Accessing Restricted Websites at School

I can't read this article from the Seattle Times on my school computer. I don't know why but it is blocked by something call Cleanpass that (after some researching) is operated by ITOP. Now, it's not the first time that I've worked at a place that has had some Internet restrictions, but it is the first place where I can't understand the logic.

There's already tons of information on the Internet for bypassing web filters, but the key words that you want to learn are Anonymous Proxies. Anonymous proxies are computer servers on the Internets that you can hide behind. And by hide behind I mean that instead of your computer directly asking for information from an Internet server, your computer now asks the proxy to ask for you. By doing this you can also ask the proxy to muck about with whatever information is involved in the transaction but for accessing restricted websites we just want the the proxy to re-write the URL so that the filter doesn't match it on its offensive site list. Other stuff, like cookie management, advertisement blocking, etc. are aspects for the truly paranoid.

So in the end, and just from a Google search, I can access that Seattle Times article via, Zend2 (article), YouHide (article), or Proxify (article).

Naver Vs. Google

Given Google's plan for world domination it's hard to imagine why it is having such a hard time getting a foothold in Korea. Then I found this article that explains it all:

A prevalent theory in Korean dotcom circles is that Google failed to impress demanding Korean customers with its lousy service. This is at least what Naver and other major local portals want Koreans to believe.

Choi Mi Jung, who leads Naver's "Knowledge Man" service, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia built by the spontaneous participation of Netizens, scoffs at the sloppy interface and unfriendly way Google's Korean site presents its search results. "It is how meticulously their service was designed that made the difference," she says.

However, the real reason behind Google's difficult path in Korea is that its highly praised search technology was rendered practically useless in the Korean language sphere when major portals decided to block Google search robots from crawling around the content they hold, industry observers universally note.

It's a Walled Garden approach and it basically means that all information is basically owned by one company. This model works well in a monoculture environment, just like it did during the early North American dial-up days where your Internet provider was also your content provider.

Following the path of AOL that worked so well during the early days of dial-up connectivity, Korean websites decided to build their own "walled gardens" on the net, where users would create content themselves or copy and paste other content they found elsewhere.

But what worked well in the beginning will not scale well when Naver tried to grow:

Experts say Naver will not be successful on the global scene if it refuses to take the approach of sharing data with others.

They warned the dominance of Naver and its operator NHN could become diluted, even on the domestic market where the Web portal has prevailed over the past few years.

"In the 10-year history of the country's Internet business, the title of the leader has changed twice. Naver should not be complacent," said Peter Kim, CEO at UCC site Pandora TV.

"Naver is overly proud and sometimes it appears to be arrogant. That has been a signal that heralds the collapse of the top player. Naver should keep this in mind," he said.

Actually, history here has created an eccentric jinx that any Internet firm claiming the top spot stays there for no longer than three years.

TightVNC

TightVNC is an enhanced version of VNC, a remote desktop application and that lets you control your home computer while your at school. There's a bit of technical information involved but it's fairly easy to set up and once you know your home computer's IP Address, you're good to go.

However be warned that usually VNC applications not secure:

Although TightVNC encrypts VNC passwords sent over the net, the rest of the traffic is sent as is, unencrypted (for password encryption, VNC uses a DES-encrypted challenge-response scheme, where the password is limited by 8 characters, and the effective DES key length is 56 bits). So using TightVNC over the Internet can be a security risk. To solve this problem, we plan to work on built-in encryption in future versions of TightVNC.

In the mean time, if you need real security, we recommend installing OpenSSH, and using SSH tunneling for all TightVNC connections from untrusted networks.

The security risk is that it's possible for somebody to eavesdrop your keyboard strokes as you transmit them through the internet:

'Decoding' the packet stream isn't all that difficult. The information entered into fields is transmitted as text inside the packet. Usernames, passwords, credit card information, etc. will all be visible to a hacker who is looking for it. Please don't think I am down on VNC. I think it is a great tool and I use it all the time, both securely and insecurely. I think it is important to remember that VNC does not provide a security mechanism other then the encrypted password. It's also important to remember that most of the Internet (web, email, chat, news, etc) are insecure. You wouldn't give your credit card on the web without HTTPS (encrypted, secure web page) would you?

So if somebody knows that you have VNC running and knows what they're doing, they could steal something like your bank account password when you log into the bank website--but why would you be remoting to your home computer to do online banking?

The real bonus is when you can use this is within a closed network; I work on three computers at my school. I have two office computers and a classroom computer. All of them are easily described as ghetto so I usually work on the less ghettolicious computer and have VNC installed on the other two. So from the comfort of one desk I can remote to either computer, transfer files, and do what ever I want.

