By Brad
Up until now, treating people for so-called Internet addiction was mainly left to China and South Korea. But now a new treatment program called “reStart” is being offered right here in America, in the town of Fall City, Washington.
How much will it cost to cure yourself of your overwhelming addiction to Facebook and World of Warcraft? Try $14,500 for a 45-day stay — and that’s after the initial $200 filing fee, and the $800 screening.
By Brad
While America’s Internet remains chock full of anonymous commentators—sometimes to the detriment of society as a whole (see any comment thread on YouTube)—South Korea is cracking down on the freedom to namelessly gripe:
[E]ffective April 1 anonymous posting became illegal under certain circumstances. The new law is called the “Cyber Defamation Law.” The law provides that any Internet user making a comment or upload to a website that has over 100,000 unique visitors a day must append their real name to the comments they make. Sites must identify whether they meet the number of visitors threshold. If they do, the registration process must require the visitor wishing to post something to enter his national identification number.
By Brad
Recently, a French law that would sever the Internet connection of online pirates went down in defeat. Now, Ars Technica reports, South Korea has picked up the idea:
South Korea is crazy for baseball—it’s national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official “three strikes” policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.
There’s a problem with focusing on individual websites, however:
An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: “It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
By Brad
While the U.S. House and Senate differ over how fast next generation broadband should be (is it 45 mbps or 100 mbps?), South Korea is leaping ahead. As Gizmodo reports, the Korea Communications Commission is promising 1 Gbps broadband by the year 2012. How fast is that? Downloading an entire movie in 12 seconds fast.
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