Yes, I should have clarified this. I dont think the folks in Korea are any more or less competent than their NA counter parts-- be that end user or operator.
Unfortunately, my experience is that system managers in Korea are considerably less competent than their NA counterparts. The managers are not stupid, but they are hopelessly underqualified. Korea made a big push to wire the country for broadband without any consideration of who would run the gazillion computers with their swell new high-speed permanent connections. So they did things like setting up every school in the country with servers with identical Windows configs that are all subject to the same wide range of well known Windows exploits. Many of the people who are by default in charge of these systems wouldn't know what to do with Windows Update even if they could read the English language instructions, because they have no computer background. That, along with an extremely ill-advised law that made spam legal if you put the Korean version of ADV: in the subject line, is why I set up the korea.services.net DNSBL which blocks all the networks in Korea except for a handful of networks with responsive admins and low spam counts. I'll be very happy to take out networks that solve their spam problems, but so far none have done so. Now and then someone writes and says "I fixed my open relay, please unlist me" (no, it's not a list of individual open relays) or "your list blocks mail that is very very important" (quite possibly, but it's not as important to me as blocking the thousands of spams that your ISP would otherwise have sent me and whoever it is that's using the list to reject your mail.) The Korean government knows that they've dug themeselves a hole, but it'll be a while until they dig themselves out of it. In the meantime, my DNSBL continues to block a heck of a lot of spam and I can live without the two legit messages a year that I otherwise would have gotten from Korea. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner "A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web