StarCraft

StarCraft is for Korea what curling is for Canadia, an unfortunate stereotype used as comedic material by other cultures. Even though not all Canadians curl, all Koreans do in fact play Starcaft; online gaming is in fact a national pastime:

To get some idea of just how big gaming is in the Land of the Morning Calm, you need only look at some of the data collected by the Korea Game Development & Promotion Institute following interviews of 1,500 Koreans between the ages of 9 and 49 in February 2004. Some 75.3 percent - seven out of 10 - have played computer, console or video games, with the percentages particularly high among males and the younger age brackets (in the case of Koreans 9-14 years of age, some 95.3 percent have played games). As for favored game platform, 50.6 percent cited a preference for online games. When asked why they visited PC bang, 74.6 percent said, "To play games." Given how you'd find it difficult to walk five minutes in any direction in Korea without passing at least one PC bang, this would seem to suggest a phenomenal amount of gaming going on.

It's so popular that it even warrants it's own tv channel:


And it's own sexed up star tribute youtube montages...set to um, horror rap:


Of course it's not without it's controversies:

Some play themselves to death. Last year, the deaths of at least seven people were attributed to excessive game- playing. In August, a 28-year-old man died after nearly 50 straight hours of playing online games. In December, a 38-year-old day worker collapsed and died at an Internet café; his logs showed that he had played for 417 hours in his last 20 days. There are private telephone emergency services that dispatch ambulances for children who collapse while gaming or refuse to come out of their rooms, where they remain glued to online games or threaten violence at intervening parents.

Even CNN has gotten around to reporting on it, slightly dumbing it down so that even your grandmother can understand this intergameweb thing:

Korean Computer Monoculture

Pandora.tv is an amazing site that hosts South Park videos subtitled in Korean and it's a high school native speaker's dream.

But there's one problem. It doesn't work for me. In fact a lot of Korean website simply do not work for me and as I was trying to figure out why I stumbled across this blog post from Mozilla in Asia that links Technology & Monoculture together. The post tells me that practically all Korean sites are made for Internet Explorer running on Windows circa 2000 and any other kind of configuration (like a FireFox running on a Mac circa 2007) is blatantly ignored. There's a couple follow-ups describing some hope and progress and there's even some valid change, but 6 months after most of these stories broke, Korean computer monoculture is still annoying westerners.

So I go back to pandora.tv, this time with Internet Explorer running on Windows (courtesy of my school) and it does indeed work, but not before the site installed a collection of ActiveX Controls, something that the blog post predicted and warned about.

Now in the grand scheme of things, being forced to watch Korean subtitled videos on a windows machine isn't really a big deal. But it's frustrating when this computer monoculture creeps into other aspects of my online world. For example:

Each Korean citizen is issued a nation ID number. This is embedded into the certificate issued by the Korean CA. Thus non-Koreans in Korea (such as US military in Korea) cannot make secure transactions like online banking or online commerce. The ‘package’ (including SEED, the national ID, and the Active-X cert.) that the CA’s distribute is Active-X based, and thus only works in Windows and IE.

There's a lot of geek words in that paragraph but you can see this as an explanation for why foreigners can't buy stuff on the Korean Internets, especially escape tickets.

It also explains why Internet Banking is such a needless complication. My banking package, like the kind offered free of charge by Shinhan Bank, only works on Windows machines running Internet Explorer. Seems simple enough, but this certificate that they're talking about is an actual file. And it's a file that I have to present every time I log into my account, which means if I try to access my account from another computer I must somehow materialize, via a floppy disk or whatever, this file to be examined. After that, I also need to install a third party program (Inisafe by Initech—no, not this Initech) to process this certificate and ensure that whatever transactions do occur are secure. Only then, after I've got

1. Windows
2. Internet Explorer
3. Certificate File
4. Inisafe
5. Password

can I look at my bank balance. By comparison all of these extra steps are needless hoops that I have to jump through and they end up elevating the North American system of a simple userid & password to a something akin of universal access.

This computer monoculture reveals some aspect of the Korean psyche that I'm failing to understand and unfortunately I can't quite describe it. It's a narcissism or nationalism that drives them to spend so much effort in developing their own way of doing things that they fail to see the easier, cheaper or more efficient path. I could see it from a perspective of competition or even going after a niche market but why then be so exclusive? It's probably another facet of the culture difference that I'm failing to grasp, but it's strong enough to make me doubt validity of any Korean high tech idea that exist solely in Korea.

backword

From the Galbijim forums I discovered Backword, a nifty plug-in for Firefox users that translates an English word into a variety of languages (including Korean) when the mouse cursor hovers over it.

Microsoft Office Viewers and Converters

Microsoft Office has a considerable market share in North America. Same here in South Korea. So chances are that you won't have to rely on another office suite to do your lesson planning.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that the version of Office you have on your laptop is going to be the same version that you have at your school. Usually this doesn't matter, but for the heavy PowerPoint 2007 user (like me) who creates on an English machine and presents on a Korean machine, converting is an essential way of life.

