Student sexually harassing teacher caught on video

This story was first broken by Korea Beat, but now we can read about the story in much more detail in the Korea Times. A high school student was caught on video sexually harassing his female teacher. It seems that the student, a sophomore (and yet already taller than his teacher) approached the teacher, putting his arm around her shoulders. After trying, unsuccessfully, to push him away, she walked away. He followed her, putting his arm around her.

After the video clip triggered criticism online, the school decided to slap a 10-day suspension on the student along with the person who taped it.

I wonder what why the student who taped the incident was also disciplined? Because he didn’t intervene? I’d say that posting this video was a form of intervention, since it is what let to the student being disciplined. And students should not be under any obligation to insert themselves into that situation, especially since the student was big and getting physical.
This is not the first time that there has been a major incident involving students getting physically abusive with their teachers. When the current generation grows up, I have my doubts as to whether I will want to remain here, teaching. If students are going to act like that, then I might as well be back in my own country. At least I’ll be close to my family, old friends, and in my own culture and language. Not to mention moving towards home ownership.

Edit/Update:

Thanks to Korea Beat commenter DynamicallySparkling, we can now see the video. Brian in Jeollanam-do and Korea Beat, respectively, made these comments:

I can guess Korean teachers might say this is symptomatic of kids being less disciplined in years past—maybe true, I don’t know—but this is testament is also to the chaos that is the classroom between periods. Not sure how it is at your public schools, but at mine it was a lawless 10 minutes where kids ran around, wrestled, fought, threw stuff out windows, raced with chairs, and sometimes destroyed the furniture and books in the room.

Exactly what I experienced as well. It was always a complete madhouse/zoo.

Jae-boem quits 2PM after some netizens demand that he commit suicide

Jae-boem has officially quit 2PM. This comes after some netizens actually called on him to commit suicide over four-year-old MySpace comments. Un-freaking-believable. Some fans have started a petition to bring him back, but it remains unclear as to whether or not it will have any effect. Personally, I doubt it. Some people will not be satisfied unless they see blood.

Despite apology, fans refuse to forgive 2PM member for four-year-old comments about Korea

The Korea Times and Herald have the story of fans who are enraged at a member of boy band 2PM, Jae-beom. Four years ago, when he was still a trainee at JYP Entertainment, waiting to debut, he wrote some negative comments about Korea on his MySpace page. (You can see screen captures of them here.) He apologized profusely, in a way that bordered on grovelling, but that’s not good enough for some fans. As a result, the promotional activities of 2PM have been put on hold for an unknown amount of time. However, Park Jin-young (JYP) has said that neither he, nor the other members of 2PM, want to kick him out of the group.
Personally, I can understand how he could have felt culture-shocked and upset. He was, at that time, an 18-year-old kid, in Korea for the first time and all alone, since his family was still in America, where he was born and had grown up. While his comments from four years ago are definitely childish and show very poor judgment, it’s clear from his apology that in the years since he’s become much more mature and articulate.

New Anti-Piracy Law; Earnings of Top Songwriters

A new law meant to crack down on intellectual property piracy went into effect yesterday. So how strict is it?

Your five-year-old daughter mimmicks a popular song at home. She is so cute, so you pick up your camcorder to record her one-minute performance. You upload the clip on your blog to share it with your friends and relatives. This seemingly benign act, however, is in violation of the Korean copyright law. No kidding. Last month, there was an actual incident in which a video clip showing a five-year-old kid singing Son Dam-bi’s “Crazy” – for 58 seconds – was uploaded on a blog run by Naver.com, and the Korea Music Copyright Association asked the country’s biggest portal to block public access to the video clip.

[ snip ]

Under the revised rules, the Culture Ministry can shut down an online community or service in connection with copyright violations, even without a complaint from copyright holders.

[ snip ]

But what ordinary bloggers fear the most is the threat from law firms. A host of Korean law firms are currently representing copyright holders in the fields of music, images, and video, and they often send an email to users, asking them to pay a settlement fee in return for dropping the lawsuit.

In April, a local law firm threatened to file a suit against 8,047 users on the charge of copyright violations, and earned 7 billion won in settlement fees, a tactic that turned out to be illegal.

However, some web-sites can get a kind of “stamp of approval” from the government if they offer copyrighted material but protect it from downloading.

