Jeronimos Monastery

Lisbon was, for me, a bit of a disappointment, but there were a few memorable things, like the church at Jeronimos Monastery, which had beautiful vaulted ceilings. The tomb of the explorer Vasco da Gama is also at rest here. Check out my photos from Lisbon at this Flickr page.

North Korean Heir is Behind the Cyber Attacks on South Korea and U.S.?

from an Email to JZ;

The future, or rather the current state of the internet is bleak here in Korea, what with the recent ddos attacks and anticipation of a third “wave” coming soon. Amid speculation that North Korea is behind the attacks, a North Korean specialist said that the cyber attacks were conducted by a posse of North Korean cyber specialists who went to China to plant the evil seeds in June and return in time for the anniversary of Kim Il Sung’s death.

The funny (or perhaps sad) thing about this is that South Koreans didn’t even bat an eye when N. Korea fired those missiles or detonated what could have been a nuclear bomb, but this cyber attack has people terrified. Of course, the government is afraid that their “special technologies” and “secret information” will be leaked, but normal people (kind of including me) are concerned because the bank sites were down. All of Korea’s banks are wired and Internet/mobile banking is quite the norm. It kind of gets me worried sometimes because my assets are not physical, and I wonder what would happen if all electronic records were to be erased completely.

I know Americans don’t really care about what happens in other parts of the world, but because the attacks included several U.S. sites, some sites like Nasdaq.com have blocked access from Korea and are currently inaccessible (reported it on Herdict!)

Update: Munhwa Ilbo,  one of the six big daily newspapers in Korea, has a scoop quoting Ha Tae-kyong, head of North Korean Radio, which is a South Korean-based short-wave radio service for people in North Korea. [In North Korea, broadcasting is controlled by the government, so one can imagine the lack of diversity in programming] According to the article, Ha says that a high-ranking North Korean government official told him that Kim Jung-woon, the alleged heir of the current leader Kim Jong Il, initiated a posse of less than 10 N. Korean cyber specialists to carry out this cyber attack operation. Of course, the North  had to send its agents to China because it doesn’t have a good enough infrastructure to do it on its own. From big areas like Beijing, Shanghai, and Dalian,the cyber attackers routed their viruses through servers in other countries including Singapore and Indonesia.

Ha said that the cyber terrorism was in line with the North’s nuclear experiments and missile shootings, and part of a strategy to solidify Jung-woon as the heir. It was not a coincidence that this year is the 15th anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s death. (Il-sung is father of Jong-Il, grandfather of Jung-woon)

北 김정운, 사이버테러 진두지휘”

북한문제 전문가 “北공작조 10여명이 중국서 주도”

// //

한국과 미국의 주요기관에 대한 사이버테러는 북한의 사이버 공작조 10여 명이 중국의 주요 도시에서 주도한 것이라고 북한 문제 전문가가 주장했다.

열린북한방송 하태경 대표는 9일 북한 내부 고위 정보 소식통을 인용해 “이번 사이버테러는 김정일 위원장의 후계자로 알려진 김정운의 주도로 10명 미만의 북한의 사이버 공작조가 지난 6월 중순 이후 중국에 입국해 주요 도시들을 거점으로 이번 작전을 실시했으며, 핵심 요원은 김일성 주석 서거일 기념행사에 맞춰 7일 평양으로 귀환했다”고 말했다.

하 대표는 “이번 사이버테러는 북한의 핵실험과 미사일 발사 등 전반적 도발 계획 과정에서 김정운을 후계자로 확실히 세우려는 기획 속에서 진행된 것”이라면서 “김일성 주석 서거 15주년을 맞아 시점을 택해 작전을 집행한 것”이라고 주장했다.

하 대표는 “북한 자체는 인터넷 인프라가 충분히 구축돼 있지 않은데다, 사이버테러 후 추적하면 바로 드러나기 때문에 북한 해커들은 북경, 심양, 대련, 상해 같은 대도시에서 활약하고 싱가포르나 인도네시아 등 동남아 제3국 서버를 경유하고 있다”고 설명했다.

그는 또 “지난 2009년 5월에 일어난 한국외환은행과 국민은행 인터넷 뱅킹으로 4백만 원 정도를 인출하려다 미수에 그친 사건도 당시에는 중국에서 시도된 것이라고 알려졌으나, 북한 해커들의 소행이라는 정보를 갖고 있다”고 전했다.—-

Becoming a political tweeter and hating it

Those few people who read my blog will know that for some time, I’ve been complaining about political tweeting, digital narcissism, and my longing for more sociable networking. It’s not that I think services like blogs or twitter in themselves have a tendency to make people more self-conscious, but that more often than naught, people use the services for promotional purposes, and in the process, a lot of the personal glitter that made the early days of web-self-publishing so innovative and interesting are losing the sparkle.

