IE-IQ connection a hoax

By now you might have read this post at The Marmot's Hole. No, not the part about Jessica Gomes's boobs, the other part about a study showing that Internet Explorer users were found to have lower IQs than users of other browsers.

No, seriously, not the part about Jessica Gomes. Try to keep up.

Anyway, after some used this new study to impugn the intelligence of over ninety percent of the South Korean population, it turns out it's all a hoax:

In a statement on its website, Aptiquant said it "was set up in late July 2011 by comparison shopping website AtCheap.com in order to launch a fake ‘study’.... The main purpose behind this hoax was to create awareness about the incompatibilities of IE6, and not to insult or hurt anyone.”

Well, I do agree with their anti-IE6 proclivities, but I'm not happy that they furthered the idea that social scientists are out purveying junk science in the process.

Anyway, I know you want it, so here it is:

Kudos to Ms Gomes for going on a magazine cover san raiment and sans le Photoshop.

Should you or should you not get a Mac in Korea?

Over at seoul space, Erik Cornelius, a self-described "Mac fanboy," provides a nice overview about the reasons to use — or not — a Macintosh in Korea.

Like Mr Cornelius, even though I love Macs for myself, I don't necessarily recommend that everyone should get them.

In addition to the considerations he lays out, a lot of it has to do with whether or not you have knowledgeable people around you who use one or the other. That makes a huge difference.

The slow death of ActiveX and the rise of Apple-friendly iPhones in South Korea may negate some of the reasons not to get a Mac in Korea, but for now, there are some good reasons to join the Windows-using Borg. Back when I set up an office for my fledgling company in the early 2000s, I did have to supply the office with one XP-running computer for those Windows-only programs (HWP in particular) that we couldn't avoid. It was an "Orange" computer, which led us to jokingly referring to the office set up as Apples and Oranges.

Cyber war?

Dozens of websites in South Korea were attacked by viruses:

Forty Web sites in South Korea were attacked by a computer virus on Friday, including the official sites of the presidential Blue House, the Foreign Ministry, the country’s biggest bank, the country’s two largest search engines, a major online auction house and some American and Korean military sites.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, but the National Police Agency is investigating the assault, which was discovered by AhnLab, an Internet security firm in Seoul.

Computer analysts said the problems amounted to a so-called denial of service attack, in which multiple computers infected by a software virus try to access targeted Web sites simultaneously. That can overwhelm the sites with a surge of traffic that crashes their servers.

My advice would be to get a Mac, but I don't want to alert Karma.

Also, stop using ActiveX.

No more ActiveX in Korea?

It's a cry heard frequently 'round the anglophone K-blogosphere: "End the tyranny of ActiveX!" (though often said less eloquently than that, and often with more profanity).

Well, the proliferation of smartphones that don't, can't, or won't utilize ActiveX have pushed the government to force the banks to stop requiring this bulky, security-impaired plugin (is that what it is?) that is the bane of existence for Mac users and anyone not using a ten-year-old Microsoft OS.

From AFP, which couches it in terms of ending Microsoft's monopoly on online shopping in Korea:

South Korea since 1999 has made it mandatory for users of online banking and shopping services to verify their identifications through Microsoft's data-encryption framework known as Active X.

Critics called for changes to allow competition and to keep pace with technological advances.
Microsoft's framework, developed in 1996, has faced a challenge amid high demand for smartphones which require more open-source software.

South Korean regulators realised the rules were preventing businesses from offering services to smartphones.

The Korea Communications Commission in May declared the online security rules "unfit for a new Internet environment involving smartphones".

The financial services commission has said it would allow the use of either the original security software or equivalents that are as good or better.

Don't you mean, "not as horrible"?

At any rate, I don't know if it's correct to say that ActiveX was "mandatory" (at least in practice). Shinhan Bank, for example, gave me forms that allowed me to do online banking from my Mac, apparently without ActiveX.

Ah, it will be nice if I can start accessing my money in KB as well.

Korean tech: hot or not?

Going by what Bloomberg's BusinessWeek is saying, it's in danger of being not:

The iPhone's popularity is a sign that Korea may be losing its edge in the international market, despite its reputation as the epicenter of digital cool. The country still rules in hardware, but it is stumbling in software. Samsung and LG, the No. 2 and No. 3 global handset makers, together manufactured nearly a third of the world's mobile phones last year, but their share of the smartphone market was just 4%. That's important because smartphones offer greater profits than traditional handsets, and they are increasingly popular with customers. The Koreans have rolled out models featuring touchscreens, high-resolution cameras, and TV. But they're often clunkier to use than rivals from Apple and Research in Motion (RIMM), maker of the BlackBerry.

Korea's software shortcomings are of growing concern to the country's political and business leadership. On Feb. 4, President Lee Myung Bak convened a special Cabinet meeting to address the issue. Ministers were told the country accounts for only 1.8% of the world market for software of all kinds, even though it dominates sales of memory chips, liquid-crystal displays, and flat-screen TVs. While Samsung sold 227 million handsets last year—10 times as many as Apple—its earnings were lower because its profit margins are much slimmer. "The government had been preparing to shift our focus to software from hardware for about a year, but the iPhone sensation provided a wake-up call," says Lee Sang Jin, who oversees the software division at the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, known until two years ago as the Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Energy.

And it's not exactly clear that government intervention will solve the problem. It seems to me the solution for Korea is somewhere between nudging and not-quite-total laissez-faire. Oh, and getting rid of the things that work in Korea but don't work anywhere else (like, say, ActiveX, the bane of all Mac users in a Korean-language environment).