Thoughts on North Korea, Cloud Computing and Cyber War

Several articles jumped off the computer screen at me this morning as I reviewed my Google alerts and read the morning papers.  One was the Chosun Ilbo article noting that Korea University has established a cyber defense course at its Graduate School of Information Security. It noted that cyber terrorists of the future will need to be even more sophisticated than they are now as South Korea is set to establish its first academic program dedicated to training military officials specializing in countering cyber warfare.

The main focus of the program at Korea University will be threats from North Korea, the Ministry of National Defense said on Thursday as it announced the plan.  Coincidentally, The Korea Times carried an opinion article entitled "Defending Cyberspace."  That piece contains some rather sobering, if they are accurate, assessments of the capabilities of North Korean hackers.  I would simply note that South Korea's heavy dependence on Microsoft Windows and the associated security risks are a well documented phenomenon, referred to by many as Korea's "Microsoft monoculture."   Over and above that, the extremely rapid diffusion of smart phones and tablets in the South Korean market is creating a whole new space for potential security threats.

The above articles already had me musing about possibilities when I ran across Roger Strukhoff's blog piece entitled "The Geopolitical Context of Cloud Computing."   The article starts by noting that cloud computing is a global phenomenon and exists within a very serious geopolitical context. The technology is not discrete from government policy, and technology marketers must be exquisitely aware of this. The highest profile example is Google's ongoing sparring with the Chinese government. But in a way, we're all Google and we should understand why.
The author makes the following point about the most immediate effect of the information revolution on politics.
...the geopolitical actions of government leaders in Beijing, Washington, and dozens of other national capitals has a direct, immediate effect on the technology industry today.
As the onset of World War I demonstrated, a provocative event in the relatively modest outpost of Sarajevo unleashed simmering tensions among the great powers of the age, resulting in tens of millions of deaths in the two wars that followed.
Today's geopolitical landscape is at least as fraught with tripwires as that of 1914. In almost 100 years, all of our technology has not made us humans any more peaceful or cooperative.
Strukhoff's full piece is worth reading.

I am formulating an argument that the growth of cyberspace is emerging as perhaps the single most important factor in, among other things, Korean unification.   Comments welcome and you can watch for more on this topic in future poses.

Massive Multiplayer Online Games in Korea

South Korea was the first nation in the world where massive multiplayer online games (MMOG) became wildly popular, and the reason is fairly simple and straightforward.   South Korea built fast nationwide fiber-based broadband networks years before most other countries.  The point has been made over and over in this blog and in my new book with Dr. Oh Myung, Digital Development in Korea:  Building an Information Society (Routledge, 2011).  In the U.S., a 1994 by Vice-President Al Gore in which he argued for the need to build information superhighways, was heeded by South Korea, which implemented an ambitious Korea Information Infrastructure (KII) plan the following year.

The building of South Korea's broadband infrastructure and the spread of PC Bangs (Rooms) were necessary but not sufficient conditions for online games to thrive.  Today I ran across a very interesting post on the Massively blog about the origins of Lineage, a MMOG with which NCSoft struck gold years ago in Korea.  It is well worth reading.  It says in part:



So let's back up the memory truck to September 1998, when a then-fledgling NCsoft rolled out a Diablo-esque isometric MMO and struck virtual gold in South Korea. At the time, gaming rooms were becoming a huge thing in the country; a recession had hit (giving people a lot of time with nothing to do), and the government was rapidly expanding the broadband network. In the face of this perfect storm, titles like StarCraft and Lineage became overnight household fixtures -- and the country hasn't looked back.



What makes this post even more interesting to me is that the offices of our new Asia Center to Advance Educational Exchange are located just down Teheran-ro from the corporate headquarters of NCSoft.  Also, I've just read  the excellent book by Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read, Total Engagement:  Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete.  I will definitely need to pay them a visit!

North Korean Defectors to Visit U.S. on Government-sponsored WEST program

Yonhap reports that a group of five North Korean defectors currently enrolled in South Korean colleges will visit the United States on a US government-sponsored programme reserved, until now, for South Korean students only, a government official said today.The five North Korean defectors will likely head for the United States next month, according to the official from Seoul's Unification Ministry."The US Embassy in South Korea and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology selected the five students in April for the West programme," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.Under the student exchange program, South Korean students can visit the United States for up to 18 months -- five months of mandatory language programmes plus internships up to one year long at US companies, followed by one month reserved for free travels.Thousands of students have visited or are visiting the United States under the programme since its launch in early 2009, but no one originally from North Korea had been offered the chance until now. "We believe the programme will help North Korean defectors get wider experience and better prepare for their future employment," the ministry official said."The ministry will consider extending the programme to more North Korean defectors," he said, adding there are currently about 850 college students here who defected from North Korea.