Apple Formally Asked To Help Korea Remain Out of Step With World Norms

In order to maintain Korea's internet status as a "walled garden," the Korea Communications Commission has formally requested Apple Inc. to include Naver as a search engine default option for the new, wildly popular iPhones.

"While it eventually became impossible to keep iPhones out of Korea, we have been doing our best to keep Korea's internet a strange, isolated backwater of the internet," said Jung Sung-hoon, from the Korea Communications Commission, "however, with this huge influx of imperial aggression foreign technology, we have had to work harder to remain a bastion of bad design, inefficient programming, and outdated protocols. It's true that our Games Ratings Board might be successful in blocking Android phones' game applications, and if we can legislate and execute that ban clumsily enough, we might be able to succeed in blocking all android apps from Korea, other than those designed by LG, Samsung, Naver and Daum. Frankly, we're pretty proud of that little bit of 'gamesmanship.' However, in order to avoid having Koreans rebel against Korea's byzantine internet experience, we're going to need Apple inc. to work with us to make the iPhone more closely resemble Korea's internet."

Toward that end, future iPhones will have several new un-removable, default features. One is a program that arbitrarily flashes a pop-up window declaring that the iPhone needs to download a new security package, or controller, which will freeze or reset the phone when it is nearly complete, and restart the process. While it's downloading, the phone will run at 10% normal speed. "It's not actually downloading anything: we just do that to remind customers of the file clusters Korean websites often require them to download."

The iPhone web browser will occasionally crash, or announce that some foreign websites no longer work with IE6 (even though iPhones actually run Safari), in order to encourage Korean users to remain on Korean websites.

"We're also working on ways to create pop-ups large enough to read on the iPhone screen, but still with complex enough flashing, moving graphics to slow down the phone's processor and run down its battery, either through trying to display said popups, or through trying to block them."

Another program that will be found on all new Korean iPhones is a "security backdoor" - while the iPhone is more secure than Korean banking sites, because it uses browser and security technology invented more recently than 1997, a security loophole will be intentionally added, in order for the iPhone experience to perfectly simulate the ordinary daily experience of working on the internet. "About twice a month, all the information stored on your i-phone will be randomly sent to one of several Chinese information gathering firms, including keystroke records, saved passwords, common search terms and browsing histories."

And how will Korean consumers react when the iPhone rolls out these new features?

"We're more worried about how they'll react if we DON'T embed these programs on new iPhones: we might actually be forced to bring Korea's internet into step with world norms!"