Stay classy, Joey.

A few days ago I saw in the Los Angeles Times the story of an eighteen-year-old Korean-American student at USC who had died after suddenly passing out in her dorm room. It caught my eye in part because the woman's name is similar to that of a friend's younger sibling.

While it was not her, the tragedy of the story gripped me nonetheless, and in my head I played out possible scenarios of causation, including alcohol poisoning and the object lessons this. (For the record, the article lists no cause for the death nor any reason to speculate drugs, alcohol, or any other self-inflicted cause; I only thought of that possibility because of empirical knowledge with such outcomes.)

With binge drinking an unfortunately prominent activity in South Korea and among some Koreans outside of South Korea, the K-blogosphere is always ripe for a fresh warning of the signs of alcohol poisoning (see the latter half of this post), so I went back a few days later to check on updates on the story. Still no updates, but in the comments section I found something entirely different that compelled me to write about it anyway.

From commenter "Joey":

this is horrible. I didn't know fan death existed in America too! My heart goes out to her family.

Well, Joey, your heart apparently doesn't go out to her family enough for you to forgo taking a wholly gratuitous dig at South Koreans in an article about their loved one's tragic death. I mean, really, Joey? You're just adding impishly imbecilic insult to unfathomable injury by your glib comment. ("Joey's" comment was only one of eight, so it wouldn't be hard to notice.)

It really makes me wonder what makes some people tick. What kind of people possess such antagonism toward Koreans that they ignore the humanity of their target group? I was all set to write a post on Internet anonymity in light of this New York Times article, with a requisite nod to this Marmot's Hole post from 2006 that suggests a concomitant problem among South Korean netizens, when along came this object lesson.

In the pantheon of insensitive anonymous drive-bys on the Internet, "Joey's" isn't all that outrageous. It wasn't nearly as egregious as what happened in this post about the brutal rape and murder of a Korean-American woman in Los Angeles, which quickly deteriorated into a maelstrom of bigotry and lewdness which saw long-time troll Mizar outed in the worst of ways (I explain this in more detail here).

But just imagine what these people's families or friends might feel when one of them inevitably runs across this crude response to their cherished one's death. Imagine how you might feel?

China's "hijacking" of global Internet raises security alarms

PBS's Newshour had a disturbingly eye-opening story focusing on state-run Chinese entities deliberately detouring Internet traffic through their sites:

RAY SUAREZ: When all the communications from tens of thousand of computer networks was routed to China, that included all the Web traffic, e-mail, and instant messages to and from dot.mil -- that's the Department of Defense -- and dot.gov -- those are U.S. governments departments. The U.S. Senate and NASA also had all their traffic diverted.

Companies like Dell, Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM had their data diverted by China Telecom, too. On that day in April, officers logging into a Pentagon Web site ended up looking at an image that came to their screen via China.

It's not clear what China did with the Internet traffic routed through its computers, and it's not clear if the data that passed through China was saved to be examined later.

The piece explains for the layperson (that's me!) how this works:

RAY SUAREZ: Normally, the Internet works by swiftly finding the shortest, most efficient trip between two computers anywhere on Earth.

Electronic routers direct the traffic flow, insuring the shortest path, like these green lines here. But, back in April, electronic communication looking for the shortest route was sent through China.

Watch the red line. For 18 minutes, the traffic on 35,000 to 50,000 computer networks elsewhere in the world began flowing toward China, before getting routed to their final destinations. China Telecom had created a massive detour.

But traffic didn't stop. The affected computer connections took just a tiny fraction of a second longer. Whether someone was logging into check a bank balance, sending a child's photo to grandma, or shopping online, the Net still worked. ...

RAY SUAREZ: One of the architects of the modern Internet, Rodney Joffe, said this diversion was a very big deal. He says it was caused when computer routers in China belonging to China Telecom began signaling to other computer routers on the Internet that they could provide the quickest path between different computers .

RODNEY JOFFE: They, all of a sudden, began announcing the fact that they were an optimal path to about 15 percent of the destinations on the Internet, that, in fact, they were a way to get to a large number of destinations on the Internet, when, in fact, they were not. We have never seen that before on this scale ever.

I've been saying this more and more: "Welcome back to the Cold War." Or maybe we never left.

World's fastest Internet?

