Cory Doctorow has an excellent post on the South Korean people being unable to move away from Microsoft products, because of an ActiveX controller
Baron sez, “This is a fascinating read on how S. Korea with all the fancy 3G phones, best broadband coverage, and electronics is shackled to Windows because of a government proprietary encryption format based on Active X. It prevents people from using Linux, Firefox, and is even holding back Vista because all secure transactions require it!”
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For years I’ve been writing about how DRM can take an entire nation hostage, requiring it to pay a tax to the US for infrastructure technology instead of developing it at home or using free/open source software. I couldn’t ask for a better example than this — Korea is eminently capable of developing its own technology. Instead, the government has created a subsidy program for Microsoft by insisting that citizens use foreign software to do business at home.
More at BoingBoing.