I think it has to do with how early esports went mainstream in SK, especially in the SC:BW scene.
Many of the people in government right now were probably into competitive gaming back then, so it makes sense that relatively more interest would go into gaming-related legislation.
I have heard some complaints about South Korea being a geritocracy - even by the standards of the US. I don't know the fine details but that sounds consistent with some of the other stuff like the porn ban. If they really are being run by a bunch of old men. I don't know nearly enough about the culture or context to know how true or widespread the perception is but it does sound consistent.
Isn't that the case of most countries, at least in the West? If you look at the median age of most public officials (ministers and all), they are usually more likely to be in their 50,60s and 70s in some cases.
Only 70 years ago, South Korea was a dirt-poor agricultural country whose major export items were rice, seaweed, and the likes.
Before that it was a Japanese colony, and before that it was a die-hard confucian kingdom that would out-Confucius contemporary China.
Old moralities die hard. (Think of how racism persists in the US, 150+ years after the Civil War.) It didn't help that we imported right-wing American Christian ideology wholesale after the Korean War. :/
Koreans accepted Christianity because they believed it’s right. Japanese are sensitive to social norms and wouldn’t accept Christianity even if they believed it was right to avoid conflict.
When your country is in ruins and barely saved by foreign soldiers fighting and dying, it becomes kinda easy to accept their belief system as your own.
But actually they were quite compatible, come to think about it. Hard working will reward you, be obedient to your elders, your family and your country before you, men decide and women follow, yadda yadda.
Edit: Of course many American soldiers who fought weren't actually right-wing Christian evangelists, but we didn't know it then. Koreans didn't speak good English on 1953: our perception of America (and what it stood for) was warped by whoever was willing to learn Korean... and a lot of them did it to spread the gospel of Jesus, I guess.
I wonder if their obsession with video games (and I say this in a positive sense) will be a competitive advantage in the future. Like the Mecca for esports, where people can make a living in the industry instead of treating it as "silly nerd fantasy hobby" like here in the US.
Given that playing video games competitively for a living is possible through large prize pools in quite a few games, and that South Korea has historically been a powerhouse of gaming, it seems not at all surprising to me that they'd treat this as fraud and try to crack down on it.
There are plenty of other types of competitions where fraud carries legal penalties, after all.
This seems very unusual even considering how popular esports are over there. Cheating in traditional sports is not a crime as far as I know as the punishment is just getting kicked out and having your winnings taken back.
What level of cheating are we speaking here? Bribing the ref, match fixing, doping are all forms of cheating in sports and could be a punishable crime.
The linked article doesn't say say that it is restricted to games that are played for money so it seems to be equivalent to being arrested for cheating in school sports day.
Off-topic question: What output does deleting the "I'm OK with being tracked" node give the site? The only possible answer here is "Yes", so does deletion mean null? But whatever, the site is usable after that, so hey.
The newspeak/doublespeak for cookies is such that placing users under surveillance without prior consent is fine, you just have to tell them after you start doing it. And after you tell them, you can just keep doing it, and they can leave if they have a problem with it. No one ever has to stop tracking anyone else, even if people ask nicely or tell you they aren’t okay with it. The only option is to close the window, clear cache and never come back.
Meanwhile, this has given way to lots of “dialogues” where the dictatorship asks you to mark a check box for how you feel about being tracked, which is of course tracked. The deception being that even when you reply “NOT OK” there is no real effect. The pixels are there. The cookie is there. You are on camera, being recorded for QA purposes. This call will be reviewed for training purposes.
This differs from opting out of mailing lists, where they stop emailing you. Opting to respond with disdain for tracking does nothing to change whether you get watched.
Joke's on you. That widget never gets logged. It's a placebo.
More likely, duration of stay, IP and cookies cross-referenced from other sources are the only things they look at.
Instead of recording your response as to whether you enjoy getting kneecapped, they just let you scream into a sound-proofed vacuum. But hey, at least you're not bound and gagged.
