91–100 of 166 posts
I've lived in Korea for quite a length of time and my wife is Korean...and I concur that it's a nightmare. No Korean financial institution will let you log into their interfaces on anything other than IE. Often the homepage would be completely broken in anything other than IE anyway. This is true for most sites, though those were easily avoidable. Banks and the like, not so much. To perform financial transactions onl…
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.
It isn't strange, most monopolies are born out of bad government policies, not the market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider the fact that if you refuse to do business with a private-sector monopoly the worst that'll happen is that you'll get a slightly less-effective alternative or in the worst case go without the good. If you refuse to participate in a government-mandated monopoly you can face civil and criminal charges. Also, a private-sector monopoly, no matter how seemingly entrenched, is always vulnerable to disruption (when…
You need to read more history – that naive dismissal doesn't work well for anything important. If someone corners the market on, say, oil, cargo transportation, etc. your choice is either to pay the monopoly tax or accept a significant loss. Do you really think “oh, it's just slightly less effective” is why the Sherman Antitrust Act ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act ) was seen as widely needed by…
1. Technically, the law doesn't require that you use Internet Explorer. The law merely requires that you use a bunch of technologies, ranging from 128-bit encryption to government-issued client certificates to government-mandated antivirus to (craziest of all) an anti-keylogger utility. Conveniently, the spec was written with Windows & IE in mind, so it's very difficult to write alternative implementations for other platforms.
2. This is not a matter of being stuck with older versions of IE like many corporate intranets in the West. In fact, most banks in Korea work perfectly well in IE11 as long as you don't try to use the Modern UI (Metro) version. Because this is not so much about IE as it is about the WIN32 environment.
3. The proliferation of phones and tablets has motivated banks and payment gateways to write iOS and Android implementations of the spec. This was the first time anybody tried to implement the spec outside of Windows & IE. But once you have one alternative implementation, it's much easier to port it to other platforms like Mac, Linux, and FF/Chrome on Windows. This is happening slowly.
4. Despite the appearance of these alternative implementations, the spec itself is still very problematic. For example, the antivirus and anti-keylogger requirements cannot be met unless the programs in question have root privileges on your device. It feels insane when you browse to a bank's home page in Linux and it tells you to download a bunch of apps and execute them as root. And of course those apps are only designed for specific versions of specific Linux distributions, so they break as soon as a new Ubuntu release comes out. No thanks! Even in Windows, the Firefox & Chrome plugins are not packaged as proper extensions, but as standalone programs that integrate loosely with the browser like Flash and Java, Because you can't meet the spec within the confines of a browser's sandbox.
5. Okay so why not just run Windows in a VM? Actually that's exactly what I do. But it's not a perfect solution. Some of the Korean "security" apps have begun to detect when the user is in a VM, and refuse to work in a VM. There is no technical reason for this policy, they just don't like people getting around the rules. My bank refuses to whitelist my VM as a trusted device. I've encountered at least one government agency that won't offer online services to a VM. The last time I bought a bus ticket online, the e-ticket wouldn't print because the printer port was virtualized and therefore could be used to produce duplicates or whatever.
6. Even mobile apps, which the article mentions, are very pesky about their environment. The app for my bank won't run on my phone because it's rooted and therefore can't be trusted. Fuck that shit. This affects everyone who uses CyanogenMod. (What's even more ridiculous is that the same bank requires root on my PC.)
7. Therefore, porting the spec to non-IE platforms and/or writing compatibility layers is not the answer. The spec needs to be fixed, period. No website should have the right to demand the use of any software other than a standards-compliant web browser. No website should require root, or even want to know anything about the environment (virtualized or not, rooted or not) in which it is being visited, except what the browser exposes to it by default.
