Unsurprisingly, terrible Korean internet strikes again. ISPs try to charge companies insane fees because customers want to connect to their servers. Company decides to use peer-ro-peer instead so the ISP starts installing spyware on customer computers.
Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
I hope everyone involved in this catches criminal charges, all the way up the chain. Completely unacceptable behavior.
South Korea at least used to have blazingly fast internet infrastructure. Of course that didn't make up for shitty banking websites that you could only use by running Internet Explorer and allowing it to install "security plugins" that hook into Windows kernel, but at least the internet was fast, and it did give Korea an edge for its IT industry.
That was, I think, about twenty years ago.
I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more.
Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)
I think this is sort of how Japan is often thought of as "land of the future" because where was a brief period around the 2000s where new tech adoption sort of got a little ahead of the US, but what people really missed was that they weren't ahead so much as just...kind of different?
And the reality today is that it'll seem practically backwards to a Westerner - i.e. tons of paper forms and bureaucracy for things like banking and rental applications.
It's also worth noting the SK has some pretty terrible laws around the internet in general. Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside. They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]. They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1].
It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open. I mean the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government and similarly, a lot more control by them. And it is a fairly tight knit group and there's only a few companies that dominate the country.
> the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government
Are they really more trusting of the government in south korea or is that just what people will say if you ask them?
If my government aggressively went after every youtuber and literal child who dared to say bad things about the government I'd probably lie and say I trusted my government too whenever asked.
> They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials
Because cyber defamation would go rampant otherwise and people would end up killing themselves on lost reputation and cyber bullying. You have to understand Korean culture, where reputation and how you're viewed in society is extremely important.
> Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside.
Incorrect, it's yet another incorrect meme. Legal pornography is always possible in South Korea, and while the actual threshold varied over time (because you know, there is no objective metric for them anyway so it has to be a function of the approximate social consensus), legal pornography is not necessarily "milder" than illegal pornography distributed via blocked websites. (EDIT: incorrectly put "stronger" there...)
The South Korean treatment of pornography was extremely distorted mainly because of the rampant copyright violation over pornographic materials produced elsewhere. That blocked virtually all attempts to sell legal pornography and profit from it, why would you pay when you already have tons of free porns out there. Technically speaking, a large portion of the current adult population should have been found guilty if foreign producers could sue them, and I can tell you that the name of a certain blocked but still popular pornographic website [1] has became a household name for many males in their 20s and 30s!
And here is where the SK law's technical distinction between legal pornography and illegal obsence material turned out to be handy. Since those websites distributed pornography illegally, you can just consider them obscene and thus exempted from the copyright protection (!). I really hate this situation and like to see the radical change, but I can also see that it would become a massive and uncontrollable international affair otherwise. So that's why those websites had to be banned (to signal that it is indeed illegal), but the ban itself is so weak that it can be easily bypassed (more effective ban would be harder to justify).
[1] I don't like to quote its exact name, but as a hint, it is often followed by "꺼라 turn sth off".
It's a lot easier to buy into a government when the most horrid example of one in modern history (arguable, I get it) is only 100 miles to the north with a huge amount of artillery pointed at you.
> Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside.
Good. Why should any country be a conduit for porn? Most sane countries frown upon and limit things like porn, gambling, drugs, etc. Like we used to until fairly recently.
> They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]
It's like that in most countries. Other countries can have their own values. Nothing wrong with it.
> They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1].
Freedomhouse is apparently a state propaganda outfit.
'Most of the organization's funding comes from the U.S. State Department[4] and other government grants.'
You are linking to a propaganda site created solely to push a political agenda. Germany has an amazing 'freedom' scores but you could go to jail in germany for espousing certain beliefs about certain events in ww2.
That south korea scores low in the freedomhouse index is a good thing. Though it is surprising given that south korea is a militarily occupied vassal of the US.
> It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open.
Are they really? You are conflating 'the west' with the US. Most of 'the west' is not like america. In most of the west, you can go to jail or be punished for speech. Most of the west doesn't have free speech that we do in america.
What's with the neverending 'coming from the west' from foreigners here? So many foreigners here pretend to be americans here? Why?
Another memory from the terrible South Korean Internet is how the national banks required customers to log in using Internet Explorer because of mandatory ActiveX blobs of code.
It makes me sad that all of these started with US's restriction on the export of cryptography, which prompted South Korea (among others) to develop a domestic algorithm that was unsupported by contemporary browsers at that time.
> Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
Same here in Japan. The funny thing is that both me here and my parents back in Spain have gigabit fibre, yet my parents' connection is much faster than mine.
>Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds.
But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia.
Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.
As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates.
I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke.
It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.
> According to the news report, KT said it directly planted the malware on its customers that use Webhard’s Grid Service, as it was a malicious program and that “it had no choice but to control it.”
Looks like the major ISP and some cloud service provider are having some kind of ridiculous fight, and they're using their customers' computers as the battlefield. I'd be pretty disgusted if I were a customer.
They should be dusgusted. KT's market share something like 80% of landline subscribers and 45% of high speed Internet usets. This is Korea's equivalent of AT&T. The National Pension Service owns ~13% of it.
Wow, are they trying to have worse internet than DPRK?
Funny how both spectrums of fully controlled market and fully free market can be terrible. Apparently what they did was a crime but it shows the spirit, they though at least that they can do it and get away with it.
I imagine keeping at the front of the pack on any infrastructure investment is very difficult. I mean, it’s an investment, you want to give it time to amortize, right?
Policy failure. South Korea enforced a "Sender Pays" rule for networks, eliminating peering between ISPs. This resulted in companies moving there server to neighboring countries to avoid paying for traffic, which was free before.
>Police officials acted on the information and discovered it came from KT’s own data center south of Seoul. ... They’ve since identified and charged 13 individuals, including KT employees and subcontractors directly connected to the malware attack last November,...
I'm actually very impressed. If this happened in the US, the police wouldn't care about it at all, and would just tell everyone affected that "it's a civil matter" and they'll have to file a lawsuit if they don't like it.
I think you're too optimistic. My reading is that the police is investigating low-level employees and subcontractors. I.e., profit for the corporation, consequence for the employees. And especially subcontractors. (Workplace discrimination against subcontractors has been a hot topic in Korea: subcontractors literally die in factories because they're pushed to handle dangerous tasks while "regular employees" get cushy desk jobs.)
It took 3 years but the FBI published the names of the fellows they believe are responsible for breaching equifax and stealing private data about half of americans
South Korea information technology (as distinguished from hardware-related technology) is unbelievably bad. Much of it is purely technical: domestic firms like Naver are simply not as good as global incumbents like Google, but also they are terrible compared to other regional players (The Kakao chat app is vastly inferior to Zalo, a Vietnamese chat app). However, just as much is due to poor cultural and interpersonal decisions. This news case highlights such a cultural factor.
Note that KT, while relatively recently privatized, is still a national corporation that is considered a critical national asset under the law (thus if the North attacks, KT towers are first priority to be protected by the South's military). So, it is not as if some rogue SME infected its users with malware; it's a national corporation infecting its users over and not even be sorry about it (as in the article).
Plenty of other comments detail the strange Active X requirement: The national law had dependency on Internet Explorer/Active X. (I do not know of any developed nation having a national legal dependency on a specific corporation's consumer technology at this scale.) Also, many comments on South Korea's purportedly great infrastructure (albeit two decades ago). There is more to this.
Interestingly, if you ask an average Korean, he would say Korea is literally the best nation in IT/internet technology, topping or at least on par with the US. The national propaganda effort that went into forming this collective conscious should not be understated. Even many of the top programmers in South Korea I met strongly believe in this superiority. I wonder if this strong sense of superiority is both (1) preventing SK from improving its actually-lagging tech and (2) act in Dostoevskian-Raskolnikov manners thinking that it is above the law and consensus ("the best can break the rules and set new ones"). Whatever the underlying reason may be, there is a serious techno-cultural issue going on in the country.
One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.
> One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.
To be fair I can see why the practices of Amazon could be considered a scam. Every time you buy something you have to untick "I want Prime"
Bittorrent normally hash checks all content against metadata in the torrent file so a simple MITM wouldn't be enough to inject malicious data unless the torrent metadata itself is being sent in the clear.
I had the same thought, i'm very confused about the details of the attacks.
As an ISP if they detect you doing it, and they control DNS servers, maybe they mark your account for death, and they could like randomly hijack you going to google.com to some download for malware, and unsuspecting user clicks accept? Not sure, i'm curious how they pulled this off.
I am wondering if this is one of those "using the term bittorrent for anything peer to peer" cases... maybe Webhard has its own peer-to-peer protocol that is more vulnerable, and they are just calling it bittorrent?