Microsoft maintains a collection of converters. The same page also has a collection of viewers which are great in the rare case that you get a computer without Office installed. And the new version of Office has a completely different file format (*.docx, *.xlsx, *.pptx, etc) that is still not as readily accepted as the previous file formats (*.doc, *.xls, *.ppt, etc). For these files, Microsoft provides a converter by way of the Compatibility Pack.

And of course if you don't want to download any software, there's always the converters at Zamzar.

Hangul on English Computers

Before figuring out how to type Hangul you may notice that your computer doesn't display Hangul properly. If you navigate to Korean site (say a certain high school's website) and you see Hangul then you have nothing to worry about; if you see garbage characters, like "Àü³²Á¦ÀÏ°í" then you have a problem. This site solves that problem, but only for the web pages.

On occasion I need Hangul for Korean applications; without the language support I get pop-ups and windows with garbled character that consist mostly of question marks. There is way but it's useless to me since I have the wrong operating system. This note from a Microsoft help site tells me how to change the language on Vista, but it's only viable for Vista Ultimate and Vista Enterprise. I have Vista Home Premium and I'm screwed. And apparently so are others.

The Korean Keyboard

I'm only a fan of laptops for their portability. I mean they're great when you're about to hop, skip, and jump over an ocean or two but I'd rather have my keyboard, mouse and flat screen monitor all as separate entities that are free to move around on my desk as far apart as possible. So one of the first things on settling in list was getting a keyboard and mouse. And since I'm in Korea, I'd thought I'd get myself a keyboard and mouse.

My Keyboard & Mouse.

There's a Samsung store right down the street from me and I spent 25,000 for the Smart & Super SMH-710CB USB Combo Mouse and 27,000 for the Smart & Super SKG-720C USB Combo Keyboard. And they're okay. That store won my heart with it's proximity so when I saw a fairly decent keyboard and fairly decent mouse I picked them up more on an impulse buy rather than educated shopping. Turns out that there are better deals, like at GoYongsan where I could have picked up the keyboard for 16,800. Google doesn't tell me anything about the mouse so I assume that it spontaneously came into existence just for my benefit.

The extra 한자and 한/영 keys.

The keyboard is a Korean keyboard with English and Hangul characters and comes with two extra toggle keys that switch the keyboard's character set.

The 한자 (Hanja) key, to left of the space bar, deals with Chinese characters. Korea and China have an intertwined history result in a collection of Chinese characters that are still used in the Korean Language; the number systems are an excellent example of crossover if you're really curious. Many Chinese characters are homophones so matching the Korean equivalent requires some prior knowledge.

Using this key is easy:

1. Phonetically spell the symbol in Hangul.


2. Highlight the Hangul.


3. Hanja-ize the Hangul.


4. If there's a homophone conflict a menu should appear presenting you with your options for the correct Chinese character.

Let's try it out on an easy example: The number one. Now normally numbers are written out in their Romanized form but spoken in Sino-Korean; Pure Korean pronunciation is 하나 (Hana) and Sino-Korean pronunciation is 일 (Il). So, in our favourite word processor we highlight and hanja-ize 일, getting a menu listing the available Chinese equivalents, and choose the correct Chinese character 一.

The 한/영 (Han/Yeong, short for Hangul/Yeongeo ) key, to right of the space bar, is more straight forward. It simply toggles the keyboard between the Korean and English character sets that you see on all of the keys. The keyboard's state is usually displayed on screen.

The Korean Import Method Editor.

Straight out of the box, your keyboard's 한자 and 한/영 keys won't work. Even though you can clearly see these extra keys, the computer cannot. Of course, for some reason beyond my comprehension or Internet searching abilities, Korean applications like Hangul will automatically recognise new keyboard straight out of the box and work magically. For other applications, like Microsoft Office or your favourite web browser, you'll need to do some configuration on your (in my case North America) laptop to recognise the foreign keyboard and the new keyboard's extra buttons. Fortunately Declan Software has all that figured out the Korean IME.

The IME remaps the current keyboard into what ever language you want; this means that if you already have a keyboard you can buy keyboard skin instead of a new keyboard. and let the IME do all of the work. Really, there's really no need to buy a new keyboard unless you're going to buy one anyways. Enabling the IME also enables the Language Bar and the virtual language tools.

Korean Keyboard Problems.

After configuring the IME I had the following problems:

1. My 한/영 button didn't toggle but my language did toggle when I used the ALT key right next to it.


2. My Won (₩) key was typing the Reverse Solidus aka The Backslash (\) instead of the ₩ symbol.

The first problem was solved by the support article Microsoft, detailing a fault in the operating system and the second problem looks to be more a case of bad design that nobody complains about as hinted by this post that deals with boring computer geeky stuff like keyboard input codes.