages greedy[1] people to greedily control capital in a way that most benefits themselves, and by proxy, their company, and by proxy, the economy. There is no competition inherent in private capital ownership, but i…

@vdaniuk: You make wild accusations against me, saying that I am name calling? Can you quote me where I did that? Because this was no diatribe and I didn't call anyone names! I conducted myself respectfully--so it is surprising that you would be so disrespectful to me with your false accusation.

I think what you've done is a basic against-the-man attack where you "discredit" what I said by inventing fake attacks against me. You're welcome to invent whatever rationalization you need to ignore me, but don't pretend it's anything more than ignorance in action, buddy.

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what exactly is needed? What is stopping someone from writing a FF extension that will capture all activex object tags and replace them with something doing the same operations in FF's chrome? Is the auth protocol completely unknown? Is the activex control obfuscated more than is possible to reverse-engineer?

ActiveX is designed to hook directly into the Windows OS. That's what makes it so dangerous, but useful in this case, since you can add a cert to the trusted store. Firefox is designed to be secure and sand-boxed, especially its plugin architecture.

You don't need to replicate all of the functionality that activex has. You just need to emulate the behaviour from the banks point of view of whatever their particular activex does. Maybe the ActiveX rewrites a bunch of files with admin privileges "for security", and then negotiates some sort of key exchange... in that case just write JS that says it did the shit that requires admin privileges, then negotiates the key exchange).

So the question is, if you are willing to ignore their activex and run your own custom JS instead, could these websites be made to work?

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#85
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where to start. Eh, you might reserve that tone for posts in which you're mostly correct. Ma Bell was not in any real sense broken up at any point in time. Presumably you're referring to the consent decree that took effect in 1984, but it's also possible you've been fooled by the fig-leaf Comm Act of '96. The result of all that mummery is that right now we have 2.5 phone companies in the USA (which organ…

I don't see why Capitalists are so often misguided about their Ideology. Capitalism is not a system of capital ownership that encourages competition directly, it is a system of capital ownership that encourages greedy[1] people to greedily control capital in a way that most benefits themselves, and by proxy, their company, and by proxy, the economy. There is no competition inherent in private capital ownership, but i…

I thought the main problem with Rockefeller and Carnegie was corruption, not capitalism. They used their political power to override the democratic process, such that most people had no say in their government anymore.

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#86
post #2

It is strange that I think of this after reading this, but this seems to be the dystopian future scenario that freaked out the DOJ due to Microsoft bundling the IE browser with Windows. It is strange that this situation actually came about, but due to reasons of law, not due to Microsoft's own market clout.

> due to reasons of law, not due to Microsoft's own market clout.

I'm quite sure Microsoft had something to do with the experts that consulted for the South Korean government when they arrived to this brilliant solution.

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#88
post #85
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why Capitalists are so often misguided about their Ideology. Capitalism is not a system of capital ownership that encourages competition directly, it is a system of capital ownership that encourages greedy[1] people to greedily control capital in a way that most benefits themselves, and by proxy, their company, and by proxy, the economy. There is no competition inherent in private capital ownership, but i…

I thought the main problem with Rockefeller and Carnegie was corruption, not capitalism. They used their political power to override the democratic process, such that most people had no say in their government anymore.

That's my point entirely. Capitalism does not breed competition, it breeds success for the private investor. Which in their case, they used government to kill competition and increase profit and personal outcomes, not increase competition and increase outcomes for all.

The idea that we can't blame Capitalism for its corruption is laughable. The greed motivation of Capitalism is WHY that corruption exists! Because they want personal success MORE than they want success for all, so they make a decision that benefits themselves/their investment at the cost of society.

The outcome of Capitalism without strong regulation in that era was a corruption of weak regulators, corruption of government, and a destruction of competition.

I guess you could argue "but what about Capitalism in absence of government entirely" but that sounds too much like the Communists and their "but but TRUE communism, without a state, would TOTALLY work, I SWEAR!"

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#89
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what exactly is needed? What is stopping someone from writing a FF extension that will capture all activex object tags and replace them with something doing the same operations in FF's chrome? Is the auth protocol completely unknown? Is the activex control obfuscated more than is possible to reverse-engineer?

Such a thing was created many years ago: http://www.adamlock.com/mozilla/plugin.htm One could guess that it was never included by default because Mozilla did not want to encourage the use of ActiveX controls.

Oh $BABY_DEITY no! That's not what I was suggesting! Activex in FF? Scared the hell out of me...

What I meant is either reverse-engineering the algorithm and reimplementing it in FF chrome in clean JS like jlgreco mentioned below, or including just the kernel of the important logic, the way ndiswrapper uses windows driver for communicating to the network cards without actually implementing whole windows kernel.

Re: South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

#90
post #81
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He became dominant through backroom deals and anti-competitive practices. Backroom deals AKA corruption. Corruption and regulation are two sides of the same coin. Had the market been perfectly competitive (ie. state governments not succumbing to corruption) the monopoly likely would not have formed and lasted. Your only example merely proves my point. Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free f…

> Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free from government 'intervention' (either regulation OR corruption). How about you cite an example of an open market that is free from government intervention?

There are indeed very few in this day and age. However markets free from government intervention do exist; open air markets in 3rd world economies would be an example. All markets follow the same principles.
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