The Wall Street Journal says it's Masan:

When it comes to connecting to the Internet quickly, the best place to be isn’t Silicon Valley, or even Japan. It’s the city of Masan, South Korea, according to a report released Wednesday by Akamai Technologies Inc.

And Masan’s speeds are blazing fast. It’s the only city in the report with average connection speed above 20 megabits per second. In contrast, the fastest city in the U.S., Monterey Park, Calif., had an average speed of 6.9 Mbps.

It’s not clear why exactly Masan, a coastal city with a population of about half a million and a name that means “horse mountain,” ranks so highly. But the top 10 cities in the report were all in South Korea, which simply has a different technology environment from that in the U.S. For years the Korean government has spent billions on high-speed networks and subsidies to encourage broadband connections. And unlike in the U.S., competition between broadband services in Korea is cutthroat, driving down prices.

And I do sometimes miss that speed. Where I am, the university or coffee house connection is not so bad, but traveling on the Mainland can be a hair-pulling experience.

Yahoo!: Aigoo!

Yahoo! is hurting a bit as NHN bails on the American company, famous for its high-tech search engine named after low-tech rednecks, in favor of its own technology.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Yahoo's biggest search affiliate, Korea's NHN, is taking search in house. (NHN runs Naver, Korea's biggest search engine.)

According to Doug Anmuth of Barclays, this will cost Yahoo an astounding 10% of gross revenue in 2011.

Fortunately for Yahoo's bottom line, the impact on Yahoo's net revenue (after paying a 95% revenue share to NHN), will be much smaller, perhaps 1%-2%.

But losing 1%-2% of revenue in a customer defection is not what Yahoo needed right now. It's also bad news for the Microsoft-Yahoo alliance, which will lose some advantages of scale.

I remember a time when major business deals between Korean companies and their American, Japanese, or European partners were a very big deal, and the idea of any but the very biggest of those Korean companies bringing hurt to major American players was, well, preposterous.

In other high-tech joint venture news, Hynix has agreed to join up with HP to produce a new type of memory chip that is expected to be a hundred times faster at storing data. It's expected to be used in phones, MP3 players, and cameras.

14 across: wild Asian ass

So you're an octogenarian going on nonagenarian status and your hobby is crossword puzzles. One of the clues is stumping you so you decide to do what the youngsters — sexagenarians and septuagenarians — are doing and you get a little help from the Interwebs.

After fifteen futile minutes or so of searching your computer for the pneumatic tube in which your written request will be transported, you remember reading something about "Google" and so you go there in search of the elusive word.

For Asian ass.

Needless to say, 89-year-old Jack Sedgewick was shocked that he was unable to find anything about the equus hemionus onager, also known as the Asian wild ass, the last word of which was the answer. But he did manage to discover plenty of other animal behavior.

He knew something was amiss when the words that popped up were super long: They were eight-, nine-, ten-, sometimes even twelve-letter monstrosities that wouldn't fit in this tiny six-letter space.

Oh, imagine the horror if he'd also typed wild.

iPhone to blame for a 24% drop in South Korean Internet speed?

With half a million iPhones now in South Korean hands, and the propensity of iPhone users to use their device for anything and everything (I myself no longer watch TV on an actual television, choosing instead to watch "Survivor" at the cbs.com website, most other programs at hulu.com, and a few select NBC programs on Quicktime with the iPhone), data flow seems to be getting gummed up.

Anyway, this all adds up to some serious slowage:

In the course of three months during 2009, South Korea's average Internet connection speed dropped by a dramatic 24 percent. Think about the magnitude of the decline here: one of the world's most wired countries suddenly sees its overall Internet speeds reduced by a quarter over a few months while similarly positioned countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, and Hong Kong all saw speed increases.

What happened? Blame it on the iPhone.

According to Akamai's recent State of the Internet report, South Korea's bizarre Internet slowdown can largely be traced to the introduction of the iPhone in that country in November 2009. Akamai saw an explosion of unique IP addresses associated with a particular mobile operator (apparently KT, formerly known as Korea Telecom) soon after the phone's launch, indicating broad new iPhone usage.

Unfortunately, this particular mobile provider is slow. "As the average observed connection speed for this mobile provider was a fraction of that observed from wireline connections in South Korea," says the report, "we believe that this launch was likely responsible for the significant drop in South Korea's average undeserved connection speed in the fourth quarter [of 2009]."

Since this iPhone-bashing article is not in the Korea Times, it might be credible.