However, I find myself becoming more and more of a political tweeter and digital narcissist myself, excluding random rants for fear of looking emotionally insecure, knowing that anyone can look at my profile– not just people (like my parents) who are interested in what I’m doing but also scholars like danah boyd who does research by looking at public profiles of people using social networking services. Of course, being “open” on the web is like being outside on the street; technically, anyone can stop by and look at you, take your picture, or even use observation of your activity for empirical research. I guess that is why I dress up when I go out instead of walking out in my nightie, but having a public profile on the web is different and I feel I’m more likely a guinea pig candidate for social science studies.

I long for the “olden” days (which for me are the late 90s) when web communities were tightly knit and I still had a strong, true-to-life identity despite the use of a pseudonym. I feel I can’t be my true self– not because I have something to hide, but because I have to maintain a professional front 100% of the time. And I feel disgusted with myself when I see myself using Twitter or Facebook in a very different way than I used them a year ago.I was so ashamed that I recently went back and deleted some of my PR-esque tweets. Really, do I want to waste bits to brag? It seems pathetic.

To some extent, I realize that this change is somewhat related to the fact that I’m getting older, and having recently celebrated a major milestone, I feel entitled to join the posse of mid adulthood and the unspoken tendency to increasingly hide one’s feelings. I feel it is also affected by my being Korean (in which what shows on the outside is sometimes more important than what is inside)– traits that have been pummeled into me by my mother. Whatever the reason, the web is becoming less of a friendly place, more of a professional place where I have to share with all or none, or put up with multiple identities.

I wonder if I am building myself on sand and not rock. My sister uses the Internet as much as I do, yet her social networking and identity building on the web is very minimal. I, however, have a very strong cyber identity that is so much a part of me that if all servers around the world (or at least those of WordPress, Flickr, Naver, Cyworld and Blogin)were to blow up, I would feel like a part of me were to disappear. [Being the imaginative person that I am, I actually asked Eric Schmidt once what would happen if someone bombed Google's servers. He said that Google had enough servers around the world to keep my information safe. Hopefully that is true. Even in the past decade, I have already had to "bury" several digital identities as services come and go, whereas all the journals and stories, photobooks from childhood are still intact in their original form.]

I wish that Twitter would be ephemeral– have an expiration date of some sorts– so that Tweeters can tweet impulsively without having to worry about the archive that follows. Or if I could have some sort of setting that lets me show people only 5 or 10 of my most recent tweets, I don’t think I’d be so much of the political tweeter that I am now.

why aren’t women’s bathrooms bigger?

You’ve probably noticed that in large public areas, there is always a line in front of the women’s restroom, but never in front of the men’s. If you haven’t, you now know. If you are a man, this is important knowledge, because there is a reason your wife/girlfriend/daughter/friend takes so long in the bathroom. Of course, some women spend a fair amount of time primping in front of the mirror, but even if she were not to look at the mirror at all, she will still take longer, because there is almost always a line.

I don’t understand why architects cannot do the math. If you make men’s and women’s bathrooms the same size, it’s not going to work. A men’s bathroom will facilitate far more stalls than women’s. Then take into consideration the average time it takes to defecate. I’m going to eliminate no.2 (the act of pooing) because we can assume that the average time it takes to poo is approximately the same for both genders. However, if you think about how long it takes to pee, women take much longer, because taking off pants and sitting down, standing up, putting pants back on, etc. takes longer than unzipping and zipping up whilst standing up. Then, the act of actually opening and closing the bathroom stalls, looking for empty stalls, and locking stalls is something men don’t have to deal with. You may not think that these slight differences amount to much, but even a few seconds taken with each additional procedure adds up to at least one minute. In addition, women also have things to do in the bathroom that men don’t have to do– such as the process of using feminine products.

So if there are the same number of men and women who want to go to the bathroom, it will take longer to process all the women than all the men, just by calculating the average time.

In addition to that, it widely known that most women have smaller bladders than men and thus have to pee more often than men. That means that in a 24 hour timeframe, you will have more females going to bathrooms than men.

So, if more people are using women’s bathrooms than men, and women take more time in the bathroom than men, why are the bathrooms the same size? It’s something that puzzles me and I’d really like architects to explain this to me– especially female architects (they should know!) and those architects designing public venues with high bathroom traffic in limited timeframes (such as theaters).

On a final note, men’s bathrooms should also have changing tables. It is extremely gender-discriminating that only women’s bathrooms have changing tables.