South Korean internet had been one of the best and fast network in the world; especially up to the point before KT was privatized. After privatization, three internet service providers have been focusing on exploiting profits, not on making better and faster network infrastructure because they don't have to.
wouldnt competition naturally produce better products if there are 3 providers? from what i remember services from companies, or really any type of services were top notch in korea. due to culture, competition, etc. also noting pricing in general is very high in korea
Competition theory assumes that if firms are abusing their market position by overcharging consumers, competitors can enter the market and undercut them.
When you have a market with very high barriers to entry (government regulation + physical infrastructure costs), you can't just start your own internet service provider to undercut existing Korean telecommunications, because you won't make enough money to pay your investment back.
I’m not sure how is the reality in South Korea but, if my country is anything to go by, these 3 companies are probably a hidden cartel that monopolizes the price and offers while offering the bare minimum.
There's no economic motivation to compete. The motivation is to raise prices slightly, wait for the other two companies to follow suit as a signal, then to raise prices again. If you raise and someone doesn't follow, backtrack to the previous level. This is assuming that they don't just have a meeting and set prices over drinks.
This is one of those situations where rubber hits the road on theory vs real life. The concept of multiple vendors being better for the user seems to not play out as the multiple vendors are still a low number (3 in the current example) which means it's very easy for them to collude even if they never actually get in the same room, chat session, email chain, etc to do the colluding.
This has been the argument for decades to justify privatisation of state infrastructure. Anything with high barriers or physical limitations instead just becomes monopolised. It’s a failed experiment at this point. I’d be highly suspicious of the motivations of anyone arguing for this in 2024.
The title is very clickbaity. These are not users downloading torrents in the normal sense. It's users that are using a specific piece of software that happens to utilize the BitTorrent protocol.
There is an enormous issue here. A service provider committed crimes against customers and their justification is the customers were using a protocol to exchange something. The service provider has no idea what the something exchanged was.
It's similar to arresting someone because they are speaking French. I don't speak French and I don't like people who speak French because sometimes French people say stuff I don't agree with. I don't know what they're saying but I hate it.
Yeah, until any details are provided, I would just assume that the ISP already requires that users install some kind of software, and they just pushed the malware through that program.
From what I understand of the autotranslation, the ISP planted the malware somehow and that malware interfered with the P2P system, but no mention of actually using the P2P protocol to spread the malware
You don't need to install any software to use the internet at home in Korea. You just get a modem that connects to fiber at one end and exposes an ethernet port (or wifi) at the other end. Just connect to that port and you're online immediately.
ISPs also provide TV and a bunch of other services, though, and some of them might require installing specific software in order to use on a PC. Or perhaps they hijacked an unencrypted download of someone else's software, most likely some component of the file sharing service in dispute.
I reckon they used a good old fashioned honeypot. Seed a torrent of some random popular content that also contains malware payload, and let users download it.
KT built fiber connection here in Poland ~15y ago. Project was made in a large part of the country, strongly subsidised and thought as a backbone for other ISPs. 4k km of fiber underground and multiple nodes.
Project is now being nationalised as kt:
- didn't pay subcontractors. Many of them went bankrupt
- offered prices so large, that other isps would rather create their own infra than use theirs
- abandon the project totally
Of course i shouldn't put this under KT's name, as they used a subcompany - SungGwang - for all the dirty stuff.
So, fast forward: we laid a new infra parallel to this one in many cases and that one lays in the ground and rots.
Readit News
Makes me wonder where this myth of "good Korean internet" even came from if everything ends up so bandwidth constrained. Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
I hope everyone involved in this catches criminal charges, all the way up the chain. Completely unacceptable behavior.
That was, I think, about twenty years ago.
I've been living in the US for 10+ years so I'm not very well informed, but basically the ISP industry ended up in an oligopoly where everybody's friends with the government, and they kept raising prices while neglecting infra upgrade. Until nobody can call Korea's internet "fast" any more.
Now all we've got is shitty websites. (To be fair, they are somewhat less shitty now... you can now access your banking websites on Mac!)
And the reality today is that it'll seem practically backwards to a Westerner - i.e. tons of paper forms and bureaucracy for things like banking and rental applications.
Deleted Comment
It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open. I mean the great American past time is complaining about the government. But in SK there's a lot more trust of the government and similarly, a lot more control by them. And it is a fairly tight knit group and there's only a few companies that dominate the country.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/world/asia/critics-see-so...