Regulators are rewarding those protecting cultural content. Soribada (www.soribada.com), a music content Web site, became the first online service provider (OSP) to be officially designated a “clean site” by the authorities.

Soribada was chosen for having functions that protected copyrighted content, including a filtering system that blocks the transfer of illegally copied material to other sites.

Once labeled clean, OSPs are able to enjoy a variety of benefits including exemption from governmental monitoring and supervision. But it can maintain its clean status when it passes the re-examination every six months. Visit www.cleansite.org for more information.

Despite this, this is expected to increase the exodus of Korean users from Korean sites (such as Naver) to foreign sites (such as YouTube) which began earlier this year. Heck, even the Blue House is doing it.

Since we’re on the topic of intellectual property, how much do Korea’s top songwriters earn?

According to the Korea Music Copyright Association (KOMCA) on Monday, Park [Jin-young, also known as JYP] earned W1.078 billion (US$1=W1,249) from copyrights in 2008.

[ snip ]

The top earner was composer Cho Young-soo, who made W1.109 billion. Lyricist Ahn Young-min came in third with W928 million.

[ snip ]

At least 100 composers and lyricists earned over W100 million a year, and the top eight made over W500 million a year. With the growing digital music market led by an increase in sales of karaoke machines and mobile phone ringtones, the income of songwriters has been growing fast.

[ snip ]

Compared to Japan and the United States, what these songwriters are making in Korea is mere 1/10 and 1/100, leading to calls to come down harder on piracy.

(Updated) Calling Dick Tracy. Calling Dick Tracy. Your watch phone is now half-price

Both Samsung and LG are planning to start selling watch phones later this summer in Europe. American releases may follow. Samsung’s phone is about half the price of LG’s, but lacks some features, such as video calling.
These phones have not been scheduled to be released in Korea as of this time, which is yet more evidence that the multinational conglomerates such as Samsung screw over the consumers in their home country.

Edit/Update:

Somebody at the Korea Times is channeling me:

Closed Mobile Market Frustrates Consumers

South Korea is allegedly the mobile-phone capital of the world and local telecommunications companies claim credit as its main architects. Consumers, on the other hand, grumble about being locked in a high-tech hermit kingdom.

In the age of “app stores,” mobile e-mails and “tweets,” Korean wireless users are still basically stuck in a phase of text-messaging despite owning among the most expensive pieces of hardware on the planet.

[ snip ]

No, you can’t access the Internet from your phone without going through our excuse for a mobile Web portal. And remember, an hour of online news reading will cost you roughly the price of a pair of tennis shoes.

By the way, we just scrapped the Wi-Fi functions on your new 800,000 won (about $630) Samsung smartphone because free Internet can’t be that good, can it? And no, we don’t intend to make it easier for you to use that shiny handset sold by our rival carrier, although technically, it would only require the switching of universal subscriber identity module (USIM) cards.

“Korea is often mentioned as an IT powerhouse, but those who know better, like early adaptors or power users, would say that the country represents nothing but one of the most closed mobile markets in the world,” said Jang Jeong-woo, the creator of the popular tech blog, IT Gadget Impression (www.alonecrow.com).

. . .

Korean has the worst access to smart phones, but you can watch TV

Resentment is growing over the fact that smart phones enter the Korean market after long delays or, sometimes, not at all. It isn’t just foreign brands like Blackberry, but also domestic ones like Samsung.
On the other hand, about half of all Koreans watch mobile TV.
Korean mobile phones: First in entertainment; last in communication and information.

(Updated) Will the Wonder Girls be the Franz Ferdinand of Twitter War One?

Korean singing group the Wonder Girls are one of the opening acts for the popular pop-rock group the Jonas Brothers on their current tour. A commenter at Pop Seoul said that some Jonas Brothers fans had posted negative comments about the Wonder Girls on Twitter. More importantly, I read from another commenter that when Wonder Girls fans saw this, they retaliated with cyber-harassment.
I decided to research this out via Twitter’s search engine.
Ohhh, my aching head. I feel like chunks of my brain have rotted away. Twitter is mental diarrhea transmitted to a screen. Attention Deficit Disorder + Narcissism = Twitter. So I only found a couple of examples. I hope you appreciate it, because it came at the cost of countless brain cells.

these wonder girls are weird…

@hannahhylen NO KIDDING! the girls behind me just laughed.

yeah, don’t like the wonder girls. they look like sluts.

wow get offended because I said I think the wonder girls look like sluts. I didn’t say they are.

okay to these people. you don’t know ME so stop calling me a slut. their dresses are short. but I guess I can’t talk because my shorts are 2

just get over it. sorry I offended your favorite girl group.

