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South Korea is stuck with Internet Explorer for online shopping

washingtonpost.com

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

#101

Post by ksk »

edwintorok wrote: post #49
ksk wrote: post #19

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…

Why can't they just use TLS encryption that is available in all browsers and supports more than 128-bit?

I think there are some government regulations around selling stuff online over there. You need to register as a seller and they issue you a digital certificate - probably another thing that keeps people locked into their own encryption standard.

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

#102

Post by jaigouk »

patrickaljord wrote: post #5
PakG1 wrote: 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.

It isn't strange, most monopolies are born out of bad government policies, not the market.

Bill Gates visited S.K several years ago. And after that, everything changed.

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

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

sp332 wrote: post #93
criley2 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm having trouble with one point of your argument. You seem to be arguing that people who are not capitalists are not greedy or corrupt?

No, I think the argument is that the greed and corruption of people who are not capitalists aren't as important to the outcome of capitalism, because capitalism is a system in which the economy is organized around the interests (including, inter alia, greed and corruption) of capitalists.

Which is why the socialist critics of the dominant economic system of the developed world of the early-mid 19th Century coined the name "capitalism" for the system they were criticizing.

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

#104

Post by ksk »

corresation wrote: post #56
ksk wrote: post #19

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 article is generally correct. Until 2010, all e-commerce had to use the SEED protocol (which is only implemented via an ActiveX control after Netscape fell), by law. Which means Internet Explorer. Yes, it originated in the days when SSL was 40-bits, and yes there was once a Netscape plugin. However the world changed, and for the next decade the law remained the same. The spirit of the article is absolutely correc…

>Long after far superior alternatives were available, the law mandated the use of Internet Explorer, which is an inertia that carries the country today.

The law does not mandate IE. The government would have maintained both plugins if people would have continued to use netscape. They didn't.

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

#105

Post by viraptor »

yongjik wrote: post #97
jlgreco wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A major online bookstore (www.aladdin.co.kr) actually tried that this year. They teamed up with another startup company (Paygate) and allowed users to use credit card with no plugins, on any browser. The few people who tried that loved it. 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 a…

That's a solution from the provider's side though. I would have thought that it's much easier to handle it from the client side really... just pretend you did whatever verification was necessary and return the expected result.

Noone should be able to shut it down, because it's on the client side, rather than the service provider, so the retailer shouldn't be blamed.

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

#106

Post by lifthrasiir »

talmand wrote: post #11

Boot Camp is a secret weapon? It costs $70? I'm confused. Could they not get a free VM and then download an image from modern.ie?

Many native "security" solutions required by websites, e.g. anti-keyloggers and antiviruses, would block the VM. They also tend to trigger weird problems in the VM, e.g. some of them makes the entire desktop fail to respond to any events. (What?)

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

#107

Post by jlgreco »

yongjik wrote: post #97
jlgreco wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A major online bookstore (www.aladdin.co.kr) actually tried that this year. They teamed up with another startup company (Paygate) and allowed users to use credit card with no plugins, on any browser. The few people who tried that loved it. 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 a…

The idea is "Can I, the end user, do this without the banks knowledge or cooperation?"

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

#109

Post by gkanai »

kippetlong wrote: post #87
gkanai wrote: post #13

I covered this on my blog in 2007: http://kanai.net/weblog/archive/2007/01/26/00h53m55s My blog post was heavily covered in Boing Boing, Slashdot, Salon, etc. at the time.

So nobody else is allowed to write about it ever again?

Where did I say that? My point is that in the 7 years since 2007, effectively nothing has changed.

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

#110

Post by yongjik »

viraptor wrote: post #105
yongjik wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A major online bookstore (www.aladdin.co.kr) actually tried that this year. They teamed up with another startup company (Paygate) and allowed users to use credit card with no plugins, on any browser. The few people who tried that loved it. 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 a…

That's a solution from the provider's side though. I would have thought that it's much easier to handle it from the client side really... just pretend you did whatever verification was necessary and return the expected result. Noone should be able to shut it down, because it's on the client side, rather than the service provider, so the retailer shouldn't be blamed.

No no no, it doesn't work that way. These banking websites don't expose a well-defined API that you can emulate. Instead they force you to install a bunch of ActiveX plugins (usually with administrative privilege) and you have to just trust that they won't, say, read the whole content of your hard disk and stream it to a third-party site.

A few years ago (when I was still in Korea), it was usually impossible to open two different bank's pages at the same time: I'd assume that's still the case now. As far as I know, the reason is that both banks will force you to install "anti-hacking" plugins, which hooks directly into your Windows Kernel and makes sure nobody else snoops on what you type. Yes, these webpages try to establish a direct connection between your keyboard and the website, completely bypassing every layer. Now imagine the fun when two such plugins try to run at the same time.

And of course without these plugins you can't use the site. Hell, sometimes these sites spontaneously break just because you're accessing it from the US, because nobody had thought to test them from a client with ping time > 200ms.

Now try emulating that in client. (I don't know if I should laugh or weep.)

EDIT: Besides, if you seriously try to make a platform that can emulate these "security" plugins, sooner or later you will be arrested for making tools to circumvent security measures, and people will be reminded that they should never install anything from "suspicious" sites. (But of course install everything from banking sites.) As a bonus, some news media will claim you were paid by North Korea, and many will believe that.

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