8 stories

Tech

Naver, Kakao, gaming, and AI

Korea Now Scans Every Image Uploaded to Its Big Forums. The Man Running One of Them Can't Tell You If It Has Ever Worked.

Since 1 July, Korean platforms above a size threshold must run every uploaded image through an AI filter that checks it against a government database of illegal recordings and blocks it before it posts. One operator published his own logs. Over a full year of the earlier video version, 1,615 blocks resolved down to about 33 that might have been real — and he cannot tell you whether any of them were, because keeping the files in order to check them would break a different law.

12 min read

Tech

A 23-Year-Old Built an App That Routes You Through Shadows. It Hit No. 1 in a Week.

Yoo Min-jun made it because his walk to campus was unbearable. It calculates the sun's angle and the shadows thrown by buildings and street trees for the minute you'll actually be walking, and tells you which side of the bus to sit on. It cost him about ₩2 million of his own money. Meanwhile the state has 93,375 cooling shelters — and on the hottest Sunday of the summer, four in five of Seoul's were locked.

10 min read

Tech

Korea Has Until December to Uninstall Twenty Years of Its Own Banking Software

In October 2025 the government finally ordered the security programs off your computer, and banks have until year-end to comply. Along the way: a cipher whose famous justification expired before it shipped, a mandate that was never in the law everyone blames, and a bank page that still uses a legal term abolished five and a half years ago.

14 min read

Tech

Korea Lost 16,000 PC방 and the Industry Got Bigger: The Gaming Café, Explained

Korea had 23,548 PC방 in 2001 and fewer than 7,000 by 2025 — while the industry's revenue rose 12.8% in a single year. A look at the strangest small business in Korea: one whose price hasn't moved in 25 years, that pays rent to game publishers by the hour, and that operates under a curfew most English coverage thinks was repealed.

13 min read

Tech

Coupang: How Korea Turned 'Hurry-Hurry' Into a Logistics Empire

South Korea has a word for its national impatience — 빨리빨리, 'hurry-hurry.' Coupang, the country's answer to Amazon, industrialized it: order at midnight, and a box is on your doorstep before you wake up. Here's how a Harvard dropout's daily-deals site became a next-day-everything machine — and what that speed costs.

10 min read

Tech

Sovereign AI, Explained: Why Korea Wants Its Own ChatGPT

Nvidia's Jensen Huang flew into Korea after fifteen years away, handed the country a quarter of a million chips, and called it 'a perfect example of sovereign AI.' So why does a nation that already has ChatGPT insist on building its own? The same reason it once bet everything on memory chips: intelligence, Korea has decided, is too important to rent.

12 min read

Tech

Naver, Explained: Why Koreans Don't Google

In almost every country, the internet's front door is Google. In Korea it's a green box that isn't Google at all. Here's how a homegrown portal built its own walled garden of Korean content, why the world's most powerful search engine still can't win here, and why Google Maps *still* can't give you turn-by-turn directions in Seoul.

11 min read

Tech

KakaoTalk, Explained: The App That Runs Korea

One free green-bubble messenger became the plumbing of Korean daily life — your taxi, your bank, your coffee gift, your login. Then a fire in a single basement in Pangyo switched it all off, and a country of 50 million discovered how much of itself runs through one company's servers.

11 min read

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