@jlovek oh I am. I like their music. their dresses were REALLY short. I’m not saying they are sluts because I don’t know them. that’s just -
-the impression I got. people went crazy and they don’t even know me.

@sunmikiwangjang I don’t dobut that they are nice. the seem really nice. I was just stating my opinion.

just let me have my opinion. kthanks. people keep screaming for the stupid screen.

so I met wonder girls. sorry if I offended anyone earlier. they really are sweet girls.

@victoriaOK it was so ridiculious I’m like stating my opinion and I get bitched at!

@alexza_18 I hate that I couldn’t just have my opinion. that’s just what I saw. thanks though

That’s the wheat (believe it or not). You can trawl through the chaff if you’d like.

Here’s more.

@minablas don’t be rude.. it seems like ur not giving wonder girls a chance. they’re really talented! they can sing & DANCE!

@Tommy_Jono_K please stop attacking other fans. be respectful.even though people r being rude to wonder girls,
WG wouldnt want fans to be rude back.

@mofutofu yeahhh i am yeah some wg fans were being really rude. so i wanted to show people that wonderfuls are NICE!

@zaharozoe why do u hate them so much ?

@woahxcorri give wonder girls a chance. u might like them. some people changed their mind after seeing them perform. plus they r super nice!

@Farrahri im sorry your being attacked. we just love wonder girls. some fans go crazy but i hope your not offended.. just dont be mean!

(the chaff)

Edit/Update:

Here is a video from Comedy Central which helps illustrate why I don’t like Twitter:

“Sure, you didn’t hear about it in the mainstream media, but I don’t see how “Delicioushair” could get this wrong.

(Hat Tip to ROK Drop)

Guess who sponsored the Canadian texting championships?

Toronto’s 16-year-old Kathy Spence won the Canadian texting championship and took the prize of $25,000 Canadian. Guess who the sponsor was?

a. LG Electronics
b. Motorola
c. Nokia
d. Samsung
e. Sony Ericsson

Answer is, like, here, dude.

Even the Japanese love the tweeting Kim Yu-na, Mao Asada becomes second woman to score over 200 points

In a poll of Japan’s favorite sports stars, Kim Yu-na made the tenth spot, the highest-ranking non-Japanese on the list. Kim’s archrival, Mao Asada, came in second.

Kim has become Korea’s most famous user of Twitter, an instant messaging service that allows one to send and receive text messages via both cell-phones and computers.

Personally, I don’t see the use of Twitter, and I’m someone who loves blogging and discussion boards. Anything worthy of being said requires at least a paragraph. In my view, Twitter’s popularity can be accounted for by widespread attention deficit disorder and il-o-literacy (lol + illiteracy). By “il-o-literacy,” I mean the condition of knowing one’s way around computer, but being functionally illiterate. I mean, is it really so hard to write “That’s hilarious!” or “Ha, ha!” that we had to replace it with “lol” (hence, “il-o-literacy”). And how often do people actually laugh out loud? Not that often. “Lol” has become an insipid cliche. If you ever want to see examples of il-o-literacy, just to go daveseslcafe and cringe at the spelling and grammar of so-called “English teachers.”

Returning to the topic of Mao Asada, she became the second woman to score over 200 points in competition. Moreover, it seems that the scoring system has been slightly revised, and in a way that could be advantageous to Mao and disadvantageous to Kim.

Be careful of new computer virus

Make sure that your anti-virus software and patches are up-to-date. From the Korea Times:

New Password-Manipulating Virus Spreading

A new computer virus that attacks the computer password, manipulates and eventually blocks the user to log in to the computer is spreading, Yonhap reported Saturday.

The virus, an advanced form of “Win32.HLLW.Shadow.based” that showed up last month, locks up the computer, resulting in log in error. It also paralyzes the network by overloading the traffic on the 445 port.

A free vaccine is available on the Web site of the anti-virus company, New Technology Wave (www.viruschaser.com).

The vaccine provider also advises computer users to regularly change their computer passwords and update Windows security patches. Once infected, the virus detours the radar of the previously installed vaccine program on the computer and makes it undeletable, the company said.