Update on Korea’s online identity system

To address the recent cyber-bullying issues I mentioned earlier this year, Korea’s government has installed a real-name comment system that went live last week and basically removes anonymity on the comment systems of the country’s most important websites (Daum, Naver, etc…)

This trial is extremely interesting to follow. Such a system will probably become necessary in all countries around the globe, but it is not clear yet what social cost it will have. Will the end of anonymity hamper democracy? Will the discussions simply move out of the controlled zones to foreign countries? Will there be a separation, the identitary Internet vs the anonymous one?

Global Voices Online is following the experiment and sharing the early findings, citing bloggers’ reactions across the country:

Since the real-name comment system, the level of malignant contents has been lower, but the number has not been dramatically decreasing. It will take time for the bad comments to disappear from the internet. Until now, it seems that it is not so effective. What I’m worried more is that these respondents with bad habits will be dispersed to small community sites and, therefore, the holistic atmosphere of the internet would be generally bad.

[...]

it [the system] could damage the basic principle and freedom of the internet, [...] it could interrupt freedom of speech, and the last is the possibility it could be controlled by the authorities.

[...]

Even though 0.06 percent is the only malignant respondents, this small number causes problems and appears as a social issue, and, therefore, we should solve this problem. Then, is the ‘real name system’ the right answer? Due to this, the freedom of opinion and speech would be controlled, and then how can we compensate for these problems?

Link

All this for 0.06% of the population behaving badly. I wonder what the percentage of “bad guys” creating social problems is in real life, and how much energy is deployed to counter them?

Who are you going to sue this time?

Prince is giving away his latest album with the Mail on Sunday, in advance of his 21 concerts (!) in London later this year.

As expected, the music industry is outraged, despite the fact that Prince is simply reverting to the patronage based business model that was current in the medieval era.

“In European cultural history, virtually every major and minor figure in music, literature, and the fine arts from the Medieval period to the early modern era had some relationship with the patronage system”

Wikipedia

As the Mail on Sunday’s managing editor puts it:

“They [the music industry] are living in the old days and haven’t developed their businesses sufficiently. We can enhance their business. They are being incredibly insular and need to move their business on”

BBC News

Beyond the chance to poke yet another joke on the back of the poor music industry, this is an interesting example of the economic cycles innovation gets us through. An old way of doing things (patronage) comes back on the forefront, simply refined by an innovation (the internet).

CERN presentations videos

I regularly inform you of the events the CERN is organizing, bringing amazing speakers like Mark Shuttleworth or Richard Stallman to Geneva.

The events are taped, but I never found the link until today. Finally, here are the videos of the presentations on what is certainly one of the less usable website still online.

Weird story involving Wikipedia

Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife’s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son.

Benoit’s Wikipedia entry was altered early Monday to say that the wrestler had missed a match two days earlier because of his wife’s death.

Link