I had read about the new Korean law forcing big web sites to enforce their users to give real identity information. This means users have to supply an ID number (like the SSN in other countries) and real information such as name, age etc. while registering with web sites. This seemed ridiculous when I first read it, it looks even worse then the censorship we have in Turkey. Just think about how this kind of personal information can be used, it seems like madness. And Korea (South Korea that is of course, I'm not talking about North Korea!) is supposed to be one of the most high-tech countries on the planet. I would have expected Korean politicians to be more clever than what we have in Turkey...

I was looking at the source code for YouTube today and I noticed a funny thing:

function commentResponse(xmlHttpRequest) {
    msg["koreaFail"] = "We have voluntarily disabled this functionality on kr.youtube.com because of the Korean real-name verification law.";
...

This is JavaScript code that is used for showing errors in response to commenting. It seems Google resisted the name verification scheme and disabled commenting feature on kr.youtube.com. You can read more about the story here. I was really surprised by this code fragment :)