Crackdown on Pro-North Korea Web Sites?

As reported in the Joongang Daily, prosecutors have said they would begin a large-scale crackdown on pro-North Korea online activities by South Koreans, saying they constituted anti-state conduct that went beyond the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression. The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office said it would hold a meeting next month with the National Police Agency and the Korea Communications Commission to discuss countermeasures against the online activities. According to a recent report by the Korea Communications Commission, 122 Web sites based overseas were found to be engaged in pro-North activities by South Koreans. Seventy-eight of them were blocked in the South, but 44 were still accessible, the report said. Currently, there is little legal basis to sanction the activities of those Web sites, but prosecutors said they were considering pressing charges of disseminating enemy-benefiting materials, a serious crime under the National Security Law, saying they considered the activities to be serious enough to rock the foundations of South Korea.

Future Screens

I've been fascinated with television, and in particular the power of the live visual image, ever since my graduate students days at Stanford.   I chose to study U.S. network television coverage of international affairs for my doctoral dissertation, which led to my first book, Television's Window on the World: International Affairs Coverage on the U.S. Networks.
One big key to the future of television news and all other human communication will be new screen technology. Korea is the world leader in manufacture and exports of television sets, mobile handsets and screens generally.
Today, the Joongang Daily carried two articles that provide interesting insight into the intensely competitive realm of screen technology as it is being pursued by two of Korea's leading companies, Samsung and LG.
The first article dealt with the release of LG's new Optimus LTE, which became available earlier this month in the Korean market, and was entitled "Our screens beat Samsung's, says LG."  The second article described a breakthrough by researchers at Samsung that may help to turn windows into large screens. Samsung Electronics said that its researchers reported a breakthrough in light-emitting diode (LED) technology that will allow production of ultra-large advanced display panels on ordinary glass such as window panes. Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology succeeded in fabricating nearly single crystalline gallium nitride (GaN) on amorphous glass substrates, a milestone that will enable production of super-sized LEDs using glass substrates, Samsung said. “In ten years, window panes will double as lighting and display screens, giving personality to buildings,” said a Samsung researcher who was part of the project.

A Note on Dated, Inaccurate, Misleading Reporting!!

Readers of this blog will know, from my weekend post, that Korean traffic to  Facebook has finally caught and overtaken Cyworld, according to statistics provided by Rankey.  Apparently this word has not reached two reporters at the Joongang Daily, who today published an article entitled "Google, Facebook Flop in NE Asia."  The article refers to a "recent report" by Mashable.   I recommend you  read the Joongang Daily article only to see how uttlerly misleading dated information can be.  As I frequently link to articles from the Joongang Daily, readers will know that this one is an exception to their generally good reporting.

Hangul Day Google Search Page

Nice!

Facebook traffic in Korea surpasses Cyworld!

I was somewhat surprised to read in The Korea Times that, for the first time ever, as of August  2011, traffic to Facebook exceeded that to Korea's homegrown Cyworld.  Social networking in the form of Cyworld had been introduced in Korea a full half decade before the invention of Facebook in the United States, and it became the most popular such service in Korea for many years.   All of that began to change around the time the iPhone finally made it to the Korean market, near the end of 2009.  The Korea Times article provides some useful background on why the shift has taken place.
The accompanying line graph, from Rankey, (click to see a larger version) shows the dramatic shift in visitors to Cyworld (blue line) versus Facebook (red line) from January of 2010 through August, 2011.