111–120 of 166 posts
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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.
Ugly boasting.
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If a monopoly raises the price too high then the consumer will seek a substitute or simply not purchase the good. This is true regardless of the form of the monopoly. 1) If rent is too high then renters will leave. 2) If an automobile is too expensive then consumers will use mass transit or carpool. 3) If there is a coal shortage due to labor conditions then consumers will use natural gas or other alternative sources…
This is simplistic: there are not always viable alternatives, even in a free market. 1) Rent is too high, where do I go? Do I leave my job to live in the country side without one? 2) Public transportation has to exist to be an alternative to the automobile, and often requires public intervention to be viable. 3) Did someone build the pipelines necessary for gas to reach my house? Does the same company own both coal a…
2) There is more than public transit such as van pools, bicycles, motorcycles, and trains.
3) There are several way to produce energy to heat a house (electricity, natural gas, wood burning stove).
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…
Since 2011, websites cannot ask or store resident registration numbers (that's the official name) for non-financial purposes. Sadly, it happened after a major incident which exposed RRNs of more than 70% of Koreans. [1] It is a common estimate that every Korean person have his/her RRN hacked at least twice due to frequent incidents.
The Korean government endorses i-PIN nowadays, which is basically... uh... redundant aliases to the unique RRN. This is obviously stupid, you can hack i-PIN instead of RRN and you have the same credential. Well, at least i-PIN is random. (RRN had very low entropy, and even shallow information about the target may limit possible RRNs to only hundreds.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number#O... for the 2011 incident.
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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…
Depending on the difficulty of working around the issue though, I wonder if it's a business opportunity: offer a web proxy which is transparent for all purposes, apart from the activex part - it would replace them with something that's either pretending to run the verification itself, or provides some replacement script. If you ran the company outside of Korea that took subscription money to bypass a number of the most popular services' auth, it would be hard to shut down. (but it would become a cat and mouse game of updating the algorithm until one side got bored...)
Unfortunately this would have to be written in some interesting way that guarantees the passwords / tokens / sessions are never captured by this system, otherwise noone would use it. But that's a technical problem - should be doable in some way.
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This is flatly incorrect. 1) Property. If you have a monopoly on the property in a given area you can charge whatever you want for rent, and no competition will be around to add competition. 2) Vertical monopolies. If your company buys out not just the competition, but the entire supply chain, and there is a high cost of entry to being able to enter the market -- say automobiles -- then you can quash competition as i…
> 1) Property. If you have a monopoly on the property in a given area you can charge whatever you want for rent, and no competition will be around to add competition. Then people can move elsewhere. People won't tolerate it forever. This can be seen in the real estate market in the city I live in. Several downtown blocks in prime locations have a single owner. She charged outrageous rents, and now half of these (prim…
There are also places on earth where you cannot easily get to another sufficiently richer country, so you don't even have the incentive to spare some money, just to go through the hard life of being an immigrant and then either adapt or come back with nothing.
People do choose this options, do struggle for visas etc, but usually to do that you have to be strongly motivated. The system often is kept somewhat balanced by this, but this doesn't means it's favourable to workers/consumers.
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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 th…
Surely this impacts Apple's sales in Korea. Amazed they haven't invested more in making a Mac technical solution for this.
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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.
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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.
Surely this impacts Apple's sales in Korea. Amazed they haven't invested more in making a Mac technical solution for this.