Ice skating is a sport where high spirit and confidence impacts the outcome greatly. I don’t usually watch ice skating performance because inspiring perfection is rare and heartbreaking mistakes are too common to make fine entertainment. But I watch Kim Yu-na’s performances because watching the growth of her spirit and confidence is a joy in itself.

Photos below illustrates the change very well.

Good spirit, still vulnerable

Confidence finally finds home

From recent Four Continents event

A hitman.com for real in Korea was recently caught doing business. Police investigating a young women's death came across the site while checking the list of sites the prime suspect accessed. Apparently the site was more like a hitman portal with individiual hitmans advertising their service anonymously through the site. Crazy.

Biggest news out of Korea in the past few days is the leak of illegal recordings of conversations between Hong Seok-hyun, Korea's current ambassador to America, and Samsung officials (Hong and Samsung's chairman are related by marriage) for a few months preceding 1997 Korean Presidential Election.

Corruption

The recorded conversations were about distribution of illegal campaign funds to Lee hwae-chang, former judge and the favorite conservative in the election. The money was coming from Samsung but the delivery was being made by Hong, in cash. The really disgusting part is that Hong was then CEO of Joong-Ang Ilbo, one of the biggest Korean newspapers. So what we have is a billionaire and owner of a major newspaper giving illegal money to a former judge. If that's not corruption, I don't know what is.

Privacy

Here is the other side of this fascinating coin: the recordings were made illegally by a government agency: National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Korean equivalent of CIA. It turns out there are more than 8000 such recordings made by a secret NIA unit called Mirin which had 3-400 agents working around the clock to record conversations of key Korean businessmen and politicians. They started with wiretapping and bugs but moved on to recording cellphone conversations.

The kicker is that this illegal activities started under Kim Young-sam and supposedly continued under Kim Dae-joong, both of whom suffered wiretapping and more by dictators in thier pursuit of democracy in Korea.

Now the problem is what to do with all that recording. If you had to choose between revealing corruption and protecting privacy, which would you choose? While the ideal solution is to have someone upload the recordings accidentally, but I doubt that will happen, not with Korean cyberpolice's uncanny ability to track hackers down.

Ohjang-dong is a neighborhood in Seoul, Korea famous for spicy cold noodle named after the area: Ohjang-dong naeng(cold) myun (noodle). Ohjang-dong naengmyun is a type of Bibim (mixed) naengmyun which originated somewhere in mountainous Korean states (I am not sure exactly where). Whenever I am in Korea, I make sure to visit Ohjang-dong frequently just to eat the spicy noodle, even if I have to travel more than an hour. Yum.

Anyway, here is the recipe for the famous Ohjang-dong naengmyun with comments from my wife (don't ask how she got this supposedly secret recipe). The recipe is in Korean, btw. If someone else can translate it, I'll post that as well.

Jonathan Krim writes about DSG in his Washington Post column. Looks like he did his research, revealing new information like the fact that DSG had to quit school. Unlike most of the million bloggers who read my post (shocking number, really), he also didn't miss what I thought was the right level of social punishment. Good job, Jonathan!

Ironically, I didn't find Jonathan's article through Technorati or Feedster. Instead I came by it after reading a syndicated Korean news article that mentioned his DSG article (Korean translation was excellent, BTW). So the DSG post blasted off like a rocket, up and out of the blogosphere, and then back down to earth on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Welcome home, DSG.

BoingBoing mention of DSG spawned more thoughtful posts which I thought deserved a read:

• Of Privacy and Poop: Norm Enforcement Via the Blogosphere – [Daniel Solove at Balkinization]
• 1984 = S. Korea? – [Gene at Desert of the Mind]
•  Re Internet Vigilantism – [Marcy Peek at PrawfsBlawg]
• Trying to redefine privacy in a transparent society – [Ari Soglin at Citizen Paine]
• Privacy and Innovation – [A Networked World]

And my own which I expect will create more problems.

• Korea Expected to Limit Online Anonymity

Post Korean-War Korean culture is called Nambi Sahwae (Tinpot Society) by Koreans which means that things come to boil up and cool down too fast. This results in:

1. short attention span
2. hasty policy making

Internet and search engines together solved the short attention span problem but the second problem got worse because Korean politicians are now being pressure-cooked in minutes by the Net-savvy citizen into making policy changes.

I haven't found any english versions of the news articles but Korean government officials have announced their intent that they are looking into ways to limit online anonymity in certain areas (i.e. portals) to curb verbal abuse, defamation, privacy violation, and cyber terrorism. Dog Shit Girl incident was mentioned as an example of privacy violation. According to polls, 60+% of the netizens think limiting online anonymity is a good idea while 30+% were against it.

Note that Korean net culture is different from US and Europe, often more extreme. Also, use of foul language in Korean culture has increased sharply since the introduction of Internet into Korean culture (a recent research conducted on Korean college students counted more than 17,000 unique foul expressions). 17,000? I am not sure if I should feel proud or sad.

Also the Korean government announced that they plan to shutdown email accounts and phone numbers of spammer.

Korea, the land of morning calm and no middle ground. You have too much gung-ho, grasshopper.

Apparently my Dog Shit Girl (DSG hereafter) post resurfaced on the blogosphere and comments are snowballing. Well, this proves that she won't be forgotten. As I wrote in one of my comments: attention cuts, retention bleeds.

Update:

Apparently the resurfacing was due to being mentioned on Fark. Go check out the massive pile of comments and pictures gathered there. The funny thing is that they are fascinated by her middlefinger just like Korean netizens were.

Farkers have clicked on the above link 34528 times.