25 July 2008

ActiveX: the Law in Korea?

I've long known that the Korean governmnet is pretty benighted when it comes to *insisting* that people use ActiveX in order to interact with it, but now it seems that opponents of this monoculture have just been seriously slapped down:

Open Web, a Korean web forum led by professor Kichang Kim of Korea University is best known for its fight against rampant use of Active X in Korea, lost a lawsuit against the KFTC (Korea Financial Telecommunication and Clearings Comittee). Professor Kim accused that the Korean government's mandate on the use of Active X programs for the internet banking and other public web services should be lifted, as it is against fair trade and "overly favors technology from a single company (that is, Microsoft)".

Professor Kim has also asserted that as many Korean netizens somehow grew to think that Active X is something they have to download anyway, many of them are exposed to security vulnerabilities. Also, as so many entities including virtually all financial institutes in the nation depend on Microsoft technology in Korea, whenever Microsoft announces an update, the whole nation has to upgrade its internet infrastructure, and this leads to various losses on a national scale - Kim asserted.

But Professor Kim's year-long accusation fell short of convincing the court that the government mandate on the Active X is against fair trade and therefore is illegal.

How can a government lock its people into one technology - one, moreover, whose flaws are now well documented? Even the UK government has never been *this* daft.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

So true. I'm currently on a work assingment in Korea, and it's use of ActiveX is just ridiculous.

Glyn Moody said...

thanks for the on-the-spot info.

Vineeth S Varma said...

the obvious solution is piracy, "wander the high seas as a stateless pirate :P"

Glyn Moody said...

except that that doesn't get around the problem that many sites demand ActiveX