8. Of course this isn't going to happen any time soon, because removing even one of the requirements on the current spec will be seen as a decrease of security, and nobody wants to take the blame the next time 10 million people get their account information stolen. Wait a second, every Korean citizen has had his or her personal information stolen multiple times in the last several years anyway. All the banks and merchants have desensitized users to the point that anytime any website ask them to install some app and run it as Administrator, they do. All the security theater of the last 14 years has done is to decrease the security of the entire country. It has also hurt the rest of the Web. Because it's so much more convenient to write a Windows Forms app than to write a website that works in both IE6 and IE11, lots of interactive and media-heavy websites in Korea (especially gaming and file-sharing websites) have become mere landing pages where you download the actual app. After all, the banks are doing it, so why shouldn't everyone else do the same?
9. One move in the right direction is that since this September, every large (over ~$3000) online transaction requires two-factor authentication. They've been handing out one-time password generators like candy lately. The ubiquity of mobile phones also means that you can even choose to use three-factor authentication (login + one-time password + SMS token) for certain types of transactions. Hopefully this will eliminate the justification for the anti-keylogger utility, since the passwords and SMS tokens can't be reused anyway.
[Edit] 10. Another positive development is that the Korean government has finally begun to pay attention to accessibility on the Internet. At the moment, among Korean web developers, accessibility is an even hotter topic than standards compliance, because lack of accessibility can get you into nasty lawsuits and hefty fines. Everyone's busy adding "alt" attributes to tags. But hopefully, in the long term, focusing on accessibility will also bring people to care about standards compliance.
I've lived in Korea for quite a length of time and my wife is Korean...and I concur that it's a nightmare. No Korean financial institution will let you log into their interfaces on anything other than IE. Often the homepage would be completely broken in anything other than IE anyway. This is true for most sites, though those were easily avoidable. Banks and the like, not so much. To perform financial transactions onl…
Does changing/spoofing the user agent not work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ke…
And guess what happened?
Major credit card companies pulled out one by one, because they "cannot ensure" that a page without Active-X is secure enough. Of course nobody's pulling any strings, no government officials are receiving unknown gifts, and nothing can be ever proved. So, there. You work for months to provide users with modern browsing experience, and those banking powers-that-be just pull the plug.
The whole system is corrupt beyond imagination.
Citation (sorry, in Korean): http://www.hankyung.com/news/app/newsview.php?aid=2013091203... http://www.leejeonghwan.com/media/archives/002331.html
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…
It's clear from your response that you didn't read the cited link. > Backroom deals AKA corruption. Corruption and regulation are two sides of the same coin. You seem to labor under some obtuse notion that the state governments were the subject of the backroom deals. Let me dispel that for you, by quoting from the article cited that you apparently couldn't be bothered to read: > In a seminal deal, in 1868, the Lake S…
http://www.pagetutor.com/standard/chapter13_part1.html
The whole text. http://www.pagetutor.com/standard/toc.html
It does seem as though they (mostly) legitimately competed, and given the historic oil price throughout their reign (which fell drastically, http://www.pagetutor.com/standard/chapter16_part1.html) it doesn't seem as though they exercised monopoly power (at least not nation-wide).
Typical of most MS bashing articles - this article is troll-bait at best and false at worst. Internet Explorer is not mandated by law. What happened was, the US had banned export of 128bit encryption software. The Korean government said screw that and created browser plugins - for BOTH Netscape and IE - to use 128bit encryption for online transactions. Netscape died and IE remained. I guess their implementation is pr…
The 128-bit export restriction ended 13 years ago, so the use of the home-grown encryption standard has been a choice made by the Korean government and corporations. Yes, the export restrictions were stupid, but there has been plenty of time to switch over. NPAPI is supported in most browsers, so the SEED implementation had to have been pretty tied to Netscape Navigator/Communicator implementation as it existed pre-F…
Because the government is not mandating IE? The public overwhelmingly used IE over Netscape which caused the government to go "okay since nobody is using netscape we're going to only maintain one plugin". I think its a pretty important distinction to make. Anyway, we disagree. No biggie :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
Right. Its called capitalism because its a system driven by serving the interests of capital.