South Korean Government will remove and replace all of ActiveX within E-Government sites by 2017 and its primary target is sites that mostly deal with civil affairs. ActiveX is a program that operates functions such as payment, authentication, security and others that are not supported by web browsers. It is weak on securities such as hacking, introduction of harmful codes and others and is a nonstandard technology. As Microsoft released its new web browser ‘Window 10 Edge’ in last July, it had stopped its support for ActiveX.



Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs had been removing and replacing ActiveX from E-Government sites and improved about 66.2% until recently. By improving rest of 33.8% sequentially, it is planning to remove ActiveX or use other technologies by 2017 so that E-Government service can be used by variety of web browsers.



“We decided to remove all of ActiveX from E-Government sites by 2017 and had requested budget for our plan to budget administration. We’ve decided to target sites that deal with public services first.” said Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs.



There are 12,013 sites that are operated by 390 organizations such as 41 central departments, 17 local governments and education offices, 315 public organizations and others. Out of these sites, 7800 sites that are used for inside administration task had already finished removing ActiveX from them. Rest of 4050 or so sites, which are sites that deal with public task, are still using ActiveX because they require function that allows them to download and send formulas,



Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs explained that there is not any problem for Windows 10 users to use such services even though Active X is used.



“We’ve performed tests by targeting 50 major sites. Unlike information that is known to public, there won’t be any problem using public sites if certain functions are adjusted from pop-up menu or if it is installed so that Internet Explorer 11 and Edge are used at the same time.” said Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs.



Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs is preparing plans for each government department to push for its plan on removing ActiveX by discussing such measures with Ministry of Science, ICP and Future Planning. It is examining a plan to sequentially remove ActiveX and apply technologies that will replace ActiveX. It is most likely that they will use ‘EXC’-form file instead of ActiveX and they are also discussing about a plan to improve technologies according to stoppage of plug-in program ‘NPAPI’ that is used for Google Chrome.



Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs emphasized that people will naturally follow demands of the times if the government restructures administration and public organizations’ sites according to international standard.



On the other hand according to statcounter.com that provides statistics about usage rate of web browsers per country, South Korea’s usage rate of browsers affiliated with internet explorer in September was 67.77%, which is more than 3 times bigger than international average at 17.77%.



Staff Reporter Yun, Daewon | yun1972@etnews.com