Opinion - The Korea Times

Gaya to nowhere

By Jason LimRecently, President Moon expressed his explicit wish that the fresh articulation of Gayan history across the whole swath of Korea’s southern coast would facilitate the easing of the current regional animosity between South Korea’s southeastern and southwestern regions. Moon basically wants to use the history of this ancient Korean kingdom to create an alternate, common cultural identity that could overcome the seemingly intractable emotional and political separation between the two regions.Understandably, the President directing the research into the history of a specific subject matter for current political purposes was received with concern by academic circles in Korea. Moon’s directive echoes the fierce debate that raged through academia when former President Park Geun-hye tried to force the rewrite of school history textbooks in a drive to emphasize her father’s role in modern Korean history while altering the description of key events to mask his accountability for having served with the Imperial Japanese Army in Manchuria.While Moon’s i

Jun 23, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Human immune system as cybersecurity

By Jason LimCyberattacks and response patterns have become painfully obvious in the last few years. There is some type of an advanced persistent threat (APT) lurking in a system, siphoning off important information that includes personally identifiable information (PII) or financial information such as credit card passwords. Or there is a new exploit that suddenly becomes visible with the potential to create catastrophic damage across countless systems around the world.Following the revelation of a threat or breach, there is frenzied activity by system owners to manage the incident if they are breached or mitigate the risks with whatever tools they have on hand. Microsoft will publish new patches designed to close the vulnerability while the media (both mainstream and social) will blast out apocalyptic warnings to end users to patch their systems or else. Of course, by this time, most of the damage has been done; the extent of which can never be known for sure, or whether the intent of the original perpetrators has been satisfied.Watching the latest hubbub over WannaCry, I recalled t

Jun 9, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Articulating gay-ness in Korea

By Jason LimBack in the late 1990s when I spent a few years working at an English language institute in Seoul, something that almost seems like a rite of passage for Korean Americans, there were no gays in Korea even though I saw them everywhere. Let me explain.Having grown up in New York City, seeing gay people, especially gay men, was not an especially surprising event for me. However, when I first saw a gay man in Korea, it almost seemed as if he didn’t realize that he was gay. While I admit that you can’t judge a person by his or her cover, my “gay-dar” was pretty tuned and it was very quickly obvious that some Korean guys were gay. What surprised me was that they themselves ― in many cases ― didn’t seem to grasp the concept of their own sexuality. Or perhaps they didn’t yet have the vocabulary and terms to articulate their sexuality in ways that made sense to their own mental maps.I fully understand that I am engaging in supreme condescension in stating that a heterosexual man would have a better understanding of a gay man’s sexual ident

Apr 28, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

We beat the competition. Not you.

By Jason LimThe image is that of a sparkling Southwest Airlines plane flying through the gorgeous sky. Underneath, the copy says, “We beat the competition. Not you.” Funny. And pretty brutal. This was only one of the countless mock advertising memes that popped up on social media platforms in the aftermath of the disastrous action by the United Airlines in forcibly yanking the Vietnamese American doctor from its flight from Chicago to Louisville.By now, everyone knows what happened, so I won’t recount what happened. Suffice it to say that it was pretty disturbing.And with the times being what they are, much of this incident was captured through multiple smartphone cameras by fellow passengers and posted on social media almost immediately. From then on, it went through several phases of organic amplification until it went fully viral and entered the national and global news cycle. I found this incident and its near-term aftermath very interesting in light of the following points.One, this is head-spinning fast. The Washington Post’s Abby Ohlheiser lays out this

Apr 14, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

By Jason LimEverything is certified these days. From used cars, massages and organic foods to program management and cyber security, certification is a ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious term that denotes a certain level of quality, authenticity, truthfulness, expertise, and everything good about the product or person. In fact, there are certifications that certify other certification processes so as to certify their capability to certify things in a certifiable way. It’s certifiably crazy sometimes.Granted, certification is oftentimes useful way for potential consumers to lessen their chances of buying lemons and employers to mitigate the risk of hiring an unqualified subject matter expert. Professional certifications, especially, does imply a certain level of baseline competency for specific subject areas and provide some guidance among competing and chaotic claims for expertise. At the same time, certification is also used to raise the barrier to entry for certain professions, control the market for specific skill sets that are in particular demand, or make a quick buck