Well, only my Mirimir persona uses this VM, with this VPN chain and exit IP. And I have Firefox delete all cookies at exit. So they don't get much from me, no matter what.
Any advice on economical methods for persona-specific VM chains? E.g. 5 personas times $X/month for a commercial VPN adds up quickly, not to mention the inconsistent reliability/transparency of VPN providers.
I use pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, so VPN chains are virtual networks. But you could do the same thing with physical routers. Given that most providers allow multiple connections, you just need a few accounts.
Let's say that you have accounts with two providers, VPNA and VPNB. So you always connect first to a VPNA server, and then through that to a VPNB server. Given that each provider likely has many servers, there are likely hundreds of possible chains. Not all of them will work well, for whatever reasons, but enough to be useful.
when i was a kid, i thought the stuff about freedom in rhetoric about america was silly and nebulous, but as i get older it seems more true. don't get me wrong, i hate the surveillance panopticon, drug war, and permanent security state as much as anyone else, but at least the government doesn't put you in jail for cheating at video games.
B) you make an almost impossible comparison to get to the resolution of
The freedom ideals in the US are part of a social contract that sometimes is reflected by judges to nullify laws that undermine that social contract, but the contract itself is part of a meme - like the pledge of allegiance - made for children in the 1940s to boost morale and national identity in a time where it made a real difference.
The nuances of the 55+ sovereign institutions in the US can never be simplified that easily.
I'd be grateful for corrections to any distortions or omissions in that description. I'd forgotten (or might not have heard at the time) that his conviction was subsequently vacated on appeal, but that was after he already spent over a year in prison.
weev wasn't put in jail because he accessed a public url structure in an unintended manner.
weev was put in jail because he wittingly conspired with others to steal AT&T customer data via a vulnerability on their website. In his correspondence with journalists and IRC logs surrounding the event he went out of his way to make abundantly clear that he was fully aware that this access was unauthorized.
At the time, weev himself described his actions as "theft".
You could sum a SQL injection attack down to "accessed a public url structure in an unintended manner", but that'd just be terribly dishonest.
You might want to tell that to the judge who overturned his conviction, and the esteemed lawyers who wrote amicus briefs for him.
I agree there's a continuum from hitting URLs with predictable structures to blatant hostility like SQL injections, but the problem with the CFAA is that it doesn't draw a clear line on that continuum.
From where I live (not in the US) the US doesn't look particularly good as far as civil liberties go. Not that my country (Australia) is great either. We're just messed up in different ways.
People who disagree with this should bear in mind the context from the parent comment - we're talking about civil rights specifically, not whether one country is better than another in general. I don't think there's much room for debate on whether US has the most expansive freedom of speech protections, for example. Many people would argue that it doesn't do a good job of balancing those rights with other matters of importance, but that is a different conversation.
I don't understand why you are being down-voted. All over the world, governments are indeed slowly becoming nanny states for the 'good of the people'. In India, for example, they just blocked all pornographic sites. Stuff like this doesn't make world news. The US is better by a far margin that most nations since your rights are explicitly stated in your constitution.
Which civil liberties do you think that you have in Australia, which has serious issues with censorship and speech laws, which we do not have in the US?
On the face of it, that seems like an absurd comparison. Can you expand on why getting a new account and playing from the lowest levels (with the knowledge you've gained) is akin to destroying public property?
There's a huge difference between SMURFING and BOOSTING. Smurfing is the act where you yourself create a new account, while boosting is the act of playing on someones account to make them seem better.
Random people matched into an even game - that has a value. People benefit, but it doesn't belong to anybody, it's public.
Smurfing and boosting are kind of similar (boosting does twice as much damage: account goes up, then it falls down). Smurfing sometimes causes damage for fun, boosting causes damage for money.
"Damage for fun" is relative. Maybe it is a part of the game.
But "damage for money" means that it's an open system now, and some people have jobs to damage the matchmaking.
So does this make selling accounts illegal too? Isn't the workaround simply to not play on someone elses account, but to play on your own account and then sell it to that person later?
