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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

#151

Post by jessaustin »

criley2 wrote: post #144
jessaustin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You attempted to discredit his post by attacking the arguments he used. Holy crap that's some egg on my face. There must be some Latin name for that particular brand of rhetorical gaffe, "attacking the arguments".

It's not a gaffe. I didn't call it a fallacy because it's not a fallacy. I pointed out that you engaged him in debate and crowned yourself winner, and that I attempted to restart the debate by providing better arguments. It's interesting, however, that you invented a new context for my words that has no basis in the words themselves, and then used that as your reply instead of engaging on merits. In fact, I believe t…

No "crowning" here. Not really even a "debate". It is a personal bugbear of mine, how many people completely misunderstand our telecom market and the role of the FCC within it. (I worked for many years in telecom, for both the offspring of Ma Bell and for CLECs.) I attempted to correct one such misunderstanding, but somehow you've trolled me into yet another episode of this tired reframing of whatever the hell it was we were discussing. South Korea? Congratulations!

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

#152

Post by leot »

uiri wrote: post #94
acdha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you actually look at the history of Standard Oil (including the exposé by Ida Tarbell which arguably depicts the strongest case for the existence of a monopoly), you will notice that Standard Oil's market share was already on the decline by the time that the US Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had to be broken up. The break up wasn't even very effective in Standard Oil's case; the modern ExxonMobil is the res…

So the fact that the monopoly failed "eventually" means that the incredible toll it took from the economy was ok?

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

#153

Post by beagle3 »

ksk wrote: post #104
corresation wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By not developing such a plugin for firefox and chrome (which now account for much, much more than IE everywhere else in the world), they are, effectively, mandating IE.

How is the situation today any different than if Netscape never existed?

It is really important to look through the dry definitions. e.g., the super rich -- like the super poor -- are forbidden from panhandling. But effectively, it's a law that only applies to the poor; The wording does not matter.

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

#154

Post by beagle3 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #106
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?)

Should be easy to foil their detection with e.g. a patch to QEMU (or just running QEMU in full system emulation mode with accelerator - x3 or so slower, but ... would serve the purpose). Would this be illegal under SK law?

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

#155

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

jessaustin wrote: post #149
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Scandinavian nations are pretty solid non crony cap states, as are the old standbys of Singapore and Hong Kong. No nation is pure, of course. But we can look at examples of crony policies within otherwise capitalist-ish nations and compare to less crony-ish policies within those same nations. It all gets a bit muddy real quick, but I guess we have to do the best with what we've got.

I can't speak to practices in Scandinavia or Hong Kong, but I've lived in Singapore, and while it has plenty of good points, and lots of things just work , it also exhibits much of what I consider to be crony capitalism. First, there is a great deal of overlap among the leadership of government, the military, education, and business. As in, the same dude is CEO of a large company and a Colonel in the army and last ye…

I don't doubt anything you said, not in the least.

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

#156

Post by alexeisadeski3 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #148
alexeisadeski3 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Scandinavian nations are pretty solid non crony cap states, as are the old standbys of Singapore and Hong Kong. No nation is pure, of course. But we can look at examples of crony policies within otherwise capitalist-ish nations and compare to less crony-ish policies within those same nations. It all gets a bit muddy real quick, but I guess we have to do the best with what we've got.

> as are the old standbys of Singapore and Hong Kong. You don't know Singapore or HK very well. They are very good at being a transparent government, but guanxi is still needed to get things done.

I really don't, you are correct.

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

#157

Post by leot »

Xdes wrote: post #47
revscat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

What, precisely, do you want your economic system to do for you? What does everyone, speaking openly, attest to when speaking of their common economic goals? Once you've answered those questions, on what time scale would you like those goals to be realized? The "long run" won't cut it, because there's no such thing (and because in any case, the universe won't stand still and wait for the system to reach equilibrium).

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

#158

Post by yongjik »

jessaustin wrote: post #141
yongjik wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the great explanations. It actually makes some sense that Koreans are getting hacked all the time, since the binary rootkits they're required to install have probably not seen the scrutiny that more open solutions have. Secure systems used in the rest of the world get hacked because of weak entropy or through timing attacks: fairly esoteric stuff. It wouldn't surprise me if these ActiveX blobs have basic a…

Sure, they crash (or do something funny) a lot of time, but that's the problem with these ActiveX controls. If you buy anything from a Korean site you end up with an unknown number of plugins downloaded from everywhere, so how do we know if it's a bug in some plugin, a plugin already infected with virus, or just some malware you downloaded accidentally? (The last one, because you have to hit "OK" all the time: actually recent versions of Windows is being quite reasonable and wants to warn you when you install binaries from random websites, but this is exactly what Koreans are asked to do every day, so Korean bank websites contain these helpful pages showing how to lower Windows' "security level" and override the warnings.)

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

#159

Post by atesti »

flomo wrote: post #135
jessaustin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that being forced to use IE on Windows is more limiting than having to install an extension for whichever browser you choose on whichever OS you choose. If the security protocol were published or reverse-engineered, a clean re-implementation outside of Win32 could take place.

It's still an undesirable result even if it compiled a portable Linux .so just for your CPU architecture. The requirements are so flawed the system should be junked, not hacked around. Also, I'm not sure why my post was dinged, but Firefox extensions/addons/plugins can call into native code and can do pretty much anything an ActiveX control can do. There is no "sandbox" as someone else implied.

But if the protocol is reverse engineered, one could USE the bank websites. There is no need for the reverse engineered solution to do any kind of anti keylogger or virus scanning stuff!

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

#160

Post by criley2 »

jessaustin wrote: post #151
criley2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a gaffe. I didn't call it a fallacy because it's not a fallacy. I pointed out that you engaged him in debate and crowned yourself winner, and that I attempted to restart the debate by providing better arguments. It's interesting, however, that you invented a new context for my words that has no basis in the words themselves, and then used that as your reply instead of engaging on merits. In fact, I believe t…

No "crowning" here. Not really even a "debate". It is a personal bugbear of mine, how many people completely misunderstand our telecom market and the role of the FCC within it. (I worked for many years in telecom, for both the offspring of Ma Bell and for CLECs.) I attempted to correct one such misunderstanding, but somehow you've trolled me into yet another episode of this tired reframing of whatever the hell it was…

Now you're literally just revising a history that is four posts up for all to read. You were not "just" correcting a telecom mistake.

In fact, you BEGAN your post calling the OP entirely wrong:

>Eh, you might reserve that tone for posts in which you're mostly correct.

And finished with:

>It's funny that you mention Somalia, because it's a direct refutation of the point you're attempting to make (i.e., no government -> monopoly). It's as if Somalia is such a favorite hobbyhorse of the corporatists that they can't actually talk about how great corporatism is without mentioning it.

Yep, nothing but a simple correction about the telecom industry, nothing more.

It's obvious you have no interest in talking, so feel free to just walk away. Your continued sarcastic response is strange, considering that no one is forcing you to reply.

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