South Korea Sharpens Its Censorship Knife

Today in international tech news: South Korea is in the spotlight for its crackdown on Internet criticism of the government. Also: A paper publishes an article on how successful -- or unsuccessful -- it has been on getting people to pay for content on iPads, and a hit Indian TV show enlists an IT firm to turn millions of messages into hard data.

South Korea is engaging in the sort of Internet censorship usually associated with China, according to The New York Times.

The Times ticks off a handful of examples of Great Firewall-esque meddling: Someone who called the president a bad word via Twitter had his account blocked; a judge who claimed that the president was out to screw over people who challenged his authority on the Web was fired; even pornography is iffy.
South Korea is a democratic nation and is among the world's most wired countries. As the Times points out, South Korea has some of the world's fastest downloads speeds, while Seoul's subway system has WiFi access for smartphones.
All that same, both the United Nations, which lectured South Korean officials last year on the benefits of public scrutiny, and Reporters Without Borders, which lumped South Korea with nations such as Russia and Egypt in a report called "Enemies of the Internet," have been critical of the nation's policing of the Internet.