Because there is real money at stake? Athletes in other sports compete under their real identity (and presumably have to prove it at some point in their career) after all.
I can think of no other country that says "license and registration, please" before playing a game or sport of any sort. South Korea is undeniably dystopian and backwards in this situation.
Having not done much gaming in the last 5 years or so, and never having been particularly competitive, I'm wondering if someone might be able to give a description of what 'boosting' is, and how it benefits a player? My point of reference is something like having a friend grinding away on Starcraft for you until your profile achieves a certain status in the ladder. Ultimately wouldn't that all be for little if you then play consistently against much better players than you, and lose continually until your profile reaches equilibrium again?
> I'm wondering if someone might be able to give a description of what 'boosting' is, and how it benefits a player?
Bragging rights as far as I can tell.
There are a few games where boosting helps (helped?) you gain higher tier items. In WoW TBC my team would sell spots on our teams. The buyer would stand around in a corner while my 2s/3s partner and I would play 2v3 win maybe 8-9 out of 10 games, and the buyer would then be rewarded with in-game currency used to buy items they wouldn't be able to get on their own. Eventually Blizzard patched the game and changed the rules so that it was not possible to boost without account sharing, so we stopped.
But, as far as I can tell that's usually an exceptional situation, and most of the time it's exactly what you describe - bragging rights that would quickly disappear if you tried to play on your own, because you'd tank your rating.
to follow up, while blizzard has "cracked" down on real money exchanges a few favored guilds can still pull it off. the method is to charge a large amount of gold in game. this of course if paid out in gold bought from blizzard nets them a lot of real money so it benefits the company.
example, recent highest difficulty full carries, where your character basically just dies at the start of each encounter so you don't screw up the mechanics, was going for more than ten million gold. With blizzard tokens returning about 110k/200k US/EU in gold that adds up unless the player has amassed that. There are end runs on the in game gold with very scripted in game conversations and money exchanged outside of game.
usually the reward is better gear but many do it for the achievements; these have become a cancer in my opinion in the gaming world; to special items like mounts and titles only obtainable to those who can do the content and do it in a timely manner.
Oh to be clear, we only ever did this for arenas, and only charged in-game gold. But even that became impossible when they changed the ranking system. I never did anything but arenas so I can't comment on pulling someone through raids.
We couldn't pull anyone past top 5% or so 2v3, so mounts were infeasible.
I totally believe that a lot of people would be doing that for real money though.
There are other uses besides bragging rights. For example there were quite a few season where if you were in the silver/bronze tier in Overwatch. You'd be eternally paired with people who wouldn't even try to work together as a team. This issue was compounded by what I saw as a bug in how healing classes were awarded for their achievements in matches wrt ranking up. If you had a team of good friends you could rank out of it but without a boost competitive lost it's flair for me. I had a friend play my account with some of his buddies who were really good to get me into gold/plat and the public groups for competitive were much more rewarding. I'm not sure if Blizzard has fixed this ELO hell situation but, that's one anecdotal reason for 'boosting' besides bragging rights.
> Ultimately wouldn't that all be for little if you then play consistently against much better players than you, and lose continually until your profile reaches equilibrium again?
"Boosting" is most common in team games, where some players believe they're being "held back" by their low-rank teams, and believe that having their account boosted will allow them to join the ranks of players that they belong in.
In practice, they're always wrong. All that a boosted account means is that the boosted player will ruin a bunch of games for other players until they drift back down to their true skill.
If it is a game that permits players playing as proxies, won't this just be outsourced to Cambodia with this law? These proxy players don't have to come into your house to do this, afterall.
I don't understand: is this paying or convincing other higher ranked to help a lower ranked player?
What action(s) is/are specifically outlawed?
Assuming there's direct evidence, how would this be legally-enforced?
What's the recourse for lower-ranked players who are kicked out based on this law but didn't do anything for gain, say a spouse who was invited to participate for social reasons but doesn't play very often?
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