Blizzard's Real Name Forum Policy Influenced by Korean Law?

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Harvard student and former online security consultant Oliver Day speculates that South Korean law could be an influencing factor in Blizzard's new policy to display on its official forums going forward.

Day's blog post (via Kotaku) brings up South Korea's Real Name System, which is a law "insisting that all users who comment on sites with greater than 100,000 users per day must use their real name."

Day notes that Google has already faced issues due to this law, with South Korea asking for all YouTube comments from the country be displayed by the user's real name. Google skirted the issue by disallowing any comments from South Korean IP addresses. South Korea has since exempted YouTube from the list of required sites under this law.

Reaction to the policy change has been fierce, with forum threads hitting 76 or even over 2000 pages on Blizzard's official forums. Reactions by the Shacknews community have been similarly intense.

Blizzard's changes will affect the StarCraft II forums and eventually the World of Warcraft forums after the release of Cataclysm. Legacy posts and forums for older titles will not be affected and no existing posts will be tied to anyone's real name.

Blizzard's interests in South Korea are especially high given the popularity of the company's franchises in the country. Shacknews has asked Blizzard to comment, but none was received at the time of publishing.

From The Chatty
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    July 8, 2010 12:18 PM

    Never posted on their forums. Never will specially now. It's bogus to be made to provide personal information specially with how many accounts in WoW get hacked.

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      July 8, 2010 12:22 PM

      The accounts getting hacked is the users fault NOT blizzards. Users are the ones that visit the naughty sites and or download "cheats" for Live wow client which are just key loggers. Or those so called programs that give you a free 30 day key to put into your account, again key logger. People do it to themselves when the get hacked.

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        July 8, 2010 12:47 PM

        Forcing users to show their First and Last names will also NOT help Blizzard catch hacked accounts. It's a form of privacy invasion. And can, and most likely will, be the largest Identity Theft we've seen in years.

        • DM7 legacy 10 years legacy 20 years
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          July 8, 2010 2:19 PM

          LOL. overreact much?

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        July 8, 2010 12:51 PM

        Bullshit; their are plenty of other ways to get hacked. Not just 'cheaters'. Unless you call downloading a seemingly legit mod of which there are thousands.

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        July 8, 2010 1:15 PM

        Your an idiot plenty of legit players get hacked.

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        July 8, 2010 1:29 PM

        Plenty of legit users log on at LAN centers and such. Yes there is the authenticator to consider, but that doesn't support your assertion that it's because they're downloading keyloggers.

        Logging in at ossibly sketchy places aside, I have a friend who has never had a virus and is very careful about which sites he goes to get hacked while his account wasn't even active to his knowledge.

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      July 8, 2010 3:31 PM

      Well, my real name is Scuturo Mobasa,what you don't believe me??? So is it only TOS' agreements that force real names?

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