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/country/south-korea/freedom-net/202...
Are they really more trusting of the government in south korea or is that just what people will say if you ask them?
If my government aggressively went after every youtuber and literal child who dared to say bad things about the government I'd probably lie and say I trusted my government too whenever asked.
Because cyber defamation would go rampant otherwise and people would end up killing themselves on lost reputation and cyber bullying. You have to understand Korean culture, where reputation and how you're viewed in society is extremely important.
> Distribution of porn is illegal there and they do their best to block it from outside.
Incorrect, it's yet another incorrect meme. Legal pornography is always possible in South Korea, and while the actual threshold varied over time (because you know, there is no objective metric for them anyway so it has to be a function of the approximate social consensus), legal pornography is not necessarily "milder" than illegal pornography distributed via blocked websites. (EDIT: incorrectly put "stronger" there...)
The South Korean treatment of pornography was extremely distorted mainly because of the rampant copyright violation over pornographic materials produced elsewhere. That blocked virtually all attempts to sell legal pornography and profit from it, why would you pay when you already have tons of free porns out there. Technically speaking, a large portion of the current adult population should have been found guilty if foreign producers could sue them, and I can tell you that the name of a certain blocked but still popular pornographic website [1] has became a household name for many males in their 20s and 30s!
And here is where the SK law's technical distinction between legal pornography and illegal obsence material turned out to be handy. Since those websites distributed pornography illegally, you can just consider them obscene and thus exempted from the copyright protection (!). I really hate this situation and like to see the radical change, but I can also see that it would become a massive and uncontrollable international affair otherwise. So that's why those websites had to be banned (to signal that it is indeed illegal), but the ban itself is so weak that it can be easily bypassed (more effective ban would be harder to justify).
[1] I don't like to quote its exact name, but as a hint, it is often followed by "꺼라 turn sth off".
Good. Why should any country be a conduit for porn? Most sane countries frown upon and limit things like porn, gambling, drugs, etc. Like we used to until fairly recently.
> They are pretty big on cyber defamation and will go after people who make fun of government officials[0]
It's like that in most countries. Other countries can have their own values. Nothing wrong with it.
> They have a comparatively low internet freedom score because they do things like fine middle schoolers for having anti-government websites and the president pursues legal action against YouTubers[1].
Freedomhouse is apparently a state propaganda outfit.
'Most of the organization's funding comes from the U.S. State Department[4] and other government grants.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House
You are linking to a propaganda site created solely to push a political agenda. Germany has an amazing 'freedom' scores but you could go to jail in germany for espousing certain beliefs about certain events in ww2.
That south korea scores low in the freedomhouse index is a good thing. Though it is surprising given that south korea is a militarily occupied vassal of the US.
> It's pretty interesting when coming from the west where all the problems are often spoken about in the open.
Are they really? You are conflating 'the west' with the US. Most of 'the west' is not like america. In most of the west, you can go to jail or be punished for speech. Most of the west doesn't have free speech that we do in america.
What's with the neverending 'coming from the west' from foreigners here? So many foreigners here pretend to be americans here? Why?
It is not a myth! A decade ago, though. I would still consider it is "good" in terms of objective metrics, but other countries have since caught up.
> Is it because all the customers and services are in the same city so it appears low latency?
No, because it would only apply to a quarter of the entire population of South Korea if it were true.
Same here in Japan. The funny thing is that both me here and my parents back in Spain have gigabit fibre, yet my parents' connection is much faster than mine.
Yes. It's because the internet of Korea is so well done between nearly all areas of the country with great speeds.
But it's true that Korean internet is super fast only within Korea, but the borders are also normal fast borders to other countries so they're just as fast as say a 1gbps connection in Australia.
Good Korean internet is not a myth, they had fibre everywhere by the time rich people in the US or Europe were getting it. Korean internet is good, it's just that their ISPs are also fairly evil like the rest of the world, but they have less freedom constraining their evils.
As said, it was good/impressive 20 years ago, now it's just what everyone else has. And SK software is a joke, like the linked post elaborates.
I don't know if it changed during the last 5 years, but when I was there I wanted to use Google maps for navigation and it looked like shit, so after some digging around I found because apparently there are some SK patents that prevent Google from using a lot of modern tech. So no wonder SK people compare that to naver and think their IT tech is top notch, but if you compare it to the "real Google", it's a joke.