Mar 31, 2017By Jason Lim

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

Jason Lim

Overcoming Korea's founder's syndrome

By Jason LimMany organizations experience the founder’s syndrome, in which a charismatic founder establishes a successful company on the power of his personality but ultimately becomes an impediment to the growth of the organization because of his need to remain in absolute control or misuse of the organization for personal gain. Most often, accountability and transparency are subverted by the founder himself through the use of nepotism, abusive leadership, and demands for personal loyalty that rivals those reserved for religious cults. Unless the founder’s syndrome can be overcome, it will prove to be lethal to the long-term health of the organization; most of the time, it doesn’t turn out too well for the founder himself either.Unfortunately, Korea is a nation of founders and suffers acutely from this syndrome.Although Syngman Rhee was the inaugural president of the fledgling country in the aftermath of the Korean War, Park Chung-hee was really the founder of the modern Korean nation, revered for his strong military-style leadership in guiding the impoverished and

Mar 17, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

By Jason LimBack in 2001, I visited China to go to Mount Baekdu, which sits along the border between northeastern China and North Korea and is considered the mythical birthplace of the Korean nation. Its place in the Korean creation myth is so important that Kim Jong-il’s official bio claims that he was born on the mountain, although Soviet records say that he was really born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk in Russia.In any case, I actually wanted to talk about getting on a bus in Jilin to ride for four hours along a brand new highway to reach Mount Baekdu. While the highway was new, everything else was still old, including what passed for roadside bathrooms that should have been more accurately named organic fertilizer storage facilities. But what struck me was that everyone carried a cell phone, even the old Korean-Chinese owner of the pork barbeque restaurant that we stopped at for a quick bite. Seeing that cellphones were still not commoditized even back in the U.S., this was a bit surprising. In fact, the guide told me that China wasn’t laying

Mar 3, 2017By Jason Lim

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

Jason Lim

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

By Jason LimA few months ago, I wrote about two widespread cognitive biases about North Korea that tend to mislead us when making policy decisions about North Korea.One, that North Korea is a one-party, socialist dictatorship like the former Soviet Union or today’s China, with internal decision-making dynamics similar to what we see in those systems. Wrong. North Korea is still essentially a monarchy with hereditary kings who rule in conjunction with a tight-knit group of elites mostly interrelated by blood and whose original elite stature was given through their forefathers’ participation in the original struggle that liberated the new country.Two, that North Korea wants to be a “normal” country as we define a normal country: a member of an international community of nations with open borders and lively interchanges. This, too, is wrong. The last thing that North Korea would want to do is to welcome global forces that would change its current political and socioeconomic status quo, which the ruling elites have carefully and meticulously built up over the past

Feb 17, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Angelina Jolie is both right and wrong

By Jason LimAngelina Jolie published an oped in the New York Times criticizing President Donald Trump’s Executive Order restricting travel from certain countries. Jolie writes, “The global refugee crisis and the threat from terrorism make it entirely justifiable that we consider how best to secure our borders. Every government must balance the needs of its citizens with its international responsibilities. But our response must be measured and should be based on facts, not fear.”Jolie is absolutely correct that policies should be based on facts. And facts undoubtedly support her position that a travel ban on select refugees is not justified. Some of the more eye-popping statistics are: For 30 of the 41 years between 1975-2015, no Americans died due to terror attacks by foreigners or immigrants.Since 9/11, your chances of dying in a given year due to terrorism are 1 in 20 million.You are more likely to be killed by your furniture falling on you, or in a car crash, or everyday street crime.Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack by a refugee are 1 in 3.64 bill

Feb 3, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

By Jason LimA few years ago, Uber got into public relations trouble when they published a blog post describing how they can analyze ridership data to infer certain behavior on the part of riders: “One of the neat things we can do with our data is discover rider patterns…we came up with the Ride of Glory (RoG). A RoGer is anyone who took a ride between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday night, and then took a second ride from within 1/10th of a mile of the previous nights’ drop-off point 4-6 hours later (enough for a quick night’s sleep).”This was over two years ago, and you can be sure that Uber knows much more about many more people’s behavior than they did then. And it’s not just Uber, of course. Amazon’s recent triumph with Alexa, the AI-infused personal assistant, means that Amazon now knows pretty much every single thing that you and your family members do on an everyday basis. If you add this on top of all the shopping, reading, and video-watching data that Amazon has about you, it’s not that difficult to

Jan 20, 2017By Jason Lim

Jason Lim

Read more

Gaya to nowhere

Human immune system as cybersecurity

Articulating gay-ness in Korea

We beat the competition. Not you.

Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

Overcoming Korea's founder's syndrome

What's tomorrow's critical infrastructure?

North Korea's `Game of Thrones'

Angelina Jolie is both right and wrong

Meaning of privacy when `they' know you better than you know yourself

Top 5 stories