It's the same in China actually, but there you simply can't access the western counterparts at all usually.
Looks like the major ISP and some cloud service provider are having some kind of ridiculous fight, and they're using their customers' computers as the battlefield. I'd be pretty disgusted if I were a customer.
Funny how both spectrums of fully controlled market and fully free market can be terrible. Apparently what they did was a crime but it shows the spirit, they though at least that they can do it and get away with it.
Deleted Comment
More details: https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/internet-fragmenta...
I'm actually very impressed. If this happened in the US, the police wouldn't care about it at all, and would just tell everyone affected that "it's a civil matter" and they'll have to file a lawsuit if they don't like it.
The people who ordered it done will be fine.
It took 3 years but the FBI published the names of the fellows they believe are responsible for breaching equifax and stealing private data about half of americans
Wu Zhiyong, Wang Qian, Xu Ke, and Liu Lei
But against a large company? I'll believe it when I see it.
Perhaps this would be a good moment to pause and ask yourself why this hasn’t happened in the US.
Note that KT, while relatively recently privatized, is still a national corporation that is considered a critical national asset under the law (thus if the North attacks, KT towers are first priority to be protected by the South's military). So, it is not as if some rogue SME infected its users with malware; it's a national corporation infecting its users over and not even be sorry about it (as in the article).
Plenty of other comments detail the strange Active X requirement: The national law had dependency on Internet Explorer/Active X. (I do not know of any developed nation having a national legal dependency on a specific corporation's consumer technology at this scale.) Also, many comments on South Korea's purportedly great infrastructure (albeit two decades ago). There is more to this.
Interestingly, if you ask an average Korean, he would say Korea is literally the best nation in IT/internet technology, topping or at least on par with the US. The national propaganda effort that went into forming this collective conscious should not be understated. Even many of the top programmers in South Korea I met strongly believe in this superiority. I wonder if this strong sense of superiority is both (1) preventing SK from improving its actually-lagging tech and (2) act in Dostoevskian-Raskolnikov manners thinking that it is above the law and consensus ("the best can break the rules and set new ones"). Whatever the underlying reason may be, there is a serious techno-cultural issue going on in the country.
One of the biggest banks in South Korea blacklisted Amazon as a financial scammer because it's Prime subscription renews monthly and customers complained after seeing the renewal charge on their credit cards. The ban was national -- no customer of this bank could buy a product from Amazon unless he calls the bank personally and ask the charge to be approved. Again, the issue wasn't technical. It was cultural.
To be fair I can see why the practices of Amazon could be considered a scam. Every time you buy something you have to untick "I want Prime"
Odd statement. How did you know that the people you met are "top programmers?"
Edit: While looking for an answer, I ran across this article. Apparently they've been fighting for a while (2015):
https://www.opennetkorea.org/en/wp/1529
As an ISP if they detect you doing it, and they control DNS servers, maybe they mark your account for death, and they could like randomly hijack you going to google.com to some download for malware, and unsuspecting user clicks accept? Not sure, i'm curious how they pulled this off.
Dead Comment
Competition theory assumes that if firms are abusing their market position by overcharging consumers, competitors can enter the market and undercut them.
When you have a market with very high barriers to entry (government regulation + physical infrastructure costs), you can't just start your own internet service provider to undercut existing Korean telecommunications, because you won't make enough money to pay your investment back.
Dead Comment
It's similar to arresting someone because they are speaking French. I don't speak French and I don't like people who speak French because sometimes French people say stuff I don't agree with. I don't know what they're saying but I hate it.
From what I understand of the autotranslation, the ISP planted the malware somehow and that malware interfered with the P2P system, but no mention of actually using the P2P protocol to spread the malware
https://news.jtbc.co.kr/article/article.aspx?news_id=NB12201...
ISPs also provide TV and a bunch of other services, though, and some of them might require installing specific software in order to use on a PC. Or perhaps they hijacked an unencrypted download of someone else's software, most likely some component of the file sharing service in dispute.
Project is now being nationalised as kt: - didn't pay subcontractors. Many of them went bankrupt - offered prices so large, that other isps would rather create their own infra than use theirs - abandon the project totally Of course i shouldn't put this under KT's name, as they used a subcompany - SungGwang - for all the dirty stuff.
So, fast forward: we laid a new infra parallel to this one in many cases and that one lays in the ground and rots.